On Monday, The Phillies and Astros kicked off what should be an interesting off-season by making a four-player deal. The Astros swapped long-time closer Billy Wagner for three young pitchers, the most accomplished of them Brandon Duckworth. My knee-jerk reaction was that the Astros had done well for themselves. Wagner is a great closer, but he’s a closer, and as such is limited in what he contributes to a team. The ‘Stros have Octavio Dotel to replace those innings, and an assortment of arms to replace Dotel’s workload. Moreover, I’m high on Duckworth, even after his second straight disappointing season. The deal allows the Astros to take the $8 million they had committed to Wagner and use it on a #3 starter, something they’d been playing without the last couple of years. Andy Pettitte is the likely target. A rotation of Roy Oswalt, Wade Miller, Pettitte (or another free agent), Duckworth and Jeriome Robertson would be one of the better ones in the NL. The more I thought about it, though, I didn’t mind the deal from the Phillies’ standpoint.
As free agents make their filings, General Managers across the game are starting the process of figuring out how they will put together their teams. An important part of that process is figuring out which free agents they should pursue. Part of the equation is expectations of health. Signing a Jeffrey Hammonds and expecting 160 games a year is pure folly and likely to cause a team to drastically overpay. On the flip side, the team that correctly assesses the risks, and prices accordingly, is much more likely to find the next Esteban Loaiza. While the factors that must be considered go far beyond health, it is one major component–one we’ll look at here with the Free Agent Health Report. Remember, this is not an exhaustive list–players not on this list are neither completely healthy nor completely screwed. They just didn’t make my cut.
Powered by a renewed sense of fiscal responsibility and Pom 100% Pomegranate Juice, here’s your 2003-2004 NL Free Agents…
Manny’s price tag was too rich for the taking. The Marlins mull the year after. The Sox say goodbye to Grady. Start printing those 2004 DRays playoff tickets: Julio Lugo is back. Frank Thomas returns to Chicago for more kvetching. These and other quips in The Week In Quotes.
The recent case involving Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) has brought the word steroid back to the forefront in a post-World Series baseball community. In a case that involves not steroid-trafficking, but tax evasion, a number of high-profile athletes, including five MLB players and a heretofore unknown anabolic steroid called THG (tetrahydrogestrinone), is perfect for the media but tells the fans nothing they shouldn’t already have known. The sexy sheen of a steroid probe involving Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi is a story that lays itself out on a silver platter for a lazy journalist that will not allow the thought to cross his or her mind that there have been no accusations of usage by these athletes or any other baseball players. Worse, by putting the word “steroid” and “Bonds” or “Giambi” in the same headline, the color of impropriety is almost impossible for these athletes to overcome. There is simply no way to ever give either a fair trial or even a reasonable testing, but there’s nothing wrong with this fact. Innocent until proven guilty is not a doctrine in American athletics; we’ve moved to a tabloid-style stoning by innuendo and rumor.
Today I’m going to indulge in one of the hoariest media traditions known to humankind: It’s my How to Fix the Yankees Column. Every year that the Yankees’ World Series aspirations come to grief, writers near and far offer up their prescriptive takes on just what needs to be done to restore the glory of yore. I’m no different. Whereas some deluded Gotham types concoct wild hypotheticals that involve swapping Drew Henson, Jeff Weaver, Amsterdam brothel vouchers, an “A Man Apart” DVD and a suitcase of unmarked bills for “Insert elite, untouchable performer here,” I’m going to do my best to remain grounded in reality. In the Yankees’ case, reality means profligate spending on the free-agent market.
Ah, free agent filing season, the most exciting time of the baseball season. What sports fan doesn’t eagerly check the Web several times a day, an ear to the radio and an eye on ESPNews, hoping to find out if Kenny Lofton beat Marvin Benard in the race to file for the millions their agents have assured them is waiting for each. Yes, faster than you’ll hear someone sing “baby” after tuning into your local pop/R&B station, the long quiet is on us. We’re left to looking over the free agent lists and trying to come up with funny teams. Like: How much would you have to pay to lose more games than the Tigers next year?
Monday, the Red Sox announced that they would cut ties with manager Grady Little. The decision wasn’t a big surprise; Little wasn’t fired as much as he wasn’t re-hired, given that his contract was just about to expire. Little was never the choice of the revamped Red Sox front office. He’d gotten the job as something of a little-known compromise candidate in early 2002 and guided the team to a 93-69 record in his first season. He was inherited by the new, performance-analysis-driven front office a year ago, and kept the job as much to provide some continuity as because of any particular skills to brought to the position.
I think too much is being made of the influence on this outcome of the last major decision Little made. Little isn’t unemployed this morning because he left Pedro Martinez in too long in Game Seven of the ALCS. Certainly, that decision will stick in memory for years to come, but I doubt there are a half-dozen cases in history where a manager lost his job for making one wrong move. I expect more from Theo Epstein and Larry Lucchino, and to say that Little isn’t the Sox manager today because of that decision is to give them far too little credit.
