Prospectus Matchups: Yanni-Free Edition
7/16Best Matchup (best combined adjusted third-order won-loss record with both teams being over .500): Boston @ Anaheim Here's the deal: before the season begins, you look at your team and realize they are not going to hit as much as they did the year before. What do you do? You get some better pitchers so you can reduce the bottom line on the other side of the ball. This is exactly what Theo Epstein did, and he stated as much. And you know what? It worked. The Red Sox are projecting to give up fifty fewer runs than they did last year while losing about the same amount on the offensive side. (Because of the nature of runs scored and runs allowed, the same differential at lower totals actually results in a better record, all other things being equal. This is why it's going to be just about impossible for the Rockies to ever win 100 games.)
Prospectus Matchups: Bescrewed Edition
7/06I got an e-mail from Yankees.com today imploring me to vote for Hideki Matsui for the final slot on the American League team. First of all, I'm a little shocked that I'm even on the Yankees.com mailing list. Second, I'm even more shocked that the Yankees are actively campaigning to get one of their own onto the squad. How utterly undignified. It's like those ads movie companies run in the trade publications promoting their pathetic offerings for Academy Awards. "Members of the Academy, for your consideration: Ben Affleck in Gigli..." Campaigning is for dog catchers and county aldermen, not the most successful, storied and--allegedly--classy franchise in American sport. Perhaps I doth protest too much. After all, the All-Star Game voting and selection is so completely bescrewed that it's much too late to bring any sanity to the proceedings now. If you would like to take a stab at doing so, however, you wouldn't be voting for Matsui.
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7/02Biggest Mismatchups (Largest disparity in records with one team over .500 and the other under .500): Minnesota @ Arizona This is the time I make a confession and beg forgiveness. I come to you with hat in hand, although I don't really own a hat, so that leads to another confession: I stole the hat in my hand so that I might come to you with hat in hand. In any case, back to my original confession: I picked the Diamondbacks to win the National League West. What was I thinking? I don't even remember. I think I was trying to be "different." Most folks were picking the Giants with a few renegades going for broke on a Padres upswing. Another tiny minority had the Dodgers. I guess I took all this in and decided I needed to be iconoclastic. Where did it get me? Coming to you with a stolen hat looking for absolution--that's where. Why should the Diamondbacks trade Randy Johnson? Because George Steinbrenner wants them to? What is this madness that has beset baseball wherein a team goes south for a year and is suddenly expected to offload every manjack on the team who has the talent to stick his head above replacement level? Arizona plays in a division built on a sandy loam. The Diamondbacks could very easily reload in the offseason and come back and cop this thing in 2005. Having Randy Johnson still in the fold would certainly help in that regard. In modern baseball it seems, we have come to expect that both babies and bathwater must both be drained to the sea.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightProspectus Matchups: The Empire Strikes Last
6/29Best Matchup (Best combined record with both teams being over .500): Boston @ New York Yankees We seem to have reached a point in baseball history where it is--what is the word?--understood that the Yankees somehow deserve to get the best available player on the trading block. When they don't, their owner and fans appear shocked. With Freddy Garcia gone to Chicago and Carlos Beltran now in Houston, it will be interesting to see how firm Arizona's resolve to keep Randy Johnson will be. The Newark Star-Ledger has also been kicking up some Tom Glavine-to-the-Yankees talk. It stands to reason. Glavine has been the best pitcher in baseball so far in 2004 (39.3 VORP, besting runners-up Mark Mulder and Carl Pavano), so it only makes sense that he should be on the Yankees. Why? Because it's the Yankees' world and we're just the extras sent over by Central Casting to fill in their background.
