You Could Look It Up: What is a Deadline Trade Worth?, Part 1
7/26''You Could Look It Up'' is a weekly look at the game's present through the funhouse mirror of the past. Today we begin an experiment in unguided writing, an experiment in blue sky time travel without a thesis. From now until shortly after the non-waiver trading deadline, YCLIU will examine the key mid-season trades for each franchise (mid-season being generously described as June 15 to the end of the regular season) and evaluate each deal to see what a mid-season addition is really worth--and if possible, to discern patterns and discover which deals really help and which are of little or even negative value. After we break down each trade, we'll come to a "snap judgment," a hasty conclusion. At the end of the series, we'll see if those judgments add up to any helpful conclusions. In each installment we'll highlight a team or two, alternating American and National League clubs. The first two installments will highlight the opponents of the 1992 World Series, the Toronto Blue Jays and the Boston/Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves.
You Could Look It Up: Free Association
7/07On Thursday night, the Yankees and Red Sox played an epochal extra-inning game, possibly the most compelling contest of the season to date. This was the game in which Derek Jeter flew like a deranged Superman into the third row of seats in short left field. A consequence of If Jeter Had Wings was that Jeter had to leave the game and the Yankees were out of infielders. Alex Rodriguez slid over to shortstop and Gary Sheffield, who had last played third base in 1993, was called upon to take A-Rod's place at the hot corner. Sheffield's first chance came on a Kevin Millar grounder. The outfielder looped the throw over first base for an error; it was clear that he had forgotten both the range and the mechanics of playing the position. The Red Sox, already up by a run, had Dave McCarty and Cesar Crespo due to bat. An obvious strategic question presented itself: could the Red Sox run up the score by bunting the ball at Sheffield?
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: Everything Happens in 1912 and 2004
6/21Every once in a while you have a day or a week that flashes back to other, older days and weeks. Last week, the United States and Great Britain signed a treaty pledging to protect the wreck of the Titanic, which sank beneath the waves in 1912; Roger Clemens and Mark Prior faced off in a pitching match-up that was a descendant of one in 1912; and a boob from Texas mistreated a four-year-old fan in a way that made one wish it was 1912. John McCain even had an opportunity to bolt the Republican Party last week, but apparently no one told him that Theodore Roosevelt had done so with honor back in 1912, because the Senator refused to go along with the 1912ness of things. Baseball, though, was unabashedly singing
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: Draft Edition
6/09Homo sapiens emerged from Neanderthal man about 38,000 BCE. It took another 31,500 years or so for the Sumerians to invent the wheel. There were 315 centuries of watching stones rolling downhill, fallen trees being pushed aside, dates falling off the table, before experience and observation could be transformed into principles (Hey! Round stuff rolls! Round stuff that rolls might be useful to have!) and those principles then put into practice (We should try to make round stuff that rolls!). Of course, as with all good ideas, some people never bought in. The Western Hemisphere did without the wheel until the Europeans showed up. Either the locals were too busy eating the corn to roll the cobs or they just didn't think much of wheels. As with the wheel, so too with the amateur draft, which kicked off in 1965 as a way to finally bring down those annoyingly persistent Yankees. Many of the lessons that have been taken away the draft--high school pitchers are riskier bets as college pitchers, don't draft high school catchers, etc.--were there to be found after the first few drafts, but it took several more years before experience hardened into a set of principles.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: Gamesmanship, Dammit
6/02In this week's Pinstriped Bible (one of the other columns in the Steve Goldman media empire, the entirety of which can be yours for a song), a reader takes your host to task for suggesting that an incident that took place last week involving Gabe White should be a hint to managers to pay attention to the rule book for bonus competitive advantages. Around here we take any excuse to delve further into a worthy thesis, in this case, that gamesmanship is, or should be, a major component of the manager's job. The White situation was very simple. The Yankees lefty entered the team's May 26 game at Baltimore in the sixth inning with the Yankees leading 7-6. The game was momentarily delayed when the umpire asked White to remove a gold chain. With the chain removed, White gave up consecutive hits, allowing another run to score and setting up a blown save for future Hall of Famer Tanyon Sturtze. After the game, White claimed that he had pitched badly because he'd been unnerved by the umpire's request.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: Rundown and Out
