Kenny Williams’ trades for Roberto Alomar and Carl Everett enhance an improving resume, while D’Angelo Jimenez is becoming the new Bruce Chen. Joe Sheehan takes a look at the White Sox moves in Prospectus Today.
Joe Sheehan can’t help but be down on the A’s after watching last night’s tilt with the Mariners.
A few weeks back, Joe Sheehan took a look at how the varying interleague schedules teams would be playing might impact the divisional races. With interleague play mercifully behind us for another year, how did things shake out?
The Royals have reclaimed first place in the NL Central. Dontrelle Willis still hasn’t faced his first good-hitting opponent. Lew Ford would make a better trade target than most of the veteran flotsam out there. Barry Bonds is still the best player in the league, even in an off year. Joe Sheehan runs through his notebook for these and other thoughts in Prospectus Today.
One of the more common themes running through my inbox this spring was Michael Lewis’ book, Moneyball, about the Oakland A’s and their approach to building a winning baseball team. I read it in in two sittings, and I enjoyed the heck out of it. The chapter detailing the conversation between the A’s scouts and their front office in advance of the 2002 draft was some of the most entertaining baseball copy I’ve read in years.
I never did write a column about the book, however, largely because I thought everything there was to say about it was said by others. In addition, the interviews Will Carroll did with Lewis and Billy Beane for Baseball Prospectus Radio provided the most interesting angle on the book that BP could supply.
So the standard answer I developed for people asking me about Moneyball was this: I enjoyed it, but it was neither the best Michael Lewis book I read this spring, nor the best baseball book. On a friend’s recommendation, I picked up Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, his book about his experiences at Lehman Brothers in the mid-1980s. It was more personal, more entertaining, and more educational than Moneyball, although some of that is due to my being less familiar with bond trading than with shortstop trading.
With the Juan Gonzalez trade still up in the air, Joe Sheehan urges the Rangers to play hardball with their reluctant slugger: accept the deal or grab some pine.
Joe Sheehan clears up a Fisk snafu, endorses Ryan Klesko for the NL All-Star Team, and mourns the loss of a die-hard Reds fan in Prospectus Today.
The focus on pitcher workloads–largely through tracking pitch counts–is perhaps the most heated area of contention between old-school baseball people and outside performance analysts. Baseball Prospectus has been a big part of the debate, with Rany Jazayerli and Keith Woolner developing and refining tools that measure workload and investigating the effects, short- and long-term, of throwing a lot of pitches.
At the other end of the spectrum are coaches and ex-players, many of whom have been in the game since before Woolner and Jazayerli were born. These men believe that pitch counts are a secondary tool at best, and at the extreme, proffer the notion that the real problem is that pitchers today are babied, not like the men years ago who always went nine innings. Or 12. Or even 26.
Lost in that line of thought is the fact that pitching is harder now. No one counted pitches 90 years ago because, to a certain extent, there was no need to do so. Pitching a baseball game from start to finish required a level of effort well within the ability of the men assigned to do so. Now, pitching nine innings of baseball at the major-league level requires a much greater effort, one that may be too much for one human arm to handle.
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.
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.
Matt Williams announced his
retirement, a little over a week after being released by the Diamondbacks.
It’s a bit of a shame in that his career is ending with such a whimper.
There are many teams who would be helped by a third baseman who can hit lefties
while making the minimum. Williams was hitting .302/.396/.581 against
southpaws this season, and regularly hits .300 with good power against
them. He can play both infield corners passably, although he’s no longer a
top-notch glove man at third base.
Just noodling here…the Yankees would be far better off with Williams than
with Todd Zeile. The Twins could actually bat him cleanup
against lefties. The A’s have to be questioning whether Eric Chavez
will ever hit lefties (.147/.188/.333 this year; .224/.272/.372 from 2000-2002); they need runs badly and would be well-served to employ Williams. The Expos could add him to their corner mix and be improved, as could the
Reds.
It’s a cliché to say that the great thing about baseball is that you can always see something you’ve never seen before. Of course, comments like that reach the point of cliche because they’re true.
Last night, the Houston Astros lost their ace starter, Roy Oswalt, in the second inning to a groin injury. This messed them up so much that they went on to use five relievers in completing the first no-hitter against the Yankees in almost 45 years. Peter Munro, Kirk Saarloos, Brad Lidge, Octavio Dotel, and Billy Wagner combined to strike out 11 batters in tossing the first six-pitcher no-no in MLB history.
I’m a Yankee fan, and while I’m frustrated by this team’s lack of depth and its terrible problems scoring runs, this was just cool. There’s not a ton of analysis to be done here. No-hitters happen, and while the Astros’ bullpen is probably more likely to do it than your average starting pitcher–getting lots of strikeouts helps, and the five relievers who threw average 10.1 Ks per nine innings–it’s not like you can predict something like this. It was just one of those great baseball events, the kind of game that makes memories for the faithful and turns the uninitiated into fans.
Joe Sheehan checks in on the 2003 Mariners, and sees a lot of similarities to the 116-win powerhouse of 2001. Can Stand Pat Gillick help push this year’s club over the top?
On Saturday, Roger Clemens missed again in his third try for career win
No. 300. Clemens pitched well for 6 2/3 innings, but was forced out of the game
by an upper respiratory infection having thrown just 84 pitches. In his wake,
Juan Acevedo surrendered a monster three-run home run to Eric
Karros–not easy for a right-handed pitcher–that was the crushing blow in
a 5-2 loss.
Clemens, of course, is going to get No. 300. He’s still a very good pitcher, and there’s no reason to expect that this will turn into a chase like Early
Wynn’s. Wynn notched career win No. 297 in July of 1962, then had just two
wins in his final 11 starts that season. He returned in 1963 to win No. 300–and only No. 300, in 20 appearances–before hanging them up for good.
The interesting thing about this mini-chase is that by struggling to reach his
landmark number, Clemens is illustrating the problem with pitcher wins as a
performance metric.
The Yankees trade for Ruben Sierra. It’s a bad deal now, just as it was a bad deal in 1995, writes Joe Sheehan. Plus Dusty Baker and his mishandling of the Cubs bullpen.
Last week, Joe Garagiola Jr. made the latest in a long series of heavily-criticized trades in which he gave up young players developed by the Diamondbacks for older talent. While the Byung-Hyun Kim-for-Shea Hillenbrand deal doesn’t quite fit the pattern of his other swaps, it does share one important characteristic: it was largely panned by outside performance analysts.
I’m with them. While I can see a scenario in which the Diamondbacks win the deal, I think that they gave up too much talent for a player who is likely to be average or maybe a little above. The deal is especially problematic because the Snakes have third-base prospect Chad Tracy available, and Tracy is a comparable player to Hillenbrand right now, and comes with a lower price tag and a higher upside.
What keeps me from emptying both barrels on the deal is Garagiola’s track record. This isn’t the first time he’s made a trade that left me shaking my head, and yet, the Diamondbacks have been one of the most successful franchises in baseball since they entered the league.