Today we're going to talk about pop-up rate and Z-contact, their inverse correlation to BABIP and their effect on DIPS projections.
Ha! Just kidding! I mean, that's what we'll be discussing , but you won't know it. What you will know is that we've engaged in a new and fascinating discussion that might help you win your fantasy baseball league.
Ha! If anything in this blog were actually fascinating, Braindrizzling would be positively thrumming with annoying but remunerative pop-up ads and flashing banners. Far more likely, you'll find it mildly relevant if you manage to read to the end.
First things first: this blog post owes everything to Dave Cameron and Voros McCracken. It is a recapitulation of this fine post by Cameron at Fangraphs.
Fourth things second: there will be no math and you won't be quizzed on it next week. However, there will be a wee bit of trailblazing that will help us understand yet a skooch better how pitchers succeed or fail.
Second things third: the abridged version of the back story. Sabermetricians, led by McCracken in '99, realized that pitchers can control Ks, BBs, HBP and HRs, and not much else. Fielding, ballpark and luck are much more relevant than pitcher aptitude to whether a grounder punches through for a single or gets gobbled up by the shortstop for a 6-4-3. Their BABIP-against, that is, the batting average on all those other balls put into play, tends to be random. Sort of. Hurlers with high BABIP one year often have low ones the next and vice versa. Not all and not always, but more or less. Void where prohibited by law.
Except: flyball pitchers give up fewer safeties than worm killers. On the other hand, those fly ball hits more often fall in as doubles and triples and those four hoppers through the infield rarely push the hitter past first.
So when the SABR dudes attempt to project pitching ERAs, they don't look at a pitcher's previous ERA but at the constituent parts -- HR, K, BB, HBP -- and assume an average BABIP going forward. These projections have bested projections using just previous ERA by a significant and consistent amount over the last decade, particularly as further refinements -- like ground ball and fly ball proclivities -- have helped salt the projections.
In English, if you want a prediction of Johnny Cueto's ERA in 2013 because you're considering making a bid on him in your fantasy league, his 2012 ERA of 2.78 says GO! But his constituent parts whisper FLUKE! They project a 3.74 ERA in 2013, assuming a league-average BABIP.
And now for something completely different: Suppose Dave Cameron tells you that he has a formula that's NEW AND IMPROVED! It can account 15% better for the batting average against a pitcher on balls put in play. That means he can get you a better idea of the pitcher's ERA and WHIP, and give you a leg up on the innumerate competition. Has Dave Cameron ever lied to you before?
In a nutshell, what Cameron found is that pitchers who induce a lot of pop-ups and who get batters to swing and miss on more pitches in the strike zone, reduce their BABIPs. It's partly why consistently good pitchers, like Justin Verlander and Jared Weaver, post consistently low BABIPs. In other words, we've found another way that BABIP is not entirely random for pitchers. (It's not random at all for batters, as anyone who's watched Ichiro knows intuitively.)
If Cameron's conclusion is supported by more research -- because this is how science advances -- pitching projections will get 15% better. How big a deal is that? Five advances of 15% each double the accuracy of projections. (Trust me on the math; I stayed in a Holiday Inn near MIT.) But even without four more Eureka moments among the seamheads, you can look up a pitcher's pop-up rate last year and squeeze out an edge on the competition in your fantasy league.
The naysayers will still neigh because advances of these stripe -- small and complicated -- are hard to see. The projections still won't identify the lucky dogs, the breakthroughs and the cliff divers. They won't be able to predict which pitcher tamed his control tiger, altered his mechanics and added 4 mph to his heater, or just figured something out. Truth is, luck is still way too big a factor in baseball to overcome with science. But if science can help you win your fantasy league you probably want to listen to the scientists.
17 March 2013
16 March 2013
The Meaning of "Spring Training"
Spring Training is a Dominican phrase meaning "people being idiots." ("Ring" = thing people wear, +"p" = just the people + "s" = plural, so Spring = many people; "training" = hoping to know something someday, but currently quite stupid.)
This is borne out by a report from the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues I read yesterday, written by a veteran journalist not heretofore known to be a moron. It said, among other things, the following:
This spring, scouts are raving about how much Bryce Harper has improved. He is hitting .444/.459/.806 with three home runs in 37 plate appearances this spring.
It seemed like the Indians were really reaching when they signed lefthander Scott Kazmir as a minor-league free agent over the winter. Kazmir has not pitched in the major leagues since the first week of the 2011 season, and he posted a 5.34 ERA in 64 innings for the Sugar Land Skeeters in the independent Atlantic League last season. However, Kazmir has yet to allow a run in eight Cactus League innings this spring and also pitched three scoreless innings in a B game. In his eight official innings, he has given up just five hits and one walk while striking out eight.
(In the same article, the author refers to a player who couldn't master the game's "basic fundamentals." The writer could use a lesson in mastering the "basic fundamentals" of covering Spring Training.)
There's actually only one "basic fundamental" about Spring Training: it rarely matters. Bryce Harper is hitting .444 in 37 plate appearances against fellow 20-year-olds whose training wheels are being adjusted so they can be successful for the Double-A West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx this year.
Scott Kazmir threw 11 good innings spread over three starts, at least one of which was against ball boys and hot dog vendors. That is supposed to have more weight than two years of evidence that he's no longer among the top 400 best hurlers in the world.
Dear writer, here's how you know when Bryce Harper and Scott Kazmir are ready to break out: when they blow off Spring Training. When they use it to master a mechanical change or experiment with a new grip -- that's when they've really made it.
That theory, however, does not apply to Roy Halladay. Phillie fans should be creasing brows about his first Spring Training start. It's not that Halladay got lit up like doobie at a hipster party; it's that his velocity, which has dipped each of the past two seasons, ebbed again below 90. That is portentious in two ways:
1. There is a point at which a lack of fastball velocity can sap the value of every other pitch. If your heater is 89 and your change is 85, no one's getting fooled, not even Adam Dunn and Mark Reynolds.
2. The Phillies are already little more than three great starters and the cast from Jurassic Park. If Halladay is no longer effective, Philadelphia's quest for a .500 season is in jeopardy.
So okay, Spring Training can mean something. Halladay's next two starts will determine whether the first one was another sign of the apocalypse or just a fissure in Doc's space-time continuum. But before more of those Kazmir stories get written, can we please use a little judgment?
07 March 2013
Gays and Ballplayers and Locker Rooms, Oh My!
Let's suppose you're a narrow-minded, ignorant homophobe (to be doubly redundant) baseball player and you feel you'd be uncomfortable with a gay teammate in the locker room with you. Allow me to make three small observations:
1. Boy are you in for a shock. 5%-15% of population x 25 guys on a team = 1-4 gays per squad.
2. Substitute "black" for "gay" and go back 60 years. Fun with racism!
3. Which would you prefer, showering in the stall next to a naked gay teammate hitting .360 or
showering in the stall next to a naked straight teammate hitting .190?
See? Turns out you're not such a narrow-minded, ignorant homophobe after-all.
1. Boy are you in for a shock. 5%-15% of population x 25 guys on a team = 1-4 gays per squad.
2. Substitute "black" for "gay" and go back 60 years. Fun with racism!
3. Which would you prefer, showering in the stall next to a naked gay teammate hitting .360 or
showering in the stall next to a naked straight teammate hitting .190?
See? Turns out you're not such a narrow-minded, ignorant homophobe after-all.
06 March 2013
Mike Trout's Getting Rooked (Or He's Not)
Shortly after Marvin Miller took command of the baseball players' union he discovered to his horror that the baseball card companies -- well, company: Topps -- were inducing rookies and minor leaguers to essentially give away the rights to their likeness by offering a handful of coins and Major League blandishment. Miller proposed to Topps that they negotiate a deal that would more fairly compensate the players for the millions that Topps was reaping.
Topps told Miller they had no reason to negotiate with him. "We don't see your muscle," they told him.
So Miller visited every MLB camp the following spring and exhorted the players not to sign the deals no matter their affinity for baseball cards. In return, he promised the players he would get them a better deal.
When Topps ran into a series of brick walls, they called Miller. Seeing his "muscle," they worked out a new deal that doubled player royalties and earned their union hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars, specifically 510 of them, is the amount that Mike Trout will "earn" in 2013, thanks to a four percent raise from his employer. That is his reward for one of the most extraordinary seasons in baseball history. Trout will take home $20K above the minimum salary for second-year players.
Mike Trout's MVP-level season was worth roughly $60 million on open-market last year, based on his 12+ WARP and a market value of nearly $5 million per win. For that performance, he earned the MLB minimum of $480,000.
Trout is unlikely to come close to repeating that in his sophomore season, but even if he's half as valuable, he's still outperforming his salary by $29.5 million.
What Angel management understands is that he has no "muscle." The Collective Bargaining Agreement signed by the league and the union gives teams total control of players until they reach salary arbitration in year three. This is designed to compensate teams for the substantial investments they make in player development.
Angel owner Arte Moreno is hardly known for austerity. He's made Google-sized investments in Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton, and has a Lehman Brothers deal with Vernon Wells. He could have thrown Trout an extra hundred grand -- couch cushion change for the franchise -- to reward him for propelling the team to contention and ingratiate the franchise to the player come free agent time. But he didn't have to. And so, Trout will earn all year what Alex Rodriguez will "earn" in three games -- three games, that is, that ARod won't play.
But even a 21-year-old knows that "my time will come," and possibly soon. L.A. brass of Anaheim may already be working on a deal with Trout's representatives to buy out arbitration and a year or two of free agency. It may be wise to lowball his current compensation to create an incentive to sign a long-term deal. Arte Moreno didn't turn a half-million dollar ad agency into an $8 billion asset by making bad business decisions.
And when Trout gets his consolation prize -- whether he's 21 or 23 when it happens -- it will be in the Powerball range. In the meantime, he's the highest-paid 21-year-old this side of ... well, Bryce Harper, whose leverage is apparently greater. Harper earns $2 million this year, a mere $23 million below his value.
Topps told Miller they had no reason to negotiate with him. "We don't see your muscle," they told him.
