We go three-for-three
Yankees v Tigers. Go Tigers! Woooo!
Not-live blog, NCDS Padres @ Cardinals
1:00pm: Chris “You’re With Me, Leather” Berman is an astoundingly bad baseball guy. Going from Jon Miller to Berman is possibly the most jarring transition ever.
Also, every Fox promo I’ve seen has been all about the Cardinals. But the Padres are easily their equal. Is there really no way to market the Cardinals?
1:02: Berman manages to use “rumbling, stumbling…” for the first time. To quote Bart Simpson, “Snipers, where are you?” We do get Orel, though, for color… who immediately says that the “stats don’t show..” Peavy’s good, because his W-L record is 11-14. WHEEEE!!
1:07: YWML does a toss to the third man in the booth, the guy on the field. It takes him about 20s to do the toss.
Eckstein! “What’s that coach? Time to go to playoffs? Is it? Is it?”
1:11: Eckstein can be an ignitor. Hee hee hee.
1:15: I remember when there was controversy over whether Peavy or Tankersley would be the better pitcher. Peavy just struck out Pujols. Anyone know what Tank’s up to?
1:23: ahhh, the cat-and-mouse game between pitcher and runner, the most exciting part of baseball
1:25: that’s a sweet double play by the Cardinals there
1:34: Orel talks for a minute about Peavy’s pitches and the relative difficulty, and it makes more sense than anything I’ve heard from a color guy in ages
1:45: I know this is a little obvious, but Peavy is sweeeeeeeet. 15th-round draft pick (472nd overall) in the 1999 draft.
1:49: Berman just used “literally” incorrectly. Arrrghhh.
1:54: I wonder if tonight’s game will turn out to be a tense, low-scoring affair too. Prrroooobably not.
2:00: These Peavy-Pujols matches are awesome
2:10: ahhhh, the old NL intentional walk
2:13 The Most Offensive Commercial Ever airs again.
2:23: Carpenter can get some incredible break on his pitches, just eye-popping. Gonzalez just saw one.
2:28: Orel just delivered a long speech about how they started Branyan off with soft stuff because, as a young player, he might be anxious… Branyan’s 30 with the hitting skillset of a 35-year-old slugger. Come on. And shockingly, despite YWML’s plea for a blooper, which is about as likely as getting insight from YWML, Branyan whiffs. TTO, folks.
2:38 Pujols hit a middling grounder up the middle and for just an instant, I thought “Oh, Betancourt’s got that, easy” and then saw the Padres shortstop pull up as it was already by him. We M’s fans have it good in some ways.
2:52 Piazza! On a pitchout! With the… throw!
3:09 during the “We scored!” celebration I saw a fan in the stands with one of the old Kroc McDonald’s-style jerseys. That’s dedication, wearing that thing.
3:16: the shadows remind me of Safeco’s afternoon shadows, where pitchers with brutal breaking stuff would throw them over and over and the batters would just shake their heads and walk back to the dugout
3:24: wow, Branyan went way down to get that, that was a golf swing triple
3:27: the wheels came off Carpenter fast. Ugh.
3:34: my cat makes an appearance, suddenly interested in the game. I guess she’s a Padres fan.
3:35: ooooh, she looks pissed
3:46: I trashed YWML, but he’s been remarkably restrained so far, especially compared to what I’ve seen out of him before. I’m not that annoyed at all.
Twins-A’s Liveblog in Semi-Real Time
Minnesota is in the throes of a late-summer renaissance. The weather is 80 degrees and clear, the baseball team’s torrid play clinched a division title on the last day of the season, and even such luminaries as Jonah Keri are taking notices.
I’m here, too, haunting the sports bars, hippie co-ops and collective bookstores. And I have tickets for the whole series on the 100 level, down the third base line.
The litany of events that brought me, alone, to attend the American League division series between the Twins and Oakland is too tumultuous and bizarre to fully recount here. Nevertheless, I am pleased to report that this may be the only baseball experience I have that Jonah has not had: the pleasure of attending a game in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. Go baggie!
Given my recent absence from the site – you would not believe the amount of work that goes into moving out of the country, let alone other, less-enticing legal hassles – and given that my faithful bag o’ technology contains all the requisite elements of a liveblog experience, it seems clear what the correct course of action is here.
Because, after all, what do readers of a Seattle Mariner blog crave more than real-time dispatches from down the 3rd base line of a division rival’s playoff game?
