Conceding that I get excited about catching a Dominican League game on Spanish-language television in January, I am really pumped about this postseason. The first-round matchups are tremendous, there are an amazing number of great players in the postseason and I think every one of these teams can win the World Series. I’m predicting the Giants over the Red Sox, but I can honestly say that no outcome, not even the Marlins over the Twins, would surprise me. All of the following comes with the standard caveat: anything can happen in a short series between two good teams.
Joe Sheehan offers up his picks for NL and AL MVP, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year, and Manager of the Year and sounds the call to vote in the Internet Baseball Awards (coming soon). Delve into the Monday edition of Prospectus Today for more.
I’m not a big fan of evaluating the character of individuals through their work, particularly when it comes to sports. I think we, as a culture, extrapolate far too much about people from the outcome of a bounce of a ball. That said, the Astros can’t feel too good about themselves this morning; when you’re tied with three games to play at home against one of the worst teams in the league, you’d like to think you could at least avoid getting eliminated in the quickest fashion possible. The Astros were blown out Friday night—down 9-1 after an inning and a half—and scored just two runs in yesterday’s defeat. It was a disappointing performance by a team that had led the division for most of the second half, and which was set up to control its own destiny when the weekend began. However, if you want to judge the Astros, what’s clear is that their collapse, and the Cubs’ taking advantage of it, changes the Division Series. With Friday’s rainout leading to Saturday’s doubleheader, and the possibility of playing meaningful games Sunday and even Monday, the Cubs were looking at having to open the Division Series with Shawn Estes and not having their top two starters available until Game 3 at the earliest. Against the best-hitting team in the league, one loaded with right-handed power, that was a recipe for disaster. Having clinched, the Cubs can set Kerry Wood aside for Game One on Tuesday. With no playoff to play Monday, Carlos Zambrano is available to start Game Two, and Mark Prior can start Game Three Friday on four days’ rest.
Q: When are 93- and 90-win seasons not success?
A: When you’re the Seattle Mariners.
By the standards of most teams in the baseball, and by the standards of their own history, the Mariners’ last two years have been excellent ones. They’ve won 183 games, been in two pennant races, drawn three million people in both years, and made a good amount of money. The problem is that in neither season did the team make the playoffs, despite spending four months of each year in first place and having a pretty good lead over their rivals as late as August.
Let’s focus just on this year. Where did things go wrong? On August 6, the Mariners were 69-43, and had a three-game lead on the A’s in the AL West and over the Red Sox for the AL wild-card slot. From that day until today, the Mariners went 21-26, losing 10 games in the standings to the A’s and seven to the Sox, being eliminated from any potential playoff spot last night. The Mariners had actually been treading water since June, when they peaked at 48-22 on June 18 with a win over the Angels.
See? THIS is why I don’t go to more games:
Have you seen anything more fun (on a baseball field) than Billy Wagner vs. Barry Bonds today? –Jim Cole
Well, Jim, I wouldn’t know, because I didn’t see that epic matchup. While the Astros were clinging for dear life to their division hopes in yesterday’s 2-1 win over the Giants, I was in Anaheim, watching the Dodgers…excuse me, the Mariners…go down like Peter McNeely against John Lackey and the Angels. I’m not complaining–I got to talk baseball for two hours with SABR’s Stephen Roney and saw some very good pitching–but Jim’s e-mail illustrates the opportunity cost of going to games in the satellite era.
I promised an analysis of the Mariners’ fade for today; that’s not coming until Friday. (Life Lesson No. 12: Never believe promises made after 2 a.m. Those of you 22 and over probably know this one already.) Today, it’s all about the Marlins.
One of the weird things about this gig is that people who aren’t familiar with BP or my work assume that I go to a lot of baseball games. I don’t, actually. While I love live baseball, I also love my Extra Innings package and the 10-15 games a night it brings into my home. Given a choice between attending one and watching 15, I often choose the lazier of two paths.
If anything, I’ve gotten worse about it with each passing season. I’ll have to make a greater effort next season, maybe set a goal of N games or to catch one game of each series.
Last night, however, I dragged my sorry ass down to Anaheim to catch the Angels/Mariners game with BP’s Jason Grady. I’d been wanting to see the Mariners, anyway (and will do so again today), because their repeat of 2002’s second-half fade is an interesting story that I’d like to cover. More on that tomorrow.
