I have good news and bad news.
Good News
My new camera arrived today, and I’m pretty fired up about it. I can’t wait to start taking some really cool shots and putting them up on my brand new photoblog. Opening the package felt like Christmas when I was a kid. As a bonus, its 75 degrees out here this weekend, and there are a ton of great photo ops in the area. I couldn’t ask for nicer weather to break the D70 in.
Bad News
I’m going to have to work most of the rest of tonight, and I have to work tommorrow. Because I just made a major screwup, I added an extra hour of work to my load. By the time I can touch my camera again, it will be dark. A beautiful day, a brand new camera, and I’ll be inside working. This is like going through the Quinton McCracken trade all over again.
Short version: unless the M’s do something colossal, I’d be surprised if I posted again before mid-April.
Long version: about two weeks ago, I fought it out with a nasty flu for over a week. Afterwards, I never felt like I’d recovered, but I’ve been working so hard on a bunch of different stuff (work, house, cool thing that I hope to talk about soon), so I put it up to stress and exhaustion. I went into the doctor today and found out that while fighting that flu, it seems that virus opened the doors for all kinds of other crazy bad-but-not-really-bad things to happen. So in the next two weeks:
– Pack all my stuff
– Finish (or hire crews of people to finish) the crazy amount of work that needs to get down to get my new (built in 1959) place ready for human habitation
– Work out all the final paperwork to sell my old (new) house
– Go on a five-day business trip
– Spend at least two days in Portland for Baseball Prospectus
aaaaaaaaaand….
– Fight several minor illnesses that seem to have teamed up into some kind of foul alliance and have stalemated my immune system for a week already and will, they threaten, be reinforced tomorrow by a brigade of members of the common cold army, the Andromeda Strain, viral narcoleptic dementia, the heebie-jeebies, wandering spleen, Cotard’s syndrome, and tennis elbow. I tried to see if they’d let me get Edgar’s hamstring pulls for 2004, but they said no
On a related note, I’m organizing a impromptu U.S.S. Mariner Pizza Feed*. It’s at my house.
Agenda:
– Hang new drywall, and patching drywall where the electricians had to tear it up to bring the wiring up to code
– Remodel where I ran out of money (everywhere– sports writing doesn’t pay, folks)
– Tear down, repair, and reshingle my roof
– I call the cops and tell them there’s a crowd of people looking for the former owner, who from what I can gather owes them all a lot of money and crystal meth
Attendees should bring their own 8′ length of 1/2″ thick drywall and tools.
* No pizza will be served. Not a real feed.
Back to baseball!
and w/r/t this constant Davis-bashing by the team — this kind of thing happens in many organizations, where they get down on a player for one reason or another and they become obsessed with ‘fixing’ the problem or dumping him off on another team, even for much less value. Sometimes they just get tired of a player’s attitude, and sometimes it’s more serious, like unwillingness to listen to coaches or obey the trainer’s instructions for staying healthy.
Don’t the Mariners, though, seem to do this a lot? They must have really high standards for makeup and clubhouse leadership, or… I don’t know. From the 2003 team:
Mike Cameron: The team fixated on trying to get his swing right for years to turn him into more of a contact hitter because they thought he struck out too much. Let go through free agency (though the Mets overspent) without contest
Carlos Guillen: Injured too much, and that DUI stop didn’t help matters. Traded for nothing.
… and now I’m really tired and need to sleep. Sorry, I’ll pick this back up in a couple weeks if no one else does.
D
Dave, whatever are you talking about? The game starts at 6:57.
Oh, right.
I’ll second that “get well” to Derek. Without him we wouldn’t have much of a site, and I mean that literally, in that he was the one who a year ago decided we had done too much talking about it and finally started the USSM.
There’s some buzz right now about an M’s-Brewers trade, because the Brewers have had a scout at six of the past seven M’s games. The talk seems to surround Kevin Jarvis, as the Brewers are looking for a guy who can start. How sad is that, when your rotation is so weak that you’re looking to add Kevin Jarvis? In any event, we shouldn’t get too excited. Jarvis won’t return anything more than a C-grade prospect, and the M’s would likely pay the vast majority of his salary as well.
We’ve worried quite a bit this winter about Randy Winn’s ability to cover ground in centerfield, but one thing we haven’t talked about is his arm. In case you missed it, Frank Thomas tagged up on Winn last night. Not tagging up to score from third, mind you, but to go from second to third. Frank Thomas, people. Winn chalked it up to bad throwing mechanics. I chalk it up to him having a weak throwing arm.
Let me be the first to wish Derek a speedy recovery. The blog won’t be the same without you. So hurry back.
