KUOW radio appearance Monday, 9-10ish
If you’re interested in hearing local radio history, BP’er (and general friend o’USSM) Jonah Keri and me, former BP’er (and general ne’er do well) will be on KUOW’s Weekday tomorrow morning, talking about the Mariners, baseball in general and, if past history is any indication, cracking each other up and going on random digressions about the Transformers and the Simpsons. There may be other guests, but last I heard we were the only confirmed ones.
94.9 on your dial, or KUOW has some nice streaming audio options for your enjoyment.
Game 7, Athletics at Mariners
RHP Rich Harden v RHP Joel Pineiro. 1:05, FSN.
2004 ended with an elbow strain. He missed a fairly large chunk of time to start 2005 with shoulder stiffness. His release point and mechanics were horrible for most of the season and his velocity was significantly down.
After the elbow injury, his strikeout rate dove and never recovered. The walk rate’s been about the same, the HR rate’s the same. He just wasn’t getting the strikeouts anymore.
By year, since 2001:
19.4%
16.7%
17.0%
18.6%
13.0%
The league average is about 16%. In game terms, that’s a stikeout in every start, and that’s a significant effect on his success. Dave’s talked recently about how the difference between Pineiro and Meche is that Pineiro’s worth something, but this Pineiro — the guy with the hittable fastball who seems to be converting into a Bosio junkballer kinda role — isn’t a whole lot of help to a team trying to compete, either.
May he now have a stellar night to show me up.
Carl Everett watch:
.158/.304/.368
Game 6, Athletics at Mariners
LHP Zito v LHP Moyer, 6:05. FSN for TV.
Divsion rivals face off for the division lead! It’s crazy!
Interestingly, Felix Day drew pretty well, much better than previous games compared to past seasons. One of the things we’ve seen over the last two years is the M’s have still been able to sell the weekend and summer games even as the others have taken a nose-dive. If the team doesn’t do well and we still see those dates hold up, it’s a sign there’s a ~1.8m floor to attendence in Seattle that’ll erode, if at all, slowly.
Just in case you forgot
Happy Felix Day.
The King takes his throne in just over five hours.
Oh, and he turns 20 tomorrow.
The number values to running aggressively
Including a long bonus ramble on the offensive character of the 2002 American League!
Taking the extra base was one of the frequently-cited qualities about the World Series Champion 2002 Angels to the point of exhaustion, and is less often mentioned as a quality of that franchise in general during the Mike Scioscia years.
The Mariners are attempting a similar strategy to what the Angels are said to do: If you’ve got a single, go for two. A double, go for three. Now hitters do this but generally speaking, they’re pretty conservative about taking the sure base over the chance at greater riches.
Is it worth doing? When does it become counter-productive?
Back to the 2002 Angels. It’s hard to distinguish the attempts at extra bases from a team’s overall character, for a couple of reasons. Particularly, extra bases are a product of the team’s speed (Adam Kennedy’s a lot more likely to take second on a liner to right-center than, say, Frank Thomas is). The Angels stole 117 bases that year (and were caught 51 times). So they’re stealing and (supposedly) taking the extra base. Where does strategy and team composition meet here, and how to divide them?
First, take HRs out of it. How often did an at-bat result in an extra-base hit? Here the Angels were #3 in the AL. This immediately reveals some odd things, though: the Mariners, #2 in steals, fare quite badly at XBH/AB. The Red Sox, who didn’t steal, do well. The Mariners, who tried stealing a ton, don’t, and neither do the Royals. Speedy teams weren’t getting extra bases, and slow teams were. Hmm.
Let’s try something different: what percentage of hits were turned into extra-base hits? That is, (2B+3B)/H. Again, strangeness: the list goes Baltimore-Minnesota-Boston-Toronto-Texas.
