Kevin Towers doesn’t believe that there are any guarantees in the draft. Dusty Baker believes that pitchers just get hurt, and there’s little you can do to prevent it. Barry Bonds doesn’t believe the game should change for just one man. Ken Griffey Jr. just wants to hit No. 500 and move on. And Terry Ryan thinks the Shannon Stewart is the missing piece of the puzzle. All this and many more quips from around the league in your Monday edition of The Week In Quotes.
Sometimes, you have a great idea for a column, and the facts just don’t lend
themselves to the story.
So you write about the process.
See, in Houston tonight, we’re going to be treated to a terrific
intergenerational pitching matchup, as Mark Prior and
Roger Clemens meet for the Cubs and Astros. And I was
thinking that you might be able to trace the history of great pitching through
maybe a half-dozen games in baseball history. Prior is facing Clemens, and
Clemens must have had to face a similarly great pitcher in the early years of
his career, and so on.
As it turns out, you really can’t do it. It seems that pitchers of this
caliber don’t take each other on as often as you would hope, and once you miss
a link, you get off track pretty quickly.
The Red Sox head to the Bay for an interleague tilt. The Reds are still playing way over their heads. The Padres could be a key player in the Carlos Beltran sweepstakes. These and other news and notes out of Boston, Cincinnati and San Diego in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
Whenever words like “overrated” or “underrated” are introduced into an argument, objectivity generally takes a holiday. Gauging the amount of hype a certain player is receiving and determining whether it’s tantamount to his abilities is by nature largely an exercise in opinion. Now that we’re all aware that I’m aware that I’m wallowing in subjectivity, I’m going to wallow in subjectivity.
Below is a list of my top five underrated position prospects. The criteria are that the player is toiling in at least High-A this season (meaning the California, Carolina and Florida State leagues or higher) and did not appear in any iterations of our Top 50 Prospect List.
Let’s light this candle…
Back 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.
It was 9:30 p.m. on a nondescript Tuesday night in April. The Bronx air was a
little damp, a little cool, and filled with tension and frustration. The
Yankees trailed 8-4 to the Oakland A’s in the eighth inning, having watched
their nominal ace blow an early 4-1 lead while pushing his ERA up to 6.55.
Coming off an embarrassing three-game sweep by the Red Sox, this game was
pushing the 8-10–soon to be 8-11–team ever closer to one of those mid-1980s
scenes in which a manager, a pitching coach, and two or three random clubhouse
attendants were fired.
Then Bernie Williams singled. Then Alex Rodriguez singled right behind him. Then Jason Giambi walked.
By a little after 10 p.m., the Yankees had a 10-8 lead and a new lease on
life. That half-hour, in which they beat up Jim Mecir and
Ricardo Rincon for six runs, looks like the most important
moment of the 2004 season. The Yankees won that game, the next seven after it
and have gone 30-9 since then, buring the field on the way to posting, by far,
the best record in baseball. A team that couldn’t score to save its life in
April, that put up an anemic four runs in losing three games to its hated
rival on the last weekend of that month, has hit like a team full of
Jeff Kent clones since then…
I spent about a half an hour today talking with a professional pitching coach about pitching. It was a great experience and he left with my book, but I left with something better. As I meet more people in baseball, I find more who want to make the game better, who are willing to be open-minded about new approaches, new research, and new possibilities. Stories like Dayn Perry’s Beer and Tacos article and Steven Goldman’s on Moneyball started to articulate a foundation for this new school of thought. Instead of the tired old school/new school debate that has become more holy war than revolution, there’s a “middle school” that is actually making inroads in the game. I’m firmly planting my feet there in the median.
Reports have been mixed on Kevin Brown. Early in the day, it looked like Brown’s back injury wasn’t serious. It was described to me as a “slip. His cleat didn’t catch and he overstepped, so his back took the worst of it.” Reports later in the day wavered between caution and fear. Brown will have some imaging and therapy, but there’s no determination yet on how serious the problem is. The Yanks don’t have the pitching depth to absorb an injury well, but there’s always the possibility that they’ll go get an extra arm.
One of the entertaining elements to following the Cubs this year is witnessing just how the city’s reactions have changed in light of the lofty expectations foisted on the team prior to the start of the season. Ordinarily, a 30-28 record during the first 90-degree week of the summer would be cause for celebration. This time around, it has triggered grave concern, as the red-on-blue Cub flag flies feebly beneath those of the Reds, Cards and Astros atop the center field scoreboard at Wrigley. One of the problems, it seems, is not that the Cubs aren’t scoring enough runs, but that they aren’t scoring them at the right times.
It’s no secret that I don’t like interleague play. It’s a gimmick that throws the schedule into chaos for the sake of letting the Yankees play the Mets six times.
