One of the favorite terms of baseball officials is “development path,” used to describe the gradual improvement of a prospect into a major league player. As Nate Silver’s PECOTA system shows us, most players follow a somewhat normal path of improvement and can be classified into a certain type of player depending on their skill set. Some low-level shortstops are that in name only, really possessing offensive skills destined for a corner spot. Others are highlight-reel defenders who hit like pitchers, but amaze and entertain with their prowess in the field. Occasionally, though, we run across a prospect that simply bewilders, showing wildly different skill sets in different years, and making future projections a bit trickier. Jose Lopez is one of these players. The 19-year-old shortstop from Venezuela has made a name for himself and has responded well to the Mariners’ willingness to push him quickly through the system, being one of the youngest players in the league during each of his first three professional seasons. However, his performances have been anything but consistent, and the reports on him are nearly as confusing.
I’ve complained a lot about broadcasts, but what do I actually want? As I’ve sat around watching every game I can down the stretch, I’ve given this some thought. I want insight, more than anything, and failing that, I’d like not to be insulted. I don’t want to have the screen read to me: I can read. If I couldn’t, wouldn’t having the dude say “as you can see from the scouting report…” only rub in the pain of illiteracy? There’s so much to talk about in a baseball game–from pitch to pitch, what’s the sequence? How does this fit into a batter’s strength and weaknesses, or the pitcher’s? What kind of strategic possibilities exist, and how does each manager handle that situation? Instead, according to the announcers, every hitter is a first-pitch, fastball hitter who likes his pitches out and over the plate, and every pitcher needs to put the heat right in on their hands (an expression Jim Bouton used to ridicule). With runners on, it’s always a good idea to put the game in motion, I’m told. Put pressure on the defense. Nothing’s this simple. I’d love to see some real debate in the booth. I’ve argued before that the best thing baseball could do would be to copy wrestling and have one announcer (the play-by-play man would be best) who’s a bit of a homer, and the other announcer who’s the critic, and rankles the home fans a little. With the right people, you might find that while fans didn’t like the crew, they were much more involved in the broadcasts and tuned in to see what would happen next.
Brandon Webb gives the Diamondbacks three aces at the top of their rotation. The Royals’ Angel Berroa deserves the AL Rookie of the Year award. Mike Lieberthal should be hitting between Jim Thome and Bobby Abreu for the Phillies. These and other news and notes out of Arizona, Kansas City, and Philadelphia in your Thursday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
I’d like to thank everyone for all the feedback on yesterday’s UTK. I went into a bit more depth than I normally do, and since there was such a reaction–many being “Jeez, Will, what’s with you using numbers and stuff? Are those BP Math Bullies kicking your butt in the playground?”–it’s something I’ll try to do more of in the future.
In fact, while many of you wrote in to enlighten me with background information on a number of the pitchers who made “the list,” even more you reminded me that the topic was addressed directly in one of the best books on baseball ever written, The Diamond Appraised. In TDA, Craig Wright and Tom House took a close look at the topic of pitcher workloads, introducing a number of ideas that were revolutionary for the time, and are still causing debate today. If you haven’t read this book, do so immediately.
Speaking of books, it’s time for my “big announcement.” I’ve reached an agreement in principle to write a book this off-season on pitcher injuries. I’m excited about the project, which will bring together some of the greatest minds in sports medicine to try and shine a bright light on the problem of pitcher health. More on this project in the future.
Powered by hope of an October beer at Clark & Addison, on to the injuries…
In the 1988 Baseball Abstract, Bill James introduces what he admits to being a “garbage stat”–the game score. For the uninitiated, the game score is a number, generally ranging from zero to 100, that’s used to evaluate a starting pitcher’s performance in any given outing. It’s scaled so that 50 is roughly an average start, 90 or higher is gem status and anything below, say, 15 is in Jaime Navarro territory. Like the man said, it’s a junk metric, but it’s an entertaining one. That doesn’t mean, however, that it can’t be improved upon. Game scores, as mentioned, were conceived 15 years ago, and in the intervening period we’ve learned a great deal about how much control pitchers exert over certain events. In light of this, perhaps it’s time to roll out Game Scores 2.0, with an eye toward what we now know about the art of pitching. As many of you know, semi-recent research has found that pitchers don’t have as much control over what becomes of balls in play as previously believed. Voros McCracken’s initial findings suggested that pitchers had almost no control over the fate of a ball once it left the bat (provided it stayed in the park). Subsequent research by Keith Woolner and Tom Tippett found that while pitchers didn’t have a great deal of influence over whether balls in play were converted into outs or fell as base hits, they did have a modicum of control over these events. Whoever’s right (I side with the latter position), pitchers appear to have much less influence with regard to hit prevention than we once thought. This principle–separating what pitchers control absolutely from what they control only partially–is where the rubber hits the road for GS 2.0.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, September was a cruel month for baseball. The weather dampened, the children went back to school, the nation’s attention turned to the Second-Best Sport, and many teams soldiered on with only pride and the next season’s paycheck to play for. Year after year, attendance slumped badly, with nothing to bridge the gap between the long, baseball-and-B-B-Q evenings of summer, and the crackling drama of the post-season. It was, like the moment just after intimacy, a time of unspeakable melancholy.
