The concept of “clutch” is one of the clearest dividing lines between traditional coverage of baseball and what you’ll find here at Baseball Prospectus. In the mainstream, performance in important situations is often attributed to some wealth or deficit of character that causes a particular outcome. Here, we’re more likely to recognize that when the best baseball players in the world go head-to-head, someone has to win and someone has to lose, and it doesn’t mean that one side has better people than the other.
Clutch performances exist, to be sure; you can’t watch a day of baseball without seeing a well-timed hit, a big defensive play or a key strikeout that pushes a team towards victory. The biggest moments in baseball history are almost all examples of players doing extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances. Those moments make the game great and the players responsible for them deserve credit, and even adulation, for their heroics.
The Joe Mauer Express appears to be steaming down the tracks right now. The 21-year-old Twin has been named the game’s top prospect by both Baseball Prospectus and Baseball America, one of those rare confluences of agreement between the two that mark a player as a future star. ESPN.com had him on their main baseball page on Tuesday, and Peter Gammons wrote glowingly not only of Mauer’s skill, but of the high opinion in which the young catcher is held. I think Mauer is currently a good baseball player. He’s shown offensive and defensive development in his three professional seasons, and while I still think the Twins should have taken Mark Prior in 2001–how different might their two playoff losses have gone with the big right-hander?–clearly it’s not like they ended up with a bum. Mauer is going to eventually be a productive right-handed hitter; comparable to Mike Sweeney, with maybe a bit more power and patience. I just don’t agree that Mauer is a future star behind the plate, and it has everything to do with his height. Mauer is listed at 6’4″, and people that height or taller just don’t have long, successful careers at the catching position.
One of the many cool things about this gig is knowing that you’ve introduced concepts that are going to be around for a very long time. For people like Michael Wolverton, Clay Davenport and Keith Woolner, it has to be greatly rewarding to have invented metrics that likely will be used by not just the next generation of baseball fans, but the ones to follow them. To create something both useful and enduring is one way to leave a mark, however small, on the world.
Me? I’m no SuperGenius (man, I miss Calvin) like those guys. To the extent that I’ve brought anything into the baseball world, it’s the second-best BP thing to ever be named after a mediocre middle infielder.
I’m talking about The DiSar Awards, now five years old and still honoring the best and brightest in the field of swinging at everything. The awards are named in tribute to former Angels shortstop Gary DiSarcina, who once remarked that he wanted to go an entire season without walking, and who finished his career with 154 free passes in 12 years and 3,744 at-bats.
I got an interesting response to Monday’s Hope and Faith piece:
“As one who wrote to complain about your writing off the Marlins last year, I have to say that I mostly agree with your list this year.
My only slight quibble would be with the Diamondbacks’ listing. If Barry Bonds gets hurt, the Giants aren’t too much better than the D’Backs. I think that if a team starts with Randy Johnson and Brandon Webb, maybe if Casey Fossum steps up a little (look at his by-team breakdown and it seems that getting shelled by Toronto twice in SkyDome inflated his stats), if Steve Sparks keeps close to .500, they are not so far off. I hate to see them giving 30 starts to Shane Reynolds, but if they can get someone to take his place and also finish .500, they have a chance to win more than 81 games. (Instead of putting a demonstrably bad pitcher like Reynolds in there every fifth day, I’d much rather see them convert one of their many good middle relievers to the starting staff.)
Sure, they have holes but if you have a couple of top pitchers to build around, and good middle relief, you can’t be written off. A team with Johnson and Webb at the top of the rotation can hope to patch something together and exceed expectations. That’s the same reason I wrote to you last year to suggest you were short-shrifting the Marlins. They had enough good young pitchers that the pieces had a chance to fall in place.
–B.C.”
I don’t really disagree, which is why I had the Diamondbacks in the gray area in Monday’s column.
There’s dumb, there’s really dumb, and there’s leaving $35 on the table.
In Tuesday’s column, I wrote about the Rotowire Staff League auction. Coming off a second-place finish in 2003, I went into it with a solid pitching staff at relatively low cost. Based on my own analysis and the great feedback I got from readers, I planned to target hitting with the $109 I had available. But despite having every intention of blowing a big chunk of my budget on two slugging outfielders, I ended up spending no more than $22 on any player, that one being Adam Kennedy, who is neither slugging nor an outfielder.
I was involved in the bidding on Manny Ramirez (who went for $46), Barry Bonds ($42), and Jim Edmonds ($40), but bowed out each time, eyeing the remaining players and telling myself I’d get one of them at a price I was comfortable with. When the last top-tier outfielder was called, I went all the way to the high 40s, but in the end, couldn’t bring myself to pay more than that for Magglio Ordonez, who ended up going for $57.