As many of our readers were submitting their ballots for the annual Internet Baseball Awards, 11 Baseball Prospectus authors went into the polling booths themselves, voicing their opinions on who should win the major baseball awards this year. Here are the results…
Fans of other teams face the off-season and have a thought process that runs (more or less) like this: “We have some good young players, they should be OK. We have this high-paid guy that sucks, boy, it’d be nice to get rid of him. We have some decent pitchers, that might work out if they stay healthy. There are a couple of obvious weak spots, I hope we get a good free agent or two. Yeah, we might be pretty good next year.” Whereas the mob of angry Yankees fans runs: “We’ve got some good young players, but they’re not good enough. They’re gone, we’ll send them to some god-awful team in exchange for their best players coming up on free agency. We have this high-paid guy that sucks. He’s gone. We have some good pitchers, if they get hurt we’ll find more. There are a couple of obvious weak spots, and we’ll go get the best free agents out there. That should do it.” Where’s the fun in that? It’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube but being encouraged to paint the sides one uniform color.
The Angels need to upgrade at CF and DH. The Cubs need players who get on base. The Tigers need an intervention for their pitching staff. These and other news and notes out of Anaheim, Chicago, and Detroit in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
The Marlins apparently didn’t need experience to keep their emotions under control. SeaBass had a feeling. Josh Beckett doesn’t care about billy goats–deer on the other hand… Big Stein draws up his plans to clean house. John Smoltz is not a fan of three-run homers. These and other quips in the World Series (and beyond) edition of The Week In Quotes.
Over the last two articles, I’ve looked at various methods for removing some of the complicating factors when looking at team defense. Based on the idea that team defensive metrics were really a measure of three separate factors (park, pitching, and actual defense), we determined one way to remove park factors (PADE: Park Adjusted Defensive Efficiency) and another to remove pitching factors (PIDE: Pitching Independent Defensive Efficiency). By removing these outside influences in our defensive metrics, we’ve leveled the playing field, allowing us to better judge which teams have the best team defense, based simply on the percentage of balls in play that they convert into outs.
With both PADE and PIDE, we removed one factor, but not both. We were able to see either how a pitching staff and defense together looked compared to the league or how a defense and park looked against the league. What we did not have was one metric that simply measured defense versus defense, our ultimate goal.
From the NY Post : “An MRI revealed an inflamed tendon in Jason Giambi’s left knee as well as patellar tendinitis. The condition is chronic and he will have to undergo diagnostic arthroscopic surgery after the World Series.” Sometimes, it’s good to know where my work hasn’t made it. You, of course, realize that an inflamed tendon is the very definition of tendinitis. Giambi will have surgery, but the recent pain that kept him out of the World Series could indicate more damage than expected. This will surely bear close watch. The Yankees will also be watching as Derek Jeter undergoes his expected off-season shoulder surgery. As we saw with Phil Nevin, the time period from surgery to game-ready is reduced from previous expectations due to new technologies and techniques. Jeter should return in plenty of time for Spring Training, assuming he maintains the new timeline we’ve seen established in the past year. There should be no ill effects and in fact, Jeter should be expected to improve slightly, on a pure health basis.
The Marlins have a cleanup hitter too young to drink and a manager too old to drive. They’re owned by a man who was a key part of one of the ugly episodes that marred MLB’s integrity in the late 1990s. They drew 8,362 fans to a Memorial Day home game as years of neglect, deception and wheedling continued to hold down interest in the team. And yet, they’re the champs, and they stood on one of the game’s sacred spaces last night and beat back a team that was supposed to be too experienced, too well-paid, and too blessed by the gods to lose to such an upstart. As a Yankee fan, I hated it. As someone who despises the way in which Jeffrey Loria came to own the Marlins, I hated it. As a baseball fan, it was hard not to love it.
It’s official: Josh Beckett will start Game Six for the Marlins on three days’ rest, with Carl Pavanoscheduled to do the same if the Fish can’t put the Yankees away tonight. I strongly disagree with this decision. It’s a move you make when you’re down 3-2, not up 3-2. It’s a decision you make when the difference between your best pitcher and the rest of the staff so large that going with anyone else in Game Six almost guarantees a Game Seven. Neither of those apply here. The Marlins need to win just one game to be champions, and they don’t get style points for winning in six. The Marlins have at least one pitcher available, in Mark Redman, who was arguably their #3 starter during the season. They certainly have Dontrelle Willis available for at least a few innings, and Willis was lights-out for a good part of 2003 and has been tough on Yankee lefties in this series. Frankly, outside of Game Five starter Brad Penny and Beckett (assuming you hold him back), the Marlins have nine pitchers who can give them at least a couple of innings, and some of those are the better pitchers on the staff. It’s Pavano’s throw day, so even he can give the team a couple of innings. Deciding that you’d rather start someone–two pitchers, actually–on short rest rather than use those guys is an inexplicable vote of no confidence.
How many people, with Ruben Sierra standing on third base Wednesday night, Aura and Mystique shaking their moneymakers just behind second base, and Mariano Rivera getting loose down the left-field line, would have figured this World Series would not only be going back to New York, but going back with the Yankees down three games to two? Other than Jack McKeon, I mean. The idea that the Yankees have some stash of special skills that only come into play in October took a huge hit the last two nights, as the Marlins not only bounced back to win Game Four in 12 innings, but took advantage of the Yankees’ bad fortune and bad baseball to move within one win of their second championship in seven seasons.