LAKE HAVASU CITY, Ariz.–It’s hot. I don’t even want to hear that it’s a dry heat. You know what I do in this kind of dry heat? Cook things. I have an appliance in my house that creates plenty of dry heat and works very well for chicken, beef, pork…people shouldn’t be exposed to it. I’m on the annual trip to Lake Havasu, which is more or less the L.A. version of the Jersey shore. There are two types up here: “river people” (referring to the Colorado River, which flows into the lake) and others. I am most definitely others, but come up here every summer with Sophia and a dozen river people and fake it as best I can. I even got a fun column out of it once. Mostly, though, I watch my flesh burn and miss my DSL. And answer e-mail.
Last night, the White Sox moved into a virtual tie with the Royals for first place, waxing the Mariners 12-1 at Safeco while the Royals were getting pounded by the Devil Rays, 9-6. Since July 17, the Sox are 13-1, the Royals 5-9. (For the sake of completeness, the Twins are 9-5 in that time, and stand 3 1/2 games out.) The boys in blue haven’t fallen under .500 yet, but at 57-50, are as close to that mark as they’ve been in weeks.
How did this happen? After beating the Mariners 7-1 in their first game after the break, the Royals had a 7 1/2 game lead in the division. Their edge was eight games over the Sox. While I didn’t think they’d hold on until October, I certainly thought they’d make it to August 11, when they begin a key two-week stretch against the Yankees and the Twins, 13 games I’d pegged as the key to their hopes.
The Royals have been lousy across the board. Over the past 14 games, they’ve have scored 62 runs and allowed 87. While their offense is off by 17%–down from 5.3 runs a game to 4.4–the real collapse has occurred on the mound, where they’re allowing more than six runs a game. [I will now write perhaps the most incongruous sentence of my career.] If not for Jose Lima, who has thrown 10 1/3 innings, struck out nine and allowed just one run in two starts, both Royals wins, they’d be in even worse shape. Jeremy Affeldt (2.13 ERA) and Darrell May (4.22 ERA) have also been reasonably effective. In fact, it’s not the rotation that’s been the problem.
I’m rarely as aware of how big a baseball nut as I am in late July. I love the trade deadline, and all the speculation, consternation and evaluation that goes with it. I’ve barely slept all week, spending most of my time with one eye on the television, a second on my computer monitor, and a third…um, my ear…pressed to my cell phone. I look forward to the last few days of the month, anticipating the moves and wondering how they’ll change the look of the races.
Which is what made yesterday such a letdown. The story of the day wasn’t the moves that were made, but the number of teams that sat out the dance. The entire National League East twiddled its thumbs; the Astros and Cardinals avoided adding pitching, which makes the Cubs look more threatening than they should. In the AL Central, the Royals and Twins failed to address their holes, even as the White Sox seem ready to leave them both behind.
Theo Epstein won’t get much sleep this week, but whatever shut-eye he does grab is going to be very, very good. Epstein, who rode out four months of small-minded teasing about his age, followed by two months of ridicule as the initial implementation of the non-closer-centric bullpen went sour, has positioned the Red Sox to be the AL’s most dangerous team down the stretch of his first year as GM.
Yesterday’s acquisition of Scott Williamson from the Reds might complete the roster, and it fills out the bullpen with the second of three pitchers best-suited to make this type of pen work. One of the others is Byung-Hyun Kim, who Epstein acquired two months ago for the extra third baseman he had lying around in Shea Hillenbrand. (The other is Octavio Dotel.)
The turnaround is stunning. For a modest cost, the Red Sox have not only picked up the two puzzle pieces that make their entire plan work, but they’ve upgraded their bullpen from a collection of high-risk, high-reward question marks to perhaps the game’s best. In addition to right-handers Kim and Williamson, the Sox have two effective lefties in Alan Embree and Scott Sauerbeck. And after a season of seeing more than a dozen pitchers post negative ARPs, the Sox go into the last two months with the following relievers…
“What the %@#$! are the A’s doing?” That’s how I found out about the Scott Hatteberg contract extension Friday night, picking up my cell phone and hearing that question.
