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.
Zack Greinke finally gets the call in Kansas City. Jason Giambi hits the DL for the Yanks. Richie Sexson comes off and returns to the DL for the D’backs within a matter of days. Ben Petrick retires after revealing he’s been battling a horrible disease for the past three years. And Dennis Tankersley gets another shot in San Diego. All this and much more news from around the league in your Tuesday edition of Transaction Analysis.
The White Sox are scoring runs in bunches this year, thanks in no small part to…Juan Uribe? The A’s acquisition of Eric Karros isn’t looking too good, especially when you consider that Graham Koonce is still waiting in the wings. And the Phillies have finally grabbed a piece of first place in the NL East after a month of unperforming. All this and much more news from Chicago, Oakland, and Philadelphia in your Tuesday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
I was checking out BP’s Adjusted Standings report this morning. I think we’re
far enough into the season that the report is useful in indicating which
teams’ win-loss records are clouding their true performance, for better or
worse. Schedules are pretty unbalanced–how many games have the Red Sox played
in Skydome this year? Six? Seventeen? Twenty-five?–and the effects of under- or overperforming
Pythagenport, or being particularly efficient or inefficient in generating
runs out of offensive events, are beginning to be felt. It’s interesting to
look at these gaps and find the performance issues–great, now I’m going to
trip spam filters–that cause them.
Take those Red Sox, for instance. With 228 runs scored and 180 runs allowed,
their record of 27-17 is a match for their Pythag mark. But according to Clay
Davenport’s calculations, the Sox should have a 241-167 edge in runs. The
offensive gap, which has cost them at least one win, is mostly explained by
the team’s early-season struggles with runners on base: 251/.342/.403, as
opposed to a whopping .281/.364/.468 with the bases empty. There’s no reason
to believe that the Sox have some inability to hit with runners on–most teams
hit a bit better in that situation–and their performance in May has been much
better than what they did in April, so they should be find going forward.
We have a Nick Johnson sighting! So often, even the slightest Johnson news seems almost too cruel with a legion of people that drafted him high (myself included) hoping against hope that they’ll see some return–not to mention the team that traded for him in real life. Johnson is finally making progress, but again, I’m not going to say that he couldn’t blink wrong and end up starting the rehab process again. Still, a 3-5 day with a homer is a major positive. If all goes well this week, he could make his Montreal debut near Memorial Day.
Jose Reyes is also making progress in extended spring training. (Jeez, if both Reyes and Johnson make it back in June, what will I write about?) Reyes has had good results in back-to-back extended spring training games, hitting and running well. There’s still some room for improvement, but it appears that the changes made in his rehab program are paying off. If all goes well, Reyes will likely make a quick rehab stop in the minors and could be back in the Mets lineup by the first week of June.
Randy Johnson describes what it’s like to be perfect. Jason Schmidt and Tom Glavine describe what it’s like to come close. Bud Selig thinks the Expos will find a new home soon. Reggie Jackson is honored by a few of his peers. And Kevin McClatchy wants to build the Pirates into a winner through a fruitful farm system. All this and many more quips from around the league in your Monday edition of The Week In Quotes.