Then, one day, the Commissioner made the Wild Card. The Commissioner was a wise man, and he knew that the self-styled defenders of tradition would not like his creation. But they had complained about westward expansion and night baseball and the Designated Hitter and too many other things to count, and every time they had come back, first to queue in line when the gates opened in spring. Tradition wasn’t marketable anyway, not in the way that a tense battle for fourth place between the Marlins and the Phillies was.
The Wild Card, in fact, was a remarkable success. The Commissioner, never known for his fondness for crowds, became omnipresent in those Septembers, maintaining a furious itinerary, shaking hands with awestruck fans at every ballpark from Yawkey Way to Elysian Fields. The Commissioner took no credit for the Wild Card; he had created it, after all, in the Best Interest of Baseball, and what reward did a man deserve for the mere execution of his duty? It was, he said, remarkable only that it had not been thought of earlier, but that was the hallmark of all great inventions, like post-it notes and garage door openers.
And they lived happily ever after.
Ryan Smith writes: I’m a Cubs fan, and one of the more interesting stats that I remember about their promising 2001 campaign was Eric Young’s 43 doubles and 42 RBI. I thought it would be near impossible for a player to have as many as 25 doubles and fewer RBI than doubles. However, after a bit of research (nothing extensive), I learned that there had been a few guys to do it. Indeed, it is rare. Since 1901, there have been only 45 players with 300+ AB who had more doubles than RBI. The record for most RBI with more doubles is held by Mark Grudzielanek, who had 54 doubles, but just 51 RBI in 1997. Grudzielanek also holds the record for most AB in such a season with 649. Three other players have had 600+ AB and more doubles than RBI: Don Blasingame for the 1959 Cardinals (615 AB, 26 2B, 24 RBI), Sparky Adams for the 1931 Cardinals (608 AB, 46 2B, 40 RBI), and the aforementioned Eric Young. The fewest doubles that exceeded a player’s RBI total was done by Dick Howser playing for the 1965 Indians. In 307 AB, he hit just eight doubles, but had just six runs batted in (one of them on a home run). J.L writes: Interesting new statistical reports. I’m piqued by Pitchers Counterpart Profile. Why should I care how the opposing pitcher has pitched all season when looking at my pitcher’s record? All that matters is how opposing pitchers performed on the particular day they “faced” my pitcher. Unlike PQBF and BQPF, the two pitchers do not really “face” one another, therefore the results need not be filtered by considering their average performances. Counterpart quality is interesting to investigate questions like whether teams juggle their rotations to get their aces facing each other, or whether good run support came from a pitcher’s teammates having an unusually good day (better than you’d expect given who they are facing), or if a team was beating up on weak pitching. It may not have predictive value, but it has some explanatory power.
Can we really call the Braves a dynasty? The Twins have reached at turning point in the season, no doubt. And the Devil Rays finally ink the first pick in the 2003 draft, Delmon Young. All this and much more news from Atlanta, Minnesota, and Tampa Bay in your Wednesday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
I’ll get right into the heart of this because Mark Prior’s 124 pitch performance tore me in two. As I’ve mentioned before, Prior tends to throw harder in later innings, and that held true last night as well, as he was reaching 96 mph in the 8th. For the first time, however, Prior lost velocity in the 9th, topping out at 93. Adding in the elbow drop, and you can imagine how I was hyperventilating and speaking to the TV in harsh tones. (Does it make even less sense to talk to the TV when you’re TiVoing the game, and you’re about a minute behind?)