The Detroit Tigers, who opened September by winning three of four from the Indians to make it appear that they would avoid baseball’s all-time lists for incompetence, have reopened all those discussions by going 1-15 since that set, including an active nine-game losing streak. With a week to go, the Tigers have tied the American League record for losses in a season with 117, a mark set by the 1916 Philadelphia A’s, the wreckage of a very good team that was scattered to the four winds by Connie Mack. (Think post-1997 Florida Marlins for the Wilson Administration.) They’re just three losses from tying the all-time mark for defeats in a season, set by the 1962 New York Mets–a first-year expansion team–at 40-120. The Tigers also have a chance to be the first team since the 1935 Boston Braves (38-115) to not reach 40 wins in a full season. Can they get there? What is the most likely coda the Tigers will put on their long and dreary 2003?
Nine days ago, the Twins were up against the wall. They’d dropped the first two games of a four-game series in Chicago, falling two behind the White Sox in the AL Central. They’d be sending their ace, Johan Santana, to the mound for the third game, but that wasn’t without its perils–the heavily right-handed White Sox were slugging above .480 against southpaws. Even if the third game went their way, the Twins would be facing Esteban Loaiza, Cy Young contender, in the fourth game. They seemed certain to leave Chicago with a hill to climb, the only question was how big. Now, nine days ago seems like nine years ago. Last night’s 5-3 win over the Sox was the fifth game in a row the Twins had taken from their chief rival, and it extended their AL Central lead to 3.5 games over the Sox. With seven of their last nine games against the Tigers, and a magic number of seven, it seems like just a matter of time before the Twins become–you taking notes, Bud?–back-to-back AL Central champions.
The last 13 days of the season kick off in a big way tonight, with two series that pit teams locked in head-to-head battles for playoff spots.
White Sox at Twins
With just a half-game separating the two teams, this is effectively the first round of the playoffs, a nearly must-win three-game set for both. The Twins were on the brink just seven days ago after dropping the first two in Chicago, but bounced back to win behind Johan Santana (not a surprise) and against Esteban Loaiza (big surprise).
The Twins won’t have their best pitcher, Santana, who started last night against the Indians. That leaves them one bullet down against a very good offense. Working for them is that they’ll be starting two right-handers who can be tough on righties in Brad Radke and Kyle Lohse, against what is still a fairly right-handed Sox lineup. Watch Radke tonight: he threw 126 pitches in his last start, and Keith Woolner’s PAP3 research indicates that pitchers who exceed 121 pitches can see some negative effects over their next three starts.
Just before 1:00, I checked the program schedule and just about collapsed from the shock: no Game of the Week. Are you kidding me? Two weeks to go in the season, half the teams in baseball still chasing playoff spots, terrific matchups like White Sox/Red Sox and Braves/Marlins on the schedule, a nation of couch potatoes sitting in front of their televisions, and MLB takes this opportunity to fold its tent? I know it was likely Fox’s decision, predicated on not wanting to compete with either broadcast college football or its own Fox Sports Net package of gridiron games. So what? It’s MLB’s job to choose a broadcast partner that will help it promote the game, and that means more than setting up stupid gimmicks for the All-Star Game. Abandoning the national stage at a time when its product should be at its most attractive isn’t just stupid, it’s corporate malfeasance. This can’t be good for postseason ratings, either. What baseball should be doing is creating interest in the teams and players who will be taking the field beginning September 30. You want people getting excited about Barry Bonds and Mark Prior and Nomar Garciaparra now, so that when you stick their games in prime time next month, you have a greater chance of drawing an audience. If I’m understanding the schedule properly, there are no more over-the-air baseball games until the Division Series, which is one of the most bizarre, counterproductive, self-mutilating decisions I have ever seen.
I’ve yet to write much about the award races this season, save for some notes about Barry Bonds a couple of months back and a column about the NL Cy Young. It’s a very interesting season in that all six major awards are under dispute, whether warranted or not, and in some cases there’s considerable doubt about who the front-runner should be, even with less than three weeks to go in the season.
Because I got an e-mail this week dissecting the AL Cy Young situation, I’ll take a stab at that one today.
When it comes to picking the best pitchers in the league. I look at two things: how much did you pitch, and how well did you keep runs off the board? I disregard the accounting categories of “wins,” and “losses” because the statistics are misleading, a relic of a time when complete games accounted for nearly 100% of all starts and it actually made sense to assign whole wins and losses to starting pitchers.
With apologies to Mark Mulder, here are the five candidates for the AL Cy Young Award.
Will the last person out of Bank One Ballpark please turn out the lights?
The Diamondbacks have gone 21-29 since the All-Star break and look like they’ll be the next team to exit the NL’s wild-card race. With last night’s 3-1 loss to the Dodgers (and 20-year-old, MLB-debut-making Edwin Jackson), the Snakes are seven games out in the race and trailing five teams, which is as good a comp for “done” as you’ll find.