So Miller visited every MLB camp the following spring and exhorted the players not to sign the deals no matter their affinity for baseball cards. In return, he promised the players he would get them a better deal.
When Topps ran into a series of brick walls, they called Miller. Seeing his "muscle," they worked out a new deal that doubled player royalties and earned their union hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars, specifically 510 of them, is the amount that Mike Trout will "earn" in 2013, thanks to a four percent raise from his employer. That is his reward for one of the most extraordinary seasons in baseball history. Trout will take home $20K above the minimum salary for second-year players.
Mike Trout's MVP-level season was worth roughly $60 million on open-market last year, based on his 12+ WARP and a market value of nearly $5 million per win. For that performance, he earned the MLB minimum of $480,000.
Trout is unlikely to come close to repeating that in his sophomore season, but even if he's half as valuable, he's still outperforming his salary by $29.5 million.
What Angel management understands is that he has no "muscle." The Collective Bargaining Agreement signed by the league and the union gives teams total control of players until they reach salary arbitration in year three. This is designed to compensate teams for the substantial investments they make in player development.
Angel owner Arte Moreno is hardly known for austerity. He's made Google-sized investments in Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton, and has a Lehman Brothers deal with Vernon Wells. He could have thrown Trout an extra hundred grand -- couch cushion change for the franchise -- to reward him for propelling the team to contention and ingratiate the franchise to the player come free agent time. But he didn't have to. And so, Trout will earn all year what Alex Rodriguez will "earn" in three games -- three games, that is, that ARod won't play.
But even a 21-year-old knows that "my time will come," and possibly soon. L.A. brass of Anaheim may already be working on a deal with Trout's representatives to buy out arbitration and a year or two of free agency. It may be wise to lowball his current compensation to create an incentive to sign a long-term deal. Arte Moreno didn't turn a half-million dollar ad agency into an $8 billion asset by making bad business decisions.
And when Trout gets his consolation prize -- whether he's 21 or 23 when it happens -- it will be in the Powerball range. In the meantime, he's the highest-paid 21-year-old this side of ... well, Bryce Harper, whose leverage is apparently greater. Harper earns $2 million this year, a mere $23 million below his value.
03 March 2013
Just One More Good Year
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.
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.
23 February 2013
The Inscrutable East
Has there ever been a team assembled quite like the 2013 Toronto Blue Jays? At 73-89 last season, the Jays continued a 20-year trend in which they finished third or lower in the AL East 19 times. The team was hampered mostly by a dearth of starting arms and a ghastly array of division rivals.
Following the 2012 season, GM Alex Anthopoulos made the bold gamble to strike while the Yankees and Red Sox were cold. New York remains a threat, but the team is trimming budget as it ages. Boston is in retreat, Baltimore in regression and Tampa in St. Pete. The sun is shining for a year or two as the Ontarions to make hay.
To a roster leaning heavily on boppers Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, and closer Casey Janssen, Anthopoulos overlayed the core of the Miami Marlins. After busting in Florida, Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson and Mark Buehrle were shipped north to join R.A. Dickey from the Mets and Melky Cabrera from exile, along with backups Emilio Bonifacio and Macier Izturis.
Will it work? Is that enough? They play 162 games to answer such questions. Certainly there is sufficient muscle on this squad to win the division. The three newcomers on the mound are a nice mix of veteran inning munchers and one-time phenom, joining Brandon Morrow fresh off his 2012 coming-out ceremony (a 2.96 ERA in 21 starts.) Most GMs would trade their luxury suite dinner spread for a rotation of Dickey, Buehrle, Johnson, Morrow and whoever.
On paper, the lineup is stacked. Aside from first base, Jays manager John Gibbons will write the name of an above-average player at every starting position, particularly if centerfielder Colby Rasmus and catcher JP Arencibia nibble at their potential.
The bench has some working parts, with Bonifacio a nice back-up plan at almost any spot on the field. Bullpens are notoriously fickle and hard to predict, but the presence of several former starters -- Brett Cecil, JA Happ and Carlos Villenueva -- adds some stability.
Yet there's trepidation. The Reyes-Johnson-Buehrle play was a flop in the NL, and now it's on the road in the brutal AL Beast. Miami's signings were generally considered folly; why does Toronto get a pass for paying the back ended portion of them?
And there are questions. Dickey's knuckler has flummoxed, but will it knuckle in a dome? Is Johnson fully repaired? Can Bautista stay on the field? Were Melky's 2012 exploits simply a PED-fueled quirk? Is Encarnacion a slugger (42 homers last season) or has the clock struck midnight (38 homers combined in the two previous seasons)?
More to the point, can a 73-win team suddenly become a 93-win team? The Brewers exercised a similar strategy two years ago, knowing that Prince Fielder would take his salads elsewhere the following season. They bet the house -- or more accurately, the farm system -- on Zack Greinke and Shaun Marcum, who helped deliver 96 wins and the division before Fielder bolted and Milwaukee tripped back into the pack in 2012.
Alex Anthopoulos is betting millions of Canadian dollars that the formula, expertly applied, can work again, even against the toughest competition. And he's betting that there's no time like the present. If you love baseball more than the Rays and Yankees, you're rooting for him to be right.
Following the 2012 season, GM Alex Anthopoulos made the bold gamble to strike while the Yankees and Red Sox were cold. New York remains a threat, but the team is trimming budget as it ages. Boston is in retreat, Baltimore in regression and Tampa in St. Pete. The sun is shining for a year or two as the Ontarions to make hay.
To a roster leaning heavily on boppers Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, and closer Casey Janssen, Anthopoulos overlayed the core of the Miami Marlins. After busting in Florida, Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson and Mark Buehrle were shipped north to join R.A. Dickey from the Mets and Melky Cabrera from exile, along with backups Emilio Bonifacio and Macier Izturis.
Will it work? Is that enough? They play 162 games to answer such questions. Certainly there is sufficient muscle on this squad to win the division. The three newcomers on the mound are a nice mix of veteran inning munchers and one-time phenom, joining Brandon Morrow fresh off his 2012 coming-out ceremony (a 2.96 ERA in 21 starts.) Most GMs would trade their luxury suite dinner spread for a rotation of Dickey, Buehrle, Johnson, Morrow and whoever.
On paper, the lineup is stacked. Aside from first base, Jays manager John Gibbons will write the name of an above-average player at every starting position, particularly if centerfielder Colby Rasmus and catcher JP Arencibia nibble at their potential.
The bench has some working parts, with Bonifacio a nice back-up plan at almost any spot on the field. Bullpens are notoriously fickle and hard to predict, but the presence of several former starters -- Brett Cecil, JA Happ and Carlos Villenueva -- adds some stability.
Yet there's trepidation. The Reyes-Johnson-Buehrle play was a flop in the NL, and now it's on the road in the brutal AL Beast. Miami's signings were generally considered folly; why does Toronto get a pass for paying the back ended portion of them?
And there are questions. Dickey's knuckler has flummoxed, but will it knuckle in a dome? Is Johnson fully repaired? Can Bautista stay on the field? Were Melky's 2012 exploits simply a PED-fueled quirk? Is Encarnacion a slugger (42 homers last season) or has the clock struck midnight (38 homers combined in the two previous seasons)?
More to the point, can a 73-win team suddenly become a 93-win team? The Brewers exercised a similar strategy two years ago, knowing that Prince Fielder would take his salads elsewhere the following season. They bet the house -- or more accurately, the farm system -- on Zack Greinke and Shaun Marcum, who helped deliver 96 wins and the division before Fielder bolted and Milwaukee tripped back into the pack in 2012.
Alex Anthopoulos is betting millions of Canadian dollars that the formula, expertly applied, can work again, even against the toughest competition. And he's betting that there's no time like the present. If you love baseball more than the Rays and Yankees, you're rooting for him to be right.
17 February 2013
Who Is Baseball's L.A. Lakers?
It's said that everyone has a twin somewhere in the world. Does every baseball player and team have a twin in another sport? As the NBA interrupts its interminably unproductive regular season for an All-Star exhibition, it's a good time to determine where there are analogs across leagues.
For example, which MLB team is most likely to repeat the work of the 2012-13 L.A. Lakers, a Ferrari of assembled talent playing like a jalopy? It seems as if the Toronto Blue Jays are setting themselves up for that, having imported the failed Miami Marlins' roster for a run at an AL East title. But it feels different with the Blue Jays, perhaps because they're no longer commanded by General Footshooter and perhaps because they are a year removed from novelty.
MLB's Angelinos are both candidates for this comparison because both have spent lavishly on talent and are expecting upper echelon results. Of the two, the Dodgers seem more vulnerable to under-performance because their imports seem less strategic and they're starting with a weaker base.
This year's Miami Heat is the MLB squad with a world class roster and championship-or-bust designs. Perennially that would be the Yankees, but management's efforts to put the payroll on a diet have trimmed some of the excess talent from the Bombers this season. The L.A. Angels feel like the team built for both the short and long haul and most likely to elicit yawns for winning the World Series.
The baseball version of the San Antonio Spurs is the St. Louis Cardinals. Both franchises have been successful for two decades despite small-market profiles and middling payrolls. They both have management with aptitude and vision, strong on-field (court) leadership, a culture of modesty and excellence, and star players who act like professionals. The Spurs no longer have the most talent, but they have the best record in the NBA so far. The Cards never had the most talent, but won two titles in six years and got to Game 7 of the pennant last year after losing the best player on the planet to free agency.
The Phoenix Suns are a once-proud franchise now in some semblance of disarray. Their 17-36 record so far this year looks a lot like the Boston Red Sox' final month of 2011. Also like the Sox, they have no pitching.
It's too early to tell who will be baseball's version of the Chicago Bulls, treading water until their ascendant superstar's triumphant return. But their opposite is in New York. The Yankees are hoping to make waves while avoiding the return of their dimmed star.
We won't even mention the Charlotte Bobcats and Pittsburgh Pirates. Their fans have suffered enough.
