Back by popular demand, I bring you another installment of “Conversations With Dave,” which are, in fact, not with Dave, but with someone not named Dave at all, who’s not a stathead or blogger, or even a management consultant. The conversation was not transcribed perfectly, but Dave has had an opportunity to review and approve the final copy, to make certain he wasn’t misrepresented.
Jaret Wright doesn’t get it. Jim Hendry and Dusty Baker talk chemistry. Doubles or home runs? Tough question, according to the Brewers. All this and more in this week’s edition of The Week In Quotes.
The last week was a whirlwind, with four Pizza Feeds in three days in the Philadelphia and New York areas. At every one, I got to meet enthusiastic BP readers who provided both great feedback on the book and the Web site, as well as hours of interesting baseball talk. The highlights for me were the first and last events: Tuesday afternoon’s Feed in Philly’s Central City included a great Q&A session from an overflow crowd, while Thursday night’s session in Brooklyn featured another group that spilled out into the Fiction and Literature aisles, and a panel of five BPers touching on everything from fantasy baseball to what wins in the postseason to the World War II-era Washington Senators. One thing I’ll take from this trip is the enthusiasm for baseball I encountered in both cities. For all the shots Philadelphia sports fans have taken, they seem genuinely excited about this year’s team and the opening of Citizens Bank Ballpark. They have good reason to be, because their boys are the consensus favorite to win the NL East. Even my pessimism about Larry Bowa can’t convince me that the Phillies will do anything but win the division comfortably this year. Meanwhile, New York was its usual baseball-crazed self; I had any number of random conversations with people who, upon discovering what it is I do, wanted to give me their analysis of the Yankees’ rotation, the Mets’ new acquisitions, and the not-so-popular baseball team located a bit to the Northeast.
I’m going to type “it’s time to answer some reader mail” into AltaVista’s Babelfish, translate it from English to German, from German to French and then from French back to English. Then, I’ll take what comes out of the wash, translate it from English to French, French to German and then back to English. And we have: “it is a time, in order to answer to the station of the reader.” This entertains me.
This 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.
John Patterson and Juan Cruz: good riddance, or highway robbery? The Astros drop another roadblock in Morgan Ensburg’s way. Itinerant pitcher Bruce Chen’s destiny likely includes fitting for a few more major league uniforms. All this and more in Friday’s Transaction Analysis.
The Diamondbacks may not look deep, but they’re one of few teams with solid upper level pitching prospects, they’ve got a deep bench, and they develop pitchers well, if slowly. As they unwind some of the financial machinations that brought them a ring, they’re slowly becoming the type of team fans like to root for–homegrown, but recognizable. Is that good enough to win this season? They should be healthy enough to find out.
A rundown of the contenders for the two open Indians rotation slots. Thurston or Cora: who’s the man at second? This could be a big season for Ichiro! on the Mariners’ career lists. All this and more news and notes from Seattle, Los Angeles, and Cleveland in today’s Triple Play.
Subway should call the agent for Victor Diaz and see if he’s interested in shilling for the company. The Mets’ own male version of Oprah is back to the normal-sized player that the Dodgers thought highly of, rather than the rotund version they shipped off for two months of Jeromy Burnitz. A rumored move to third base was mentioned in St. Lucie, however, as his inability to turn the double play was becoming an issue in camp.
For all the criticism that the Devil Rays take–deservedly–for their on-field misadventures, they do medhead well. Over the past three seasons, no one has done it better. How can a team be so bad in most areas and so good in another? The simple answer is commitment. At some point, the Rays management decided that losing players to the DL was unacceptable. With trainers Jamie Reed (now of the Texas Rangers) and Ken Crenshaw and team doctors James Andrews and Koco Eaton, the Devil Rays did the medical equivalent of signing Alex Rodriguez and Pedro Martinez. From the simple to the technical, the Devil Rays’ medical staff has become second to none. It shows. While their dollars lost to DL stats are skewed by the fact that they don’t spend many dollars, they were among the best in days lost to the DL. The question is, do they get enough advantage from what seems to be their one area of excellence? For now, the answer is no. Keeping mediocre-at-best players healthy only keeps a team from plumbing the depths of replacement level.
