The Greek God of Walks has been a boon for the Red Sox. Scott Stewart gets a well-deserved demotion by the Indians. The Mets could be in decent shape if they can get all hands on deck. John Mabry makes it back to the bigs with Cardinals. Alexis Rios gets a taste of the majors with the Blue Jays. These and other happenings in today’s Transaction Analysis.
Excellent columns on sacrificing. One question though. In the situation where the team is looking for just one run, and there is a runner on 2nd with no outs. If I were the opposing manager, and the other team succesfully sacrificed the runner to third, depending on the next batters, I might give batter two an intentional walk and hope for a double play to get out of the inning. Does this response by the opposing manager change the effectiveness of the strategy?
–J.P.
You make an excellent point. Running the numbers assuming that a GIDP is possible after a sacrifice of the man to third, the breakeven levels now read:
AVG: .306
OBP: .384
SLG: .516
(Instead of the .351/.436/.619 line from the article.) Obviously this reduces the number of players who should be sacrificing from “everyone except Bonds” to simply the vast majority. I will definitely include this correction in future adjustments to the equations. Thanks for pointing out the shortfall.
One 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.
Even after losing their last two games to the Florida Marlins, the Cincinnati
Reds still have the best record in the National League, now tied with those
same Marlins. They hold a half-game lead over the Astros in an NL Central that
is separated by just 4.5 games from top to bottom.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before. The six teams in
the Central have been playing this game almost since realignment. For example,
a year ago today, the top four teams were just 3.5 games apart, with the whole
division showing just a nine-game spread. It took until the second week of
June, when the Reds and Brewers started collapsing, for the division to
separate. On May 27, 2001, the top four teams in the division were within four
games of each other.
The NL Central just hasn’t had exceptional teams, so the early part of the
season has often been spent beating up each other, and getting beat up by
whichever of the East or West is up in a particular year.
There’s a lot of fog in every report on Andy Pettitte, but while some would like you to believe that you can’t get good info, I just say they don’t know where to look. Most of the key to analyzing Pettitte’s injury lies in the description of the injury. We noted that Pettitte was holding his elbow, not his forearm, and that was a good clue. Most reports, including this good one in the Houston Chronicle, indicate that the team is waiting 48 hours to evaluate the injury. The reason is likely that there’s swelling in the area, which could make some imaging more difficult. While the team is putting a happy face on it by saying Pettitte might not miss his next start–which is possible–the injury appears to be as serious as the elbow injury that landed him on the DL in April.
Forearm problems appear to be in vogue in the league, at least among good Southern pitchers. Jake Peavy was near his Mobile home testing his arm (after his wife gave birth–congrats) and the flexor tendinitis was enough to push him to the DL. It’s not considered a severe injury, but just enough to keep the Pads ace off the mound as a precaution. Expect him to be out the minimum and to come back without much problem. With the staff also missing DL’d David Wells, suffering through sub-par seasons by Adam Eaton and Brian Lawrence as well as the flailings of Ismael Valdez, it’s shocking to see the Pads atop the NL West. Thanks, Dodger losing streak!
Many teams have built new stadiums only to see their teams fail and their attendance drop. But look at the Seattle Mariners: Could it be that they’ve struck upon the nightmare of the true fan? Are they turning into a team with a large fan base that thinks of games as good, clean entertainment, who will show up at a state-of-the-art stadium when the team is good or when they’re bad, just as long as it features nice, wholesome young men with winning smiles?
Atlanta’s deal for J.D. Drew looks good, and but John Thomson hasn’t lived up to hopes. Speaking of Drews, will the Devil Rays have a shot to draft J.D.’s little brother? And Toronto’s large crop of top prospects are off to a mixed start in 2004. All this and much more news from Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and Toronto in your Thursday Prospectus Triple Play.