Also, Derek’s completely right, but the Mariners spend more time obsessing over character, and what they perceive to be a willingness to do it their way, than any other organization in the game. The belief that they found the magic formula in 2001 and simply need to recreate that kind of all-for-one and one-for-all team spirit in the locker room drives a lot of the ill-advised decisions we see today. But thats a longer post that I won’t get into right now.
Also, to whoever decided that a Sweet 16 tournament game between Wake Forest and St. Joe’s should start at 9:57 pm on a Thursday night, you suck. That’s all.
Did anyone catch the game on TV last night? Freddy Garcia looks like he’s lost 20 pounds.
Important update! Keith’s original email to me had the labels reversed
2003 overall rates, pulled by Keith Woolner from play-by-play data:
Bases empty: 3048 HR
Runners on: 2159 HR
That’s 59% bases empty, 41% runners on base
Which makes this totally false:
So Franklin *and the Mariners* are skewed way towards solo shots, far beyond what you’d expect even given the team’s good pitching (and thus fewer baserunners).
So instead
The M’s weren’t that far off the norm after all. I think Keith may write about this for a BP article, so I’m going to leave that part to him.
And, following up, this is why I love the blogosphere. I had no sooner finished up my post below than Jeff Sullivan sent me a link to his even-better post over at his blog. Franklin’s rate of solo homers allowed was actually less than the team average. Good stuff, Jeff.
Also, Chris Begley sent in an email that included the same research I did below, but also included three year splits. From 2001-2003, Franklin gave up homers at a rate of 1 every 24 at-bats with no one on, and 1 every 28 at-bats with runners on base. Last year was actually his worst year for allowing dingers with men on base. Which just further goes to show that my speculation was just flat out wrong.
As was kindly pointed out, I shouldn’t blog early in the morning. My mind avoided the fact that most at-bats occur with the bases empty, so the rate of home runs will not be evenly distributed among solo, two-run, three-run, and grand slam home runs.
Here is Franklin’s breakdown by home run per at-bat last year:
Solo Homers: 21 allowed in 480 AB’s. 1 homer for every 23 trips to the plate with the bases empty.
Two Run: 8 allowed in 223 AB’s. 1 homer for every 28 trips to the plate with one man on.
Three Run: 4 allowed in 80 AB’s. 1 homer for every 20 trips to the plate with two men on.
Grand Slam: 1 allowed in 11 AB’s. 1 homer for every 11 trips to the plate with three on.
Any Runners On: 13 allowed in 314 AB’s. 1 homer for every 24 trips to the plate when there were baserunners.
The difference of one homer every 23rd or 24th at-bat would be what we call statistically insignificant.
The conclusion? Our readers are smarter than me, and I was pretty much dead wrong. There’s no evidence to support my claim that Franklin intentionally pitched in a way to allow more home runs when it would do his team the least harm. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, or that he didn’t try to pitch that way, but it sure didn’t seem to work, even if that was his intent.
Just so Derek doesn’t need to do any more sketchy math, here are Jay Jaffe’s handy 2003 DIPS numbers. I’m not sure where Derek’s calculator failed him, but his average on BIP rates weren’t all that close. The actual totals for the M’s starters last year:
Franklin: .245
Moyer: .267
Pineiro: .271
Garcia: .273
Meche: .281
Franklin’s .245 average against on balls in play ranked 3rd best in the majors, behind only Barry Zito and Jeremi Gonzalez. Before you think that this is some kind of stat that proves Franklin is an an upper echelon tier and we’re not giving him credit for pitching well, some of the other folks on that leaderboard are Kip Wells, Joaquin Benoit, John Halama, Ron Villone, Kevin Appier, and Jon Garland. An all-star list it is not.
Also, without having any evidence, it strikes me that Franklin’s rate of allowing solo HR’s would be much higher than normal. There are four possibilities for types of longballs, meaning that the odds of a home run being one certain type should be at least within the range of 25 %, I would think. Perhaps some factors do make a certain home run more common, but I can’t imagine anything that would make a 60 % mark in one category normal. Perhaps I’ll see if we can find some kind of information on this, as I find it an interesting topic.
Dave’s totally right. Here’s my view of Franklin as a pitcher (and I’m going to repeat some stuff I’ve gone over before): Franklin doesn’t have the raw talent or stuff of a top-tier pitcher, but he’s still smart and he’s particularly good about knowing how to get deep into games. Franklin’s a guy you could go to and say “I need a complete game and don’t throw over 120 pitches” and you’d be able to rely on him for it. Now, he goes about getting there by putting balls in play early, relying on his defense, and that means he’s almost certainly going to be slapped around for a couple runs at some point — but he’d give you a complete game in under 120 pitches if that’s what you really needed.
Now to the issue of whether Franklin was lucky. I should have thought that through a little and been more specific.