If that’s an exaggeration, it’s only a slight one. The selling point of
interleague play is the eight or nine “natural rivalries” that are
played out each season, with the rest of the interleague schedule built around
them. Whatever nonsense is spread about allowing fans in cities of one league
to see the stars of another is just smoke and mirrors, because in some places,
it will take 30 years for the entire other league to make a visit.
I wouldn’t mind as much if MLB would just admit that interleague play exists
for the natural rivalries. Ratchet it down, make interleague just those games
each year and force everyone else into two matchups built around those two
weekends. MLB would rather sell the idea that interleague is hugely popular,
publishing context-free attendance figures–four of six interleague series are
on the weekend again, all are in June, and the natural rivalries will drive
the attendance gains–as part of the perpetual misinformation campaign.
Troy Percival hits the disabled list for the Angels. The White Sox lose Magglio Ordonez for a couple weeks. Eric Chavez breaks his hand, forcing the rest of the A’s offense to pick up the slack. Mark Prior makes his long-awaited return to Chicago’s north side. Milton Bradley gets a four-game suspension for another temper tantrum. And Dos Molinas suddenly becomes Tres Molinas, with the addition of Yadir to the MLB family. All this and much more news from around the league in your Thursday edition of Transaction Analysis.
The Marlins have spent the whole year exceeding expectations. Can they keep it up? Hideki Matsui has turned into a different type of hitter. And the Pirates’ two best hitters share the same last name, but little else in terms of ability. All this and much more news from Florida, New York, and Pittsburgh in your Thursday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Tools Vs. Performance – MWF, 8:00
It’s not often you find a good tools-versus-performance debate among the fraternity paddle crowd (i.e., college draftees)–usually this forms the parameters of the prep-collegiate arguments that have become old hat by now–but there’s one to be found this year in Seth Smith against Dustin Pedroia. Smith, an outfielder for Ole Miss, went at number 50 to the Rockies, while Pedroia, Arizona State’s starting shortstop, was the Red Sox’s first pick at number 65.
Derek Jeter seems to draw more emotional responses than anyone, whether through discussions of his defense or his place in the Pantheon. His recent struggles with his injured groin have taxed my inbox, but the injury is not worth the pixels; it’s as simple as they come, a straightforward strain. Sure the injury is painful, and he’ll miss a bit of time, but it’s also predictable, treatable and healing. People seem to forget that even when they’re emotional about a player, the rules of medicine still apply. Your captain will return, likely on Wednesday.
The Cubs-Cards series is one of those great happenings, but without Sammy Sosa and Albert Pujols, fans aren’t getting exactly what they expected. Both players will miss this series, but both are making progress. Pujols is seeing a reduction in the swelling of his hamstring, enough so that Tony La Russa had him available as a pinch-hitter, but only in an emergency. (Is a 17-inning game an emergency? I’ve never seen a game go this late into the UTK process as the Angels-Brewers epic.) Sosa was able to take batting practice, but remains a week away from returning to the lineup. His back is still tender, but there’s been great improvement.
Homo 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.
In Baseball Prospectus 2004, our authors ranked Devil Rays farmhand B.J. Upton as the No. 8 prospect in the game, while Baseball America on pegged him at No. 2 on their preseason list. Since then Upton’s done nothing to make those rankings look foolish, and at the tender age of 19, has already found himself playing shortstop every day at Triple-A Durham, where he’s currently hitting .315/.422/.565. Since being taken second overall in the 2002 amateur draft, Upton has been covered by John Sickels at ESPN.com and by David Cameron here at BP.
Baseball Prospectus caught up with Upton before a recent home game against the Syracuse Skychiefs, where we discussed tough pitchers, being a role model, and what it takes to improve defensive performance.
High school or college, position player or pitcher, the one constant in the
amateur draft is that no one seems to like Scott Boras’ players.
That was rarely as evident as it was yesterday as two Boras clients, each
considered the #1 draft prospect at one point during the college season, fell
to #12 and #15 on a draft day marked by an all-out search for pitching.
The Padres, picking first, passed on Florida State shortstop Stephen Drew to
instead take local high schooler Matt Bush, who signed almost immediately for
$3.15 million. Bush was probably only the second-best prep shortstop prospect
in the pool, and joins Adrian Gonzalez has a recent overall #1 who holds his
spot in history more for financial reasons than talent ones. Drew, who was
rumored to be the Padres’ choice as late as Friday, slipped all the way to
#15, where the Diamondbacks ended his torment. Given that the gap between #15
money and #1 money has range from $2-$3 million over the past few years, a
heck of a negotiation awaits Drew and the Snakes.