Pedro could help himself and the Red Sox by airing it out this season. Can Brandon Larson be a viable option for the Reds at third base? Kevin Towers predicts good things for the Padres offense. These and other news and notes in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
Last year, I solicited help for the inaugural auction in the Rotowire Staff League. The league, into which I was invited because of some writing I did for the Rotowire Fantasy Baseball Guide, marked the first time I’d ever participated in a perpetual fantasy baseball set-up.
Thanks in no small part to the advice I got from BP readers, I finished second in the league, which I thought was a heck of a feat for someone who went into it as a fantasy novice. Of course, that fact never came up when talking to Jeff Erickson, Pete Schoenke, Chris Liss and the rest of the career roto guys over in Culver City, all but one of whom spent the year looking up at my fantasy rookie behind. Nope. Never. Not once.
(OK, maybe once.)
Later today, the league gathers for its second auction, again putting me in uncharted waters. See, I understand that there’s such a thing as “inflation,” but I understand it the same way I do the idea that there are dishes in the sink. I’m vaguely aware of it, but unsure what, if anything, I’m supposed to do about it. I picked some people’s brains and made some guesses as to what this would mean for both protection lists and the price of talent made available, but in the end, they were just guesses.
In the beginning, there were no rotations. There were no relievers. There was only one pitcher, and the term “everyday player” had no meaning. In 1876, George Bradley started all 64 games for the St. Louis Brown Stockings, completing 63 of them; his teammates combined to throw four innings all year.
Of course, in the early days of the National League, the task performed by the pitcher bore little resemblance to what we call “pitching” today. At various times in the first two decades of professional baseball, the distance from the pitcher to home plate was less than 50 feet; a walk required nine balls; bunts that landed in fair territory before skidding to the backstop were considered fair balls; hitters could call for a “high” or “low” pitch; pitchers could throw the ball from a running start; and curveballs and overhand pitches were illegal.
The game changed quickly, and it quickly became impossible for a team to rely on a single pitcher for its entire season. And once that point was reached, the question of how best to maximize each pitcher’s usage was born.
The Red Sox are in trouble if Johnny Damon succumbs to injury. The Cubs open the vault for Kerry Wood and Derrek Lee. The Devil Rays take Josh Hamilton off the 40-man roster as he works through off-field problems. These and other happenings in today’s Transaction Analysis.
Freddy Garcia was coming off a down year, but you chose to bring him back at a considerable salary. What was behind that decision? What will it take for him to back to where he once was? Bavasi: How will it happen? Greater focus on his part, and more focused instruction working with the pitching coach. This is a young guy who’s a good pitcher who’s had good years and only had one down year. His stuff is good, his strength is good, physically he’s fine. There’s no reason he can’t come back and be better than he was last year. How much better is open to discussion. Our approach to him in the off-season–considering him as a possible non-tender–as we went through that decision, thinking about throwing him into the pile of non-tendered players, we would have his salary to spend. Having analyzed potential players in the group of remaining free agents and potential non-tenders, if you threw all those guys together and threw Garcia in that pile, the best guy in there was going to be Freddy Garcia. Once Lee made the deal with his agent, to bring him back at the same salary, it was a no-brainer.
Paul DePodesta takes the helm in L.A. Dusty Baker is not a government agent. Turk Wendell apparently has spy cameras in every clubhouse in baseball. Bob Melvin saw Eddie Guardado taking magic closer pixie dust. These and other notable quotables in The Week in Quotes.
It is one of the most suspenseful moments in a baseball game. There’s a smash to the second baseman, he slides, knocks it down, picks up the ball, throws from his knees, and the first baseman can’t dig it out. The crowds waits, and then the message appears on the scoreboard “On the last play, the official scorer has ruled: HIT.”
Many of the problems inherent in evaluating defense are evident in the situation above. The first, and most crucial, is the fact that one of the most basic statistics involved in defense, the error, is assigned by one of baseball’s loosest rules, left to the interpretation of the various official scorers. While the league has struggled for the past few seasons to remove the subjectivity inherent in calling the strike zone, it has done nothing to remove the same from the assignment of errors. Rules 10.05.a-e discuss in detail what is to be considered a “base hit”–essentially any ball that could not be fielded with “ordinary effort,” a phrase that is never defined or clarified. In any field, statistics are only valuable if they are consistent and accurately reflect the action on the field. Errors, especially recently, have become assigned in such an ad hoc fashion as to relegate the statistic to nearly unusable status.
Pay attention, folks, because I’m about to reveal the identity of the 2004 world champion. Two years ago, in a column titled, "No Hope, No Faith," I pegged the Anaheim Angels as one of eight teams who had no chance of being competitive during the 2002 season. Last year, in a non-BP article (not online at this time), I reprised the concept by naming the Florida Marlins as one of just seven teams whose fans should have no hope for the 2003 season. As you might recall, the two teams did all right for themselves. I didn’t start out trying to make a fool of myself. The idea behind the annual column listing the teams with no hope and faith for the upcoming season stemmed from Bud Selig’s catchphrase during the 2001-02 labor negotiations. He insisted that "hope and faith" was lost for fans of as many as 18 teams, and the media picked it up and ran with the concept. I was just trying to find the teams that, looking out from early spring, legitimately looked as if they did fit that description. I suppose the fact that my conservative listing of just seven or eight teams each year has included the eventual world champions two of three times is an indication that even the most overmatched team can surprise. That should given hope and faith to all but the most destitute of organizations.