5/28One of the values of knowing history is that you can recognize repeat situations when they arise. We humans are pretty creative, but somehow every generation has to work itself into some scrape that a previous class already tried out. Sometimes it's a historical blunder on the scale of invading Russia from the west with winter coming on; other times, it's just hiring Raul Mondesi. The benefit to recognizing a repeat situation as it manifests is that you can call it off before, say, you trade this year's Jay Buhner for this year's Ken Phelps, or your Iraq becomes your Vietnam, and consequently someone else's problem. In some cases, it's just fun to know that even if you missed something the first time around, chances are it will come up again so you can see it for yourself. For example, it's safe to say that none of our readers were in attendance at Game Six of the 1917 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the New York Giants, and so they didn't see the controversial play that iced the championship for the American League. Fortunately, Monday's Angels-Blue Jays game was just as good as a time machine--and not just any time machine, but the deluxe model with the cruise control, the heated mirrors, and the side mirrors that fold down when passing through a dangerously narrow aperture, handy for automotive proctological exams and navigating the capillaries of longtime smokers. The score was tied 5-5 with two out in the bottom of the 10th at Toronto and two runners on. Chris Gomez was standing on second. He had reached on a fielder's choice, then was pushed into scoring position by Eric Hinske's walk. Simon Pond came to the plate. Pond grounded to first baseman Casey Kotchman, who dove for the ball and knocked it down. Pitcher Ben Weber stood at first, waiting to receive the ball for the 3-1 put out. Gomez rounded third, trying to score. Second baseman Adam Kennedy picked up the ball and fired it to catcher Ben Molina. Gomez was now in a rundown. Molina chased him up the line, then threw the ball to third baseman Alfredo Amezaga. Gomez reversed field and headed back towards home. Amezaga threw the ball to...he didn't throw it to anyone, because there was no one to throw it to. Gomez scored. Game over.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: The Ben Christensen of 1938
5/18I intended this week's YOU to be a tale of one of baseball's great reprobates, a square table of scum and villainy that Christensen will now not have a chance to join. It's hard to pick just one. It's easy to dispense with Cap Anson, Dixie Walker, Ben Chapman. They were racists, sadly common rather than arch-villains. Chick Gandil and the other game-fixers of 1919 are closer to the mark, but everyone knows their story. They were the subject of a classic book and an excellent film. Hal Chase, the serial cheat, would have been a great subject, but in the last couple of years he's been rediscovered, with two full biographies hitting bookstores. Denny McLain's's story is just distasteful and travels to too many places far removed from the ball field. Rogers Hornsby and Ty Cobb were anti-social and paranoid, respectively, but that's all. For today, that leaves us with a more obscure figure, not one of the game's spectacular evildoers, but simply a consistently bad guy, one who, like Christensen, went out of his way to cause injury. Jake Powell played the outfield for the Washington Senators, New York Yankees, and Philadelphia Phillies in the 1930s and 1940s. He spoke rashly, acted rashly, and ultimately paid the price for his way of living.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: Managers Reconsidered, Part II
5/05Americans have many rights, but as many recessions and depressions have revealed, the right to work is not one of them. Conversely, there is no compulsion to stay at a job a moment longer than you want to. If you're not happy, if you can't put the same spirit into the job that you used to, or the job is taking more than it gives back, just move on. Easier said than done, of course. Every day, many of us trade a little misery for the security of a paycheck. Even when more rewarding fruits are obviously ready to be plucked from the tree, the cubicle we know sometimes feels safer than the office that we don't. Sparky Anderson chose security for the last half-dozen years of his career. Long after it was clear that Detroit ownership had quit on the team, even past the point that the strain of losing sent him home with nervous exhaustion, he stayed on as captain of a sinking ship.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: Managers Reconsidered
4/19There isn't much about in the way of statistical reports on managers here at Baseball Prospectus. The official BP POV is that you need proof to prognosticate or pontificate, and there is little about managers that can be explained without resorting to subjective, anecdotal evidence. The most we can do is point out aspects of a manager's personality or performance that are well-documented and likely played some role in influencing the performances of those around him. Fortunately, the most successful and longest lived managers--not always the same thing--have left a fossil record of accumulated incidents that goes a long way towards defining them. Though it is impossible to prove a manager's precise effect on his team's record of wins and losses, the historical record contains ample evidence of managers' ability to both hinder and, in more select circumstances, help their teams. Here, in order, are the 20 managers who have compiled the most victories in the history of the game, with an emphasis on their human side--from which much about their teams can be inferred, but conclusions cannot be drawn.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: One False Move