LeBron and Kobe have no equal in horsehide. Prince Albert still generally needs a last name, has never been a brand and is no longer the unquestioned king of the game. But Mike Trout, Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg appear to be the Kevin Durant and Derrick Rose of baseball. Like Rose and Durant, the baseball trio has made the All-Star team every year they've spent in the league. Maybe the Bulls should have shut down Rose in last spring's playoffs to avoid catastrophic injury.
Tim Duncan and Derek Jeter are sports doppelgangers. Bright, beloved, biracial, respectful Hall of Famers with lots of team-based jewelry. Neither ever says anything controversial. Neither has been able to reach a grounder hit six feet to his left for eight years.
Jarvas Varnardo averages less than a point per game for the Heat and less than a third of a rebound as the last guy off the bench for Miami. But he and Dwayne Wade will sport the same ring if Miami repeats as NBA champs. That would make him the Eli Whiteside of basketball. The 32-year-old catcher backed up Buster Posey last season for the World Champion Giants -- which is like being Robert Deniro's understudy. Whiteside got into 12 games with a double, a walk, a .396 OPS and a ring. And then he got waived.
Finally, Charles Barkley has Curt Schilling, the retired great who can't seem to shut up. Actually, Barkley has Barkley and Schilling has Schilling, which might be the crux of the issue.
For example, which MLB team is most likely to repeat the work of the 2012-13 L.A. Lakers, a Ferrari of assembled talent playing like a jalopy? It seems as if the Toronto Blue Jays are setting themselves up for that, having imported the failed Miami Marlins' roster for a run at an AL East title. But it feels different with the Blue Jays, perhaps because they're no longer commanded by General Footshooter and perhaps because they are a year removed from novelty.
MLB's Angelinos are both candidates for this comparison because both have spent lavishly on talent and are expecting upper echelon results. Of the two, the Dodgers seem more vulnerable to under-performance because their imports seem less strategic and they're starting with a weaker base.
This year's Miami Heat is the MLB squad with a world class roster and championship-or-bust designs. Perennially that would be the Yankees, but management's efforts to put the payroll on a diet have trimmed some of the excess talent from the Bombers this season. The L.A. Angels feel like the team built for both the short and long haul and most likely to elicit yawns for winning the World Series.
The baseball version of the San Antonio Spurs is the St. Louis Cardinals. Both franchises have been successful for two decades despite small-market profiles and middling payrolls. They both have management with aptitude and vision, strong on-field (court) leadership, a culture of modesty and excellence, and star players who act like professionals. The Spurs no longer have the most talent, but they have the best record in the NBA so far. The Cards never had the most talent, but won two titles in six years and got to Game 7 of the pennant last year after losing the best player on the planet to free agency.
The Phoenix Suns are a once-proud franchise now in some semblance of disarray. Their 17-36 record so far this year looks a lot like the Boston Red Sox' final month of 2011. Also like the Sox, they have no pitching.
It's too early to tell who will be baseball's version of the Chicago Bulls, treading water until their ascendant superstar's triumphant return. But their opposite is in New York. The Yankees are hoping to make waves while avoiding the return of their dimmed star.
We won't even mention the Charlotte Bobcats and Pittsburgh Pirates. Their fans have suffered enough.
LeBron and Kobe have no equal in horsehide. Prince Albert still generally needs a last name, has never been a brand and is no longer the unquestioned king of the game. But Mike Trout, Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg appear to be the Kevin Durant and Derrick Rose of baseball. Like Rose and Durant, the baseball trio has made the All-Star team every year they've spent in the league. Maybe the Bulls should have shut down Rose in last spring's playoffs to avoid catastrophic injury.
Tim Duncan and Derek Jeter are sports doppelgangers. Bright, beloved, biracial, respectful Hall of Famers with lots of team-based jewelry. Neither ever says anything controversial. Neither has been able to reach a grounder hit six feet to his left for eight years.
Jarvas Varnardo averages less than a point per game for the Heat and less than a third of a rebound as the last guy off the bench for Miami. But he and Dwayne Wade will sport the same ring if Miami repeats as NBA champs. That would make him the Eli Whiteside of basketball. The 32-year-old catcher backed up Buster Posey last season for the World Champion Giants -- which is like being Robert Deniro's understudy. Whiteside got into 12 games with a double, a walk, a .396 OPS and a ring. And then he got waived.
Finally, Charles Barkley has Curt Schilling, the retired great who can't seem to shut up. Actually, Barkley has Barkley and Schilling has Schilling, which might be the crux of the issue.
11 February 2013
A Smoaking Gun and Other Stories
At the risk of putting too fine a point on a previous post -- aw hell, there's no risk: we're going to shave the nub to within a millimeter of its life -- Baseball Prospectus released their projections for MLB players today and here's what the Tarot cards suggest for Justin Smoak:
.224/.313/.371 with 14 HR in 470 plate appearances for the Mariners this season. With weak baserunning and slightly below average defense, Smoak grades out essentially to replacement-level at first base, even after factoring in the park he plays in.
In other words, you can pick up any old Tom, Dick or Justin Smoak off the waiver wire and expect about the same production.
Add in the missing 150 plate appearances, which suggest either an injury or a demotion; in either case his contribution during those 30 games is zero.
By comparison, to which the previous post alludes, Matt Wieters's forecast comes in at .259/.330/.422 with 19 HR in 588 plate appearances while dinging him slightly on defense behind the plate. Wieters is worth a pair of wins against replacement in this forecast, which makes him a solid regular but not a star.
These are projections, not predictions, so even if Smoak breaks out and Wieters breaks down, the system can't be said to be "wrong." (In fact, the system includes the odds of breakout and collapse as well, but the math is obtuse.) It just means that players who have performed the way these two have at their ages in the past have tended to perform like the projection going forward.
According to BP's projection system, the top 10 players offensively in 2013 will be:
It's also interesting to see the system projecting a return to stardom for Hanley Ramirez, whom it ranks as the 21st best offensive player. That is based on the Dodgers leaving him at short and giving Dee Gordon the seasoning he needs in Albuquerque.
The system also sees a return to relevance for newly shorn Tim Lincecum with a 3.10 ERA in 174 innings and a return to normalcy for Gio Gonzalez with a 3.67 ERA and the same value to his team as Milwaukee's Mike Fiers.
As for the unprojectable R.A. Dickey? Canada won't want to hear this. The system sees a 38-year-old moving to a tough division in the tougher league and projects 224 innings of a 4.41 ERA with a below .500 record. But then, R.A.'s beaten the odds before.
This is the kind of conjecture we have at our disposal as pitchers and catchers loosen up in Florida and Arizona.
.224/.313/.371 with 14 HR in 470 plate appearances for the Mariners this season. With weak baserunning and slightly below average defense, Smoak grades out essentially to replacement-level at first base, even after factoring in the park he plays in.
In other words, you can pick up any old Tom, Dick or Justin Smoak off the waiver wire and expect about the same production.
Add in the missing 150 plate appearances, which suggest either an injury or a demotion; in either case his contribution during those 30 games is zero.
By comparison, to which the previous post alludes, Matt Wieters's forecast comes in at .259/.330/.422 with 19 HR in 588 plate appearances while dinging him slightly on defense behind the plate. Wieters is worth a pair of wins against replacement in this forecast, which makes him a solid regular but not a star.
These are projections, not predictions, so even if Smoak breaks out and Wieters breaks down, the system can't be said to be "wrong." (In fact, the system includes the odds of breakout and collapse as well, but the math is obtuse.) It just means that players who have performed the way these two have at their ages in the past have tended to perform like the projection going forward.
According to BP's projection system, the top 10 players offensively in 2013 will be:
- Albert Pujols
- Joey Votto
- Ryan Braun
- Miguel Cabrera
- Mike Trout
- Troy Tulowitzki
- Adrian Gonzalez
- Andrew McCutcheon
- Robinson Cano
It's also interesting to see the system projecting a return to stardom for Hanley Ramirez, whom it ranks as the 21st best offensive player. That is based on the Dodgers leaving him at short and giving Dee Gordon the seasoning he needs in Albuquerque.
The system also sees a return to relevance for newly shorn Tim Lincecum with a 3.10 ERA in 174 innings and a return to normalcy for Gio Gonzalez with a 3.67 ERA and the same value to his team as Milwaukee's Mike Fiers.
As for the unprojectable R.A. Dickey? Canada won't want to hear this. The system sees a 38-year-old moving to a tough division in the tougher league and projects 224 innings of a 4.41 ERA with a below .500 record. But then, R.A.'s beaten the odds before.
This is the kind of conjecture we have at our disposal as pitchers and catchers loosen up in Florida and Arizona.
08 February 2013
Now You See Him; Now You Don't
"Past results are not indicative of future returns."
It's the standard caveat rolled out by every mutual fund, after touting its polymath insights and market-beating deliverables. And it's part of the fine print we ignore while pouring our life savings into Bernie Madoff's trough, or the Parkcentral Hedge Fund.
The retirement this week of Brandon Webb reminds us that everyone who makes a living firing a baseball overhand should wear a tag with the same warning.
Webb is a strong-armed, 230-pound right-hander who commanded the mound from 2003-2008. He hurled more than 1300 innings over six years for the Diamondbacks to the tune of a 3.26 ERA, a Cy Young and two runner-ups. In short, he was a stud on a Hall of Fame path.
Then, in his first start of 2009, a funny thing happened to his shoulder. Well, not funny if you're Brandon Webb, or the guy cutting the checks owed to him for 2009 and 2010, which totaled $15 million. Four innings into the '09 season the Arizona workhorse was done for the year.
And for 2010.
And for 2011.
And for 2012.
And now, for evermore.
After five 200-frame seasons, the fraying of Brandon Webb's labrum and rotator cuff prevented him from tossing another MLB pitch. He tried a comeback in '11, but 12 unproductive Double-A innings put him back under the knife and on the DL.
Think back to Opening Day 2009. Brandon Webb's on the hill, arguably the best pitcher in the game entering his age-30 season. He wears consistency, sturdiness and reliability like a second glove. Any reasonable extrapolation of his career, even if you build in decline, suggests a solid return on investment.