The Diamondbacks left themselves thin in the outfield. The Royals’ off-season moves could pay off in the standings. The Phillies need to get Chase Utley in the lineup. These and other news and notes out of Arizona, Kansas City, and Philadelphia in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
One of the most important differences between a starter’s job and a reliever’s is that relievers often have to enter the game with a crisis already brewing. In addition to the normal pitching responsibility of preventing batters from coming around to score, the reliever often has the task of preventing runners already on-base from touching home as well. His handling of those inherited runners is a critical part of his overall job performance, but it’s one that gets very little attention in mainstream baseball coverage. It doesn’t show up in ERA or any other widely available stat; and while you’ll occasionally hear a mention of a reliever’s “stranded runner percentage,” that’s not a number you’ll find listed in the tables of your morning paper. Besides, just measuring the percentage of inherited runners that were stranded (or the percentage that scored) doesn’t paint a complete picture of the inherited runner issue. For one thing, in many cases those inherited runners are still on base when the reliever leaves the game. If Joe LOOGY comes in the game with a runner on second and none out, he strikes his batter out, and then gets taken out of the game, it doesn’t make sense to count that runner as “not stranded” or “not scored”. To see this in practice: Tom Martin was easily the majors’ best reliever in percentage of inherited runners scored, according to STATS Inc.’s list, and Buddy Groom was the AL leader. But those ratings of Martin and Groom, both situational lefties, were inflated by the fact that they didn’t finish innings nearly as often as the average reliever. They didn’t allow their inherited runners to score partly because they were taken out of the game before they had a chance to.
If you’re anyone other than a key decision maker for most teams in baseball, you’re probably aware that you shouldn’t place too much emphasis on spring training stats. Besides the obvious (to most) sample-size caveats, there’s also a litany of other reasons not to take Cactus or Grapefruit League numbers terribly awfully really very seriously. For one, an inordinate amount of the playing time goes to reclamation projects, prospects not quite ready for competition at the highest level, minor league vagabond types or veteran performers tinkering around with a new pitch or reconstructed swing. It’s simply not the sort of premium level of competition you’ll find in regular season contests. While spring training numbers should be taken more seriously than, say, laundry instructions or warning labels on beer, they’re still not to be imbued with head-slapping importance. All that said, this time out I’m going to take a look at a handful of spring performances that do have a reasonable degree of import for one reason or another.
In 1980, the world witnessed a hockey Miracle. In 1999, the United States watched its down-and-out Ryder Cup team explode into a jarring celebration on the 17th green. We love international competition. In 2005, we’re hoping to see a rumored World Cup of Baseball.
So, as is our wont, we’ve started poking into some numbers. Assuming the World Cup comes to fruition, and assuming (big assumption) everybody plays, how might the teams stack up?
So far, it’s been all U.S. On the hitting side, we named eight starting position players to come up with each team’s total MLVr+D, a crude measure of hitting and defense, measured in terms of runs plus or minus Major League average. We focused only on those countries with a sufficient number of players in Major League Baseball to field teams: the U.S., the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico (treated as a separate country just for fun), and Venezuela. At the end of our analysis it was readily apparent that Team U.S.A., and even a Second Team U.S.A., had more than enough firepower to cover the competition–so we posited a “World” team made up of all other countries except the U.S. mainland.
The biggest question mark on the Angels’ postseason hopes is the back of Vladimir Guerrero. He’s the new poster boy for trunk and core strengthening, coming out of a specialized program to counteract the effects of a disc problem. Like Ivan Rodriguez before him, Guerrero worked hard and showed no signs of any recurrence. He’s been wearing a brace throughout spring training, but it’s merely precautionary. The worst-case scenario is a recurrence which could be treated through similar conservative therapy or surgery. The downside given his value isn’t that great. The biggest actual concern is Troy Glaus. His shoulder, repaired in the off-season, might force him across the diamond. That slot is now held down by Erstad, who’s better off in center according to pretty much everyone not employed by the Angels. For now, Garret Anderson, who has a bum right shoulder, takes center field and faces a situation similar to Bernie Williams’ last season. The injury causes Anderson trouble both throwing and extending his arms and could eat into his power slightly. Anderson moved over to make room for Guerrero and Guillen. Yes, Virginia, it is possible to have too much talent sometimes.
The Braves may have Hung Jaret Wright out to dry. The Twins need to find room for their 7,529 outfielders. The Devil Rays have pitching issues. These and other news and notes in this Wednesday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.