Two months ago, the Oakland Athletics signed Eric Chavez to a six-year, $66 million contract extension that will keep him with the club through 2010. Despite some head-scratching from the public, there are good reasons behind why Billy Beane campaigned to do for Chavez what he hadn’t done for former MVP shortstop Miguel Tejada. Unlike Tejada, Chavez is a player whose skills, like his fine defense and his ever-improving plate discipline, are likely to be undervalued by the market. On top of which, Chavez has continued to demonstrate growth season after season, and PECOTA thinks that he’s a very safe bet going forward.
It is no secret, however, that Chavez has a tragic flaw: he can’t hit left-handed pitching. From 2001-2003, Chavez managed a stellar line of .306/.375/.579 against right-handers, but a Mathenian .229/.278/.395 against southpaws. The A’s, recognizing his defensive value and perhaps hoping that repetition would breed improvement, continued to start him anyway, in spite of a rotating array of viable platoon alternatives.
This year, indeed, has brought about a turnaround–Chavez is crushing lefties so far on the season (.288/.373/.561), while performing well below his career averages against righties (.214/.358/.398). Whether there’s any rationale for the change other than sample size, I’m not certain (I don’t get to see the West Coast teams play as often as I’d like to). What is clear, however, is that if such a change becomes permanent–if Chavez learns how to hit left-handed pitching at the age of 26–it would be a relatively unprecedented development. In most cases, a platoon split for a left-handed hitter is something like a finger print or a dental record: it remains a readily identifiable and more or less unchanging part of his profile throughout the different stages of his playing life. A left-handed hitter with a big platoon split early in his career is, in all likelihood, going to have a big platoon split later in his career.
Thursday in Indianapolis is so big, the state should just go ahead and call it a holiday. At the Indy 500, the Thursday before the race is called “Carburetion Day,” or to locals, “Carb Day.” In the heyday of the race, all 33 cars would be out on the track making final adjustments to their setups. From then on, the cars are locked down until Sunday morning. Of course, it’s been years since there were actually carburetors on these million-dollar engines, but the name still holds. It’s a tradition that, with the changes at the Speedway, have become a shell of the past–but it’s still pretty great. It’s impressive that 50,000 people watching cars practice can be considered failure, that pit-stops can be turned into a spectator sport, and that more beer will be consumed in five hours than at all seven games of the last five World Series. What makes me sad is that the good old days seem to keep some from appreciating what we have now.
Baseball is like that some days. People pine for the days that probably weren’t as good as they remember. Worse, they actively try to pull baseball back into the mythic grasp of the few. It’s just another battle in the war that has been raging for the last 30 or 40 years. Some want you to believe that baseball is myth, and that only they can give you a peek inside the mystical workings of the game. Others show that anyone with an original thought and sufficient effort can open the game up and make it better, whether they’re a national columnist, a writer in Kansas, or a guy who talks about groin pulls with an uncomfortable regularity.
Baseball belongs to all of us, and shame on anyone that tries to take it away. On to the injuries…
Red Sox pitcher Charlie Zink is a rarity among pitchers: a 24-year-old knuckleballer. As a traditional pitcher in the Sally League, Zink put up a 1.68 ERA in relief in 2002 before the big club converted him to a full-time knuckleball pitcher. Zink posted a 3.90 ERA in High-A last year before improving on that with a 3.43 ERA in 39 innings at AA. This year, he cracked BP’s Top 50 Prospects list. We sat down with Zink last week before a road game against the New Britain Rock Cats, and asked him about life as one of baseball’s rarest breeds.
Adam Dunn is O.P.T. draw 162 walks on the season, which would be the fourth-highest total of all-time.
Dunn, who’s abusing the ball to the tune of .271/.457/.564 and is tied for third in the NL with a .348 EqA, has often been criticized for being too patient at the plate. It’s possible there’s merit to that idea, but he’s knocking the snot out of the ball and he has more unintentional/quasi-unintentional walks than Barry Bonds. If he keeps this up, comparisons to a mid-’90s Frank Thomas won’t be off base.
