Dave Nilsson is back in the bigs, this time with the Braves. Damaso Marte and Joe Nathan would get extra bucks from the White Sox and Twins depending on their managers’ whims. Geoff Jenkins’ three-year deal with the Brewers may become another Milwaukee millstone. These and other happenings in today’s Transaction Analysis.
Gene Orza thinks smoking is worse than juicing. Not everyone agrees. Peter Magowan thinks the Yankees are out of control. Jason Isringhausen wishes Scott Kazmir the best of luck in New York. Ozzie Guillen wants to win by doing the little things. And Jose Lima just is glad to be in a major league uniform. All this and many more quips in the latest edition of The Week In Quotes.
The Houston bullpen looks to take a pretty significant step back, according to PECOTA. The Brewers are already looking two years down the road … or least they should be. And the A’s have quite the bunch of misfits invited to Spring Training in Arizona. All this and much more news from Houston, Milwaukee, and Oakland in your Monday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
The history of spring training is one of ongoing professionalization and standardization, which is a 13-syllable way of saying, “All eccentricities have been stomped out of it.” In the early days of spring training, teams lacked set destinations. There were no permanent Florida or Arizona complexes, the Dodger installation at Vero Beach not coming until mid-century. Depending on the year and where the manager felt like spending his spring, teams trained in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Catalina Island, California, the Dominican Republic. Ernest Hemingway figures in a number of spring training stories because the hard-drinking Papa frequently crossed paths with the hard-drinking Dodgers when they trained in Cuba during the 1940s. Most of the stories revolve around Hemingway and closer Hugh Casey getting drunk and beating the heck out of each other. As Papa wrote in The Sun Also Rises: “Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Today, teams have expensive stadiums waiting for them, some appendages of theme parks. There are no more holdouts, no Rickey Hendersons who report late because they can’t be bothered to start on time. But for Dominicans with visa problems, punctuality is the rule. If the training season is used for anything more fun than training, it’s kept on the down low.
You might recall that last year I wrote a trio of articles that examined the minor league pitching statistics of two distinct populations of major league hurlers. One group was manifestly successful at the highest level, while the other group, while not as bad as a Slim Whitman concept album, still didn’t fare to well in the bigs. While far from conclusive, the findings of the study were more confounding and counterintuitive than anything else. It provided more questions than answers, which is usually what happens when you give a former English major the keys to Excel. It was quite surprising to find that Group B outperformed Group A in several key measures like K/BB ratio, K/9 and BB/9. In short, they struck out hitters at a higher clip, had better control and demonstrated more command. The only thing Group A did do better, albeit modestly, was keep the ball in the park and prevent hits (and the latter probably wasn’t entirely of their own making). As such, I’ve decided to revisit this matter with an eye toward home runs and hits allowed–the two measures that favored Group A in the original study. Additionally, this time I’ll remedy an oversight in the first study and bring age into the equation.
The Indians are not only one of the top medhead teams around, but also one of the best-organized front offices. From their pioneering use of databases to the way they have dealt with the Kaz Tadano situation, this franchise is first-rate. My sidekick on Baseball Prospectus Radio, Scott McCauley, is a big Tribe fan. Often, he’ll look like a dog that’s been kicked when we discuss the Indians, but I keep telling him that things are looking up. As the dawn of hope starts to light the horizon, it can appear very dark. Even in the AL Central, that lineup isn’t going to cause a lot of fear, and the rotation has a ton of question marks. Still, as Rob Neyer pointed out, this team could sneak up on people. They won’t be the Yankees, Red Sox or even the A’s, but in the AL Central, they don’t need to be. If they sneak into the playoffs some time soon…well, we all know how to play craps, right?
One of the objectives of the Basics series is to sort of rehash everything that is very basic: what we know now, and how did we get to the point that we know it? Filling in some of the back-story of what’s up in terms of player analysis serves a few important purposes. First, it helps eradicate some of the potential barriers anyone might have to analysis: take a look, and you that this isn’t all rocket science. If even a non-math person and ex-Teamster like me can get it or get some of it, I’m willing to bet that everybody else can too.
But if you like the flavor and you want more, there’s a really important second goal the Basics series can achieve if you’re new to this. Or, if you’re already familiar with this sort of stuff, the series serves as a general reminder to those of us who think we know it all. That second lesson is: When in doubt, don’t quit early.
Whether you call the line of inquiry about baseball that we’re involved in here “performance analysis” or “sabermetrics” or snarky and insufferable, one of the perils of working within this community is that it’s stocked with bright people devising ever-better mousetraps to define player value statistically, particularly offensive value. As a result, you run the risk of getting lost in the inevitable alphabet soup of different newfangled metrics. And rather than try to sort through them all, it’s perhaps easier to settle for a figure that some people refer to as simple and elegant: OPS, or On-base percentage Plus Slugging percentage. And perhaps worse yet, if you’re an analyst, it’s probably easiest to use OPS, because it’s the easiest to explain. As we mentioned earlier in the series, OPS winds up doing a pretty decent job of mimicking a description of overall offensive value. So it works, right? And if it works, and it’s simple, why not use it as a gateway stat to introduce fans to the broader, more diverse world of statistical analysis?
I got an interesting response to Monday’s Hope and Faith piece:
“As one who wrote to complain about your writing off the Marlins last year, I have to say that I mostly agree with your list this year.
