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.
Matsui’s impressive career across the Pacific has people comparing him to Barry Larkin in his prime, and there is no doubt that he had a phenomenal season in 2002, and a pretty good one in 2003. According to Clay Davenport’s translations Matsui posted a line equivalent to a .291 EqA in 2002, putting him near Derek Jeter offensively among shortstops, clearly among the best in the game. He slipped to .267 last year, approximately the same production Angel Berroa gave the Royals in his debut season. PECOTA pegs Matsui as a rebound candidate in 2004, projecting a weighted-mean EqA of .279 with a VORP of 39.0, again putting him in the upper tier of major league shortstops. However, a significantly large portion of his value is tied directly to his power, and the translation of power numbers from Japan to MLB may be the area we know the least about.
Here’s the bigger issue, which I’ve saved for the second half of the article: Every other major league team takes it on the chin because of the relocation committee’s failures. The Expos make almost nothing revenue-wise. Since baseball bought them, they’ve run Opening Day payrolls of around $40 million for two straight seasons. Plus $35 million a year to keep the lights on in the offices…work out their share of MLB media deals, divide by pi, and…the Expos probably cost Major League Baseball $40 million more than if they were a team that could manage to break even. Consider revenue sharing, that’s easily going to be another $50 million, and now we’re talking about serious money. Unless you’re an Expos fan, the team you root for paid about $2.75 million a year under the old labor agreement and will pay more than $3 million this year. If this drags on for the entire season, 29 teams will have paid out a little shy of $10 million each for another team to compete against them. If it wasn’t so stupid and contrived, and if you didn’t know the history of how things got to be this bad, it’d be enough to make you sympathetic to contraction.
Ozzie Guillen loves his closers. The Cardinals look like they have their rotation set, after all. And the Rangers still have a few positional battles to evaluate on the field. All this and much more news from Chicago, St. Louis, and Texas in your Tuesday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Last week, the A’s made their first major contract commitment since the ill-fated Jermaine Dye signing, agreeing to a six-year, $66 million extension with Eric Chavez. The deal is the biggest in franchise history, and coming on the heels of the departures of Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada, is being hailed as a sign that Steve Schott is intent on keeping the core of his team.
While conceding that the commitment to Chavez is probably a necessary one for a franchise whose on-field success has translated to higher, but not still not impressive, attendance, I just don’t think it’s a great baseball deal. The obvious comparison is to the Cardinals’ Scott Rolen, the National League’s best third baseman and a player who also signed with his current team without testing the free-agent market.
Bobby Jenks: The next Goose Gossage? Bobby Estalella finds a job. Tony La Russa finds a new broken toy in Tony Womack. Syracuse could give the Devil Rays a good battle. These and other pontifications in today’s jam-packed Transaction Analysis.
The Red Sox and Yankees are trying to get all of their injuries out of the way…or at least it seems that way. It’s doubtful that these early-season injuries are all that the two teams will have. The pressure of being very evenly matched throughout the season could keep some players on edge and–knowing every game is important–could lead to more diving, sprinting, and colliding in order to get that little extra edge, and potentially more injuries. I’ve said throughout the spring that one of these teams will collapse and miss the playoffs, but I’m not sure which one. Like Vladimir Guerrero last year, a minor disc herniation is becoming a major problem for Trot Nixon. Nixon is following the same protocol–therapy, then injections, then surgery–so the Sox are hoping that like Guerrero, the cortisone injections and a core-strengthening regimen will get Nixon back in mid-May. Use Guerrero as the comp here and you’ll likely be able to spot exactly where Nixon will be back. We’ll know shortly whether the injections worked.
The Astros bench leaves much to be desired. The Brewers have a group of prospects that could be making an impact as early as this season. And the A’s finally forked over the cash to keep one of their young, productive stars. All this and much more news from Houston, Milwaukee, and Oakland in your Monday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Hiring a state-of-the-art General Manager does nothing to change a team’s health.
