I have a hard time thinking of someone who went to batting left-handed exclusively and thrived. Some guys, notably Mariano Duncan, have given up batting left-handed and had success. I think re-adjusting to breaking balls, as well as trying to pick up new arm slots, would doom most efforts to failure. Valentin was so bad against lefties that I can’t blame him for trying, though. At worst, he’s the same should-be-platooned guy he’s long been. The Sox’s bigger problem is that neither Harris nor Valentin is capable of a .330 OBP, and if you have two guys like that batting 1-2, you’re screwed. All of this, of course, is Frank Thomas’ fault.
Why the hell is Justin Morneau in the minors?
Morneau, the 22-year-old hitting machine from British Columbia, nearly made
the Twins in spring training, losing out because Ron Gardenhire and Terry Ryan
didn’t think they could give him enough playing time in the majors. Since
then, three of the Twins’ Opening Day starters have made their way to the
disabled list, including Matt LeCroy, who nominally beat out
Morneau for the DH job.
When Joe Mauer injured his knee in the second game of the
season, I figured that would create the opening for the Twins to recall and
play Morneau. LeCroy could take over behind the plate, and Morneau could get
the majority of the DH at-bats until Mauer returned. When LeCroy himself was
hurt the next day, the move seemed even more logical. Now the Twins needed a
bat in a big way, and Morneau would have no competition in the DH role for at
least two weeks. The Twins instead went to 12 pitchers and no Morneau.
Torii Hunter’s strained right hamstring didn’t help him,
either; the Twins instead recalled Lew Ford, a decision that
actually made sense under the circumstances.
While I don’t think the Anderson contract was a good one, I can at least see the rationale behind it, the organizational thought process. The Expos’ commitment to Hernandez, an innings sponge coming off of his best season, makes much less sense to me. To justify it, you have to think that 2003 represented an Andersonesque leap in performance, and be comfortable with the idea that Hernandez’s huge workload in his 20s isn’t going to affect either his pitching or his availability over the next few years. I don’t know that I can agree with either premise. Despite being the Pitcher Abuse Points poster boy throughout this career, Hernandez has remained healthy enough to make virtually all his starts since reaching the majors for good in 1997. He’s established himself as a workhorse who, 2003 aside, provides league-average performance over 210 or more innings. That has value, but when you look at what pitchers of Hernandez’s ilk got over the winter, it’s hard to understand $7 million a season. Jeff Suppan, a pretty good comp for Hernandez, signed for two years and $6 million over the winter. Jason Johnson is a bit inferior to Hernandez, and got $7 million over two years. Steve Trachsel got his 2005 option picked up at $5 million and an option year–not guaranteed–tacked on at $7 million. In light of these signings, Hernandez was retained at a significant premium above his market value–assuming other teams don’t think Livan’s 2003 represented a new performance plateau.
Since taking over the Angels less than two years ago, Arte Moreno has made
contract commitments of more than $200 million in an effort to fill Angels
Stadium and push his new team back to the World Series. Tuesday’s agreement to
pay Garret Anderson $48 million from 2005-08 is just the latest big-money
signing. Joe Sheehan examines the deal.
The term “luck” is actually shorthand for a more difficult concept, that when two playoff-caliber teams square off in a best-of-five or best-of-seven series, any result is reasonably likely. Just because a particular one occurs doesn’t reflect anything other than the events that made up that series: one player’s hot week, or one pitcher’s inability to throw his curve for strikes, or a baserunner’s ill-fated decision to take an extra base. These events do not, despite the mythology of October, enlighten us about the character or fortitude of people any more than Nate Robertson’s huge last week out of the bullpen does. Those things aren’t luck, they’re performance, and using the former word to describe them isn’t helping us make the larger concept accessible to more people.