4/12He still had a fantastic career--you can make an argument that Mantle was the most valuable player in the American League for at least 10 years (he was first or second in runs created/game in 1952-1958, 1960-1962, and 1964, while playing a key defensive position), but many, including Stengel, were left wondering what the boy with the power of Ruth and the speed of Cobb would have done had he been completely healthy for even one season. His 1957-1958 performance, 358/.487/.686 in a league that hit .266/.343./.404, seemed only to scratch the surface. No one will ever know if their expectations were too high. Once Mantle's knee was damaged the opportunity to find out vanished. Earlier this week, 20-year-old Twins rookie catcher Joe Mauer tore medial meniscus cartilage in his left knee sliding after a foul ball on the hard Metrodome turf. It is said to be a minor injury, though it still required surgery to repair. The catcher will be back on the field in about a month, and there are not expected to be any lingering consequences to Mauer's assumedly glorious future. Yet, any sudden disruption of a young player's career can have unanticipated consequences.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: Backlash
4/05Statistics are a tool, not unlike a microscope. Statistics are a hammer, a speculum, a thermometer. A statistics-based approach to understanding of baseball is one of many paths to knowledge of the game. Calling those who take that path "freaks" or "Nazis" makes as much sense as calling a Ph.D. chemist a wimp because he tests the qualities of his cyanide compound by means of Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy rather than just drinking the thing.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: Reverse Lepidoptery
3/26This week's YOU, tenth in an ongoing series looking at today through the looking glass of yesterday focuses on two unusual mammals, one of the marine variety, the other a pitcher with an unusual adaptation. The passing last week of left-handed knuckleball pitcher Gene Bearden, hero of the 1948 American League pennant race, has me missing Stellar's Sea Cow. It's a silly emotion because I've never seen a Stellar's Sea Cow, and neither has anyone living. Stellar's was ejected from the big game back in 1768. Still, to know that there was once such a magnificent creature on this planet and to have missed a chance to see it is quite depressing. Stellar's was the mega-manatee, a huge version of the endangered Florida marine mammal. Like Cecil Fielder, it weighed as much as ten tons and could reach lengths of up to 100 feet. At one time Stellar's had a large range, but due to hunting by primitive fishermen with pointy sticks they hung out exclusively in the Bering Strait by the time they were officially discovered in 1741. The Russians, who found them quite accidentally, exterminated them in about two minutes, give or take 27 years. The eighteenth century is known as the Age of the Enlightenment, which proves that historians have a sense of humor. Having gone back and read what I just wrote, the following now seems sort of trivial. Aspiring writers, avoid this sort of segue: knuckleball pitchers are baseball's version of Stellar's Sea Cow circa 1767. If you were around to follow the game in the 1980s, you had a good chance of seeing at least two starts by a knuckleball pitcher in any given week. Back when it was morning in America, Phil Niekro, Joe Niekro, Tom Candiotti, and Charlie Hough made a combined 917 starts (1981-1990), and at times they were each very good. In fact, Hough was consistently one of the best pitchers in the game.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: Prejudices
3/19Earlier this week, the merry BP Brigade was found shooting the baseball breeze in the bullpen at our secret HQ, the Prospectus Nexus. As our lovely girl Friday Esmé Chimère (author of BP's upcoming column for our female readers, “The Boys on the Basepaths”) tended the hibachi, weighty topics were bandied about like the tainted games of the 1919 World Series that suggested to Ring Lardner pretty bubbles marred by cancer spots. One of the questions we briefly kicked around and the YOU-crew has gnawed like a bucket of Sammy Byrd's legs ever since is that of where a manager makes his primary contribution to his team's fortunes. Some would say that the manager's main job is morale-building. Before agreeing, we should probably ask Larry Bowa what he thinks. It was easy to eliminate in-game tactics, because aside from the odd obsessional bunter (Don Baylor) or compulsive lefty-righty switcher (Tony LaRussa), these are largely rote decisions. It has been suggested elsewhere that constructing the batting order was where the manager most exerts his influence. This is closer to the heart of the matter, a minor truth in search of a major one. It's not what order the players bat in that defines the manager, but who is allowed to bat in the first place.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: Spring Training, What’s It Good For?