My only slight quibble would be with the Diamondbacks’ listing. If Barry Bonds gets hurt, the Giants aren’t too much better than the D’Backs. I think that if a team starts with Randy Johnson and Brandon Webb, maybe if Casey Fossum steps up a little (look at his by-team breakdown and it seems that getting shelled by Toronto twice in SkyDome inflated his stats), if Steve Sparks keeps close to .500, they are not so far off. I hate to see them giving 30 starts to Shane Reynolds, but if they can get someone to take his place and also finish .500, they have a chance to win more than 81 games. (Instead of putting a demonstrably bad pitcher like Reynolds in there every fifth day, I’d much rather see them convert one of their many good middle relievers to the starting staff.)
Sure, they have holes but if you have a couple of top pitchers to build around, and good middle relief, you can’t be written off. A team with Johnson and Webb at the top of the rotation can hope to patch something together and exceed expectations. That’s the same reason I wrote to you last year to suggest you were short-shrifting the Marlins. They had enough good young pitchers that the pieces had a chance to fall in place.
–B.C.”
I don’t really disagree, which is why I had the Diamondbacks in the gray area in Monday’s column.
The Expos will lean on Livan Hernandez to carry their questionable starting rotation. The Giants may tinker with their lineup. The Blue Jays wrestle with their starting corner-outfield spots. These and other news and notes in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
The Angels possess five of the top prospects in the game. Did the Cubs do enough to help their offense this off-season? Jeremy Bonderman is a rare bright spot for the Tigers’ future. These and other news and notes in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
It was nice to watch the team play as I wrote the Team Health Report. It should be, if not successful, at least more interesting to watch the Mets in 2004. As the team moves away from a Phillips Era that led to one World Series and much woe, and into what could probably be best described as the Wilpon Era, the team begins to turn over what was an old, fragile lineup.
It’s an accepted, but not always true, tenet that younger teams are healthier. Clearly, young pitchers are more at risk in terms of workload, but in fact, there are significant changes in the body over the normal range of ages in a baseball career. Young players tend to have more tears and trauma, while older players tend to have problems of muscles and bone. Like most things, there are too many factors involved to say that there is any one rule. Team health, like players, is very individual.
The two yellows at the top of the rotation aren’t terribly concerning to me. Both Leiter and Glavine have operated for the last several years as “crafty left-handers,” rarely having problems even when taxed. Leiter especially recognizes the dangers of Dallas Green-style workloads, having the scars to prove it. Pitchers of this age are already nearly singular and have to be special to make it this far. There’s a point where the aches and pains destroy their effectiveness and it usually comes in a hurry.
There’s dumb, there’s really dumb, and there’s leaving $35 on the table.
In Tuesday’s column, I wrote about the Rotowire Staff League auction. Coming off a second-place finish in 2003, I went into it with a solid pitching staff at relatively low cost. Based on my own analysis and the great feedback I got from readers, I planned to target hitting with the $109 I had available. But despite having every intention of blowing a big chunk of my budget on two slugging outfielders, I ended up spending no more than $22 on any player, that one being Adam Kennedy, who is neither slugging nor an outfielder.
I was involved in the bidding on Manny Ramirez (who went for $46), Barry Bonds ($42), and Jim Edmonds ($40), but bowed out each time, eyeing the remaining players and telling myself I’d get one of them at a price I was comfortable with. When the last top-tier outfielder was called, I went all the way to the high 40s, but in the end, couldn’t bring myself to pay more than that for Magglio Ordonez, who ended up going for $57.
So to understand the methods we use to analyze pitcher usage, it’s important to appreciate that while every team in baseball today employs essentially the same usage pattern–starting pitchers work in a five-man rotation, with four or five days of rest between starts, and never relieving in between–that usage pattern is far from the norm historically. As recently as 30 years ago, starters were expected to start every fourth day, with only three days of rest between starts. This does not appear to have had a detrimental effect on the pitchers of that era; in fact, over half of the 300-game winners of the live-ball era were in the prime of their careers in the early 1970s. There is no definitive proof that pitching in any kind of rotation is a necessary ingredient for successful pitching staffs. Through the 1950s, starting pitchers would routinely get six or seven days off to pitch against a team they matched up favorably against, then return to the mound on just two days’ rest for their next start. There is no evidence that starting pitchers who relieve on their days off between starts suffer adversely for doing so. Starting pitchers routinely made 10 or 15 relief appearances a season for the better part of half a century.
So, with no discernible plan and playing in the toughest division in baseball, can this team at least stay healthy? Over the past three seasons, the medhead numbers have not been kind to the Orioles. In addition to questions surrounding the death of Steve Bechler, the Orioles medical staff has had a difficult time with injuries. Injuries to players like Segui, B.J. Surhoff, Chris Richard, and Omar Daal leave them in the bottom quartile in most measures. Once again, the top three teams in the AL East trump the Orioles, and Tampa Bay is fast becoming a medhead team, led by their top-notch staff.
I wrote a piece in the Baseball Prospectus Basics last week (“How to run a bullpen.”) I got a lot of feedback that ran like this: Hey, that table you ran shows that it’s good to generally use the best reliever in tighter situations, rather than to protect three-run leads in the ninth…Facing a tie game in the eighth, wouldn’t it make sense that a manager would save his best pitcher for the ninth, which would be even more important? This is a fine question, and one I think deserves to be answered in some depth.
No news is good news for the Orioles this spring. The Rockies’ decision to move Shawn Chacon is equal parts puzzling and silly…or is it? And finally, the Mets look to be considering some trades. All this and much more news from Baltimore, Colorado, and New York in your Wednesday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.