Freshly minted Dodgers GM Paul DePodesta has plenty of challenges ahead of him. The Dodgers, a team historically accustomed to success, haven’t made the postseason since 1996 and don’t appear poised to break that trend in the upcoming season. If they don’t, it’ll be the organization’s longest glory drought since they wallowed in mediocrity from 1921 to 1940.
This season, the club does have well defined needs, but those needs–offensive production of some kind–are sweeping and not easily addressed. Although there have been a few rumors floated by the press (Jose Canseco, Adam Dunn, Jason Kendall, Larry Bigbie), DePodesta has yet to make the headline-grabbing move that Dodger nation awaits with bated breath. Although his tenure in L.A. will certainly bring its share of major trades, I’m not so sure that one is in the immediate offing. A panic move isn’t in order; a reevaluation of the “Dodger Way” most certainly is. The organization has famously relied on pitching since moving Westward, and it served them well for many years. Stockpiling quality arms is praiseworthy, but not when it’s achieved at the utter neglect of the offense. The Dodger Way must change.
A positional switch is in order for the Orioles. The Rockies have a top-prospect to look forward to in Chin-Hui Tsao. And despite popular belief, acquiring Mo Vaughn was actually one of the better moves of the Steve Phillips Era. All this and much more news from Baltimore, Colorado, and New York in your most recent edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
The 1980 season opened under the cloud of a threatened mid-season labor stoppage. In March the players voted 973-1 to strike if the owners persisted in their demand that a club losing a free agent receive a major league player from the signing club as compensation–in effect converting the signing of a free agent into the equivalent of a trade. Hours before the strike deadline, the parties settled all other issues and agreed to revisit the compensation issue the next year. On the diamond, the Philadelphia Phillies rode their league-leading payroll to their first (and so far only) World Championship. Owner Ruly Carpenter blames himself and his fellow owners for rising salaries, noting that “no court can compel you to spend millions on players.” For proof, Carpenter needed to look no further than Oakland’s Charles O. Finley, who rode the majors’ lowest payroll to an 83-79 record in the year of Billyball.
A change last year from long-time trainer Kent Biggerstaff to a new staff makes it difficult to assess with statistical certainty, but many of the more bizarre medical stories last season came from Pittsburgh. Whether it was the ‘sudden discovery’ of an injury to Jason Bay or the saga of Brandon Lyon’s shoulder, the Pirates’ medical staff raised questions around the league. Coming into the 2004 season, the Pirates will be facing the same challenges. Most of their offense last year was expected to come from the bats of Brian Giles and Jason Kendall. While Kendall remains, his name continues to come up in trade talks. Giles was dealt for, among others, Jason Bay and Oliver Perez, two players with significant injury concerns. While contention in the NL Central probably isn’t possible in ’04, health could be the difference between being bad and being the Tigers.
Lineup changes for the Red Sox, a look at the Reds’ 2004 outfield, and a comparison of last year’s Padres offense with this year’s. All this and more news and notes from San Diego, Cincinnati, and Boston in Tuesday’s Prospectus Triple Play.
As a big college basketball fan, I spent a good chunk of last week watching the conference tournaments and trying to dope out who would be in and who would be out of this year’s NCAA championship. Like many people, I had Utah State in the field instead of Richmond, which was my only miss after a perfect record in ’03. Even though I didn’t see that coming, I think the committee did a good job in sorting through the eligible at-large teams and filling out the field.
However, I stromgly disagree the way in which the panel seeded the teams. I think they screwed up the Big Ten teams beyond belief. They gave a bit too much credit to the way some squads–such as Maryland and Xavier–finished their seasons, while applying criteria haphazardly in other cases. They’re the experts, and they have to consider dozens of factors, but my informed-outsider position is that they made some errors.
Yesterday, I got to thinking about how this line of thought also applies to my evaluations of baseball teams. Each year, I have some teams rated well ahead or well behind where most other writers and analysts have them. Some of you are already nodding your heads, remembering my touting the Padres and Reds, or my dismissals of the Angels and Marlins. Hey, I was wrong, and that’s going to happen. Sometimes I’m out there and right, as with the Mets in 2002. Either way, as long as I can go back and understand my analysis, and perhaps learn from a mistake or gain confidence in a particular point, it’s all good. I’m only right all the time when I disagree with Sophia.
Looking ahead towards the 2004 campaign, I can definitely see some teams whose “Sheehan seeds” are going to be much different than the consensus. Unlike in the NCAA tournament, however, I can’t hide behind a one-game-and-out format to defend my decisions. That’s the beauty of the baseball season; it brings out a team’s strengths and weaknesses in a way that the other sports just can’t match.
There’s a number of ways to indicate the bipolar nature of this team, but looking above you’ll see that there’s one big problem that the White Sox face heading into 2004: not enough innings on the board. The bullpen is again supposed to be a strength of the club, but Guillen is again an open question. He at least should have a healthy bunch this season, assuming he doesn’t tax them when his starters aren’t able to go as deep as he’s expecting. PECOTA doesn’t have high hopes for Shingo Takatsu, but at least this pen is deep. In fact, instead of looking for the innings in the rotation, this is where Guillen should be looking. If he could overcome ‘the book’ and start using this deep and potentially very effective pen for longer stretches, he’d be placing his team in a much better position to win.