It’s 1,395 miles to Seattle. I have a camera, a laptop, an ass pocket full of whiskey and internet access through my cell phone. I’m going to be inside a dome, wearing a hat.
Hit it. Read more
Looking back at the win lines
I wrote a couple of posts this season where I compared the pre-season betting lines on how many wins a team would get in 2006 to where I thought they would. Short version: I went 7/8 for a 66% return on a hypothetical betting investment.
Here are the eight picks, with commentary, a review of the pre-season line predictions and results, and some criticism of the original piece. Read more
Baker’s columns on Moneyball
Here are some reader-submitted Baker snippets (thanks msb!)
“Rain Man rules Jays”, September 28, 2002. Kinda rags on Keith Law a little, also mentions the ill-advised purge of Blue Jays player development personell Ricciardi carried out.
It takes a journey deep inside a maze of SkyDome offices before one hears the telltale tapping sounds of the mysterious Blue Jays employee that curious colleagues have dubbed “Rain Man.”
The sole job of this first-year hire, nicknamed after the character in the Oscar-winning Dustin Hoffman movie, is to peck away at an ultra-fast computer laptop and conjure up statistics he can then spend the rest of the day arguing about with his boss. It helps when that boss is Jays general manager J.P. Ricciardi, a modern breed of baseball executive who shuns tradition in favour of business methods many of his peers consider off-the-wall.
…
That’s why the 43-year-old Ricciardi’s approach to the business of baseball doesn’t include any stopwatches, radar guns, or notepads stained with chewing tobacco. It’s instead about hiring Rain Man – a 29-year-old Harvard graduate whose only previous baseball experience came as a fan – to crunch a myriad of statistical percentages, probabilities, and cost factors into his computer and then giving him top-level input into the most serious player decisions the Jays have to make.
And anyone in the Jays’ organization who doesn’t play along with Ricciardi, Rain Man, and their statistical approach will quickly become as much a part of history as all that baseball tradition.
This is a little misleading. Ricciardi did many, many things that drove the sabermetric-oriented columnists batshit crazy.
“It’s time to turn the page on Moneyball theories,” 12/3/2004 argues that Moneyball’s full of crap
The biggest hole was the book downplaying the impact of Big Three starting pitchers Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito on the A’s success. Anyone who crunched the numbers from 2000 to 2003 would have seen a gradual decline in Oakland’s offensive production coinciding with a sharp rise in the Big Three’s fortunes.
In other words, a book could have just as easily been written about how the key to winning on a budget is to gather three potential Cy Young Award winners and use any remaining cash on assembling a mediocre offence. That’s not as sexy as the Moneyball premise, but arguably more accurate as Beane wrestles with what to do now that the Big Three are heading towards free-agent status.
Yeah, that was a disaster, wasn’t it? Essentially, this article argues that Moneyball was about offense, no closers, etc, and that pieces of it were disproven. I’d argue that Moneyball, for all its flaws, was about trying to be smarter than the competition and exploit market conditions to find ways to win, rather than the simplistic “OBP, no-name offense, draft college players who look horrible in jeans” it was boiled down to.
He returns to this in 2005 with “Chisox disprove the theory of ‘Moneyball'” 10/28/2005.
One additional passenger joined the Chicago White Sox on their private plane here and flew off into the sunset with manager Ozzie Guillen, slugger Jermaine Dye and the rest of baseball’s champions.
That would be the concept of Moneyball, a great read but lousy franchise blueprint that appears to have bid adieu to the baseball world after these 2005 playoffs. Sure, there will still be more teams rightfully employing statistical experts to assist front offices in player decisions, a trend that began well before author Michael Lewis penned his 2003 best seller.
But the idea that Billy Beane and his Oakland A’s had discovered the divine formula to success at the expense of traditionalists, scouts and supposed “dinosaurs” was laid to rest in a post-season that culminated Wednesday night with Chicago’s four-game dismantling of the Houston Astros to win the World Series.
Again, I’d argue that it’s not a magic formula, few people would argue that you can dispense with scouts (and those people are nuts) and so on. It’s a convenient straw man.