Or does it? Is there any evidence that teams like Oakland, Toronto, and Boston suffer less injuries? Is being medically state-of-the-art different than being front-office smart? It’s a good question, and impossible to answer completely. Due to the hidden nature of most of the data, we’re left looking at imperfect measures like Days Lost to DL and Dollars Lost to DL. In these, there is simply too much luck and the data is too easily skewed.
When the Dodgers lost Darren Dreifort and Kevin Brown in the same season, they doomed themselves to the bottom of the Dollars Lost charts even if the entire team had been healthy. There’s an argument that more progressive management never would have given those contracts to those players, but the Yankees are always at risk with the big-money players they have at, well, every position.
Jim Palmer plays the fool. Bob Feller preferred Wheaties to steroids. Rey Ordonez gives way to Khalil Greene. Dallas Green thinks the time is right for younger talent to take over GM jobs. These and other quips in The Week In Quotes.
It’s been a fairly bustling off-season with more than its share of meaty trades and free-agent signings. The winter derring-do of teams like the Yankees, Red Sox and Angels have been sufficiently analyzed in other spaces and in this one, but some of the sage moves of the past few months have passed by seemingly unnoticed, with church-mouse quietness (you can only if hear it if you’re pure of heart and listen oh-so closely). So today, I’m going to look at a trio of front-office decisions that haven’t garnered much bandwidth, but nevertheless merit praise.
Enough debate. Let’s just go ahead and put Leo Mazzone in the Hall of Fame. Coaches of all sorts are criminally unrepresented in Cooperstown, so Mazzone’s decade of instruction in Atlanta is as good a start as any. While Mazzone may only be teaching what he learned from his coach, Johnny Sain, I don’t think Sain would mind. Each year, the question is asked how the Braves will overcome the loss of this pitcher or that pitcher. We look at a bunch of no-names and retreads in the bullpen and through his alchemical abilities, Mazzone and manager Bobby Cox end up in the playoffs again. This year, let’s not debate–Leo Mazzone is the best pitching coach inside the game, bar none.
What will Mazzone work with this year? Once again, he’s asked to overcome the loss of talent as Greg Maddux has moved on. Only John Smoltz is left from the core of the Braves dynasty. Instead of Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Smoltz terrorizing hitters, the Braves will send out Hampton, Ortiz, and…Jaret Wright?
Earlier this week, the merry BP Brigade was found shooting the baseball breeze in the bullpen at our secret HQ, the Prospectus Nexus. As our lovely girl Friday Esmé Chimère
(author of BP’s upcoming column for our female readers, “The Boys on the Basepaths”) tended the hibachi, weighty topics were bandied about like the tainted games of the 1919 World Series that suggested to Ring Lardner pretty bubbles marred by cancer spots.
One of the questions we briefly kicked around and the YOU-crew has gnawed like a bucket of Sammy Byrd’s legs ever since is that of where a manager makes his primary contribution to his team’s fortunes. Some would say that the manager’s main job is morale-building. Before agreeing, we should probably ask Larry Bowa what he thinks. It was easy to eliminate in-game tactics, because aside from the odd obsessional bunter (Don Baylor) or compulsive lefty-righty switcher (Tony LaRussa), these are largely rote decisions.
It has been suggested elsewhere that constructing the batting order was where the manager most exerts his influence. This is closer to the heart of the matter, a minor truth in search of a major one. It’s not what order the players bat in that defines the manager, but who is allowed to bat in the first place.
BP has been at the forefront of using statistics to help evaluate minor league players, but not every top prospect will be found among the leader boards. James Loney is a perfect example of someone BP ranked highly despite a superficially unimpressive performance during the 2003 season. At first glance, it is hard to get excited about the numbers he produced in Vero Beach last year. He hit .276, drawing only 43 walks and knocking 41 extra-base hits, leading to a pedestrian .338 on base-percentage and .400 slugging average for a .277 EqA that ranked seventh on his own club. As a first baseman, that isn’t the kind of production that usually makes people sit up and take notice. However, a deeper look inside the numbers reveals a more detailed story.