So, how weird is it that the M’s chose now to pick up Bob Melvin’s 2005 contract option? It would have made sense to do this after last season, as he won 93 games as a rookie manager. It would have made sense to do it this season, had the team gotten off to a good start. Instead, they’re off to a horrible start and there have been reasonable people (not just KJR callers) calling for, and hinting at, Melvin not being back next season (cough Paul Molitor cough). Honestly, I would have been less surprised if they had found a team to take Kevin Jarvis in trade.
Oh, and Corey Koskie was safe in the top of the 9th; Wilson never tagged him.
On to extra innings…
I posted this once, but Blogger ate it.
Rafael Soriano is back in the majors, Bloomquist is on the DL (so Putz stays) and Jarvis is officially gone, released, that’s all folks. What, they couldn’t find a taker in trade? I’m stunned. Stunned, I tell you. Stunned.
I’ve tried to make it a point not to plug my photoblog here, because I’m not a fan of self-promotion, but I’ve finally taken a shot I like so much that I want as many people to see it as possible. I’ll refrain from this in the future, but forgive my indulgance this once.
Back to your regularly scheduled baseball talk.
As promised, the new Future Forty is online. There are some fairly significant changes from the pre-season version, including the invasion of the Initials Gang. T.J. Bohn, A.J. Zapp, and T.A. Fulmer all make their debut, displacing less competant, fully named prospects. Chris Snelling plunges to #7 after yet another wasted season, and Ismael Castro joins him in the what-might-have-been ranks, as he too will miss the rest of 2004.
Really, though, what is striking about this list is just how, well, not good, the M’s farm system has gotten. There isn’t anyone in the system that doesn’t come with a giant question mark. Nageotte and Hernandez have a ton of potential, but both are in the super high risk category. I’ve never been a huge Jose Lopez fan, and he’s basically this high by default. Blackley, Choo, Madritsch, these just aren’t the names of perennial all-stars. Toss in the fact that depth, the supposed strength of the organization, is now a memory, and the minor leagues aren’t in very good shape. Scraping together 40 guys that could be labeled prospects was a real challenge, and I have next to no hope for everyone past #25 on the list.
Realistcally, its time to pray for the health of Felix Hernandez, because the rest of this crop just doesn’t look so hot. Right now, the M’s farm system is in the bottom third of major league franchises. Considering the age and performance of the major league club, it is a more severe problem than for most of the other teams in a similar circumstance. The M’s didn’t have one good draft under Frank Mattox, and it is imperative that Bob Fontaine can restock the system this June. Considering the M’s once again threw away their high draft picks, he’s going to have to work some miracles. Good luck, Bob.
“Woohoo. Finally.”
— David Cameron, upon seeing that the M’s beat the Tigers 12-2 yesterday.
I didn’t watch much-ok, any-baseball this weekend, so I have very few comments, other than its nice to finally earn a win. Even 2-1 and 10-9 wins where the team plays like crap are tough to enjoy, so it’s nice to see the M’s go out and just beat the tar out of the opponent.
Soriano is expected to join the team tomorrow, with J.J. Putz taking the shuttle back to Tacoma. I think Putz probably deserves a shot somewhere, but this isn’t holding back Edgar Martinez. I have no real problem with Putz being in Triple-A. However, George Sherill is making his case for Mike Myers’ roster spot in a big way. In 15 innings, he’s allowed 11 hits, 4 walks (1 intentional), struck out 25, and has posted a 1.80 ERA. Contrast that with Myers, who has retired 18 batters in 13 games and is still a punching bag against right-handers. Lefty specialists are fine, but when they’re batting practice pitchers against right-handed hitters, they’re not worth the roster spot.
Coming later today; updated Future Forty.
Hey, remember when I talked about Kevin Jarvis and how getting rid of him and his salary wasn’t an added cost for the team? In fact, I even said —
If this is used as an excuse at any point this season for not making moves, or taking on salary, or raising beer prices, everyone should know this — this is not an added expense in any way.
Turns out Howard had beat me to it.
“The message this sends is that we are prepared to make a significant financial sacrifice in order to meet our number one objective, which is to field championship teams that get into the playoffs and go as far as possible,” said Howard Lincoln, the Mariners chief executive officer. “But right now, we don’t know if he will picked up by another team or traded. We don’t know that.”
What we do know is that Lincoln was, at best, being deceptive, as the team was making no financial sacrifice here.
Wow, that’s a surprise: Edgar and Boone out and the team can’t score runs.
Anyway, a little bit about defensive efficency. Click that link to bring up BP’s report on this. The short explanation is “How good are teams at turning balls that hypothetically could be turned into outs into outs?”
You take all the plate appearances and subtract everything not related to the defense: walks, strikeouts, HBP, HR, and… what’s ROE? I forget. That’s embarassing. That’s the number of balls put into play. Last year the Mariners were amazingly good at this, and I wrote a lot about how important that is, but not just in turning balls into outs but doubles/triples into outs/singles. Unfortunately that chart’s not sorted by DE rank, but the Mariners are down towards the bottom. Only Minnesota, Anahiem, are much worse than the M’s, and Cleveland, Kansas City and Detroit are a hair worse. The best were St. Louis, followed closely by Tampa Bay, Florida, and the Chicago White Sox (!).