Then there’s the “Old is new in baseball again” 12/3/2005, which hails a counter-revolution:
Philadelphia’s entrusting of Gillick to secure a championship is being hotly debated by fans burning up online chat sites with their opinion. At a time when the role of statistics based analysis in baseball is being questioned like never before, it’s impossible to ignore Gillick’s stature as one of the sports grandest “old guard” members, the same way Epstein and DePodesta were hailed as the vanguard of the new-wave “Moneyball” movement.
I’m a little discouraged by these pieces.
It’s easy to make “statheads = online geeks” arguments. USSM gets tarred as being a bunch of statheads a lot, which always strikes me as laughable since Dave’s been as strong an advocate for “get as much data as possible, and understand that the value of any school varies” since before Moneyball became a controversy, and I’ve argued that there are no camps and the whole fight is an artificial construction of people with axes to grind (or agendas to pursue or books to sell) on one side or the other.
It’s easy to point a finger at statheads like they’re a homogenous group of AD&D players who’ve taken to rolling stats instead of dice, but that’s ridiculous, an easy crutch. It’s a bully’s approach, and I’m disappointed to see it appear in these pieces.
Alex Rodriguez and the uniform with pinstripes
I understand why Alex wasn’t embraced by Yankee fans. For all of his talk about embracing the pinstripes, he spoke with the same somewhat robotic insincerity that’s been his public face for years, a mask that he grew into that free agent year. Everything he says runs through the self-censor loop, because he’s been so consistently and so harshly punished for verbal slips before, and then he’s criticisized for not being frank and open.
In any event: Alex isn’t having a good year, and it’s certainly not the year the Rangers and Yankees are paying him to have.
From my distant view, this all looks insane. There’s the Yankees broadcast crew, possibly prodded from outside (see rumors), hashing on him, ESPN has been frantically whipping the flames of this conflict as a former GM (who once tried to sign Alex, failed, and then attacked him) and now analyst attracts more and more attention by, over and over, whipping Alex for real but mostly perceived shortcomings. The Yankee fan base seems easily-led and almost irrational, spouting off about how he lacks the soul to play in New York, or the courage to face pressure, and so on, until you want to be sick.
I wonder if this makes future signings or trades that require consent harder. If I was a player, knowing that any bad month or week might be fanned into a wildfire of hatred, I wouldn’t want to play there, no matter how good the money was. It wouldn’t be worth it.
In any event, for a reasonably intelligent view on this, I recommend Steven Goldman’s Pinstriped Blog, on the Yes Network site.
Here, a first view on what was happening, and here, even better, at length answering emails from readers on the situation.
As for the Mariners, if the Yankees did call, offering one of the best players in baseball for pennies on the dollar, well, you take that deal.
You do.
Look back at 2006’s free agent pitching buffet
To harken back to Jeff’s post of similar title, I thought it’d be cool to look at how the 2006 signings are doing, looking at the deals they got and how they perform. I’m going to lean on xFIP (glossary!) here, because it amused me. In alphabetical order:
A.J. Burnett 5 years/$55M (2006-10)
The crown jewel of this off-season. Signed with the Blue Jays. He’s had injury issues and the team’s been cautious in pushing him back, looking at to the remaining four years on his deal. He’s barely over forty innings on the year, and while the ERA’s not so hot, the 41:8 K:BB ratio’s nice. While his ERA’s 4.25, his xFIP is but 3.29.
Kevin Millwood 5 years/$60M
Millwood was probably the general second choice of fans, including us. So far this year he’s thrown a lot more innings than Burnett, and he’s been reasonably good: in 116 innings, he’s struck out 78 and walked 25, and Texas doesn’t seem to be bothering him too much. His xFIP is 4.14, and that’s not that much better than the average is good, since xFIP isn’t park-adjusted, as Dave notes in the comments.
So those were the two big guys on the market, and neither of them have been worth the money. Burnett may yet turn in a performance through the rest of his contract to make it worthwhile, but Millwood’s a little less likely to pull that off, since he’ll be in his late 30s at the tail end of his deal.
The rest:
Esteban Loaiza 3 years/$21.375M (2006-08)
Ugh. This looked like he’d gone a little higher than market (Dave’s offseason plan had the M’s taking him for 3/$18m, for instance) but then the market for pitchers went insane, and suddenly it looked like the A’s had looked forward into the market and picked off a relative bargain.