Now, the easy thing is to look at the injuries the D’backs suffered this season and excuse their disappointing performance. Twenty million or so dollars invested in Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson have produced just 36 starts with an ERA of 3.54 and an SNVA of 5.4. That’s a lot of pitching to replace, and it would be difficult for any team to recover from that.
I could talk about roster/lineup/role optimization all day, which is just one of the many reasons it’s a wonder I’m married. Back in the nascent days of baseballprospectus.com, I wrote a column called Lineupectomy (a couple of which actually show up in the archives), which got its name from something we used to do at Strat tournaments–taking people’s teams and creating optimal lineups. It’s a geek thing, and as has been pointed out, not remotely the right name for the process, but it’s something I spend a lot of time doing.
There’s a question as to how much the effort matters. It’s something of a stathead truth that the difference between the optimal lineup and a reasonably constructed one is small, less than a win per year. I don’t necessarily buy that; as Chris Kahrl pointed out in BP2K1, the simulations on which that idea is based are fairly old, done on ancient technology, and it’s possible that we just haven’t been able to model it properly yet. I find it hard to believe that doing simple things like getting your OBP guys in front of your SLG guys, making the lineup less vulnerable to attack relievers, and minimizing double plays aren’t worthwhile endeavors that can add not just a few runs, but a few wins a year.
My thought process on the Yankees goes something like this: they have seven good hitters, so one of those seven ends up at the back of the line. Ideally, you’d like that to be the worst of the seven, but that’s complicated by the fact that players don’t change roles as easily as Strat cards, and the collective media and fan base is poised to make a very big deal over any radical changes. Ask Theo Epstein.
The National League playoff race has thinned out over the past few weeks, with the Rockies and, unfortunately, the Expos falling out of contention. Seven teams are still playing for two spots, however, which will mean plenty of meaningful baseball down the stretch. How does the remaining schedule affect the chase? As I’ve mentioned a few times, there’s no team in this race that can’t go 16-4 over three weeks, which is one of the things that makes the game great.
Check out the schedule for the week of the 15th. In the mid-week games, the Phillies and Marlins play in Philadelphia, the White Sox and Twins in Minnesota, and the Diamondbacks and Dodgers in L.A. That weekend, effectively showdown weekend, the Royals and Sox play in Chicago, the Astros and Cardinals in St. Louis, the Mariners and A’s hook up in Oakland, and the Dodgers and Giants–just one contender, but these two could be 55-95 and play a great series–are in L.A. I’m not a fan of the Wild Card, but if there’s ever going to be a week for the sport to steal the audience’s attention and get some positive focus on the tremendous excitement generated by races, it’s that week.
You can read Wednesday’s column for a longer discussion of the principles behind this research, but the general idea is that you have to dig deeper than just looking at seasonal stats to see what a team has going for it down the stretch. That piece addressed the quality of rotations; this one looks at the quality of bullpens. As I wrote Thursday, I orginally researched this using Adjusted Runs Prevented (ARP). I had to throw out that data, though, because using a value stat distorted the results. I went back and used Runs Responsible Average–the rate equivalent of ARP–to generate the lists below. I determined each team’s current core relievers by looking at game logs; most teams had six, but some had as few as five or as many as eight. The point is to pull out the pitchers whose performances show up in the seasonal numbers but who are no longer pitching, or pitching much, for their teams. This correction should give us a better idea of who has the best bullpens in baseball for the stretch drive.
I promised a second part to the study in which I would analyze team bullpens in the same manner, and I spent a good chunk of Wednesday doing the research and preparing the data. I used Michael Wolverton’s Adjusted Runs Prevented, and separated team bullpens into current core relievers (five or six per team) and everyone else.
Now, even as I was doing the work I kind of thought ARP might not be the best tool for the job, because it’s not a pure rate stat. It is a value metric that has performance, context and playing time components, the latter two of which make it a poor analogue for Support-Neutral Winning Percentage. Nevertheless, I went ahead with the research because I thought using ARP would still be useful while being a much simpler calculation than Runs Responsible Average, the rate stat from which ARP is derived. (Calculating RRAs for the core relievers and the others is a manual task, and no small one.)
I was wrong. The playing-time effect dominates everything, so much so that using ARP in this manner only really tells you which teams are using pitchers who they haven’t used all season. It’s a worthless data set that clouds, rather than illuminates, the issue of which teams have the best bullpens right now.