Whew. I think I responded to everyone who emailed about getting together to watch road games. If you’re interested, we’ve got two dates already, both Bellevue: May the 12th and May the 26th. If you’re interested (and if you emailed and I missed it) drop me a line for the info.
Rafael Soriano’s back in the majors; Bloomquist is on the 15-day DL and Jarvis has been officially released. What, they couldn’t find a taker in trade? I’m stunned. Stunned, I tell you. Stunned.
Productive Gluttony
Productive outs are defined in a sidebar in that article I didn’t see at the time because ESPN’s pages format like ass when you use anything but IE w/Flash. So!
POP explained
What is a productive out?
A productive out occurs when …
A baserunner advances with the first out of an inning.
A pitcher sacrifices with one out.
A baserunner is driven home with the second out of an inning.
What is the formula for productive out percentage (POP)?
Productive outs divided by the total number of outs. For instance, if three of Player A’s 10 outs are productive, his POP is .300.
So it’s even worse than what I lambasted him for (that is, it’s just a proxy for OBP, since productive outs couldn’t occur without a runner). And a pitcher sacrificing with no outs isn’t productive but with one out, it is? But if you advance a runner while making the first out, that’s productive, but advancing the runner while making the second out isn’t? Why is it productive for the pitcher, then?
I actually think that defintion’s wrong. I can’t believe that Elias defined a stat so stupid: I mean really, POP must be calculated as
“productive outs” made/potential “productive outs”
Which would make it not a proxy for OBP. But until they actually define the stat, start publishing numbers, rather than using it as some kind of drive-by article reinforcement, that argument’s entirely valid.
Oh, and check out this chart:
Top and bottom
Through April 26
1. Detroit Tigers .430
2. Arizona Diamondbacks .417
3. Pittsburgh Pirates .417
4. San Diego Padres .400
5. Texas Rangers .365
6. Houston Astros .349
25. Seattle Mariners .229
26. San Francisco Giants .226
27. Cincinnati Reds .225
28. New York Yankees .210
29. Boston Red Sox .200
30. Oakland Athletics .137
Source: Elias Sports Bureau
Let’s look at those in a little more detail. Do they correlate to runs scored a game?
Team, POP rank, Runs scored/game rank
Tigers, 1, 1
Dbacks, 2, 6
Pirates, 3, 25
Padres, 4, 18
Rangers, 5, 8
Astros, 6, 2
—
Mariners, 25, 25
Giants, 26, 26
Reds, 27, 16
Yankees, 28, 21
Red Sox, 29, 17
Oakland, 30, 23
Ummmm… a little, I guess. But not really…. take OBP (please!), which everyone knows is even a better measure of team offense because it shows how good a team is at NOT MAKING OUTS AT ALL. Sorry, sorry. OBP to runs scored a game has a correlation of .865, which is about as strong a correlation as you’ll get (except maybe the inverse correlation between “decline in ESPN.com quality and number of old newspaper guys brought in to replace interesting writers”).
Correlation between productive outs and runs scored/game, based on the limited set of data he gives us? .544, which isn’t insignificant, but it’s like… Olney article:Neyer article::Produtive outs:OBP
Oh yeah, it’s that huge. And given that Olney (weirdly) only gives us six top and six bottom, I’d bet even that overstates the worth of this stat.
Here’s the huge, fatal flaw of POP:
It’s a measure of tactics and chance in a limited set of circumstances, and so it’s subject to wild variation. Do certain things happen when certain other things have already happened? It is not, and cannot be, a measure of success. Because while it purports to measure what teams do with their outs, but it totally ignores that the greatest thing a team can do when they’re up, which is NOT MAKE OUTS AT ALL. Sorry, sorry.
Let’s say you’re SUPER SMALL BALL TEAM.
Given a runner on first, you can advance them to third by giving up two outs every time. Your first guy in an inning gets on first 1/3rd of the time (a little more in practice, but bear with me), you give up two outs and… runner on third, two outs. A third of the time the fourth guy in an inning gets a hit and a run scores (that’s going to be much less in practice, but bear with me). The rest of the time he makes the third out and you score nothing:
3 innings: first batter gets on, gets moved to third with two outs
1 inning: 4th batter gets some kind of hit with two outs to score the run.
Then, with your non-productive innings (6) where you actually play baseball, the run expectation for no one on and one out is about .28, so you’d figure to score two runs in those innings on average. It scores as often in the innings where this perfect execution fails as it does when this perfect execution works as everyone wants it too.
Your team, the Productive Out Masters, now scores three runs a game. Congratulations, you’re the second-worst offensive team in the majors, ahead of only the Expos. Your team sucks.
But wait, you say, what if you only need three runs a game to win?
Please. Olney argues the Red Sox w/Schilling only need a couple runs, but go look at the game logs. Schilling doesn’t give up two runs a game consistently, so you’re punting on games…
Generally speaking, giving up an out to advance a runner does two things:
– it slightly increases the chance that one run will score
– it decreases the chance that many runs will score
The run expectation with a guy on first and no outs and a guy on second with one out is the same. It gains nothing except polite applause from the crowd for doing the little things. As Earl Weaver wrote, you should only play for one run when it’s certain that that one run will win you the game.