Hatteberg was one of the A’s success stories of 2002. Picked up for the bargain price of one meeeeeelyun dollars, the former catcher was made into a full-time first baseman and hit .280/.374/.433, good for a .292 EqA that ranked right in the middle of the pack among major league first basemen. Hatteberg made a strong transition to his new position; according to Clay Davenport’s defensive Translations, Hatteberg saved 17 runs more than an average first baseman in 81 games last season, an excellent figure. He was one of the primary characters in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, with Lewis devoting a chapter to Hatteberg’s story and, in particular, to his approach at the plate. In 2003, however, Hatteberg has hit like a replacement-level first baseman: .264/.348/.394 (which includes a monster series against the Angels over the weekend), and his .259 EqA ranks him above just a handful of regulars at the position. At 33, Hatteberg doesn’t seem to have much development left, and if he is to have an unusual career path, Nate Silver’s PECOTA system doesn’t see it. After plugging in Hatteberg’s 2003 performance, it projects a slow decline from his 2002 peak.
The received sabermetric wisdom is that the breakeven point on stolen bases is a success rate of 67%; if you’re above that, you’re adding runs; if you’re not, you’re just hurting yourself. Now, that’s a broad stroke; for one, the run environment of the early 21st century is high enough to change the relative values of the base and the out, meaning that you want to be at least in the low 70s. For another, all situations are not created equal. Sometimes, you try and steal second base with a slower runner with two outs and a singles hitter up, especially in a close game. On the other hand, there’s little sense in trying to steal with no one out and a power hitter at the plate, even with the love child of Tim Raines and Carlos Beltran edging off of first.
The general point is that you can’t evaluate stolen bases in a vacuum. You have to consider the costs of the times you get caught stealing, and that cost is about twice the benefit of the stolen base. Regardless of how you adjust the numbers, though, there’s no way that the Tigers aren’t killing themselves on the bases with their 54% success rate. Had they never attempted a steal all year, they’d be a better offensive team for it.
Now, you’ll see this a lot with bad teams, especially bad teams that can’t hit. The general notion is that if you can’t hit you might as well run, in order to “make something happen.” The Marlins are doing this with a bit more success this year: they have an MLB-leading 108 stolen bases. Because they’ve been caught 45 times, however, all their running hasn’t amounted to much on the scoreboard; maybe an extra win, total.
What I thought was interesting was the reaction to the Cubs’ end of the deal.
Tuesday night, I heard Betsy Ross praise the swap on SportsCenter, lauding the addition of Lofton’s veteran
leadership. She mentioned that the Cubs hadn’t been to the
postseason since 1998, which I supposed might have had some relevance in a
world where Marvin Miller was elected to public office in 1964 instead of
getting into baseball.
That kind of “analysis” trickles down. Yesterday afternoon, my good
friend Matt called from Boston to ask what his beloved Sawks might be doing in
the trade market. In the course of the conversation, he more or less repeated
the line about Lofton’s impact on the Cubs’ clubhouse.
I think the idea that the Cubs need veteran leadership is a crock. Take a look
at their lineup. On most days, they start old people at four positions,
including two players with World Series rings (Moises Alou
and Damian Miller) and another, Sammy Sosa,
who has some occasional experience in dealing with baseball-related pressure.
Was Eric Karros sitting around wetting himself over the idea
that he might not be able to perform in August and September, desperately
hoping the Cubs would acquire someone who could teach him?
The National League is beginning to sort itself out, after looking like it was
going to be a wild, 13-teams-for-three-spots free-for-all. The Mets, Brewers
and Padres have been done for a while, and the Reds, Rockies, Expos and
Pirates are going to have a hard time selling the idea they’re contending for
much longer. That still leaves nine teams within six games of a playoff spot,
however, which will make for a great second half of baseball.
Eight of the AL’s 14 teams can entertain October dreams, with the Angels’ hopes on life support just four days into the second half. The Mariners and Royals have far outplayed my expectations, and the Rangers have, for the third straight year, made me look silly for thinking they’d win. Thank god for the amazing predictability of the AL East, or I might have to give back my blue beanie emblazoned with the logo of the Certified Baseball Experts Society.
Just to reiterate: “This Time it Counts” is a fraudulent notion being shoved down our throats by an administration known for disinformation and a cowed media without the courage to call a spade a spade. I’m not surprised to see Kevin Kennedy sell the idea; after all, he works for Fox, and this is Fox’s baby. I am disappointed to see the ESPN staff climb aboard so willingly. I just wish I’d see one person on television with the temerity to suggest that tying World Series home-field advantage to the All-Star Game is a worthless gimmick, and moreover, point out that the real problem with the All-Star Game is interleague play, a worthless gimmick in and of itself.