Prior may have had a birthday last week, but he’s still in the heart of the injury nexus. Future owner Steve Stone rightfully pointed out in Tuesday’s broadcast that Prior was in “unchartered” territory, nearing 200 innings pitched–and that the collision with Marcus Giles may have been, in the long run, the best thing for him. Prior, as well as teammates Kerry Wood and Carlos Zambrano–who is even younger than Prior–are all near the top of the PAP charts. Comments from Dusty Baker seem to indicate that he’s more than willing to keep his young pitchers working down the stretch. While flags do fly forever, and the ineffectiveness of the Cubs’ bullpen should factor into his decisions, Baker also needs to remember that his young pitchers’ arms might hang limp–like the flags do on a windless summer day–if he keeps working them so hard.
BP: What’s the number one skill the Giants look for in their players? Colletti: It’s our view you can never have enough pitching. If you’re short in another area, you can always trade pitching, because it’s the toughest commodity to find. Our drafts have been pitching-heavy. The last couple of years we’ve started drafting more position players, but the percentage is still high on the pitching side. We’ve seen this year how it’s paid off, with (Jerome) Williams, (Jesse) Foppert, (Kevin) Correia, (Kurt) Ainsworth…Joe Nathan is one of our own, we used (Ryan) Hannaman to get (Sidney) Ponson, (Russ) Ortiz for (Damian) Moss. BP: Which do the Giants favor, high school or college pitchers? Colletti: We prefer college pitching. College pitchers are further along in terms of maturity and life experience. That doesn’t mean we haven’t taken high school kids. But when you’re 18 years old and you’re going away from home for the first time, it can be tough–there are a lot of different things that occur in a young person’s life. If a pitcher goes through the right college program though, we’ll know that he hasn’t been misused, and that he’s also been taught well. We do as much research as we can to make sure we don’t get a pitcher coming out to the draft who’s misused and might be injured. And that can easily happen at the high school level, sometimes the college level too. A major league club has a different level of investment in a player, to where you wouldn’t have used him the way he might otherwise get used at the high school or college level.
Elsewhere on this Web site, Joe Sheehan has often promoted TINSTAAPP, or “There Is No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect.” To this we must add a second acronym, TINSWTBAPS–There Is No Sure Way To Build A Pitching Staff. Even just decent pitching staffs require an element of luck to come together. The 1984 Tigers required Willie Hernandez to pitch approximately twice as well as he had in any other season to make up for almost every other pitcher on the staff being just average. The 1933 Yankees had two Hall of Fame pitchers, Lefty Gomez and Red Ruffing, at the peak of their careers, plus a couple of other very good starters in Johnny Allen and Danny MacFayden. They were terrible. When Joe Torre put Mariano Rivera in the bullpen in 1996, he had no idea that the skinny righty would be one of the most valuable pitchers in the American League that season. You cannot plan these things.
Trot Nixon is still about a week away from returning to the Red Sox lineup as the team battles for the Wild Card slot. Nixon’s calf is making progress, but team sources say that he’s still experiencing “catches” when he runs above a certain effort level. Given their current lineup, moving Nixon to DH isn’t an option, but there’s been some internal discussion about trying him at first base. Outside of a change in the current situation–like a positional move or another injury–Nixon is likely to be back in the lineup for the weekend series against the Indians.
As expected, Melvin Mora tore his MCL in Toronto, but the news could have been much worse. The MRI returned only a partially torn ligament, and it is likely that Mora will be able to avoid surgery. Once the swelling is reduced he’ll begin an intensive rehab program, and will make a final decision on surgery by November. Why November? To give him time to recover in case surgery is necessary. All indications are that he should be able to avoid the knife and be ready for spring training. More importantly, Mora should retain his versatility and mobility.
When Randall Simon made the diving catch and threw to Matt Clement in stride, I cheered for two reasons: 1) Because it was a great play by my new favorite Cub, and 2) Because I knew right then that Clement had no residual problems with his groin. I did get clarification on the groin/calf mix-up, and it makes a bit more sense to me now. Clement was hit in the calf by a batted ball during his start on September 3rd. Running the bases afterwards, his changed gait caused a cascade which led to the strained groin. The muscle tends to tighten up on him after running, not pitching, so as long as his mechanics stay compact–always a problem with Clement–he should be fine.