How do the Expos look without Vlad the Impaler? With few meaningful offseason additions, do the Giants still have what it takes for the playoffs? Is there any hope for the Blue Jays while they’re stuck in the division from Hades? All this and more from Toronto, San Francisco, and Montreal in your Friday Prospectus Triple Play.
It’s awards season again, with people across the country anxiously awaiting the results of the Oscars, the Pulitzer Prizes, and of course the most prestigious award of them all. Yes, it’s time for the third annual Golden Gun Award, honoring last year’s most valuable catcher arms. The winner is the major league leader in Stolen Base Runs Prevented (SBRP), which measures the number of runs a catcher saves his team by throwing out opposing basestealers. It is calculated from the number of opponent steals (SB), the number of runners the catcher throws out (CS), and the number of runners the catcher picks off (CPO), using this simple formula:
SBRP = 0.49*(CS+CPO) – 0.16*SB
And the winners are…
Before delving into those harrowing inhabitants of the Baseball Prospectus statistics page like VORP, RARP, EqA or any other acronym that sounds like a debutante sneezing or something uttered on Castle Wolfenstein circa 1986, it’s worth asking: What’s wrong with those comfy traditional offensive measures like RBI, batting average and runs scored? This Baseball Prospectus Basics column is going to address that question and, ideally, demonstrate why the traditional cabal of offensive baseball statistics tell only a piece of the story. Later, someone smarter (but shockingly less handsome) than I will take you on a tour of the more advanced and instructive metrics like the aforementioned VORP, RARP and EqA. For now, though, we’ll keep our focus on why we need those things in the first place.
The Angels must keep Darin Erstad in center to take full advantage of their off-season moves. The Greg Maddux signing improved an otherwise uninspiring free agent shopping season for the Cubs. The Tigers could win 25 more games this year by virtue of their off-season moves plus regression to the mean. These and other news, notes and pontifications out of Anaheim, Chicago and Detroit in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
So, here’s the thing. I’m going to spend more time answering reader mail this year, because I get great feedback and I haven’t done a good job of responding to it.
But I’m also going to turn the spotlight on that feedback a bit more often, because there are a lot of good ideas that come in that deserve a wider audience. (There’s also the too-frequent reminder that I make mistakes, but I digress.)
The Kansas City Royals forgot to take their calcium; the team had more breakdowns than Zelda Fitzgerald. George Brett’s knee blew out, forcing him to miss the first six weeks of the season. Frank White’s leg sent him to the DL in July. There was no regular shortstop because both Onix Concepcion and U.L. Washington were hurt (though not because Washington swallowed his toothpick), leaving the position in the hands of chronic non-hitter Buddy Biancalana. Third base rested in the hands of veteran understudy Greg Pryor. Propelled by a 4-for-37 May, Pryor posted a .301 OBP and .356 SLG, a far cry from what Brett would have provided. Then there was Willie Wilson’s drug-enforced vacation, which left the team with an ugly outfield of Darryl Motley, Pat Sheridan, and Butch Davis. Only Steve Balboni remained to carry the offense. Balboni, a 27-year-old rookie first baseman/four-time minor league home run champion, had been buried at Triple-A Columbus by the Yankees because (a) he wasn’t an expensive free agent (b) he struck out a lot, and (c) he had been lapped by a prospect named Don Mattingly. The Royals had liberated him from New York the previous December by dealing reliever Mike Armstrong and catcher Duane Dewey, one of the more perspicacious trades in team history.
What the Royals lacked in positional depth they made up for in young pitching. At season’s outset, Kansas City envisioned its top four starters as Paul Splittorff (37), Larry Gura (36), Dennis Leonard (33), and Bud Black (27, and excellent). The best plans of mice and men quickly ran into the Grim Reaper of Old Pitchers: Splittorff was battered in three starts and summarily retired; Leonard missed the entire season with a knee injury; Gura started well then declined precipitously over the balance of the season. After 10 starts, Gura sported a 3.59 ERA. He allowed 70 runs over his next 101 innings and was yanked from the rotation.