Even Edgar and Olerud hit a ton of doubles, though. Maybe the double’s not the best method. The real mark of aggressive baserunning and speedy teams is the triple. Who pulled that off more, as a percent of their non-HR hits? Kansas City, Detroit, Toronto, Tampa Bay… Anaheim’s almost at the bottom.
So we shrug and move on. Some people believe that aggressive baserunning is worth a run a game, but no matter how we look at this (what teams scored more runs than you’d expect, given the number of balls they put into play, or hits they got, or… whatever) there’s no way the effect’s that big. There’s a good Michael Wolverton article from 2004 where he looks at this and finds the difference in 2003 between the best team in the league at not being caught stretching and the worst was 15 runs. The Angels were the second-best team in baseball that year.
15 runs over a season is hard to distinguish from noise. I’d be interested to see if that pattern exists over a long period of time: did Sciosia-managed teams do consistently well over years? That his players were thrown out so rarely in 2003 suggests that they were not as aggressive as widely believed, since Wolverton’s study focuses on the cost of baserunning outs. The Angels could have scored 100 runs by advancing more than they should have — but if they were doing that, even with a tremendous success rate, they’d still have been on the leader board there for their failures.
Back to the point. Stretching an extra base is, from a value standpoint, exactly the same as trying to steal a base. You start with the value of being on the base you could get with 100% certainty, and you’re risking the value of being one base further against the damage of being out. There are obvious real-world differences that affect the decision (where’s the ball, who’s fielding it, and so on), but in the end, it’s the same kind of wager that stealing bases is.
Fortunately for my purposes, a ton of research on this has already been done. For purposes of simplification, make it a generic situation, so I can use a run expectation table.
Say that leading off, Raul Ibanez hits a ball into left-center, and it’s a sure single. In 2005, teams with a guy on first with no outs scored on average .9 runs.
Should he make the turn to second? Teams with a guy on second with no outs scored on average 1.1 runs, which means it’s worth +.2 runs if he makes it.
But if he’s thrown out… teams with one out and no one on scored only .3 runs/inning. So it’s -.6 if he’s caught trying.
This is easy. 75%, right?
Wow, that’s tough. Stretch a double to a triple? The value of being on third with no outs is pretty high — 1.5, a gain of .4 runs — but the difference between being on second with no outs and having one out and no baserunners is also larger — .8 runs.
You need to be able to get there 2/3rds of the time to make it worthwhile.
You see where this is going: as a strict value proposition, trying for the extra base is worth it when the player can do it successfully in the vast majority of situations. Every time they fail, it’s a pretty nasty knock to the team’s chances that inning.
In this sense, it becomes clear that there are players you want trying this: more than speed, you want players who can judge their chances on the fly, maybe able to head back if the fielder who looked like they bobbled it comes up throwing, and you need coaches who can help. If a guy’s going to go every time, they’re going to get killed out there. So there are players who may not be well-suited to this. The trick would be to figure out who those guys are, and get them to knock it off, while the others keep at it.
So if you see some players getting thrown out now, so be it. If they’re thrown out over and over stretching their hits, that’s when you should get really mad about it.
Up soon: the secondary effects. Putting pressure on the defense, keeping the rally going, and so on, and good stuff like that.
Quick game notes
I was never a big believer in karma, but I kinda think after the seats I had tonight that the universe is finally creaking around to making up for my 1988-1992. I was in pretty bad shape for a while there and was glad I managed to rally in time to drag myself into town for the game.
In the spirit of Dave’s notes earlier this week:
- I saw an extremely drunk woman come in before the game and fall over on the steps to her seat.
- She kept yelling “Get a job! Get a fucking job!” at A’s players. I have no idea why.
- They cut her off in middle of the third inning. The third inning.
- They pulled her out of her seat before the fourth for a chat with the cops and she didn’t come back for about an hour.
- Johjima does a lot of infield positioning.
- Johjima is one mobile dude back there. He’s such an amazing upgrade over last year it’s amazing.
- I was psyched about the Johjima signing, and now I’m rapidly turning into a raving fan.