I say this every year, but only because the thought dominates my brain for 72 hours each July: I hate the All-Star break. Two days with no games sandwiched around an exhibition contest. Yuck. Anyway, here are my midseason awards ballots, which missed the deadline to be included in the BP staff balloting by a hair or dozen. If you’re new to this column, welcome to my biases: I favor performance at up-the-middle positions, and I try to strip what a player has done from the context in which he did it as much as I can.
The Angels are back to their old tricks. They scored eight runs on seven singles, two doubles, one home run and two walks. For the second day in a row, they bunched their hits, putting together a four-run inning late in the game. It looked a lot like last year’s team, actually: runners in motion, guys scoring on hard-hit singles, no double plays. The Angels are just eighth in the AL in run scoring (and seventh in EqA) after finishing fourth in runs (and fifth in EqA) last year. Just as they did last year, they’re scoring more runs than you would expect given what they’ve done at the plate, with 450 as opposed to a “projected” total of 437. One of the big differences between last year’s team and this one has been their propensity for hitting into double plays. Using (1B+BB+HBP-SBA-SAC) as an estimate of runners on first base, the Angels hit into a double play every 13.7 opportunities in 2002; in 2003, that figure is one every 10.0 opportunities. A team dependent on putting the ball in play has to avoid making two outs when it does. The other key element for the Angels is their defense. They have a flyball staff that needs good outfield defense to succeed, and for almost two months, they played without center fielder Darin Erstad. Erstad is largely overrated for his good batting averages and “intangibles,” but he may be the best defensive center fielder around. The Angels’ run prevention works because of him, and they missed him badly while he was out. In his absence from April 20 through June 8, they allowed 189 runs in 42 games, an average of 4.5 runs per game. The rest of the season, they’ve allowed 198 runs in 50 games, or just 4.0 runs per game. That’s the difference between being disappointing and being a contender, and a big part of that improvement is directly attributable to Erstad’s range in center field.
With the All-Star break just around the corner, it’s getting kind of late to dismiss disappointing performance as “just a slump.” A number of hitters counted on to put up numbers in the middle of their teams’ lineups haven’t come close to expected performance. Is the problem with the players or the expectations of them, and which guys can be expected to bounce back in the second half?
One of the criticisms of the various formulae used to evaluate baseball players is that they don’t take into account everything that happens on a ballfield. Runs Created, Equivalent Average, VORP, et al rely on a player’s stat line to measure his performance, and there are elements of the game that escape the statistics. (It should be noted that with the increased availability of play-by-play information, more rigorous methods which use this data are being developed.)
The issue is a minor one. As Bill James put it nearly 20 years ago, an elephant walking through the snow leaves tracks. If baserunning, or clutch performance, or leadership, or any of the things often cited as critical omissions were that important, things like Runs Created or EqA wouldn’t correlate with actual runs as well as they do. In the big picture, what we can measure dwarfs the what we cannot, and allows us to use our analytical tools with confidence.
I bring this up somewhat tangentially because I’ve been seeing a lot of ridiculous baserunning the last couple of weeks
At some point, you just have to laugh.
The Los Angeles Dodgers are fading into oblivion, unable to put together much in the way of an inning, never mind an entire game. They’ve scored 14 runs in their last eight contests, or as many as the Diamondbacks tallied in the last five innings of their win on Monday night. They might not reach 300 runs by the All-Star break, a feat I didn’t think was possible in the modern era of late-March starts and league RAs in the mid-4.00s, and they’re on pace to be the first NL team since 1993 to not score 600 runs.
I’ve watched almost every inning of Dodger baseball in July, and I have to say, I deserve something for that. For the past week, the Dodgers have been just as bad as the Tigers–who might be The Worst Team in 40 Years–were back in April…
The All-Star teams were named yesterday, announced all at once as part of the new system of choosing the teams in which the players select about half the roster.
It makes for a different kind of analysis, because where in the past the disputes were with the managers and league offices, those entities have been reduced to little more than the job of filling token slots for bad teams and replacing injured players.
No, the interesting picks this year were by the players, who in their first contribution to the process in my lifetime proved themselves to be short-sighted as to the definition of “All-Star” as the people outside the game.
Let’s start from the beginning.