Baseball Prospectus mourns the loss of pioneering sportswriter Leonard Koppett.
Kansas City Royals owner David Glass discusses taking on salary and the pennant race. Sammy Sosa’s still talking Corkgate, but Danny Graves isn’t. Rick Peterson offers some insight on developing and managing pitchers. All this and more in this edition of The Week In Quotes.
Vlad’s hurting, but his Expos mates are feeling their own kind of pain. Velocity Project Jr.: just how hard is Jesse Foppert throwing? Halladay and Escobar are shutting down offenses for the Blue Jays. All this and more on Toronto, San Francisco, and Montreal in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
Everyone knows the shorthand of fan apparel. A Red Sox hat? Well, you know you’re dealing with a borderline alcoholic with a proclivity for self-flagellation. (See also: Woolner, Keith.) An old-time White Sox uniform fashioned from modern fabric? Probably a gullible masochist whom you can defraud for a lucrative second income; but be careful–could also be creepy, stalking Scientologist. A Pete Rose jersey and matching haircut? That’s a future Wal-Mart greeter who spends the majority of his free time calling political talk radio shows. A cap sporting the colors of both the A’s and Giants? Those are David Koresh rejects who should be dragged from their ’82 Dodge Colts and savagely beaten into a persistent vegetative state.
But save your pity for those gilding themselves with the colors of the New York Mets.
As you know, the Mets fired Steve Phillips, and now find themselves facing not only their own intra-Gotham inferiority complex, but with a number of landmines in house that may not be possible to avoid. The days of being able to readily unload horrifying, soul-draining contracts is largely over, and the Mets have their share. They’re not going to be able to Mondesi someone about the head and shoulders, a la Toronto. Those days are over. What are they really facing as they try to rebuild a team?
I’m not sure how to report the injuries to Paul Wilson because I don’t know who said what or how the tension built to the point where Kyle Farnsworth form-tackled Wilson and proceeded to drop a beatdown unlike most baseball fights I’ve ever seen. Wilson, for one, owes Damian Miller a six-pack for covering him and keeping a couple more Farnsy haymakers from landing. I’m sure suspensions will be forthcoming, but this fight–in more ways than one–hurt the Reds much more than the Cubs.
It’s an odd injury to Alex Rodriguez, who is nearly as durable as his hero, Cal Ripken. From the tape, I can’t tell if he just dropped his glove early or was making something of a deke tag, but either way, the throw down on the steal attempt whacked Alex squarely in his nose. He was dazed and bloodied, leaving the game early, but there’s no word on if he’ll miss any time. With injuries like this, it will be based on his awareness level and pain tolerance. I’d expect him to miss a game or two, but nothing serious.
A groin injury has put yet another Yanks reliever on the shelf. Antonio Osuna’s injury is not considered serious, but an already thin bullpen might push Frankensteinbrenner to do something, well, rash. The mind can’t really wrap itself around the possibilities in such a thin trade market, but I keep hearing that Jeff Weaver is suddenly available.
Steven Goldman takes on the Tigers’ and Padres’ flirting with a .300 winning percentage with a history lesson on some of baseball’s most renowned losing clubs.
If you’re following the College World Series for the first time, you’ve picked a really great year to do it. The format has changed this year so that the TV-inspired one-game crapshoot final of the past fifteen years has been replaced with a best-of-three round between the winners of the two half-brackets. Given that most college teams are built around the idea of winning a three-game series, this should show the teams at their best. On top of that, there have already been some great games this week, and the final comes down to two of the three best teams in the country, so I’m really excited about this weekend. So you can share that excitement, I want to give you a viewer’s guide to this weekend’s series.
Despite years of Kids’ Inning mishaps, the Mariners announce they’re bringing the kids again this year to run the show. Derek Zumsteg recounts a few kids’ horror stories, including the real reason Lou Piniella left town.
The Diamondbacks keep cycling through injuries. The Red Sox keep cycling through relievers. Lima Time has Royals fans cowering. Izzy returns to a battered bullpen. News, notes, and Kahrlisms from 21 major league teams in the latest edition of Transaction Analysis.
Will Carroll offers the latest injury news on Vladimir Guerrero, Matt Morris, and Seth McClung in today’s edition of Under The Knife.
The Angels staff has been tateriffic; Mark Bellhorn is getting the cold shoulder in Chicago; and the Tigers have shifted their lineup around, with the hope of reaching 50 wins. All this and much more from Anaheim, Chicago, and Detroit.
The focus on pitcher workloads–largely through tracking pitch counts–is perhaps the most heated area of contention between old-school baseball people and outside performance analysts. Baseball Prospectus has been a big part of the debate, with Rany Jazayerli and Keith Woolner developing and refining tools that measure workload and investigating the effects, short- and long-term, of throwing a lot of pitches.