Last year, I solicited help for the inaugural auction in the Rotowire Staff League. The league, into which I was invited because of some writing I did for the Rotowire Fantasy Baseball Guide, marked the first time I’d ever participated in a perpetual fantasy baseball set-up.
Thanks in no small part to the advice I got from BP readers, I finished second in the league, which I thought was a heck of a feat for someone who went into it as a fantasy novice. Of course, that fact never came up when talking to Jeff Erickson, Pete Schoenke, Chris Liss and the rest of the career roto guys over in Culver City, all but one of whom spent the year looking up at my fantasy rookie behind. Nope. Never. Not once.
(OK, maybe once.)
Later today, the league gathers for its second auction, again putting me in uncharted waters. See, I understand that there’s such a thing as “inflation,” but I understand it the same way I do the idea that there are dishes in the sink. I’m vaguely aware of it, but unsure what, if anything, I’m supposed to do about it. I picked some people’s brains and made some guesses as to what this would mean for both protection lists and the price of talent made available, but in the end, they were just guesses.
Pay attention, folks, because I’m about to reveal the identity of the 2004 world champion. Two years ago, in a column titled, "No Hope, No Faith," I pegged the Anaheim Angels as one of eight teams who had no chance of being competitive during the 2002 season. Last year, in a non-BP article (not online at this time), I reprised the concept by naming the Florida Marlins as one of just seven teams whose fans should have no hope for the 2003 season. As you might recall, the two teams did all right for themselves. I didn’t start out trying to make a fool of myself. The idea behind the annual column listing the teams with no hope and faith for the upcoming season stemmed from Bud Selig’s catchphrase during the 2001-02 labor negotiations. He insisted that "hope and faith" was lost for fans of as many as 18 teams, and the media picked it up and ran with the concept. I was just trying to find the teams that, looking out from early spring, legitimately looked as if they did fit that description. I suppose the fact that my conservative listing of just seven or eight teams each year has included the eventual world champions two of three times is an indication that even the most overmatched team can surprise. That should given hope and faith to all but the most destitute of organizations.
Think of stealing bases as a bit like one of those commercials for breakfast cereal. You know, the ones where they say it takes 14 bowls of Cereal X to equal what you get from one bowl of Cereal Y. In this case, it takes three stolen bases to equal one walk of shame back to the dugout. If you’re stealing at less than a 75% success rate, you’re better off never going at all.
February is like being stuck in a footlocker with Katie Holmes: Short, cramped, and full of distractions.
I can’t stretch out my arm in February without hitting some date of importance. I guess I could blame my mom, who pitched me out into the world 33 years ago yesterday, setting the stage for the month to hold a bunch of birthdays: my closest cousin’s, both my parents-in-law, and a number of other relatives on both sides of the family. Valentine’s Day is wedged in there, of course, a day that requires weeks of planning and meticulous…oh, heck, Sophia doesn’t read my column…a day that requires my attention.
The month features less enjoyable markers as well. While I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve lost just a small number of loved ones over the years, many of those have died in February, some recently enough to still cause pain as the anniversaries approach.
Memorable dates aside, February has less emotional ways to turn my head. I have a passion for college basketball–Jonah, Will and I often kid about launching College Basketball Prospectus–and the game holds my attention throughout the shortest month. While I don’t play the game as much as I used to, the February arrival of the new Strat-O-Matic cards is a time sink that will probably be with me until I can’t see anymore.
The point of all this is to say that as I sit at my laptop at 5:15 a.m. on Friday morning, I genuinely have no idea what to write about. That happens maybe a half-dozen times a year, and you’ll usually recognize those times as columns with an awful lot of bullet points or reader mail. I have concepts, I have great and wonderful writing ideas, but they’re not making through the process today, caught up in the mind along with memories of a birthday wine-tasting, analysis of bubble teams, missing my grandparents, and the jaw-dropping power of an Eric Gagne Strat card.
The Astros keep running the same core out there every year, and it just keeps getting older and further from its glory days. This team is starting to remind me of the mid-1990s Orioles or recent-vintage Mets, where the defense was going to hell in a handbasket, the offense was declining, and no one was coming through the system to help. I thought this Astros team was done two years ago, but they keep adding past-prime players in an effort to hang on, and to the extent that “hanging on” is a goal, they’re accomplishing it.
It’s a funny game, though. Larry Dierker managed the Astros to four division titles in five years and was forced out. Jimy Williams inherited basically the same roster, managed it to consecutive second-place, playoff-free seasons, and keeps his job.
Baseball, like life, is not a meritocracy.
Enough setup; here’s what PECOTA has for the 2004 Astros.
At the end of Friday’s column on the Cubs, I tacked on a line about how the team wasn’t clearly better than the Astros and Cardinals. No one questioned the inclusion of the Astros, with their revamped rotation, in that sentence, but I got a few questions about the Cardinals.