And then, poof!
It's should serve as a a red flag to teams thinking of handing the car keys to their seemingly-indestructible ace pitchers. The Mariners are poised to guarantee Felix Hernandez a week of federal budget deficits for his next, undoubtedly awesome, seven years of service. If you were going to bet on anyone to deliver for that long, King Felix would be the guy.
But so was Bernie Madoff.
It's the standard caveat rolled out by every mutual fund, after touting its polymath insights and market-beating deliverables. And it's part of the fine print we ignore while pouring our life savings into Bernie Madoff's trough, or the Parkcentral Hedge Fund.
The retirement this week of Brandon Webb reminds us that everyone who makes a living firing a baseball overhand should wear a tag with the same warning.
Webb is a strong-armed, 230-pound right-hander who commanded the mound from 2003-2008. He hurled more than 1300 innings over six years for the Diamondbacks to the tune of a 3.26 ERA, a Cy Young and two runner-ups. In short, he was a stud on a Hall of Fame path.
Then, in his first start of 2009, a funny thing happened to his shoulder. Well, not funny if you're Brandon Webb, or the guy cutting the checks owed to him for 2009 and 2010, which totaled $15 million. Four innings into the '09 season the Arizona workhorse was done for the year.
And for 2010.
And for 2011.
And for 2012.
And now, for evermore.
After five 200-frame seasons, the fraying of Brandon Webb's labrum and rotator cuff prevented him from tossing another MLB pitch. He tried a comeback in '11, but 12 unproductive Double-A innings put him back under the knife and on the DL.
Think back to Opening Day 2009. Brandon Webb's on the hill, arguably the best pitcher in the game entering his age-30 season. He wears consistency, sturdiness and reliability like a second glove. Any reasonable extrapolation of his career, even if you build in decline, suggests a solid return on investment.
And then, poof!
It's should serve as a a red flag to teams thinking of handing the car keys to their seemingly-indestructible ace pitchers. The Mariners are poised to guarantee Felix Hernandez a week of federal budget deficits for his next, undoubtedly awesome, seven years of service. If you were going to bet on anyone to deliver for that long, King Felix would be the guy.
But so was Bernie Madoff.
06 February 2013
Blowing Smoak at Reporters
Let's engage in a little hypothetical hijinks.
Let's suppose your friend complained to you that he didn't understand why Oriole backstop Matt Wieters is selected to the All-Star squad while Mariner first-sacker Justin Smoak is considered a flop. The two are contemporaries from the Charleston, SC area and former first round picks in the MLB draft. Consequently they get compared 'round these parts.
After all. your companion notes, Smoak's 162-game average for the first four years of his career is a .223 BA with 21 HR and 71 RBI. Wieters' performance during the same period is .260, 21 & 79. It's a red pubic hair's difference, right?
Knowing the progressive sort that you are, no doubt you would patiently explain to your unenlightened friend that Smoak has managed to stay on the field more than 130 games in a season just once while Wieters has done so three times. You would point out that Triple Crown stats were demonstrated 33 years ago to be woefully inadequate to the storytelling task and that the difference in OPS, .749-.683 in favor of Wieters, is not insubstantial.
You would further mention that Smoak is a lumbering first baseman, the lowest form of defensive player this side of the DH, and Wieters is a Gold Glove catcher, the most grueling position on the field. More to the point, the two should be compared to hitters at opposite ends of the offensive spectrum -- Wieters to catchers and Smoak to first basemen. Viewed against their position-mates, Wieters has been worth eight-and-a-half wins compared to a replacement level catcher while Smoak IS a replacement level first baseman.
And that's just the offensive side of the equation. Accounting for their glovework takes the former to 14.7 wins against replacement in four years and the latter down to 2.7 wins BELOW replacement. In other words, an All-Star and a bust.
Sadly, you were not around to apprise the author of this story in my local paper of such considerations. And so, a professional journalist, whose area of expertise is supposedly sports, managed to pen this stunning piece of ignorance. He will not be fired or reprimanded or even educated because no one at his paper has the slightest awareness that they are living in the Dark Ages.
And none of his knowledge-challenged colleagues or editors will be fired, reprimanded or educated themselves because neither their colleagues at other newspapers in South Carolina, or in the Southeast, or nearly anywhere, nor their TV or radio counterparts, nor virtually anyone else who is considered a sports reporter or commentator or analyst has the slightest idea about the advances in their field since they stopped learning anything new back in 1974.
And so they continue to peck out tripe like this on their IBM Selectrics, completely oblivious to the development in the interim of the IBM Wheelwriter, word processor, personal computer, smartphone and tablet. They are the Amish of journalism, refusing to adopt advancements of science and technology, continuing to view the game as their great-grandfathers did with horses and buggy metrics.
Thirty-three years since Bill James's first Baseball Abstract. It'll be 34 years in March.
Let's suppose your friend complained to you that he didn't understand why Oriole backstop Matt Wieters is selected to the All-Star squad while Mariner first-sacker Justin Smoak is considered a flop. The two are contemporaries from the Charleston, SC area and former first round picks in the MLB draft. Consequently they get compared 'round these parts.
After all. your companion notes, Smoak's 162-game average for the first four years of his career is a .223 BA with 21 HR and 71 RBI. Wieters' performance during the same period is .260, 21 & 79. It's a red pubic hair's difference, right?
Knowing the progressive sort that you are, no doubt you would patiently explain to your unenlightened friend that Smoak has managed to stay on the field more than 130 games in a season just once while Wieters has done so three times. You would point out that Triple Crown stats were demonstrated 33 years ago to be woefully inadequate to the storytelling task and that the difference in OPS, .749-.683 in favor of Wieters, is not insubstantial.
You would further mention that Smoak is a lumbering first baseman, the lowest form of defensive player this side of the DH, and Wieters is a Gold Glove catcher, the most grueling position on the field. More to the point, the two should be compared to hitters at opposite ends of the offensive spectrum -- Wieters to catchers and Smoak to first basemen. Viewed against their position-mates, Wieters has been worth eight-and-a-half wins compared to a replacement level catcher while Smoak IS a replacement level first baseman.
And that's just the offensive side of the equation. Accounting for their glovework takes the former to 14.7 wins against replacement in four years and the latter down to 2.7 wins BELOW replacement. In other words, an All-Star and a bust.
Sadly, you were not around to apprise the author of this story in my local paper of such considerations. And so, a professional journalist, whose area of expertise is supposedly sports, managed to pen this stunning piece of ignorance. He will not be fired or reprimanded or even educated because no one at his paper has the slightest awareness that they are living in the Dark Ages.
And none of his knowledge-challenged colleagues or editors will be fired, reprimanded or educated themselves because neither their colleagues at other newspapers in South Carolina, or in the Southeast, or nearly anywhere, nor their TV or radio counterparts, nor virtually anyone else who is considered a sports reporter or commentator or analyst has the slightest idea about the advances in their field since they stopped learning anything new back in 1974.
And so they continue to peck out tripe like this on their IBM Selectrics, completely oblivious to the development in the interim of the IBM Wheelwriter, word processor, personal computer, smartphone and tablet. They are the Amish of journalism, refusing to adopt advancements of science and technology, continuing to view the game as their great-grandfathers did with horses and buggy metrics.
Thirty-three years since Bill James's first Baseball Abstract. It'll be 34 years in March.
30 January 2013
Rod Barajas's Career Thrown Out
Since the Pirates cut him in the off-season, veteran backstop Rod Barajas has been seeking employment. He might want to check the classifieds.
At 250 pounds, Barajas's best production at the plate currently involves the dinner table. He hit just .206/.283/.343 in 104 games last year, but that's probably not what's keeping him from finding MLB work. Barajas has pounded 16+ homers four times and slugged .400+ most of his 13-year career.
The problem with hiring Rod Barajas to be your team's catcher, or back-up catcher, or seventh string catcher, is his catching. Or more accurately, his throwing.
Last season, Rod Barajas threw out six baserunners attempting to steal. The other 93 were successful.
That's right, 15 out of every 16 would-be base stealers . . . did.
No one ever accused Barajas of illegal possession of a firearm when he squatted. Even in his prime, no one confused him with Ivan Rodriguez and his 50% caught stealing percentage, though he has a lifetime 31% caught stealing rate, which is about league-average. And some of the trouble might be an inability of Pirate hurlers to hold runners.
Nonetheless, a six percent throw out rate is historically bad. Worst since 1956. And if you want to blame the Pittsburgh pitchers for throwing slow and sloppy, credit them for two of Barajas's six caught stealings. Twice Pirate pitchers picked off the base runner while Barajas was behind the plate, accruing a CS in his column.
Now if you accept the premise that in the current run-scoring environment a stolen base is worth on average about .3 runs and a caught stealing is worth about .7 runs, then runners gained about 24 runs, or about three wins, by the commission of thievery against Pirate pitchers on those occasions when the big Californian was their battery mate.
If a replacement level backstop nails a third of the runners, they gain, in the aggregate, nothing.
Which means Rod Barajas cost his team three losses compared to a replacement receiver simply on that one aspect of the game. He might be the best handler of pitchers, caller of pitches and framer of strike zones in the long, storied history of baseball. He might sell programs before the game, help the grounds crew pull out the tarp during rain delays and entertain fans between innings. But he's still not overcoming 93 of 99 stolen bases.
Considering he's a jalopy on the basepaths, a nearly automatic out with the bat and of lengthening tooth, it's easy to see why his big league days may have withered.
To console him, he's got the memory of 1000 games behind the plate, 136 lifetime homers, an '01 Diamondbacks World Series ring and $19 million in career earnings.
Thanks for playing Rod and enjoy your consolation prize. Just be careful it doesn't get stolen!
At 250 pounds, Barajas's best production at the plate currently involves the dinner table. He hit just .206/.283/.343 in 104 games last year, but that's probably not what's keeping him from finding MLB work. Barajas has pounded 16+ homers four times and slugged .400+ most of his 13-year career.