Leave it to Randy Johnson to ruin a perfectly good trivia question. At the
end of my previous article on “Hidden
Perfect Games,” I included a trivia question on the remaining pitcher who
tossed two perfect games (hidden or not), having already named Pedro Martinez and Tom Browning. In the meantime, Randy Johnson threw an “official” perfect game on May 18th, to go along
with a hidden perfect game in 1998, to add his name to list of those attaining multiple perfection.
In response to the original question, many people sent in their guesses…
Here’s a nod to Buck Showalter, who moved Hank Blalock
down to sixth in the lineup last night against Scott
Schoeneweis, after batting him second against everyone for the entire
season (and most of ’03). Blalock has improved slightly against left-handers,
enough to warrant his continued playing time against them, but not enough to
justify batting him second. Moving him down in the lineup acknowledges the
team’s need to score runs while allowing Blalock to keep getting reps against
southpaws.
More teams should find this middle ground, rather than either stubbornly
batting guys who can’t hit one side in the same lineup spot all the time, or
giving up and sticking them into a platoon.
I found out about Doug Pappas’ tragic passing on Friday. There were phone messages on both my cell phone and home phone from a number of people, all with a more serious tone to their voices than you’d really like to hear. None of the people actually left the momentous news, but rather some version of “Give me a call the second you get this message.” Moments later, I checked my e-mail, and a barrage of messages with the header “Sad News” scrolled up my screen.
Doug Pappas had passed away. My friend, a colleague for whom I have immense respect, and all-around good guy, had departed from us too soon. My initial response was the same during those horrid times when another friend had died; it sounds strange, but my first impulse is to give him a call and find out what was really going on. It can’t be right, you know? This has got to be some sort of misunderstanding, right? Doug’s only 43, in good health, and a standup guy. Must be someone else. There’s definitely a big ball of confusion out there, and this is completely out of left field. I felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach and stolen the air from the room, but I knew it was a mistake. Had to be.
It wasn’t. And we are all diminished because of it. Doug’s particular chosen role was a particularly difficult one–to call the powerful on the inaccuracy or dishonesty of their public statements. That’s not easy. Over the years, Doug came out and publicly pointed out the inaccuracies, contradictions, and misleading nature of Major League Baseball’s financial disclosures. He did his homework, explained his position, made sure that the MLB functionary’s agenda was understood by the public, and stood by his work. It was an often thankless and misunderstood role, but the public interest was well served because Doug was willing to vigorously undertake it.
With all the injuries the Angels have been dealing with, the one that’s perhaps the most concerning to them is that of Bartolo Colon’s mysterious loss of velocity. Colon’s apparent lack of fitness has never deterred him from being an ace-level starter and one of an elite few that actually gain velocity as the game goes on. Like Mark Prior and Livan Hernandez, Colon doesn’t throw with full effort on every pitch, something often done in previous eras. However, over the last few starts, Colon has started around 90 mph–and then gone down. Velocity loss is a measure of fatigue in the best case and an omen of shoulder injury in the worst, so the Angels are watching him closely. You should as well.
There are some pained e-mails from Cubs fans determined to “prove” that the Cubs are lying about Kerry Wood. Why would he have a good result from the bone scan, then have it released that he’d be out another two weeks? Simply put, there are two things going on here. The Cubs realize they botched the public relations part of the Mark Prior injury, so they’re trending toward to the cautious. They’re also being more cautious with their two aces’ arms, perhaps realizing that it’s not worth the risk, and saves innings they could need even more in October. The results they’ve had with the rest of the staff and the current standings give them the luxury to be conservative.
Walking down Occidental to a Mariners game is a great experience. There’s the smell of brats on grills, roasted peanuts and kettle corn, the bad music of persistent street musicians and the chatter of fellow fans walking south to the stadium…
…And guys selling programs. Independent programs. Many teams only have one program, the one the team puts out, but in Seattle, we have a choice.
I bought both this week to compare, and the results…man, I pity people in cities without competition, if their team-issued programs are anything like this.