- Billy the ballboy is about the same weight and only slightly smaller then Ichiro.
- This aggressive baserunning thing is great and all, except when they’re getting picked off and generally acting badly. I’ll have to write a whole thing on the breakeven now, but man, Reed seems to not be cut out for this philosophy.
- Meche is Meche. From up close, about 50-75% of his pitches in any inning look like minor-league stuff you’d expect to see from some random AAAA pitcher (like Andrew Lorraine, no offense intended to Lorraine).
- Chavez cranked that ball. That it was only measured at 12 feet longer than the Everett home run is a testament to the unreliability of the metric. I’ve rarely seen balls that well-hit.
Game 4, Athletics at Mariners
RHP Loaiza v RHP Meche. 2006 salary battle: $5m vs $3.7m. 7:05p, FSN for TV.
Also, it’s the season opener for the Tacoma Rainiers at 6:05. Fireworks and everything. They’re taking on the Colorado Springs Sky Sox.
As noted in another thread, the M’s traded Carvajal for another righty who doesn’t require a roster spot.
Simmer The Monkey
In Chinese astrology, 2004 was the Year of the Monkey. This was supposed to signify unpredictable, tumultuous changes.
I have this theory that, with apologies to my 2006 canine friends, the Year of the Monkey never actually ended.
Mike Hargrove doesn’t strike me as the star-signs type, but you might ask him again after the All-Star break. The Sporting News’ Ken Rosenthal has a list of managers on the hot seat, and Hargrove falls smack in the middle of it. Rosenthal’s rationale:
Mike Hargrove, Mariners. G.M. Bill Bavasi is far more likely to be in trouble after presiding over back-to-back 90-loss seasons; Hargrove is in the second year of a three-year deal. Still, Hargrove had philosophical differences last season with Ichiro Suzuki, the Mariners’ best player. Ichiro, signed through 2007, might not agree to an extension if Hargrove stays.
Rosenthal lists Hargrove’s status is “simmering,” perhaps like a nice potato leek soup. This seems to mix the “hot seat” metaphor, since most heated recliners don’t have a simmer setting. Dave’s take on the manager’s fate, as you may recall, was more aggressive — he’s forecasting a Hargrove ouster by mid-May.
The underlying point is the same. The Mariners have to win, win now, and win impressively, or there’s going to be upheaval. Blame it on the monkey if you want, but the team can’t fire a symbolic primate.
cough couch hack hack
HACKING MASS is back! This is always a great time: you try and pick the worst players in baseball this coming season based on a combination of awfulness and playing time.
From the Mariners this year we don’t have a lot of candidates. Reed/Lopez if you don’t believe in them, Beltre if you’re in the anti-Beltre camp. Meche as a pitcher if you don’t think he’ll get yanked from the rotation at some point, though even as bad as he is, he’s not bad enough to win the game for you.
Betancourt’s an interesting choice: we like to look at the chance he’ll develop offensively, but if he doesn’t, they’ll still run him out there every day because he’s so good with the glove. He could be the worst-hitting shortstop and not worry about his job.
And if you’re going to win, you’re going to have to make some choices everyone else isn’t.
Have fun.
Game 3: Angels at Mariners
To paraphrase Bill Bavasi at the most recent USSM feed, “free agent pitchers scare the hell out of me.”
Today’s thrill ride features the respective debuts of Jarrod Washburn and Jeff Weaver with their new clubs. Watch closely to be sure they don’t try to swap in Jered Weaver for his richer brother, since the resulting confluence of misspelled names could cause headaches for years to come. In me, anyway.
And in case you weren’t already frightened by Washburn’s contract, beware — he’s out for revenge on the Angels, who let him go without so much as a phone call.
Revenge of the Wash. This time, it’s personal.
Winning two out of three before the A’s come to town would be an inspiring, nerve-calming way to start the season. Game time is 3:35.