Thanks to nine runs in two innings–a week’s output for last April’s squad–the Detroit Tigers moved to 4-0 with a 10-6 win over the Minnesota Twins. While the Tigers have gotten fairly good pitching, with all four starters notching wins and a team ERA of 3.00, the key to the start has been an offense gone haywire. The Bengals have 30 runs in four games, with at least six tallies in each contest. It’s the first time since last May that the Tigers have scored six or more runs in at least four straight games (a streak that stretched to five at the time). I had a sense that what the Tigers had done this week was historic, so I decided to put on my researcher cap–two sizes too big, signed by Clay Davenport, and rarely worn–and check. I fired up my two favorite tools, the Sabermetric Baseball Encyclopedia and Retrosheet (God Bless Retrosheet!) and tried to ascertain how unique this was. Damned if I’ll go down that particular rabbit hole again. Thinking this would be a quick process, I soon discovered that the Tigers have gone where no team of their ilk had gone before. Of the worst 50 teams by winning percentage in baseball history, none had ever started the following season 4-0 until Steve Colyer closed out the game yesterday.
I’ve been trying to write this column for about a month, but I wasn’t sure how to frame it. What follows isn’t a list of breakout players, or sleepers, or MVP candidates, or really anything that is easily describable. It’s just a list of players who I really, really like going into this season. They range from a player with 67 games of Double-A experience to a six-year veteran with his fourth team, and in age from 21 to 29. I expect some of these guys to get MVP votes, some of them to contribute to playoff teams, and others to just establish themselves as solid major leaguers or future stars. But I can’t lump all 10 of them into one category, unless, “guys who appear on almost all my fantasy teams,” is a category. I guess this is just a column about…my guys.
Since Sunday at 5 p.m., I’ve watched approximately 417 baseball games, or about half the number of college basketball games I watched in March. The opening of the new season has me more excited than any supposedly grown man should really be, but I can’t help it: I’d missed baseball, and it was back in a big way the last few days. So what have we seen so far? Well, I’ve proven that I can jinx even the best pitchers: Mike Mussina, my pick for AL Cy Young, has now been blasted by the Devil Rays in two hemispheres to the tune of an 11.00 ERA. (Completely random note: Roy Halladay won the AL Cy Young Award last year despite having an ERA of 5.13 after eight starts.)
Between the time I submit this and the time you read it, Paul DePodesta may
have made another half-dozen deals that move the Dodgers up from their current
standing. Here’s what I’m going with for now…
Choosing between the top two teams in the American League is an exercise in predicting the future. Any analysis of the current rosters is going to be inadequate, because what will separate these two come September are the relative health of the teams’ stars, what the two teams do to add players in-season, and what happens in the 19 games the two will play against each other. In light of that, my selection of the Red Sox seems a bit strange. After all, they’ll play seven games against the Yankees this month without Nomar Garciaparra and Trot Nixon, two major parts of their lineup. Moreover, the Sox don’t have any obvious holes that they can address in the trade market, whereas the Yankees can get better by acquiring a second baseman and a starting pitcher. Moreover, the Yankees’ willingness to take on any contract at any time–a trait that should only become more pronounced after last week’s court victory that assures the YES Network of considerable revenue–means that they are a threat to acquire any player in the game. I’ll still take the Sox.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Four years ago, when the Mets and Cubs became the first teams to open the season
with a short series in Tokyo, I went to bed early, set my alarm for 2 a.m. PST,
jumped out of bed right around that time, watched the game and fired off a
diary of the experience for posting that morning. It was a fun exercise,
especially since it was a pretty good game and I had at least a few hours’
sleep.
So with my…er, the Yankees opening their 2004 season in Japan, I
figured this would be another opportunity to get a fun column out of it. Being
on the East Coast now, though, and with no real sleep pattern to speak of, I
elected to stay up all night to do so.
I guess that was my first bad decision. My second was asking Grady Little to
be my insurance policy in case I dozed off. As you’d expect, Little eventually
got me, but just a few minutes too late. Figures.