3/06The history of spring training is one of ongoing professionalization and standardization, which is a 13-syllable way of saying, "All eccentricities have been stomped out of it." In the early days of spring training, teams lacked set destinations. There were no permanent Florida or Arizona complexes, the Dodger installation at Vero Beach not coming until mid-century. Depending on the year and where the manager felt like spending his spring, teams trained in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Catalina Island, California, the Dominican Republic. Ernest Hemingway figures in a number of spring training stories because the hard-drinking Papa frequently crossed paths with the hard-drinking Dodgers when they trained in Cuba during the 1940s. Most of the stories revolve around Hemingway and closer Hugh Casey getting drunk and beating the heck out of each other. As Papa wrote in The Sun Also Rises: "Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together." "Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?" Today, teams have expensive stadiums waiting for them, some appendages of theme parks. There are no more holdouts, no Rickey Hendersons who report late because they can't be bothered to start on time. But for Dominicans with visa problems, punctuality is the rule. If the training season is used for anything more fun than training, it's kept on the down low.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: Problems in Red Sox Management: A Tourist’s Guide
2/27Thus the main import of Yawkey's largesse was mostly symbolic. As a competitive program, he and Collins were misguided. As is now grudgingly accepted, the difference between a star and an average player may only be a few wins a year. There is no player, pair of players, or trio of players, that is capable of taking a team staffed by replacement-level players and turning it into a pennant winner. Improved talent must be diffused throughout the roster. In the 1933-1936 period, the Red Sox never came close to achieving this goal. Two key problems: The Yawkey/Collins program never got around to addressing the outfield; the Sox annually presented the most punchless pasture aggregation in the league; after Grove and Ferrell, the Red Sox were unable to dig up anything like another eight decent pitchers, or even another three. One lesson to be drawn is that even in an environment in which rival teams are "freely" giving away talent, it's almost impossible to buy enough to staff an entire ballclub. Not only will the pool of available talent, at its deepest, be unequal to the demand (note that even this year's Yankees, who have acquired a number of big-ticket items from more conservative clubs, have not been able to buy certainty for their starting rotation) but buying off the rack forces a team to be overly dependent on making the right selections--that is, on luck. A team that chooses to bank on stars rather than on depth faces a greater risk of having no fallback should their star prove to be infirm, unreliable, or simply on the way down. The large influx of talent that comes with developing a strong minor league system gives a team the depth to survive its own misjudgments.
continue reading chevron_rightchevron_rightYou Could Look It Up: 1984 Part V: Baseball Prospectus, Circa ’84
2/23Had Baseball Prospectus existed in 1984, there are a number of topics we would not have been talking about. The debate about how best to use a closer wouldn't have existed because the "one inning and only with a lead" doctrine had yet to be invented. 1984 closers who pitched more innings than 2003 National League Cy Young Award winner Eric Gagne: all of them. Twenty relievers threw over 100 innings that year. The reason that Willie Hernandez was perceived to be so important to the Tigers, why Goose Gossage was considered the last piece in the Padres puzzle, was because they pitched in high-leverage situations. They could have saved 45 games if they had been used that way, but managers of the time thought it would be more useful if they pitched when the game was on the line. Like all pitchers, some relievers are durable and some are not. Bruce Sutter averaged 99 innings a season through 1984. After that year, in which he recorded a record 45 saves and had a 1.54 ERA, he became a free agent and was signed to a large contract by the Braves. Consistent with the Ted Turner touch o' gold that persisted throughout the second half of the 1980s, Sutter's arm immediately fell off. That was his problem. It was Eddie Haas' problem, Turner's problem. Twenty years later, it should not be Eric Gagne's problem. Sutter was no cautionary tale--pitchers are largely immune from generalization. Each should be exploited according to the extent of his ability to remain healthy (with consideration being given to frequency of use, mechanics, weather conditions, pitches per appearance and the like), rather than at some mythical lowest common denominator level of work which is deemed "safe."
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