The problem with hiring Rod Barajas to be your team's catcher, or back-up catcher, or seventh string catcher, is his catching. Or more accurately, his throwing.
Last season, Rod Barajas threw out six baserunners attempting to steal. The other 93 were successful.
That's right, 15 out of every 16 would-be base stealers . . . did.
No one ever accused Barajas of illegal possession of a firearm when he squatted. Even in his prime, no one confused him with Ivan Rodriguez and his 50% caught stealing percentage, though he has a lifetime 31% caught stealing rate, which is about league-average. And some of the trouble might be an inability of Pirate hurlers to hold runners.
Nonetheless, a six percent throw out rate is historically bad. Worst since 1956. And if you want to blame the Pittsburgh pitchers for throwing slow and sloppy, credit them for two of Barajas's six caught stealings. Twice Pirate pitchers picked off the base runner while Barajas was behind the plate, accruing a CS in his column.
Now if you accept the premise that in the current run-scoring environment a stolen base is worth on average about .3 runs and a caught stealing is worth about .7 runs, then runners gained about 24 runs, or about three wins, by the commission of thievery against Pirate pitchers on those occasions when the big Californian was their battery mate.
If a replacement level backstop nails a third of the runners, they gain, in the aggregate, nothing.
Which means Rod Barajas cost his team three losses compared to a replacement receiver simply on that one aspect of the game. He might be the best handler of pitchers, caller of pitches and framer of strike zones in the long, storied history of baseball. He might sell programs before the game, help the grounds crew pull out the tarp during rain delays and entertain fans between innings. But he's still not overcoming 93 of 99 stolen bases.
Considering he's a jalopy on the basepaths, a nearly automatic out with the bat and of lengthening tooth, it's easy to see why his big league days may have withered.
To console him, he's got the memory of 1000 games behind the plate, 136 lifetime homers, an '01 Diamondbacks World Series ring and $19 million in career earnings.
Thanks for playing Rod and enjoy your consolation prize. Just be careful it doesn't get stolen!
26 January 2013
Hey! I'm the Manager!
Congratulations to me. Charleston, SC just got a new American League franchise (along with the NL's new entry in Indianapolis) and Swamp Foxes managing partner Mike Veeck has appointed me manager.
The bulk of managerial duties are practiced in the clubhouse, on the plane and in the hotel with the human beings populating the team. I'll be off-loading that element of the job to my chief operating officer Joe V. Uhl.
My forte is applying optimal game strategies, which means understanding the research, analyzing situations, maintaining a season-long time horizon, and knowing what makes the players tick. Joe will be by my side in the dugout for that last part.
What fans of the Swamp Foxes will notice, besides our awesome home uniforms featuring Francis Marion in full Revolutionary War regalia and our well-appointed neo-classical ballpark hard by the harbor in historic downtown, is that our team will operate differently than every other. Consequently, we will win games.
No Closer; More Platoons
First, when we break camp, only 10 pitchers will come north from Florida. Five starters and five relievers should be sufficient, particularly in the early months, as days off reduce the fifth starter to a utility role. Our best reliever is our fireman, ready to douse rallies whenever they occur. Securing the last three outs with a three-run lead, though recorded by the newspaper, will be neither particularly noted in our dugout nor assigned to a particular hurler. Let Joe deal with the fallout.
While I'm at it, I'll staff a couple of bullpen jockeys who can throw two or three frames at a time. That will provide the flexibility to scratch the starter early if he's scuffling.
The happy consequence, of course, is that 15 position players will leave our bench thick with pinch-hitters, defensive specialists and platoon-pairs. The flexibility that gives us will enhance the output at some positions and foil the use of LOOGYs and other pitching abominations.
Employing platoons means a roster soft on stars but packing punch nonetheless. An outfield platoon of Matt Joyce and Drew Stubbs (they aren't teammates, but my GM is working a 10-cents-on-the-dollar deal for each of them) doesn't sound too impressive, but Joyce rocks a 1.032 OPS against righties (versus .639 against southpaws) and Stubbs delivers .831 facing lefties. With six hitters riding my pine every night (loblolly pine: this is Charleston), I can afford to mix and match, yanking Joyce when the LOOGY makes a late-inning appearance.
A Sensible Batting Order
I'm not bestowing top billing to our speedy middle infielder with the whiffle ball bat. The guy who bats first bats most and that's the wrong place for a junebug who couldn't hit a beach ball with a kayak paddle. On-base percentage, not velocity, is paramount in the leadoff position, so my leadoff batter will be someone who gets aboard. Lumbering Jason Giambi (.403 OBP) trumps Zack Cozart (.290) as a leadoff prospect, but Giambi saw the top spot nine times in his 17-year career while Cozart has heard his song first in 101 of his 130 MLB games.
Generally after that, my best hitters will be at the top of the order and my worst at the bottom, adjusting to alternate lefties and righties when practical.
Bunting and Stealing Judiciously
Sacrificing trades a precious out and the opportunity to post crooked numbers for a skooch better chance at scoring one run. Consequently, we'll employ this strategy when one run wins the game, and only enough otherwise to keep the enemy on its toes. These decisions will also be affected by the batter-pitcher match-up, the fielding alignment and the on-deck batters.
Stealing is an asset when it succeeds but a little bit of death when it fails. We'll limit our attempts strategically, but we'll occasionally send the runner when we shouldn't -- just to confuse Ron Washington and other deep thinkers.
Customized Pitch Counts
Mark Buerhle's on the hill? Let him throw all night. Pedro Martinez starting tonight? Get him out around 100 pitches. History tells us he tires after 90. A 22-year-old coming off TJ surgery? Yank him as soon as he labors. Pitch counts are more blunt instrument than science, so I'll treat them with respect without allowing them to become my master.
Shifts and Other Customized Strategies
Oreos are yummy, but you wouldn't feed them to your dog. Likewise with fielding alignments: you don't defend David Ortiz the same way you defend Ichiro. I'd throw novel defensive arrangements at some enemy batsmen and challenge them to prove us wrong. A beneficial side effect is that it won't behoove a hitter to practice beating a shift until several teams employ it, so if we're first, we're most likely to succeed.
Use the Right Stats
You'll never hear this manager talk about a good RBI guy. He knows that a batter is either a good hitter in a position to knock in runs or a lucky hacker fronted in the lineup by mad table-setters. Ryan Howard didn't knock in 136+ runs a year from '06-'09 because he was a good RBI guy; he knocked in all those runs because he smashed 45+ homers and tallied 300+ total bases behind Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley.
You also won't hear this manager justify a pitcher-batter match-up based on a handful of previous experiences. If I pinch hit for Juan Pierre against Matt Albers it won't be because of a career .125 batting average against the Indians' righty. Pierre has eight plate appearances against Albers. In fact, Pierre has essentially no lefty-righty splits for his career. The Swamp Foxes' skipper understands about small sample sizes.
I might trot out terms like on-base percentage, OPS, BABIP, range factor and other metrics that matter. The difference between Dusty Baker and me will be that one of us mouths atrophied old statistical shibboleths while the other flexes his muscular quantifiers, not that one uses stats and the other doesn't.
Don't Be Afraid to Innovate
Testing new ideas that don't work gets managers excoriated in the baseball media, providing a palpable disincentive to innovating. I already disdain the baseball ignorati, so I won't be swayed by their recalcitrance to unorthodox methods.
Here are some things I might try:
1. Take a pair of starters who lack stamina and platoon them every fifth day. One guy will pitch the first four or five innings and the other will know he's coming in for the last four or five. It might produce a #1 starter and save the bullpen some action.
2. Platoon position players not by handedness but by day/night or by ballpark or something else that might have an impact. Who knows better than a manager with whom this might work?
3. Give selected players whole series off to go home, see the family, take care of life business and recharge. At the cost of four missed games, they get five days of rest and emotional health. It wouldn't work for everyone -- maybe not even for most players -- but I'll bet there are those who would benefit.
4. (Ironically) practice bunting endlessly. Then employ the bunt for safeties. It forces the opposition to defend yet one more part of the field.
5. Instruct my team to strike out less and hit more home runs. I'm telling you, I'm an innovator.
The bulk of managerial duties are practiced in the clubhouse, on the plane and in the hotel with the human beings populating the team. I'll be off-loading that element of the job to my chief operating officer Joe V. Uhl.
My forte is applying optimal game strategies, which means understanding the research, analyzing situations, maintaining a season-long time horizon, and knowing what makes the players tick. Joe will be by my side in the dugout for that last part.
What fans of the Swamp Foxes will notice, besides our awesome home uniforms featuring Francis Marion in full Revolutionary War regalia and our well-appointed neo-classical ballpark hard by the harbor in historic downtown, is that our team will operate differently than every other. Consequently, we will win games.
No Closer; More Platoons
First, when we break camp, only 10 pitchers will come north from Florida. Five starters and five relievers should be sufficient, particularly in the early months, as days off reduce the fifth starter to a utility role. Our best reliever is our fireman, ready to douse rallies whenever they occur. Securing the last three outs with a three-run lead, though recorded by the newspaper, will be neither particularly noted in our dugout nor assigned to a particular hurler. Let Joe deal with the fallout.
While I'm at it, I'll staff a couple of bullpen jockeys who can throw two or three frames at a time. That will provide the flexibility to scratch the starter early if he's scuffling.
The happy consequence, of course, is that 15 position players will leave our bench thick with pinch-hitters, defensive specialists and platoon-pairs. The flexibility that gives us will enhance the output at some positions and foil the use of LOOGYs and other pitching abominations.
Employing platoons means a roster soft on stars but packing punch nonetheless. An outfield platoon of Matt Joyce and Drew Stubbs (they aren't teammates, but my GM is working a 10-cents-on-the-dollar deal for each of them) doesn't sound too impressive, but Joyce rocks a 1.032 OPS against righties (versus .639 against southpaws) and Stubbs delivers .831 facing lefties. With six hitters riding my pine every night (loblolly pine: this is Charleston), I can afford to mix and match, yanking Joyce when the LOOGY makes a late-inning appearance.
