The Orioles may land two players in the All-Star Game. The Rockies are carrying too many disappointments. The Mets may have rushed Jose Reyes. These and other nuggets out of Baltimore, Colorado, and New York in the latest Prospectus Triple Play.
Derek Zumsteg reaches into his bag of useful ideas to bring you this handy-dandy guide to marketing the game of baseball. Not to be taken internally.
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.
It hasn’t yet gotten to this point yet, but it might make the Reds and their fans feel better. In Monday’s game with the Cubs, Ken Griffey Jr. reached up to wave at the home run that put the Reds down and banged into the wall. For most players, the move to rub his shoulder would be a non-item, but this is Griffey–at one time one of the best players in baseball, and now the hope of a proud franchise. Griffey is OK, no more or less sore than any other player who ran into a wall, hoping to find a way to help his team with a miracle catch.
There’s nothing I like seeing like an old-fashioned pitching duel. Good pitching should not be “old-fashioned,” it should be a part of many ballgames–poor pitching should be the exception. But in today’s game, 1-0 contests are few and far between. Monday’s Mets/Marlins game didn’t really have the makings of a great game, but I dialed it up on TiVo and watched for signs of Tom Glavine’s poor health. I got none of those expected signs. Apparently, Glavine’s elbow has responded extremely well to treatment and he was very effective. If Glavine can come back from this start and make one more solid one, I’ll have to back off–slightly–on my doomed predictions of impending implosion.
Just days after notching his 300th win, Roger Clemens is back
to garnering bad press. Clemens, who spent his first 13 seasons with the Red
Sox, claims he will skip his Hall of Fame induction ceremony unless his plaque
shows him wearing a Yankee cap. Clemens, whose malice towards his first team
is well known, became a free agent after the 1996 season and signed with the
Toronto Blue Jays, with the Sox making just a token offer for his services.
He’s been largely disliked in Boston since then, and the feeling is mutual.
This could be a pretty good battle, if the Hall elects to pick a fight over
it. I mean, Roger Clemens versus the Hall of Fame? These two are to public
relations what the Tigers and Devil Rays are to quality baseball. By the time
it’s over, the Hall might be a burning pile of rubble, and Clemens on the lam
in South America, a man without a country.
I’m inclined to side with Clemens. If an organization wants to honor someone
by hanging their image on its walls until the glaciers melt, the person should
have control over that image. Within reason, I think players should be allowed
to choose their own cap or, as Catfish Hunter did, to have
no team logo. Clemens has spent a significant chunk of his career in
pinstripes, winning two championships, a Cy Young Award and No. 300, which is
more than enough to warrant his identification with the Yankees.
The Astros express elation over throwing a no-hitter, while the Yankees express their disgust; Roger Clemens is happy about getting his 300th win, but not so happy about the idea of going into Cooperstown as a member of the Red Sox (let alone Blue Jays); and Lou Piniella tries to connect to a younger generation. All this and much more in the newest edition of The Week In Quotes.
After a dozen seasons of tremendous baseball, of winning their division in
every full season, reaching five World Series and winning one championship,
the Braves were supposed to be done. Last December’s budget-paring decisions
to let Tom Glavine leave and to trade Kevin
Millwood to Philadelphia for aging catching prospect Johnny
Estrada were the final steps in the process. The Braves would be just
another team, owned by corporate penny-pinchers and run by a front office no
better or worse than most others. The Phillies would ascend, led by expensive
acquisitions and some homegrown pitching, and the transition–anticipated for a
number of years–would be complete.
Not so fast.
Oakland Athletics outfielder Adam Piatt knows the stretch of I-80 between Oakland and Sacramento all too well. He’s driven the stretch of road a dozen times in the past three years, going back and forth on the Sacramento Shuttle between the A’s and the Triple-A River Cats. Driving the 90 miles between Network Associates Coliseum and Raley Field means a lot more than wear on your car; it means the difference between being in the majors and being one of thousands who are trying to get there.
“I didn’t quite understand the process when I got to the majors,” says Piatt. “I figured they had brought me up to play. Then I got optioned down, and it was hard for me. But by about the fifth or sixth time I got sent down, I learned that it wasn’t personal, that it’s just how the system works.”
The rules that govern baseball on the field are complex. But there is another rulebook, one that governs the movement of players and roster management. A large part of this book details the world of options and waivers, and we’re here to try and make these often-confusing subjects as simple as we can.
The Marlins are getting star production out of Dontrelle Willis. George Steinbrenner seems intent on wrecking the Yankees. Reggie Sanders has shackled the Pirates with a world of suckiness. Plus more Prospectus Triple Play news and notes out of Florida, New York, and Pittsburgh.
Darin Erstad returns to Anaheim just as Jeff DaVanon’s terrorizing the league. David Dellucci hits the DL just as he’d started to find a groove. Hee Seop Choi’s should be back healthy and playing after a scary moment at Wrigley. Vlad Guerrero’s DL stint has Expos fans clamoring for Terrmel “the Hammer” Sledge. News, notes, and Kahrlisms from 17 major league teams in this edition of Transaction Analysis.
Baseball could learn a lot from Don King. When Don King puts on a fight, there’s instantly a thin, greasy film of sleaze on it, but most of the time, King’s able to overcome the aversion and distrust inherent in his productions, and sell the damn tickets. When King promotes a fight, he works his butt off to transform the tomatoest of cans into a Mythic Warrior whose nobility and sense of purpose is matched only by his strength and cunning in the ring. Then, after the inevitable whooping of Steve Zouski by Drederick Tatum, the No. 3 contender of the Uzbekistan Boxing Council (not affiliated with the Uzbekistan Boxing Association), people feel ripped off, and know they were stupid for signing up for the $84.95 pay-per-view event–even though they kinda liked the two chicks beating the living crap out of each other on the undercard.
The promotion of the fight was great, but the fight itself, the actual product, was pretty lame.
Baseball’s in exactly the opposite situation. The product is amazing beyond description, providing a mix of rapid, short-term thrills with the mysterious narrative of a 162-game regular season that still actually counts. Collectively, MLB clubs have lost their focus on getting people to actually watch the game, be it on television or in person. Over the past 20 years, management’s developed an affinity for publicly trashing their own product, and in terms of holding onto the front of the sports fan’s mind, they’ve had their butts handed to them by Pete Rozelle, Paul Tagliabue, and even the Michael Lerneresque David Stern. From the Commissioner writing off a third of the clubs before the season starts in an attempt to get givebacks from the players, to George Steinbrenner talking about how dangerous it is to come to Yankee games, no stone’s gone unturned in the inexplicable quest to keep fans away. To date, no club has come up with “Persistently Infected Sore Night,” but at least one club did threaten Jason Tyner bobbleheads.
Joe Sheehan calls MLB’s efforts “anti-marketing,” which is certainly a solid enough label, even if it’s overly kind to MLB.