Except Loaiza has sucked. He’s gotten into off-the-field trouble, and when he’s been on the mound for all of sixty innings, he’s been bad. 29 K, 27 walks is ugly, and that home run rate isn’t helping. His xFIP’s a whopping 5.75, and after a half-season, it looks like this deal is going to join a collection of weird, expensive deals Beane’s made that didn’t work out. It’s still a tribute to the A’s ability to construct a team that they’re able to do as well as they have when they’re fielding a team on a $60m payroll and $11m goes to Kendall and $6m goes to Loaiza right off the bat.
Loaiza’s had a weird career, and I’m not going to pretend I have any idea of how to explain it coherently. Maybe he’s done, and maybe he’s not — it’s certainly been thought before. But he has been flat horrible so far.
Matt Morris 3 years/$27M (2006-08)
Oh yeah, this guy. 72/39 K/BB ratio, 121 innings pitched, xFIP’s 4.83. At least they’re getting innings out of him, even if they’re not that great of innings.
Kenny Rogers 2 years/$16M (2006-07)
With his declining peripheral stats and age, I’d have stayed away from Rogers unless he came with a 50% discount tag or something ridiculous. But he’s been even better thais year than in the last few – he’s getting strikeouts, he’s not walking guys, and it adds up to an xFIP of 4.50. Same deal as the other guys: that’s too much money for what they’re producing.
Jarrod Washburn 4 years/$37.5M
Ah, the local boy. Not doing so well. He’s the pitcher he appeared to be in past seasons if you were paying attention, and not the superficially awesome pitcher some people saw. His K rate’s the same, more or less, his walk rate’s the same, the home runs, pretty much the whole package. As a result, his xFIP is only a little higher than what it’s been the last few seasons, while his ERA has skyrocketed from last year’s deceptive 3.20 to 4.58, which is only a hair better than 2003, and from there… yeah. Top-of-the-rotation money for mid-rotation fodder.
Jeff Weaver 1 year/$8.325M
You may expect that I’m going to hold my nose while I write about how stinky a deal this was. The problem is that in every serious way you want to measure it, Jeff Weaver has performed better than Jarrod Washburn, and that earned Weaver a trade off the team and the Angels ate a huge amount of his deal.
Meanwhile, the Mariners are happily cutting Washburn checks. Eeeeeeeeeeyup.
Halfway through the first season is too early to make final determinations, of course. They could yet get injured, or become stars, or whatever. But it certainly seems that in an irrational market, it doesn’t pay to participate.
My own opinion, ill-developed, is that pitchers are a lot like first baseman: it’s extremely hard to get your money’s worth in a free-agent contract. There will be cases where a pitcher is clearly worth the money if they’re healthy (Roger Clemens’ free agent deals, for example), and that might be as close to value as you get. In terms of making the least-worst deal in free agency, you’re much better off signing Carlos Beltran, say, over AJ Burnett.
How draft slotting works
This topic came up a lot during the draft, so I wanted to point people to the latest Baseball America, which has a great article by Jerry Crasnick (“Slot System Tests Teams’ Creativity,” subscription required). I wish they’d make it free because it’s the best single piece I’ve seen on how MLB is forcing draft slotting, why it’s good and why it sucks, and how some teams are losing players over it and others are taking advantage. It’s a really good piece of work.
I don’t want to quote it too much – if you’re at all interested in this, find an issue at your local newsstand – but it’s got stuff like this
“In the big picture, everybody in baseball is on the same page,” the AL official says. “But this has created a division between the teams who will toe the line–the ones that (commissioner Bud) Selig and the commissioner’s office have influence over–and the clubs who don’t give a crap. They’ll take the best players and give them the money. There’s an advantage there, isn’t there?
Essentially, as the article outlines, it works like this:
– scouting director wants to pay a kid over slot
– he calls MLB, which now handles the offers, and says “give the kid this offer”
– MLB balks, gives him a hard time
– MLB calls the owner, gives him a hard time
– (optional) Selig calls the owner and/or other people, give them a hard time
– if the team insists, the player gets the new offer, and the team gets fined for exceeding the slot
The article doesn’t really speak to what happens to teams that ignore slotting, but it does hint at it:
“We have the choice to go over slot, but that’s like telling a high school kid, ‘You have the choice to break curfew,’ ” an NL talent evaluator says. “Sure you do. But you also know there’s going to be some kind of consequence.”
Anyway, go check it out, and remember it when you think of Andrew Miller.