A Sensible Batting Order
I'm not bestowing top billing to our speedy middle infielder with the whiffle ball bat. The guy who bats first bats most and that's the wrong place for a junebug who couldn't hit a beach ball with a kayak paddle. On-base percentage, not velocity, is paramount in the leadoff position, so my leadoff batter will be someone who gets aboard. Lumbering Jason Giambi (.403 OBP) trumps Zack Cozart (.290) as a leadoff prospect, but Giambi saw the top spot nine times in his 17-year career while Cozart has heard his song first in 101 of his 130 MLB games.
Generally after that, my best hitters will be at the top of the order and my worst at the bottom, adjusting to alternate lefties and righties when practical.
Bunting and Stealing Judiciously
Sacrificing trades a precious out and the opportunity to post crooked numbers for a skooch better chance at scoring one run. Consequently, we'll employ this strategy when one run wins the game, and only enough otherwise to keep the enemy on its toes. These decisions will also be affected by the batter-pitcher match-up, the fielding alignment and the on-deck batters.
Stealing is an asset when it succeeds but a little bit of death when it fails. We'll limit our attempts strategically, but we'll occasionally send the runner when we shouldn't -- just to confuse Ron Washington and other deep thinkers.
Customized Pitch Counts
Mark Buerhle's on the hill? Let him throw all night. Pedro Martinez starting tonight? Get him out around 100 pitches. History tells us he tires after 90. A 22-year-old coming off TJ surgery? Yank him as soon as he labors. Pitch counts are more blunt instrument than science, so I'll treat them with respect without allowing them to become my master.
Shifts and Other Customized Strategies
Oreos are yummy, but you wouldn't feed them to your dog. Likewise with fielding alignments: you don't defend David Ortiz the same way you defend Ichiro. I'd throw novel defensive arrangements at some enemy batsmen and challenge them to prove us wrong. A beneficial side effect is that it won't behoove a hitter to practice beating a shift until several teams employ it, so if we're first, we're most likely to succeed.
Use the Right Stats
You'll never hear this manager talk about a good RBI guy. He knows that a batter is either a good hitter in a position to knock in runs or a lucky hacker fronted in the lineup by mad table-setters. Ryan Howard didn't knock in 136+ runs a year from '06-'09 because he was a good RBI guy; he knocked in all those runs because he smashed 45+ homers and tallied 300+ total bases behind Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley.
You also won't hear this manager justify a pitcher-batter match-up based on a handful of previous experiences. If I pinch hit for Juan Pierre against Matt Albers it won't be because of a career .125 batting average against the Indians' righty. Pierre has eight plate appearances against Albers. In fact, Pierre has essentially no lefty-righty splits for his career. The Swamp Foxes' skipper understands about small sample sizes.
I might trot out terms like on-base percentage, OPS, BABIP, range factor and other metrics that matter. The difference between Dusty Baker and me will be that one of us mouths atrophied old statistical shibboleths while the other flexes his muscular quantifiers, not that one uses stats and the other doesn't.
Don't Be Afraid to Innovate
Testing new ideas that don't work gets managers excoriated in the baseball media, providing a palpable disincentive to innovating. I already disdain the baseball ignorati, so I won't be swayed by their recalcitrance to unorthodox methods.
Here are some things I might try:
1. Take a pair of starters who lack stamina and platoon them every fifth day. One guy will pitch the first four or five innings and the other will know he's coming in for the last four or five. It might produce a #1 starter and save the bullpen some action.
2. Platoon position players not by handedness but by day/night or by ballpark or something else that might have an impact. Who knows better than a manager with whom this might work?
3. Give selected players whole series off to go home, see the family, take care of life business and recharge. At the cost of four missed games, they get five days of rest and emotional health. It wouldn't work for everyone -- maybe not even for most players -- but I'll bet there are those who would benefit.
4. (Ironically) practice bunting endlessly. Then employ the bunt for safeties. It forces the opposition to defend yet one more part of the field.
5. Instruct my team to strike out less and hit more home runs. I'm telling you, I'm an innovator.
21 January 2013
Earl Weaver, Sabermetrician
Sabermetrics lost its grandfather this week.
Earl Weaver, who died this week at age 82, was in many ways the first sabermetrician. Weaver employed, and later elucidated, strategies now supported by voluminous research from the SABR community.
Weaver didn't know VORP or the run expectancy matrix. He had his own innate vision of the game that transcended its time.
Weaver wove his strategies, a particular human resources style and good players to a .583 winning percentage over 17 years, four pennants and a 1970 World Championship.
More specifically, Weaver was the first -- or the first to enunciate -- the following philosophy: because a team has a small and finite number of outs per game, an out is precious and avoiding outs is the key to success.
These rules were the cornerstone of his managerial career and he won 1400+ games using them:
Earl Weaver's valedictory managerial season came in 1986 -- his first and only losing season. Twenty-six years later, half of today's managers and nearly the entire cadre of reporters covering the game know less about it than he did then.
Earl Weaver, who died this week at age 82, was in many ways the first sabermetrician. Weaver employed, and later elucidated, strategies now supported by voluminous research from the SABR community.
Weaver didn't know VORP or the run expectancy matrix. He had his own innate vision of the game that transcended its time.
Weaver wove his strategies, a particular human resources style and good players to a .583 winning percentage over 17 years, four pennants and a 1970 World Championship.
More specifically, Weaver was the first -- or the first to enunciate -- the following philosophy: because a team has a small and finite number of outs per game, an out is precious and avoiding outs is the key to success.
These rules were the cornerstone of his managerial career and he won 1400+ games using them:
- A home run is the fastest way to score a run.
- Obvious corollary: get players who hit home runs.
- If you play for one run, that's all you'll get.
- Obvious corollary: don't play for one run unless that's all you need.
- Conserve your 27 outs at all costs.
- Obvious corollary: on-base percentage is more important than batting average. (Put another way, walks are very important.)
- Defense matters.
Earl Weaver's valedictory managerial season came in 1986 -- his first and only losing season. Twenty-six years later, half of today's managers and nearly the entire cadre of reporters covering the game know less about it than he did then.
20 January 2013
Hey, They Listened to Me!
Last installment of the Look Back trilogy on posts during the 2012 baseball season that either left the yard or whiffed.
This June 26 post suggesting the Mets should eject their most powerful booster rocket engendered some indignant emails. Ha! Take that indignant emailers! Not only was it right, the Mets took the advice and traded R.A. Dickey while his value was high.
Where the post went wrong was in suggesting that Dickey couldn't possibly keep up his first half heroics. Technically speaking, that was true: everything about R.A. Dickey is an impossibility, and yet the 38-year-old fireballing Scroogie artist manages to astonish us anew every fifth day. Only now he'll do it for Toronto while the Mets develop C Travis d’Arnaud, and RHP Noah Syndergaard.
This report of the Phillies' death as contender was not exaggerated. Nor was it premature. The core of the team in 2012 was crippled, two of the triumvirate of pitchers expected to provide ballast came up short and the franchise is left betwixt and between -- neither a contender nor a rebuilder.
This fact was underscored by the assertion in the aforementioned post that the Phils had to make a run at a pennant in 2013 given the boatload of investments in their expensive and aging core. That was followed five months later with this post, which flambe'd GM Ruben Amaro for signing another aging veteran when he should be punting the season.
Ding this blog for being inconsistent and the Phillies for being in no-man's land. Their only hope is that Howard, Utley, Rollins, Polanco, Young and Halladay have one last burst in them, like a Phoenix, or a bag of microwave popcorn.
Finally, on a romp through the Majors at around the three-quarter pole of the season came three notable assertions that rang the distant echoes of Meat Loaf. Two out of three ain't bad.
First the losing proposition: that Mike Trout and Andrew McCutcheon seemed MVP locks, not withstanding complete collapses. Well, McCutcheon and his locks collapsed nearly completely in the second half while his Pirates skittered into the record books on the futility side. Trout continued to amaze, as did the baseball writers who picked the wrong guy -- by a country mile -- for the award.
On the other hand, the same post suggested the Dodgers should find a new home for Hanley Ramirez after a .330/.392/.549 performance and good behavior in 23 games following his trade from Miami. Put this way:
Now if the Dodgers are smart, they'll flip Hanley's re-motivated self to another club while his value remains spiked and let his next sulk come at someone else's expense.
Ah, but they held on in the vain hope that he could help them slip into the playoffs. Instead, a .268/.305/.375 September drained most of his trade value and for the second time in five years an uninterested "Ramirez" will plague the Dodger roster at high cost.
Carl Crawford, however, did listen, just from the other end of the country. Attempting to play through the lost Red Sox season with a torn left (throwing) elbow tendon, Crawford finally heeded the same post, which urged him to bag the season and accede to Tommy John surgery the next day. Nearly the next day . . . Crawford was packaged up with Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett and Nick Punto to the Dodgers, whereupon he went straight into the operating room. With eight months to heal, Crawford is expected to be ready for Opening Day.
We all will be. See you there with a new batch of provocations, some of which will even be right.
This June 26 post suggesting the Mets should eject their most powerful booster rocket engendered some indignant emails. Ha! Take that indignant emailers! Not only was it right, the Mets took the advice and traded R.A. Dickey while his value was high.
Where the post went wrong was in suggesting that Dickey couldn't possibly keep up his first half heroics. Technically speaking, that was true: everything about R.A. Dickey is an impossibility, and yet the 38-year-old fireballing Scroogie artist manages to astonish us anew every fifth day. Only now he'll do it for Toronto while the Mets develop C Travis d’Arnaud, and RHP Noah Syndergaard.
This report of the Phillies' death as contender was not exaggerated. Nor was it premature. The core of the team in 2012 was crippled, two of the triumvirate of pitchers expected to provide ballast came up short and the franchise is left betwixt and between -- neither a contender nor a rebuilder.
This fact was underscored by the assertion in the aforementioned post that the Phils had to make a run at a pennant in 2013 given the boatload of investments in their expensive and aging core. That was followed five months later with this post, which flambe'd GM Ruben Amaro for signing another aging veteran when he should be punting the season.