At the other end of the spectrum are coaches and ex-players, many of whom have been in the game since before Woolner and Jazayerli were born. These men believe that pitch counts are a secondary tool at best, and at the extreme, proffer the notion that the real problem is that pitchers today are babied, not like the men years ago who always went nine innings. Or 12. Or even 26.
Lost in that line of thought is the fact that pitching is harder now. No one counted pitches 90 years ago because, to a certain extent, there was no need to do so. Pitching a baseball game from start to finish required a level of effort well within the ability of the men assigned to do so. Now, pitching nine innings of baseball at the major-league level requires a much greater effort, one that may be too much for one human arm to handle.
Baseball is full of bounces, and not just the path of a Jacque Jones double as it skips across the Metrodome turf (or a Carlos Martinez homer as it skips off Jose Canseco’s head). Rather, teams can expect a bounce in attendance when they move into a new facility, facilitating a higher payroll, a more competitive club, and ultimately, it is hoped, a couple of pennants to hang on the outfield wall.
Or at least, once upon a time, they could have. The standing-room-only precedent established in places like Toronto and Baltimore and Cleveland no longer seems to hold. Attendance in Detroit, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh has already regressed to the levels those teams had grown accustomed to prior to the opening of their new stadiums. Attendance in Cincinnati is up, but only barely–and this with reasonable ticket prices and a fun team on the field. Nobody expects the honeymoon to last forever, but the reinvigorated relationships between ballpark and city that the new stadiums were supposed to engender have lasted shorter than a Liz Taylor nuptial.
Since the debut of SkyDome in 1989, 13 of the 26 teams in existence at that time have opened new parks. Two more will open new facilities next year. It has been the longest sustained period of new stadium construction in baseball history. Call them mallparks or, as I prefer, Retroplexes. Either way, there’s plenty of evidence that the ball isn’t bouncing quite as highly these days.
There are days when I wonder why I didn’t call this column Under The Needle or something similar. The reason for this is steroids; it seems that no matter what the topic is or where I am, when people talk baseball with me, they’ll bring the conversation back to steroids, and likely to Barry Bonds. Sure, I opened myself to this with my offer to help Barry get tested (which was politely declined by the MLBPA) last year after Bonds said that he wanted to be tested. Why did I offer? I wanted to make a point much different that the Rick Reillys of the world.
I am reasonably sure that Bonds would have passed.
Completely sure? No. Heck, I could have had something in my meatless chicken patty tonight that would trip the light on a urinalysis. The steroid issue is clouded by a couple issues–it’s easier to say ‘steroids’ than Beta-2 agonists or chorionic gonadotrphin, and it’s simpler to explain changes. Ignore new bats, new ballparks, better techniques, dietitans, personal trainers, video breakdowns, and a year-round focus, but blame some drug that’s been lapped by the field. Easy, but wrong.
A Monday night at the park with Pedro Martinez and the Boston Red Sox. Ryan Wagner looks like a reach for the Reds. The Padres are finally rolling with the rotation they wanted all along. All this and more news and notes from San Diego, Cincinnati and Boston in this edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Sometimes a big epiphany just leads you back to a better understanding of a mundane truth. Let me walk you through one of mine.
A few months back, I finally hit upon a useful algorithm for determining reasonably accurate park factors for all 287 NCAA Division I baseball programs. Given that, in any given year, a given team will only play 25-30 of the other teams, and that over half of those matchups will not be home-and-home contracts but will involve a smaller program playing only at a larger one (which is of no benefit in determining park factors), I was quite pleased with this discovery.
Current major league park factors, relatively speaking, are a little dull. Sure, you have Coors Field, which routinely comes in around 160. The rest of them, though, hover within about 20% of each other from top to bottom. It matters if you’re picking at the fine details of performance analysis, but for a lot of fans it causes the issue to just resolve down to “the Rockies and everyone else.” College park factors, on the other hand, have a good bit more range in them, from the lows down in the 60s up to New Mexico, at an astounding 211. In other words, a theoretical game played at New Mexico will produce more than twice as many runs as the same game played at a neutral park like Fresno State.
I then set about finding practical applications for these park factors. The most common use for park factors is to take performance metrics, both team and individual, and place them in a neutral context. So I began thinking of ways to park-adjust statistics and look for players and teams who were actually better or worse than they appeared at face value. Suddenly, it occurred to me that the park factor for runs scored was not the same as the park factor for OBP, and that the relationship between the two was not linear; it was exponential. In other words, if the park factor for OBP increased from 130 to 140, that would result in a greater increase in runs scored than 100 to 110.