Miguel Cabrera has a bright future ahead of him–at least according to PECOTA. Bernie Williams had a bit of a tummy ache; luckily Kenny Lofton is there to pick up the slack. And the Pirates have a slew of questions to answer regarding their pitching staff. All this and much more news from Florida, New York, and Pittsburgh in your Monday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
The Seattle Mariners hired Bill Bavasi as their new general manager Nov. 7, replacing Pat Gillick. Bavasi spent 19 years with the Angels, working his way up from his first job as a minor league administrator. As general manager from 1994 to 1999, the team finished below .500 in four of six seasons. But the farm system that Bavasi presided over during that time would generate much of the core for the Angels’ 2002 championship team, including Troy Glaus, Troy Percival, Darin Erstad and others. Bavasi spent the last two years overseeing the Dodgers’ farm system as director of player development. He takes over the Mariners coming off four straight years of 90+ wins, with Gillick staying on as a consultant. BP spoke to Bavasi about the team’s off-season signings, the risk of long-term contracts, the changing nature of major league talent and more.
As we’ve stated on a number of different occasions throughout the Baseball Prospectus Basics series, one of the goals of performance analysis is to separate perception from reality. Sometimes that means interpreting numbers, and sometimes that means interpreting events with our eyes. Either way, it’s about collecting information, and getting a little bit closer to the truth.
Evaluating the importance of strikeouts, especially for hitters, is something that has traditionally fallen into the second category. And it’s easy to understand why: baseball is a game that centers around the ongoing conflict between pitcher and batter, and there are few outcomes that capture the drama of that conflict better than a mighty whiff, followed by a long walk back to the bench. On the surface at least, a strikeout appears to be the ultimate failure for a hitter–infinitely worse than a Texas-leaguer or a fly-out to center.
Now that the ball is gone and Jamaal The Goat is next in line for explosive therapy, the Cubs may be in line for a World Series win that would finally end all the curse talk. Despite Joe Sheehan’s protestations, most Cubs fans think all that stands between them and October glory is the Astros and cruel, cruel fate.
Despite the best work of PECOTA, many still see the rotation as something akin to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or choosing from amongst five recent Playmates. To opponents, it’s pick your poison; to fans, it’s a matter of personal taste with no bad choice. Only Clement, surprisingly, avoids the yellow light. Without giving too much away from Saving the Pitcher, Clement’s mechanics are extremely good. If you want one key, watch how his glove stays steady over his plant foot.
Wait… Prior and Maddux have among the purest mechanics that motion capture has, well, captured. Why the yellow on those two? The answer is age. For Prior, he’s crossing the injury nexus after the heaviest per-outing workload of his career last season. For Maddux, he’s in a rare age bracket, one where there’s not much of a sample size. Maddux had a few minor injuries last season, but he’s hardly overworked in any sense. The problem with any system of prediction is in capturing the outliers. The Cubs have two of the most extreme on one staff. Cautionary yellows hold, but these two aren’t your average yellow-light players.
The Dodgers offered a number of $5 million, and Gagne’s rep, Scott Boras, offered $8 million. How come the lower number was so compelling? Sadly, the current CBA lacks a clause allowing unfettered access to the process to self-important analysts, so we have to posit a little, and ask around some front offices to hear possible explanations. One NL exec had this to say: “Boras overreached.” Not that there’s a whole lot of ambiguity in that statement, but after prodding, the exec clarified the statement: “Gagne’s in his first year of eligibility, and there’s a bunch of comparable guys. They’re not as good, but they’re a clear baseline from which it’d be easy to convince the panel to work.” This is true.
In my last column, I made a throwaway remark about the Blue Jays possibly and concomitantly being the third-place team in the AL East and the third-best team in all of baseball. It’s an intriguing notion–unassailable quality knuckling under to circumstance. Even so, it’s worth asking whether Toronto might have the goods to displace Boston or New York in the junior-circuit pecking order. With the Red Sox and Yankees already brimming with talent and throwing cash around like Marion Barry sans tracking collar, the Jays, in spite of their substantial merits, will likely be resigned to the brand of pre-October respectability to which they’ve accustomed in recent years. Nothing terribly wrong with that. That’s especially the case for a team on a hermetically sealed budget and facing an unbalanced schedule packed with tilts against the Sox, Yanks and the suddenly passable Orioles. Unaccommodating circumstances notwithstanding, one’s led to wonder: What would need to happen for the Jays, undeniably a fine team with a highly intelligent front office, to pass playoff muster this season?
Staring down the “Evil Empire” won’t be easy if part of the Rebel Alliance is banged up, broken, or otherwise in close proximity to Jim Rowe. While Theo Epstein has been bringing state-of-the-art ideas to the front office, he’s also been adjusting the risk tolerance of the organization. If one of the basic tenets of Moneyball-friendly organizations is getting the most bang for the buck, then watching any of those bucks sit on the shelf is waste. While the Red Sox could be wasteful with their revenue stream, they aren’t.
The key to the team is, of course, Pedro. Providing more than a third of the PECOTA projected VORP for this staff is pretty amazing considering the five-deep quality. But just as it’s been the case for the last few years, this team can only go as far as Pedro takes them. Pedro is watched more closely than any other pitcher, and the continuing focus on preparing his body to pitch makes Chris Correnti one of the real up-and-coming trainers in the business. New manager Terry Francona wasn’t known for a light touch with pitchers in his Philly gig, but this is Francona v2.0.
If Pedro can do what he did last year, the Red Sox will have more than a fighting chance in baseball’s version of Spy vs. Spy. Pedro gets a yellow light based on injury history, but honestly, he’s much less likely than last year to come up lame.
Think of stealing bases as a bit like one of those commercials for breakfast cereal. You know, the ones where they say it takes 14 bowls of Cereal X to equal what you get from one bowl of Cereal Y. In this case, it takes three stolen bases to equal one walk of shame back to the dugout. If you’re stealing at less than a 75% success rate, you’re better off never going at all.