“Addition by subtraction” is one of those terms that seems exclusive to sports, and more specifically to baseball. While it would seem to apply in other walks of life, you just don’t see it used very much. “Tina, you know Bob from accounting? He quit.” “Heck, that’s addition by subtraction; he never made deadlines, and he was always hitting on me.”
In baseball, however, addition by subtraction has a long and storied history. Over the past 48 hours, we may have the seen the concept have its all-time peak.
The data for all regular players from 2000-2003 still shows that sacrifices are almost never a good idea. Putting the 2001 version of Ichiro–the player with the highest breakeven point for Batter One’s AVG–in front of every batter, the minimum expected runs lost by sacrificing over swinging away is 0.018, when Ichiro bats in front of Chris Truby in 2002 and his massive .199/.215/.282 line while he was in Detroit. Using other batters who are also highly adept at taking advantage of a sacrifice for Batter Two yield no situations in which run expectation increases by sacrificing, at least when there’s a runner on first and one out.
Expanding the results to look at other sacrifice situations does not change these conclusions. Looking at the second situation–a runner on first and no outs–and using the same plan of attack, the smallest difference between sacrificing and swinging away is again Truby and Suzuki, but this time the difference is .085 runs. Other players who come close are Craig Paquette in 2002, Alex Gonzalez in 2000, and Pat Meares in 2001 with .100, .107, and .114, respectively. (Not surprisingly, the three players who should never sacrifice as Batter One are Barry Bonds 2003, Barry Bonds 2001, and Barry Bonds 2002, costing the team .466, .481, and .518 runs respectively.)
Bob DuPuy says there’s nothing wrong with putting ads on the bases. Fay Vincent disagrees. Barry Bonds couldn’t care less what’s on the bases, as long as he gets to round them. Mike Mussina wonders what the future holds. Manny Ramirez is prepared to help help keep Pedro around. Larry Bowa is confused as to why his team isn’t hitting well with RISP. Lloyd McClendon thinks MLB needs to market itself better. And Darin Erstad doesn’t count last year in his mind. All this and many more quips from around the league in your Monday edition of The Week In Quotes.
Early word on the knee and ankle injuries suffered by Jose Guillen is pretty negative. Guillen injured himself sliding into second and needed to be carted from the field. Tests on Monday will reveal the damage. With Darin Erstad and Garret Anderson already on the DL for extended periods, the Angels will have an outfield that has only one of their expected powerhouses, while prospect Casey Kotchman will be asked to man Erstad’s position at first. The depth that once looked like overkill has turned out to be necessary. Erstad’s hamstring injury will keep him out much longer than originally expected, and may be as bad as a Grade 3 strain. He’s looking at missing at least a month, potentially not returning until the All-Star break. With Anderson, the Angels and their medical staff still have no idea what is causing the pain. They’ve ruled out disc problems and arthritis, but until they have a cause, Anderson has been completely shut down.
Let’s leave the Angels and their fans with some good news: Tim Salmon should be back by next week. Brendan Donnelly may actually beat Salmon back to Anaheim. He’ll make a couple of appearances in Salt Lake City, then return to his setup role.
I was disappointed that baseball backed off its plans to put Spider-Man 2 logos on bases in order to bring more kids into the game. What’s baseball coming to when you can sign an agreement with those guys and they back off it over a little negative publicity? Isn’t a deal a deal?
It’s bad enough that MLB turns out to be so cowardly that it’ll turn its back on the children they were trying to help, but what about the other outreach campaigns to widen baseball’s appeal? Once they’re putting ads in the field of play, it’s open season: We can change the field, the game, whatever we want, in order to reach new audiences by running advertisements that they’ll identify with.
This is my fourth year of having the Extra Innings satellite package. Over the years, I’ve developed something of a system that determines what my “main” games are in any given time slot. Usually, I’m watching the most interesting pitching or team matchup, or perhaps someone’s debut or pursuit of a record. My default if there are no games of note is the Yankee game, and if they aren’t playing at a particular time, I could end up focusing on almost any matchup.
Mind you, I do all of this with remote in hand and a scoreboard Web page reloading on my screen so that I can jump to rallies or key moments. It’s sometimes hard to believe that a little over a decade ago I was a slave to “Baseball Tonight” and hoping that the New York Daily News had the West Coast box scores. This is really a golden age of sports fandom.
This year, I’ve been adjusting my personal decision tree. I’ve found myself watching the Brewers more and more, particularly the latter part of their games, after the 4 p.m. Pacific games come to a close. They’re really growing on me. Scott Podsednik is the player people think Darin Erstad is, Ben Sheets is on the brink of a Greg Maddux circa ’92 leap, two-way player Brooks Kieschnick, with an OPS nearly 10 times his ERA, is more fun than Jonah Keri on a Boone’s Farm binge. Keith Ginter is one of my guys for ’04, while the guy he’s been starting for over the last week, Junior Spivey, is an underrated second baseman, kind of Ray Durham Lite. Two years ago, I flagged Doug Davis as the pitcher with the best chance to have Jamie Moyer’s career, and I root for that every time he takes the mound. Hell, they’ve even resurrected Ben Grieve!
I got more than a few e-mails yesterday about Webgate, MLB’s plan to, as put
by most people, desecrate the bases with a promotional graphic for the
upcoming Spider-Man 2 movie. It’s a moo point–“Friends”
tribute–now, as MLB has backed away from the logoed bases in the face of
overwhelming fan and media backlash.