Ding this blog for being inconsistent and the Phillies for being in no-man's land. Their only hope is that Howard, Utley, Rollins, Polanco, Young and Halladay have one last burst in them, like a Phoenix, or a bag of microwave popcorn.
Finally, on a romp through the Majors at around the three-quarter pole of the season came three notable assertions that rang the distant echoes of Meat Loaf. Two out of three ain't bad.
First the losing proposition: that Mike Trout and Andrew McCutcheon seemed MVP locks, not withstanding complete collapses. Well, McCutcheon and his locks collapsed nearly completely in the second half while his Pirates skittered into the record books on the futility side. Trout continued to amaze, as did the baseball writers who picked the wrong guy -- by a country mile -- for the award.
On the other hand, the same post suggested the Dodgers should find a new home for Hanley Ramirez after a .330/.392/.549 performance and good behavior in 23 games following his trade from Miami. Put this way:
Now if the Dodgers are smart, they'll flip Hanley's re-motivated self to another club while his value remains spiked and let his next sulk come at someone else's expense.
Ah, but they held on in the vain hope that he could help them slip into the playoffs. Instead, a .268/.305/.375 September drained most of his trade value and for the second time in five years an uninterested "Ramirez" will plague the Dodger roster at high cost.
Carl Crawford, however, did listen, just from the other end of the country. Attempting to play through the lost Red Sox season with a torn left (throwing) elbow tendon, Crawford finally heeded the same post, which urged him to bag the season and accede to Tommy John surgery the next day. Nearly the next day . . . Crawford was packaged up with Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett and Nick Punto to the Dodgers, whereupon he went straight into the operating room. With eight months to heal, Crawford is expected to be ready for Opening Day.
We all will be. See you there with a new batch of provocations, some of which will even be right.
17 January 2013
More Looks In the Rearview
Yes, it's true: this blog signed off on a new five-year, $11 million contract for Brewer backstop Jonathan Lucroy in a March 31 post. We're cruising back through 2012 to see where we braindrizzled and where we were just brain dead.
With respect to Lucroy: that commitment was for a second-year player with a .313 on base percentage and middling power. How'd that abomination work out?
It made the Brewers look like geniuses. Lucroy hit .320/.368/.513 in 96 games before succumbing to a broken wrist. He produced three wins against replacement and excellent defense in less than two-thirds of a season for just $500K. And there's the potential for four more years of goodness on the cheap.
As that post made clear, you'll be seeing more of those kinds of contracts -- in which young players sign away their first few years of arbitration and even a year or two of free agency in return for guaranteed multi-million dollar paydays during their pre-arb years. The reason is that there are diminishing marginal returns to the Lucroy family on the next $8 million he may be leaving on the table, while the first $11 million will set his family for life.
Meanwhile, teams will save money (and keep their young stars for an extra year or two) on average, even if the occasional signing goes belly-up.
April was a good month for the prognostimeter too. It predicted the Cardinals had already replaced Albert Pujols by moving Lance Berkman from rightfield to first base and signing Carlos Beltran to slot in for Berkman. It didn't quite work out that way, even though Beltran pounded 32 home runs en route to a .269/.346/.495 ledger that recouped all three batting wins against replacement lost with Prince Albert. And the Cards went a round deep into the playoffs
Berkman succumbed to his every-other-year injury pattern and played just 32 games, so it was second-year pro Allen Craig who punched up three wins of offense in his place, mostly at first base but also in 60 games of spot duty in the outer pastures. That ensemble fared fine absent Albert, and Beltran cost the Busch clan $26 mil over two years, or roughly $700 skajillion less than Pujols.
Al of which leads nicely into another prediction: that Rangers management desperately wanted an excuse not to sign Josh Hamilton for the $25 mil/year he was preparing to demand into the next decade. Here's an excerpt:
What Daniels no doubt knows is that while Hamilton is a great player and a heart-warming tale of redemption, he's also a 31-year-old with an emergency room loyalty card. Despite his .313/.370/.556 stick and defensive prowess in a key position, this is not a man to whom you give a golden parachute.
The post suggested Hamilton would find some opportunity to injure himself, as he is wont to do. Instead, he avoided Aaron Burr all season and played in 148 games,* adding four-and-a-half wins of stardom. His hall pass out of Dallas was the late season brain fart/heart failure that earned him the enmity of Texas fans as the team stumbled out of first place in the season's final two weeks and then off the playoff map in one embarrassing effort. No more dilemma for Nolan Ryan.
*Rangers fans would argue that he actually played about 144. He was physically present for 148.
How much Anaheim's five-year/$123 million bet on the injury-plagued star will come back to bite them in the butt remains to be seen. But it made the day of Rangers brass, for sure.
Is this just going to be a recapitulation of all the top Braindrizzling hits of 2012? No, and we can thank the Baltimore Orioles for that.
The Orioles aren't this good, we've seen it all before, they've been lucky, their 15 minutes are up, yadda, yadda, yadda. That was the refrain from this space -- and nearly every other -- that noted Baltimore's youth, inexperience, lack of stars, run differential, actual performance and track record. But none of that could compensate for the life-sized rabbit's foot carried around by Buck Showalter all season.
We're wishing the Baltimores good luck in 2013 but not betting that way.
A week later, the same prediction about the 24-16 Indians in this imagined conversation. Cleveland rode a 4.79 ERA and no 20-HR hitters to 94 losses and a new manager in 2013. Sorry Tito, but if the Choo-less Tribe runs out to 24 wins in its first 40 games I'll dust off the same blog post.
Stay tuned next time when we sing that sweet ditty from last June 26, "Trade R.A. Dickey Now!"
With respect to Lucroy: that commitment was for a second-year player with a .313 on base percentage and middling power. How'd that abomination work out?
It made the Brewers look like geniuses. Lucroy hit .320/.368/.513 in 96 games before succumbing to a broken wrist. He produced three wins against replacement and excellent defense in less than two-thirds of a season for just $500K. And there's the potential for four more years of goodness on the cheap.
As that post made clear, you'll be seeing more of those kinds of contracts -- in which young players sign away their first few years of arbitration and even a year or two of free agency in return for guaranteed multi-million dollar paydays during their pre-arb years. The reason is that there are diminishing marginal returns to the Lucroy family on the next $8 million he may be leaving on the table, while the first $11 million will set his family for life.
Meanwhile, teams will save money (and keep their young stars for an extra year or two) on average, even if the occasional signing goes belly-up.
April was a good month for the prognostimeter too. It predicted the Cardinals had already replaced Albert Pujols by moving Lance Berkman from rightfield to first base and signing Carlos Beltran to slot in for Berkman. It didn't quite work out that way, even though Beltran pounded 32 home runs en route to a .269/.346/.495 ledger that recouped all three batting wins against replacement lost with Prince Albert. And the Cards went a round deep into the playoffs
Berkman succumbed to his every-other-year injury pattern and played just 32 games, so it was second-year pro Allen Craig who punched up three wins of offense in his place, mostly at first base but also in 60 games of spot duty in the outer pastures. That ensemble fared fine absent Albert, and Beltran cost the Busch clan $26 mil over two years, or roughly $700 skajillion less than Pujols.
Al of which leads nicely into another prediction: that Rangers management desperately wanted an excuse not to sign Josh Hamilton for the $25 mil/year he was preparing to demand into the next decade. Here's an excerpt:
What Daniels no doubt knows is that while Hamilton is a great player and a heart-warming tale of redemption, he's also a 31-year-old with an emergency room loyalty card. Despite his .313/.370/.556 stick and defensive prowess in a key position, this is not a man to whom you give a golden parachute.
The post suggested Hamilton would find some opportunity to injure himself, as he is wont to do. Instead, he avoided Aaron Burr all season and played in 148 games,* adding four-and-a-half wins of stardom. His hall pass out of Dallas was the late season brain fart/heart failure that earned him the enmity of Texas fans as the team stumbled out of first place in the season's final two weeks and then off the playoff map in one embarrassing effort. No more dilemma for Nolan Ryan.
*Rangers fans would argue that he actually played about 144. He was physically present for 148.
How much Anaheim's five-year/$123 million bet on the injury-plagued star will come back to bite them in the butt remains to be seen. But it made the day of Rangers brass, for sure.
Is this just going to be a recapitulation of all the top Braindrizzling hits of 2012? No, and we can thank the Baltimore Orioles for that.
The Orioles aren't this good, we've seen it all before, they've been lucky, their 15 minutes are up, yadda, yadda, yadda. That was the refrain from this space -- and nearly every other -- that noted Baltimore's youth, inexperience, lack of stars, run differential, actual performance and track record. But none of that could compensate for the life-sized rabbit's foot carried around by Buck Showalter all season.
We're wishing the Baltimores good luck in 2013 but not betting that way.
A week later, the same prediction about the 24-16 Indians in this imagined conversation. Cleveland rode a 4.79 ERA and no 20-HR hitters to 94 losses and a new manager in 2013. Sorry Tito, but if the Choo-less Tribe runs out to 24 wins in its first 40 games I'll dust off the same blog post.
Stay tuned next time when we sing that sweet ditty from last June 26, "Trade R.A. Dickey Now!"
New Rules For Today's Sports
New Rule: A woman you have never met, by definition, is not your girlfriend.
Evidently this rule was not already in force in Indiana or Hawai'i.
New Rule: Lying, cheating, harassing, slandering and litigating for 15 years is not ameliorated in the slightest by an admission after conviction.
This rule remains in force but evidently at least one person and his well-paid advisers believe it can be circumvented.
New Rule: Writing a silly book hectoring your former employer is not the best revenge. Living well, by bringing a pennant to Cleveland, is.
Evidently you can get a job as a leader of men without knowing this rule.
New Rule: A top-ranked college basketball team that defeats the #2, #3, #4 and #5 teams and then drops a league road contest to #16 is still the #1 team in the land.
Part B of New Rule: Even if it is Duke.
This rule does not seem to have widespread support.