I’ll admit that the I didn’t think too carefully about them while writing the column; over the past half-decade, I’ve just gotten used to considering the Houston and St. Louis ballclubs as the teams to beat in the NL Central, and it seemed natural that the trend would continue.
Are the Cards really deserving of comparison to the Cubs? Or is the Central down to two reasonable contenders?
Earlier this week, the Chicago Cubs tried to exorcise some demons by bringing back the one that got away. A little more than 10 years after allowing him to leave for Atlanta, they signed Greg Maddux to a two-year, $15-million contract. The deal includes a vesting option for 2006 at $9 million, one that kicks in based on Maddux’s 2005 innings pitched. Even so, the deal looks pretty good in a market where Kelvim Escobar got a guaranteed $18.75MM over three years and Andy Pettitte got more than $31 million for three seasons.
Maddux gilds one hell of a lily. The Cubs’ four returning starters were among the best front four in the game in ’03, with the rotation dragged down statistically only by the Lerchian performance of #5 man Shawn Estes. The upgrade Maddux provides over Estes is significant, but that’s not the relevant comparison. With Estes long gone, Maddux actually replaces Juan Cruz, a hard-throwing 25-year-old who has struggled to establish himself in three major-league seasons.
So, here’s the thing. I’m going to spend more time answering reader mail this year, because I get great feedback and I haven’t done a good job of responding to it.
But I’m also going to turn the spotlight on that feedback a bit more often, because there are a lot of good ideas that come in that deserve a wider audience. (There’s also the too-frequent reminder that I make mistakes, but I digress.)
“Stathead.” “Stat-drunk computer nerd.” “Rotisserie geek.”
You can earn a lot of derision when you look at things in a new way, and the people who have applied statistical tools to evaluate baseball players and teams have heard the above epithets and more. The work of people such as Bill James, Craig Wright and Clay Davenport has often been dismissed as the mind-numbing analysis of people who need to put their slide rules away and get out and watch a game once in a while. Their efforts, which have been dubbed “statistical analysis,” have expanded and improved the body of objective baseball knowledge, and their work is even beginning to penetrate the insular world of baseball front offices.
But the term “statistical analysis,” as applied to baseball, isn’t descriptive enough. Actuaries analyze statistics, and while the work pays well, it is pretty dry stuff. Life-expectancy tables and risk/benefit workups aren’t going to get your average Red Sox fan excited, nor should they: baseball fans care about their teams, and the players on them, not a series of numbers.
But baseball statistics are not numbers generated for their own sake. Statistics are a record of performance of players and teams. Period. Benjamin Disraeli’s oft-quoted line–“There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”–just doesn’t apply.
Much of what I have to say about the Alex Rodriguez trade shows up in an e-mail exchange between Gary Huckabay and I that was posted here yesterday. We kicked around a few of the issues the trade brought up, and I encourage all of you to check out that piece.
One issue we didn’t really cover was defense. I’m coming around to the idea, which a number of people inside BP have proffered, that the initial announcement of Rodriguez’s shift to third base will be forgotten by Opening Day, and that he’ll soon take over shortstop from Derek Jeter. I think the announcement was a necessary subterfuge to keep the controversy of “who plays short?” from overwhelming the trade talks. As I said on the radio yesterday, I don’t think there’s much chance that Rodriguez plays 160 games at third base for the Yankees this year.
This isn’t a matter that requires a lot of study. It’s not one of those, “six of one, half-dozen of the other” debates that gets stirred up sometimes. This is a no-brainer, complicated only by Jeter’s popularity and the mythology that surrounds him. Rodriguez should be the Yankees’ shortstop, and Jeter should be offered his choice among second base, third base or center field. (If you’re willing to move Alex Rodriguez to third base, then you should be willing to make Kenny Lofton a fourth outfielder and Bernie Williams a full-time DH. For that matter, you should be willing to move Mariano Rivera to left field.)
Most of the excitement in Philadelphia has to do with an improved bullpen, recent versions of which have been the perceived bane of the city’s existence. So out with Jose Mesa, in with Billy Wagner. Given how much of the blame for the Phillies’ disappointing performances the last two seasons has been placed at the foot of the relief staff, it’s easy to understand why fans, media, and the team itself is so eager to have the hard-throwing lefty closing games. I actually agreed that the move would help the Phillies, although not exactly for the reasons generally given. Closers are overrated as a class, and as great as Wagner is, using him solely to protect ninth-inning leads and the occasional ninth-inning tie is a suboptimal application of his talent. However, I also know that Larry Bowa is one of the most temperamental managers in the game, and I strongly believe that his emotional style has been a detriment to this team over the past two seasons.