The last week was a whirlwind, with four Pizza Feeds in three days in the Philadelphia and New York areas. At every one, I got to meet enthusiastic BP readers who provided both great feedback on the book and the Web site, as well as hours of interesting baseball talk. The highlights for me were the first and last events: Tuesday afternoon’s Feed in Philly’s Central City included a great Q&A session from an overflow crowd, while Thursday night’s session in Brooklyn featured another group that spilled out into the Fiction and Literature aisles, and a panel of five BPers touching on everything from fantasy baseball to what wins in the postseason to the World War II-era Washington Senators. One thing I’ll take from this trip is the enthusiasm for baseball I encountered in both cities. For all the shots Philadelphia sports fans have taken, they seem genuinely excited about this year’s team and the opening of Citizens Bank Ballpark. They have good reason to be, because their boys are the consensus favorite to win the NL East. Even my pessimism about Larry Bowa can’t convince me that the Phillies will do anything but win the division comfortably this year. Meanwhile, New York was its usual baseball-crazed self; I had any number of random conversations with people who, upon discovering what it is I do, wanted to give me their analysis of the Yankees’ rotation, the Mets’ new acquisitions, and the not-so-popular baseball team located a bit to the Northeast.
Last week, the A’s made their first major contract commitment since the ill-fated Jermaine Dye signing, agreeing to a six-year, $66 million extension with Eric Chavez. The deal is the biggest in franchise history, and coming on the heels of the departures of Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada, is being hailed as a sign that Steve Schott is intent on keeping the core of his team.
While conceding that the commitment to Chavez is probably a necessary one for a franchise whose on-field success has translated to higher, but not still not impressive, attendance, I just don’t think it’s a great baseball deal. The obvious comparison is to the Cardinals’ Scott Rolen, the National League’s best third baseman and a player who also signed with his current team without testing the free-agent market.
As a big college basketball fan, I spent a good chunk of last week watching the conference tournaments and trying to dope out who would be in and who would be out of this year’s NCAA championship. Like many people, I had Utah State in the field instead of Richmond, which was my only miss after a perfect record in ’03. Even though I didn’t see that coming, I think the committee did a good job in sorting through the eligible at-large teams and filling out the field.
However, I stromgly disagree the way in which the panel seeded the teams. I think they screwed up the Big Ten teams beyond belief. They gave a bit too much credit to the way some squads–such as Maryland and Xavier–finished their seasons, while applying criteria haphazardly in other cases. They’re the experts, and they have to consider dozens of factors, but my informed-outsider position is that they made some errors.
Yesterday, I got to thinking about how this line of thought also applies to my evaluations of baseball teams. Each year, I have some teams rated well ahead or well behind where most other writers and analysts have them. Some of you are already nodding your heads, remembering my touting the Padres and Reds, or my dismissals of the Angels and Marlins. Hey, I was wrong, and that’s going to happen. Sometimes I’m out there and right, as with the Mets in 2002. Either way, as long as I can go back and understand my analysis, and perhaps learn from a mistake or gain confidence in a particular point, it’s all good. I’m only right all the time when I disagree with Sophia.
Looking ahead towards the 2004 campaign, I can definitely see some teams whose “Sheehan seeds” are going to be much different than the consensus. Unlike in the NCAA tournament, however, I can’t hide behind a one-game-and-out format to defend my decisions. That’s the beauty of the baseball season; it brings out a team’s strengths and weaknesses in a way that the other sports just can’t match.
The Cards’ decision to make Albert Pujols the everyday first baseman opened a hole in left field, and no matter who stands out there on April 5, it’s going to be hard to argue that it’s been filled. None of the candidates for the platoon–and it will almost certainly be a platoon–has anything resembling a track record of success. Kerry Robinson and So Taguchi are fifth outfielders who bring defense and some speed and little else. Mark Quinn and Ray Lankford combined for 76 major-league at-bats in 2003. Emil Brown hasn’t played in the majors since 2001, but he’s 8-for-14 with two homers so far, so he’s in the mix. I don’t think there’s an acceptable solution here.
This is one of my favorite spring columns. Like any baseball fan, I love arguments over the relative merits of players and how teams should be aligning their talent. And each spring, those arguments get played out on fields across Florida and Arizona. This March brings a fresh batch of players dueling for playing time. I’ve picked out some of the more interesting ones for today’s column.