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6/25It was my pleasure to see former A's great Rickey Henderson play for the Newark Bears on Wednesday night. I'm reminded of that scene in "Eight Men Out" when Joe Jackson is playing out the string on an independent team late in life--except, of course, that Henderson is not banned or anything like that. His at-bats were much like you remember them from his major league career. He came to the plate five times and saw a total of 32 pitches. He drew two walks and hit a single. His first trip to the plate came against Bill Pulsipher of the Long Island Ducks. On a night when Jason Isringhausen pitched for the Cardinals and Paul Wilson was resting up after pitching for the Reds the night before, Pulsipher looked pretty bad. Not that he was necessarily hit hard--none of the five hits he gave up were especially tagged (he also walked a batter without retiring anyone). It was his appearance. If he is serious about getting back to the majors, he needs to trim some ballast. Spare tires are acceptable only after one has won 15 games in a season.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightProspectus Matchups: Sluggish
6/22I would have bet real, actual cash money that more 1931 teams would have made the top 10 given that the entire league fell off by 61 points from 1930, but only the Pirates made the cut. Every National League team dropped by at least 44 points. Four Pirate regulars slugged over .500 in 1930; the high man the next year was Hall of Famer Paul Waner, at .453. On the other hand, we have the Tigers, a team that finished 116 points behind the Red Sox last year in slugging. They have closed that gap to just 11 points through this juncture of the season. Largest improvements in team slugging, 2003-2004: Tigers: +62 Dodgers: +60 Cubs: +40 White Sox: +32 Reds: +27
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightProspectus Matchups: Interleague Edition, Part Deux
6/15Closest Matchup (Teams with records most resembling one another): Texas @ Cincinnati Anyway you smack the numbers around, the Reds are riding for a fall. As we all know, teams that get outscored the way they have don't fare well in the long run. Going into last night's game against Philadelphia, the Reds had been outpolled by 24 runs. This put them five or six games ahead of where they should be, depending on which version of the Pythagorean you want to use. Having said that, you can find that entire 24-run differential in their meltdown against the A's last week. If you toss that series away, they'd actually be 284-284 in runs scored and runs against. This still means they're playing over their heads, but not by as much. Are we letting one disastrous series get in the way of assessing them honestly? On the other hand, that disastrous series helped call attention to the fact that this was a team riding a little too high. Do you miss the time when a 34-28 record was a 34-28 record? You know, back in the good old days, when they didn't used to clog the mind by putting the number of runs a team scored and allowed right there so you could make your own value judgments. Actually, newspapers still don't do that. Instead, they give us streak info and interleague play records. What is interesting is that the NFL standings have had the points for and against since…well, ever since I can remember. When you think about it, with a smaller schedule, NFL PF/PA can get skew a lot worse than a baseball record can. I'd like to see newspaper sport sections leap into the 21st Century and start including runs scored and runs against, wouldn't you?
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6/11Back before Al Gore invented Sabermetrics, I would have forgiven Sports Illustrated for their cover story on Derek Jeter and slumps. In this day and age, though, I have to get more from a publication of S.I.'s stature than the usual interview-the-player/manager/GM/ask-the-anonymous-scout kind of article. The topic of slumps is a fascinating one beginning with the concept of whether they--like alien invaders, auras and repressed memories--even exist at all. There were several times in Tom Verducci's article that I thought he was going to veer into that very area. At one point, he quotes Bob Uecker (lifetime .200 batting average but, let us never forget, a man who always walked at least once every 10 at-bats) as saying, "I had slumps that lasted into the winter." Here was an opportunity for a great segue into a couple of paragraphs into how things tend to even out over time for the good hitters and "slumps" seem permanent for the bad ones--and by "bad" I mean, those with lower batting averages. Which is another problem with the piece--it's all about batting averages. With so much research afoot about balls in play and the declining import of BA, the article treats the stat like the intended audience was the 1955 subscriber base of Sport magazine. Did we learn nothing from the Yankee experience of April 2004? S.I. is a great magazine with some of the best photos ever taken on the planet, and several writers who kick the language in the ass. In other words--they have what it takes to be more probative than this.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightProspectus Matchups: Yankees-Rangers, Live on PESN
6/04BEST MATCHUP (Best combined records with both teams being over .500): Texas Rangers @ New York Yankees (62-41) Here's a round-up of Wednesday's 6-5 victory over the Orioles in which the Yankees only had three hits, as brought to you by PESN (Pidgin English Sports Network): Yanqui gat stick. Nogat paitim. Paitim kam tripela taim. Wokabaut sikis taim. Gat plet sikis taim. Pisin losim sikis – faipela. Taking an all-time great from a team is no guarantee of immediate success against that team in the ensuing season. The Yankees lost two of three in their first meeting with Texas this year in the wake of getting Alex Rodriguez from the Rangers.
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