Necessity being the mother of invention, the Royals deployed their every pitching prospect, in the process creating the pitching staff that would get them to the World Series just a year later. The new rotation retained Black, who was pitching his way to a 257-inning/3.12 ERA season (league ERA, 4.00), and added Charlie Leibrandt (unestablished at 27 and freshly returned from a year’s exile at Omaha), Danny Jackson (22), Mark Gubicza (21), and Bret Saberhagen (20). Though not all of them were consistently successful that year, Kansas City had performed one of the greatest player-development feats of all time, introducing four of the best pitchers of the era simultaneously.
“Stathead.” “Stat-drunk computer nerd.” “Rotisserie geek.”
You can earn a lot of derision when you look at things in a new way, and the people who have applied statistical tools to evaluate baseball players and teams have heard the above epithets and more. The work of people such as Bill James, Craig Wright and Clay Davenport has often been dismissed as the mind-numbing analysis of people who need to put their slide rules away and get out and watch a game once in a while. Their efforts, which have been dubbed “statistical analysis,” have expanded and improved the body of objective baseball knowledge, and their work is even beginning to penetrate the insular world of baseball front offices.
But the term “statistical analysis,” as applied to baseball, isn’t descriptive enough. Actuaries analyze statistics, and while the work pays well, it is pretty dry stuff. Life-expectancy tables and risk/benefit workups aren’t going to get your average Red Sox fan excited, nor should they: baseball fans care about their teams, and the players on them, not a series of numbers.
But baseball statistics are not numbers generated for their own sake. Statistics are a record of performance of players and teams. Period. Benjamin Disraeli’s oft-quoted line–“There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”–just doesn’t apply.
Does health really matter to a team that stinks? To most teams–notably last year’s Tigers–the answer is yes. For the 2004 Brewers, the answer is mostly yes. The Brewers could lose more games if Geoff Jenkins goes down than if he’s healthy, but it won’t be the difference between making the playoffs or not. Instead, they need to keep the players that might be trade bait healthy and focus on not overtaxing their young players. The Brewers are selling hope this season, not contention, so the most important players that will see Miller Park in April will be Sheets and Spivey–for different reasons. Sheets remains the one player that could conceivably be on the next good Brewers team; Spivey is the likeliest trade bait.
In part one of the current series remembering the 1984 season, You Could Look It Up revisited the champion Detroit Tigers–a phrase difficult to write with any comprehension giving the current decrepit state of the franchise–a team whose dominance came as the result of surrounding a strong core with a large cadre of role players. It’s a solution set that is largely impossible now, due to the prevalence of bullpens bulging with mediocre lefties. At various times in the 1984 season, Bobby Cox, manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, platooned at catcher, third base, right field, and designated hitter. The Toronto bullpen was widely perceived to have been a disaster, yet Cox used 12 pitchers all year long. Truly, we live in a time like unto the dark ages, where the wisdom of the past has been lost and superstition thrives. With no further ado, let’s continue by dropping in on George Steinbrenner and pals during the summer of Wham.
The Orioles are featuring some fresh, new faces. The Rockies are pegged “improve,” but what does that really mean? And the Mets have two of the best shortstops in the league playing in the same infield. All this and much more news from Baltimore, Colorado, and New York in your Wednesday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
By now, you’ve no doubt heard that Barry Bonds’ trainer has been arrested after federal agents raided his home and found anabolic steroids on the premises. What’s perhaps more noteworthy is that agents also seized Greg Anderson’s computer files and a certain manila folder, both of which reportedly contain the names of Anderson’s litany of high-profile clients and their supplement regimens. Without a doubt, months of legal sword-crossings are to follow before the contents of Anderson’s records are ever released, but that fact in tandem with his close association with Bonds means a growth economy for wild speculation.
I’ve written elsewhere about how the dangers of steroids have been wildly exaggerated and how any actual detrimental side effects are likely due to its being illegal in the first place. I think the war on drugs is as feckless and dangerous as anything our government has ever attempted. There are unexamined penumbras of the DEA and our log of federal drug laws that are inherently racist and have led to a gradual erosion of our fourth amendment safeguards. But that’s not my concern today. My concern is the idea–one that seems to be gaining traction in the mainstream sports media–that notable increases in body size are prima facie evidence of steroid use. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Much of what I have to say about the Alex Rodriguez trade shows up in an e-mail exchange between Gary Huckabay and I that was posted here yesterday. We kicked around a few of the issues the trade brought up, and I encourage all of you to check out that piece.