New Rule: Anyone demonstrating sufficiently dim wits to assert that winning four of four Super Bowls is superior to winning four of six should be banned from the radio airwaves until they can credibly explain how leading a team to six championship games is a lesser accomplishment than leading a team to four.
The people who would have to enforce this rule are equally dimwitted.
New Rule: The rule requiring the L.A. Lakers to make the NBA playoffs is hereby repealed.
This rule is supported in 49 of 50 states but is unlikely to be enforced. Again.
New Rule: The NHL will have a labor dispute that eliminates all games before January every year.
This rule is evidently already in force.
13 January 2013
Flipping Melky Cabrera for Jonathan Sanchez Was a Stroke of Genius . . . and Other Horror Stories
Gather 'round the campfire boys and girls to hear the grisly fate of Uncle Braindrizzling's ghoulish 2012 definitive assertions. Actually, we're going to harken to the waning days of 2011 to examine what went right and what went terribly, terribly wrong.
For example, the goblins visited this post on November 8, 2011 in which the team of monkeys that staff Braindrizzling typewriters suggested that the Royals were more likely than the Giants to benefit from the swap of Melky Cabrera for Jonathan Sanchez.
That would be the .346/.390/.516 Melk Man who staffed the San Francisco outfield and came within a Commissioner's decree of winning the batting title. Baseball-Reference says Cabrera was worth four wins against a replacement outfielder during his 113 games for the World Champs.
In contrast, Sanchez could not have been worth less to the Royals had he spontaneously combusted during spring training. In fact, in retrospect, that would have been a relief. Instead, he delivered 15 undead starts in which he walked 7.4 batters per nine innings, served up a homer-and-a-half per nine and accomplished 1-6, 7.76 worth of damage before KC shipped his growing hindquarters out the door, at a cost of $5.6 million.
TKO: Giants.
Of course the elephant in the room is a failed drug test. Cabrera was caught juicing 2/3rds of the way through the season and benched for the remainder and throughout the playoffs. So the monkeys can be forgiven for claiming that the trade was a nothing-for-nothing deal more likely to benefit the Royals. It just didn't turn out that way.
In any case, the monkeys redeemed themselves in this November 24 post in which they penned the opinion that whoever inked a deal with primo pitching free agent CJ Wilson would rue the day. Day rued, at least so far. The Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles forked over $75 million over five years and got below average production from the 31-year-old lefty. Fanning fewer than twice as many batters as he walked, Wilson's ERA ballooned a full point despite moving to the non-DH league and an offense-dampening ballpark.
Likewise, this December 9 post suggested the Cardinals were better off without Albert Pujols raiding the treasury. As it turned out, Pujols continued a four-year trend of decline to a lifetime low OPS of .859, a lifetime low 30 homers and a lifetime low 3.6 wins against replacement. By contrast, as the post suggested, Allen Craig picked up much of the slack, with an .876 OPS, 22 homers and three-quarters of Pujols' value for four percent of the price.
The split decisions continued with the assertion on Christmas Eve that the Oakland A's were running on an endless treadmill in the wake of trading hurlers Trevor Cahill and Gio Gonzalez for low-cost prospects. It said here that Billy Beane's methods guaranteed the A's were the team of the future . . . and always would be.
Ninety-four wins and a division crown later, Billy got the last laugh. But it's worth noting that his pitching rotation featured four lightly-heralded rookies, a 28-year-old journeyman and half a season of a jacked-up Bartolo Colon. How this crew competed, much less rallied into the playoffs, is a mystery being guarded by Judge Crater and the crew of the Mary Celeste.
It's no mystery how the Detroit Tigers snuck into the playoffs: the Chicago White Sox nose-dived to end the season. Despite the mega-signing of Prince Fielder to a star-studded squad, disdain was hurled from here at the iron-gloved mess taking the field in Detroit.
The Tigers played in the World Series, sure, but they needed a 15-7 finish to win just 88 games in a competence-challenged AL Central -- the worst total of any playoff-bound team. Cabrera won the Triple Crown and Fielder poured on a .940 OPS, but the infield defense was every bit the train wreck described in that January post. The team finished five wins below replacement-level defensively.
One more prognostication worth mentioning from the first quarter, before adjourning for more marshmallow-toasting in subsequent posts: Nostradamus paid a visit in late February and shocked the cognoscenti with the bold prediction that Seattle would, absent any hitting, pitching or defense, suck the hairy moose knuckles. Talk about sticking your neck out!
Now go to bed, kiddies. Next we examine what witch's potions we were drinking when we approved of Milwaukee's $11 million deal with catcher Jonathan Lucroy.
09 January 2013
Hall Aflame
At the risk of driving over an old road: I understand how baseball writers can deny steroid users Bonds and Clemens first-ballot Hall of Fame status.
But how do they justify slamming the door in the faces of Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Tim Raines, Curt Schilling and Edgar Martinez?
And Mike Piazza? If the greatest hitting catcher of all time isn't a Hall of Famer, then Bowie Kuhn really does belong.
Just for grins, let's recap the career that two of every five writers dismissed. In 15 seasons (plus a cup-a-Joe) he hit .308/.377/.545, the highest OPS for any catcher in history. He belted 427 homers, the most all-time by a guy who primarily caught. That's despite playing all but five games of his career in bomb shelters -- Dodger Stadium, Shea Stadium, Petco and whatever they call that monstrosity in Oakland.
He hit 43% above average, which is to say twice as well as an average backstop. He hit .300+ for eight straight seasons and finished in the top 10 of MVP voting seven times. With the lumber, he is the superior of everyone in the history of the planet who has ever squatted behind the plate.
By no accounts was Piazza an asset defensively. Baseball-Reference.com rates his career about replacement level in the field. But that hardly offsets his 63 wins above replacement at the plate. The average HOF catcher is at about 49 wins above replacement.
There has been some sniffing among the voting writers that links Piazza with steroids. Any journalist relying on innuendo to besmirch one of the greatest careers in the annals of the sport deserves to be fired, much less have his BBWAA card burned. Since when is innuendo a credible source?
The writers whiffed this year and the result is a HOF ceremony in August that will induct three men long dead before a crowd of dozens and a flood of empty Cooperstown hotel rooms. Bu Selig has got to be cringing.
The baseball writers have managed the impossible. They've made Gary Bettman look good.
05 January 2013
BABIP Regressors: Pitchers to Watch
If you're in the market to sign a starting pitcher, it would be helpful to know what performance to expect from the various options. Unfortunately, while there are plenty of rear view mirrors, only Mr. Peabody & Sherman can tell you what lies ahead, and their time machine stopped working in 1971.
Nonetheless, we gaze into the past and salt our observations with what it all portends. Which brings us to pitcher BABIP.
Research over the years since Voros McCracken elucidated the theory that pitchers don't control the results once a ball is put in play has uncovered a grain of truth in his finding. While some pitchers can maintain a lower BABIP over their entire career, it's still true that large variations from their own established levels can often be attributed to a smiling deity. Because deities are fickle, this element of a player's performance tends not to repeat itself over time.
All of which is a long way of saying that some pitchers appeared to be particularly lucky or unlucky in 2012 and may be expected to deliver more or less of the goods in 2013.
Let's take a look:
League average BABIP is about .298. That is, batters hit just under .300 when they aren't striking out, homering, walking or getting dinged by pitches. In 2011, Braves lefty Mike Minor suffered through a season of .350 BABIP, so while he pitched solidly, his ERA of 4.14 belied it.
In 2012, the league adjusted to Minor and his performance wasn't nearly as strong. But his ERA held steady (4.12) thanks to a .256 BABIP. Nothing in his underlying performance, or in the defense behind him, suggested such a change. That means Atlanta should hold the reins on expectations for the 25-year-old Vanderbilt man.
If Minor inspires warning flags, the regression sirens have to be blaring around Kyle Lohse. Over the last two years, Lohse is 30-11, 3.10, following a 10-year career of 88-98, 4.50. It's likely that Lohse has figured something out, but BABIPs of .269 and .262, compared to a lifetime BABIP right around league average, hasn't hurt. The music eventually stops, and 2013 is as good a time as any. Add to that his age-34 season and Lohse is in for major regression.
Jeremy Hellickson enjoyed a .262 BABIP last season, but is he in for regression? Hellickson's three-year career in St. Petersburg has been a study in confounding the numbers. Over 403 innings, Hellickson has a career BABIP of .244, which suggests that he might be doing something special (or playing behind a special defense) that's tamping down opponent batting average. Either that or the dude has been abidingly lucky and is going to crash in 2013. Hellickson has a lifetime ERA 0f 3.06, but the statheads suggest he's more like a .450 ERA pitcher. We'll see.
Then there's Gio Gonzalez, who entered MLB in 2008 with Oakland. Here is the arc of Gio's career, expressed in ERA:
2008 - 7.68
2009 - 5.65
2010 - 3.23
2011 - 3.12
2012 - 2.89
So the fact that batted balls fell safely at just a .267 clip last year doesn't dull his prospects much. Gonzalez has a lifetime BABIP of just .286; perhaps in part because his two home parks, Oakland and Washington, are BABIP dampers; so if he regresses even to his 2011 performance, he's still a star in 2013.
Max Scherzer had a terrific 2012, going 16-7, 3.74 with 231 strikeouts. That last figure helped dull the impact of a .333 BABIP. That's fortunate, because it's likely that a chunk of Scherzer's BABIP lies at the feet of immobile infielders who will be back with the Tigers, barring a major surprise, in 2013.
It's just the opposite for Nathan Eovaldi, the young Marlin righty who relies on his defense more than average. His .316 BABIP in L.A. and Miami was particularly harmful to his stat line, a painful 4-13, 4.30 that overstates his struggles. Given his youth, Eovaldi is headed for what will look like a breakout in 2013.
One last interesting case -- in nearly every respect -- is R.A. Dickey. Kuncklers have a history of outfoxing the whole BABIP system, but Dickey has maintained nearly identical BABIPs around .275 since returning with the scroogie in 2010. It's quite possible that Dickey as not been particularly lucky, just particularly adept, and that his run of extraordinary performances could continue.
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