Why Albert Pujols will break the single-seaon home run record
Albert Pujols is having an almost unbelievable year. He’s hitting .323. His on-base percentage is .449. He’s on pace to hit over eighty home runs. It’s ridiculous. The season’s a little over a quarter done, but at this rate, he’s going to walk about 140 times and strike out only 45 times. That’s historic.
Top Five Hitter Seasons ever by BB-K
Barry Bonds, 2004, 191
Barry Bonds, 2002, 151
Ted Williams, 1941, 120
Ted Williams, 1947, 115
Ted Williams, 1949, 114
If Pujols finishes at +95, he’d be the 17th-best ever.
Pujols has to hit 50 home runs the rest of the way to tie Bonds at 73. Now, there’s reason to believe he won’t keep up this torrid pace. He’s currently putting over 30% of fly balls over fences, which is way over his career numbers around 20%.
Hitting 50 home runs over the next 110+ games is not that tough for Pujols, though. Assume he cools off tomorrow and goes back to only hitting a home run every 14 at-bats. That’s another 30, to finish at 53.
Where do the other twenty come in? He’s going to be given them. The pitches aren’t going to come gift-wrapped, and he’s not going to have meatballs grooved over the plate. But he’ll be challenged, and Pujols will hit home runs in many of those situations.
Here’s why:
– Barry Bonds holds the single-season record
– Pujols is liked
It’s that simple. When Bonds pursued the record, when he wasn’t intentionally walked, he was semi-intentionally walked: they’d throw him four garbage pitches hoping he’d swing at something so awful the only thing he could do with it would be to ground out weakly or pop up. Bonds’ 2001 is the 8th-most anyone’s been walked intentionally. Four of the seven slots ahead of that year are other Bonds seasons. He got walked 120 times in 2004, putting the brakes on a year where he might have challenged his own record. This hasn’t been helped by the Giants’ offense, but that’s beside the point.
Whether or not the intentional walk is the right choice for opposing managers to make, the only way the record can be challenged will be for a prodigious power hitter to get a ton of at-bats. St. Louis doesn’t have an offense that gets on base a lot to turn the lineup over and get Pujols more at-bats, unfortunately, but that won’t matter.
Every manager who faces the decision on whether or not to walk a hitter has to decide whether that’s the best move. If they’re facing a player involved in the home run chase at home, they have to make an additional consideration: how pissed are these fans going to be if I don’t pitch to this guy, and does that mean the owner’s going to be chewing on my butt before tomorrow’s game?
That pressure will be much greater for Pujols. People believe he’s clean. They like him. They don’t like Bonds. He’s tainted, and as long as he holds the record, the record is tainted. When Pujols threatens 73, they will yearn for his success, even at the expense of their own team, because if the record is held by a clean player, the record’s redeemed, and baseball will have in a symbolic way closed the book on the steroid era.
Every manager will also weigh their own personal views — do they want to take away a chance for Pujols to beat Bonds? I can’t imagine that Bonds is any more popular among opposing managers than he is with any other segment of baseball, and it’s not as if managers live in a vacuum and don’t get earfuls from people they know about the state of the game. If Pujols cracking the record makes everyone’s life easier, the decision becomes easier too.
I don’t expect that any of these considerations, consciously considered or not, will override a manager’s better judgement. If they love the intentional walk, and they think it’ll help win, they’ll still call for it. But all of these things will help push decisions on when to pitch to Pujols strongly in Pujols’ favor.
Similarly, pitchers aren’t going to want to give up a home run to Pujols, but they’re going to feel the same way their managers will: better him than Bonds, and if I get beat challenging Pujols and go into the record books that way, it could be worse.
This sounds a little strange, I understand. Yet it’s already happening. Pujols is a monster hitter on a tear. Would you pitch to that guy? But he’s only been walked seven times this season. He’s walked on purpose far less often than you’d expect given his career numbers (compare his last few years to Bonds’ 2002-2004, for instance), but seven times a quarter of the way into a season like this? It doesn’t make sense, no matter who else is behind them, they’re not Albert Pujols.
Pujols’ hot start makes a run at the title possible, and unless we see a dramatic shift in sentiment, he’ll be given every opportunity teams can spare to make sure his path is clear.
Off days are boring days
In the TNT, they talk to Julio Mateo about his brother. Other than that, we’re reduced to stories on Kevin Appier and noting that Rick Sutcliffe was more incoherent than expected.