During the day that the plan was in place, I couldn’t get worked up about it,
in the same way that I couldn’t get worked up about the ads that appeared on
uniforms during the season-opening series in Japan. While I know that some
people consider these things to be an affront, as well as an aesthetic
nightmare, I consider neither to be the case. Certainly uniform and base ads
are less intrusive in person than ballpark signage or between-innings
advertising blasted at 110 decibels. For those watching at home, ads
superimposed on the backstop on every pitch are clearly a greater incursion on
the experience. If MLB could mine one more revenue source without detracting
from the game–and six-by-six painted squares certainly pale in comparison to
the profile of the other marketing messages being conveyed–then more power to
them.
Jose Contreras was banished all the way down to A-ball. The Mariners finally euthanized that dying animal known as Kevin Jarvis, while extending Bob Melvin’s contract for 2005. The Brewers signed Scott Podsednik for another two years. All this and much more news from around the league in your Friday edition of Transaction Analysis.
The calendar has flipped, we’ve all celebrated that strange Mexican holiday by cramming fruit in our beers, and power bills around the country are preparing for the arduous climb that will face them in the coming months. Clearly, it’s time to prematurely hand out (a split infinitive… for the people!) awards for the 2004 season. Here’s my hardware for the season’s first checkpoint. For my criteria, I’m using the dread “If the season ended today…” qualifier that leads to so much analytical white noise. Five months from now, these picks may be as relevant as Justin Guarini circa 2007, but, nevertheless, here they are…
Positive Signs: The Indians started off this season almost as badly as their mates here, but then knocked off four straight against Baltimore and Boston before a Wednesday loss. Pleasant surprises have included the performance of lefty Cliff Lee who has gone five games, though not very deep into them–only 28.1 innings–hasn’t allowed a home run yet, and in his last three games struck out 17 in 18.1 innings. Lee is a 6’3″ guy with a rare repertoire for a pitcher of his size. He gets batters out with movement and his wicked slider more than sheer speed, and his success is a testament to the Indians’ ability to look at what their prospects can do, rather than fixate on trying to get the big guy to throw 97 and close. Lee was part of the deal with the Expos that brought in Grady Sizemore, Brandon Phillips and (cough) Lee Stevens in exchange for Bartolo Colon and Tim Drew.
Meanwhile, catcher Victor Martinez is creaming the ball: .286/.364/.519 (through Wednesday) and looking like the stellar catching prospect that we saw in him back in the day. Like Lee, Martinez is just 25 and part of the Indians youth movement that could build the next contender. Martinez also got some national attention when he hit a two-run home run in the first inning off of Curt Schilling on Monday that stood up in a 2-1 win. These two are backed up by Travis Hafner, who’s mashing at a .313/.417/.550 rate (through Wednesday).
In the third installment of this series, I review the ticket options for fans in MLB’s smallest but most geographically dispersed division, the AL West.
If you’ve read the first two installments (Part I, Part II), you know the drill. To simulate the average fan’s experience, I pick a mid-week game, then shop for tickets on MLB.com a few weeks in advance. (I made an exception for Anaheim, choosing their next available mid-week series–since their next two mid-week visitors are the Yankees and Red Sox, I thought the earlier date would still be more representative.)
First I shop for my imaginary family of four, whose ideal combination of price and view is usually behind the plate and towards the front of the upper deck. Then I pretend that my imaginary family just won the lottery, shopping instead for the best available block of four seats (as determined by MLB’s ticket computer) anywhere in the ballpark. The seats available for the family of four serve as a rough proxy for the club’s season-ticket and advance sales. Then I play Stranger Visiting Town, looking for a single seat. My expense-account alter ego shops for the best seat available through MLB.com, while his starving-student counterpart heads right for the cheapest seats in the park.
Next, I scan the club Web sites for promotions that could reduce the cost of my hypothetical fans’ attendance, as well as unusual promotions and giveaway items. Finally, I write a snappy summary and prepare to start the process all over again with another division.
One of the most striking discoveries of much of the statistical research done in baseball over the last 20 years is that outs are more valuable than bases. This breakthrough means that stolen bases are only good when the stolen base percentage is above a certain break-even point. Furthermore, it means that “sacrifices” are an extremely bad idea if you’re trying to score runs, which we’d like to assume everyone is trying to do–even that team in Los Angeles.
I was at Safeco Field on Tuesday, watching a fast-moving game that was on pace to wrap up 3-2 Mariners in about two and a half hours, and ended up with one of the longest, craziest games I’ve ever attended.
I scored this game. I’ve been working on an article about scoring and finding a good card to match your style, and thought I’d finally settled on one. This game, of course, became the torture-test for a scorecard:
One big issue I didn’t address when I wrote about the wrong-headedness of the earned run rule last month is the idea that, while the rule may have outlived its usefulness today, it was necessary and meaningful in the error-filled early days of baseball. An old friend, Steve Thornton, put the argument well in a recent letter:
Your article on UERA, and the follow-up piece in Mailbag, are interesting. While I agree with you that the current system hasn’t made a lot of sense for the past 50 years or so, I think you’re missing, or glossing over, the history of the earned run.
Americans 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.
Leaving aside whether anyone should take seriously statements made by the guy
who said he was moving the White Sox to Tampa, on the face of it the idea
is a no-brainer. In terms of market size, the New York metro area is
mind-bogglingly huge, dwarfing every other market in American baseball.
Even splitting the market in half (OK, more like 65/35) the Yankees and
Mets each have enough TV-rights firepower to blow away the rest of the
league at free-agent time. You could put a team in Jersey and three more
in Brooklyn, and each of the six area franchises would still have a larger
populace to draw on than the likes of Milwaukee or Cincinnati.