On the fly ball issue: I don’t see that that’s the case. Franklin put a ton of balls into play and… doing some sketchy math….
Moyer: G/F ratio: .85, faced ~900 batters, about 700 balls put into play, 200 hits for about a .285 average on balls in play
Franklin was a little more extreme: .76 G/F, 877 faced, 683 put into play, .291 average on balls in play
Meche .92, slight fly baller, 785 faced, 562 in play, .332 average on BIPs
… I’m wrong.
Garcia, 1.04, 862, 616… .318 average on balls in play
Pineiro, uhh… 1.26 G/F ratio, 890, 644 in play, 192 hits… .298 BIP
now, please don’t go quoting those stats around without doing them yourself — this is me with a STATS book and a calculator doing rounding and neglecting HBP, IBB, and some stuff.
What’s the moral there, really? I have no idea. Current thought on defense-independent stats holds, to make a huge generalization, that a pitcher’s effect on balls in play is much less than people have historically thought. Moyer, for instance, was used as an example by Tippett (I think) of a pitcher who over his career has managed to have a slight and consistent depressing effect on hitters’s ability to get hits on balls they make contact on.
But here’s Franklin’s historical numbers, and these should be pretty consistent because he’s been in front of the same OF defense, right? Not so much as you’d think. It was .319 in 2001, and .297 in 2002.
By contrast, Moyer’s nice and level: .282 in 2001, .280 in 2002, to the .285 in 2003 I estimated above. We might reasonably expect (given the same defense) that Moyer’s a much better bet to stay frosty while Franklin regresses.
On the other side of this — It’s entirely possible that Franklin gives up dingers because he challenges batters when no one’s on. It’s certainly the view he’s advance, with going after Bonds recently the latest example. But is that the case?
Home Runs Against Franklin
—
A Chronology in 34 parts
R Sierra (1, 2nd inning off R Franklin 1 on, 0 Out)
H Blalock (1, 5th inning off R Franklin 1 on, 1 Out)
B Fullmer (3, 3rd inning off R Franklin 1 on, 2 Out)
E Chavez (2, 3rd inning off R Franklin 0 on, 2 Out)
M Ellis (2, 5th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 1 Out)
G Anderson (2, 1st inning off R Franklin 1 on, 2 Out)
S Halter (2, 4th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 0 Out)
J Valentin (7, 1st inning off R Franklin 1 on, 0 Out)
R Ibanez 2 (7, 4th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 2 Out; 6th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 1 Out) [clears throat]
D Mohr (5, 2nd inning off R Franklin 0 on, 0 Out)
D Mohr (7, 7th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 1 Out)
J Phillips (2, 5th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 0 Out)
C Floyd (11, 7th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 0 Out)
B Fullmer (8, 2nd inning off R Franklin 0 on, 2 Out)
D Erstad (3, 6th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 0 Out)
G Anderson (16, 6th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 1 Out)
T Salmon (9, 8th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 2 Out)
S Burroughs (4, 4th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 1 Out)
M Kotsay (3, 5th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 1 Out)
R White (14, 7th inning off R Franklin 2 on, 2 Out)
T Batista (16, 6th inning off R Franklin 1 on, 2 Out)
J Gibbons (21, 2nd inning off R Franklin 0 on, 0 Out)
T Batista (23, 6th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 2 Out)
A Guiel (6, 3rd inning off R Franklin 0 on, 1 Out)
A Berroa (11, 5th inning off R Franklin 0 on, 0 Out)
R Palmeiro (23, 1st inning off R Franklin 2 on, 0 Out)
H Blalock (17, 5th inning off R Franklin 1 on, 1 Out)
H Matsui (14, 2nd inning off R Franklin 0 on, 0 Out)
N Johnson (7, 6th inning off R Franklin 3 on, 1 Out)
R Johnson (7, 4th inning off R Franklin 2 on, 0 Out)
D Ortiz (19, 4th inning off R Franklin 2 on, 2 Out)
E Durazo (21, 1st inning off R Franklin 0 on, 1 Out)
E Chavez (29, 3rd inning off R Franklin 1 on, 1 Out)
Solo shots: 21/34
That strikes me as a normal proportion. Without having a point of comparison, though, that really doesn’t answer anything. Except the question “Do I spend too much time researching random Mariners questions?” The answer is “Yes.”
Also, it cracks me up that stations are airing anti-satellite radio ads that end “brought to by your local radio station.” Which are all owned by Entercom or Clear Channel, massive conscience-less corporations involved in hugely complicated pay-for-play lawsuits, responsible for the Balkanization of commercial radio, and… it bugs me to hear these kind of ads — they should go “Folks, giant corporations are all alike. Stick with us, because you’re lazy.”
Or something.