One issue we didn’t really cover was defense. I’m coming around to the idea, which a number of people inside BP have proffered, that the initial announcement of Rodriguez’s shift to third base will be forgotten by Opening Day, and that he’ll soon take over shortstop from Derek Jeter. I think the announcement was a necessary subterfuge to keep the controversy of “who plays short?” from overwhelming the trade talks. As I said on the radio yesterday, I don’t think there’s much chance that Rodriguez plays 160 games at third base for the Yankees this year.
This isn’t a matter that requires a lot of study. It’s not one of those, “six of one, half-dozen of the other” debates that gets stirred up sometimes. This is a no-brainer, complicated only by Jeter’s popularity and the mythology that surrounds him. Rodriguez should be the Yankees’ shortstop, and Jeter should be offered his choice among second base, third base or center field. (If you’re willing to move Alex Rodriguez to third base, then you should be willing to make Kenny Lofton a fourth outfielder and Bernie Williams a full-time DH. For that matter, you should be willing to move Mariano Rivera to left field.)
If you’re not familiar with Baseball Prospectus, here’s what we’re all about: understanding the game better, and innovating in order to do it. Everyone at BP loves the game of baseball with a passion that most people just don’t understand. We feel that this greatest of games is so compelling that we want to know everything about it. We always want to improve our understanding of the game–each player, each play, each pitch, each throw, each hit–what does it really mean? Those arguments that take place in bars about the relative merits of different players? We really want to know the definitive answer to those questions. But we don’t want to kill the joy of the game while we’re looking.
To help better understand what we’re all about, we’re launching a series of articles, entitled “Baseball Analysis Basics.” The series seeks to make our work more accessible to new readers, and to remind those familiar with our work of the underlying concepts. As Keith Woolner’s recently published “Hilbert Questions” article noted, there is much work still to be done.
Alex Rodriguez is a Yankee, and his timing is awful. It wasn’t two weeks ago the Rangers had a little song-and-dance routine that named him their captain after the botched attempt to get a trade done that would have sent him to Boston. Alex said the right things: “This is kind of like a double crowning for myself and my family. I feel very, very excited and very honored; one, at being recognized as the MVP of the American League and representing the Texas Rangers team, and almost equally important, if not more important, to be named the captain of the Texas Rangers and Mr. Hicks’ team and Buck Showalter’s team and John Hart’s team.” And he started to break out the lines the lines we’d heard in Seattle: “I definitely hope I’ll be here for at least seven years and hopefully I’ll be knocking on Mr. Hicks’ door and asking to do a little renegotiation to play here into my 40s.” In accepting a trade to the Yankees, Rodriguez makes a liar out of himself. Back when he was a free agent, he said this: “I would like to sign with another team and help dethrone the Yankees–they’ve won too much already.”
After the introductory edition of this column appeared last week, I received a couple of messages from–if Star Trek fans are “Trekkies,” what are BP fans? Beepies? Beppies?–readers asking why we were bothering to take notice of the 20th anniversary of the 1984 baseball season, with a week-long series no less. Nothing special happened that year, they said. Actually, 1984 was a case study in baseball problem solving, as executives were faced with difficult decisions, like, “If my entire starting rotation retires at once, what do I do?” “How do you react to an aggressively restructuring team who happens to be leading you in a close pennant race?” “If one-10th of my 40-man roster is arrested for attempting to obtain illegal drugs, how many of them should I retain?” and many more. Call the year a Choose Your Own Adventure book for managers and GMs, not to mention little pubescent proto-sabermetricians and performance analysts nationwide.
John Burkett says goodbye. The Twins win their arbitration case against Johan Santana. The A’s sign Chad Bradford for another year. Oh, yeah…and apparently the Yankees and Rangers traded infielders or something.