Dusty Baker doesn’t think much of walking; he also doesn’t think much of pitch counts. Reggie Jackson thinks modern-day sluggers are on ‘the juice,’ while Julio Franco admits to being on a juice of a different kind. Jim Hendry is old school, and proud of it. Torii Hunter is about the only non-Yankee in MLB who doesn’t hate George Steinbrenner. All this and many more quips from around the league in this edition of The Week In Quotes.
The Cards’ decision to make Albert Pujols the everyday first baseman opened a hole in left field, and no matter who stands out there on April 5, it’s going to be hard to argue that it’s been filled. None of the candidates for the platoon–and it will almost certainly be a platoon–has anything resembling a track record of success. Kerry Robinson and So Taguchi are fifth outfielders who bring defense and some speed and little else. Mark Quinn and Ray Lankford combined for 76 major-league at-bats in 2003. Emil Brown hasn’t played in the majors since 2001, but he’s 8-for-14 with two homers so far, so he’s in the mix. I don’t think there’s an acceptable solution here.
The Marlins may finally Free Ramon Castro!, to fine results. The Yankees’ pitching depth has thinned considerably. The Pirates could benefit from creative handling of their young pitchers. These and other news and notes in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
Was Jody Gerut really that much better than Hideki Matsui? The Dodgers are inviting a number of fresh faces to training camp in ’04. And the Mariners don’t have many options off the bench…to say the least. All this and much more news from Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Seattle in your Friday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
This is one of my favorite spring columns. Like any baseball fan, I love arguments over the relative merits of players and how teams should be aligning their talent. And each spring, those arguments get played out on fields across Florida and Arizona. This March brings a fresh batch of players dueling for playing time. I’ve picked out some of the more interesting ones for today’s column.
Every March, there’s some college basketball team that climbs on the back of some player and makes a run deep into the tournament. It happens nearly every year and probably always has, but it’s burned into my memory with the Kansas Jayhawks’ championship run behind Danny Manning. Now known as “Danny and the Miracles,” Manning simply carried an inferior team to the top. Baseball has similar runs from time to time–Orel Hershiser’s amazing run through the 1988 season comes to mind. But as the Giants essay in BP04 shows, General Manager Brian Sabean and Assistant General Manager Ned Colletti are expecting more from Barry Bonds, even as he becomes less likely to be able to deliver. Bonds’ homers may defy gravity, but there’s a point where his body will no longer be able to defy age.
There aren’t many places to hide on a baseball field surrounded by 40,000 spectators, but one place you can enjoy relative anonymity is the coaching box. Most season ticket holders would have a hard time naming their team’s third base coach, never mind the casual fan.
So it isn’t necessarily a good sign that Cubs third base coach Wendell Kim is already well-known in Chicago after having spent just a year there. An even worse sign is that most Cubs fans know Kim best by his nickname: Wavin’ Wendell. Kim’s reputation for sending runners to their deaths at home plate preceded his arrival in Chicago, and it’s only grown since he’s been there.
Of course, reputations can be unfair, and reputations about baserunning in particular are difficult to check, since baserunning numbers don’t show up in the box score or the stats page. So who are the teams who make the most outs at home plate, and elsewhere on the bases?
My name is Nate, and I am a forecaster. I forecast how baseball players are going to perform. And I pretty much get the worst of it. Tell somebody that their childhood hero is going to hit .220 next year, or that the dude they just traded away from their fantasy team is due for a breakout, and you’re liable to get called all kinds of names. A bad prediction will inevitably be thrown in your face, (see also: Pena, Wily Mo) while a good one will be taken as self-evident, or worse still, lucky. The truth is, though, that those of us who make it our business to forecast the performance of baseball players have it pretty easy. For one thing, we’ve got an awesome set of data to work with; baseball statistics are almost as old as the game itself, and the records, for the most part, are remarkably accurate and complete. For another, it’s easy to test our predictions against real, tangible results. If we tell you that Adam Dunn is going to have a huge season, and instead he’s been demoted to Chattanooga after starting the year 2-for-53, the prediction is right there for everyone to see in all its manifest idiocy. Not so in many other fields, where the outcomes themselves are more subject to interpretation.
Talk of a World Cup of baseball, potentially starting as early as 2005, has inspired early speculation about what the lineups might look like. The team from the Dominican Republic promises to be a monster. Vlad, Manny, Pujols, Sosa, Pedro–yeah, that’s going to be tough. Tough enough to threaten the U.S.A.? I caught the Errol Morris documentary “Fog of War” recently, which offers 11 lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara, seven-year Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. McNamara, one of the celebrated “Whiz Kids” who brought the science of modern management to a struggling postwar Ford Motor Company, was an early adopter of quantitative analysis. McNamara’s Lesson Six: “Get the data.” A World Cup of baseball is hardly the Cold War, but the McNamara in me relishes any opportunity to take the 2004 PECOTA Weighted Mean Projections out for a spin. Data? We’ve got data.