Last week I laid out my All-Surprise Team. Since I much prefer going negative, I thought this week I’d rear my ugly head upon the All-Disappointment Team. Once again, it’s with the help of Nate Silver’s PECOTA projection system. First a bit of housekeeping: A couple of readers pointed out that Baltimore’s Melvin Mora deserved a spot on the All-Surprise Team. I’m inclined to agree. I left him off mostly because I was on a crack bender for much of the week, but I’m fine now and fully possessed of my faculties. The All-Disappointment Team, forthwith…
Every time a shuttle bus back from a game pulls into a stop, the line to pay and get off snags. “How much is it?” people ask, fumbling for more change, and then three fans later, same deal. The Mariners have played 73 games at home so far this season, the shuttles have run for years, and even this late in the season, after years of popular baseball, there are people who don’t know it’s $2.50. It’s another sign of the huge casual fan base teams enjoy. I see more than 40 games a year at Safeco Field, as part of a season-ticket plan I split plus games I head to on my own. I’m atypical though. The Mariners have about 20,000 season-ticket holders, and they push season-ticket packages aggressively starting just after their annual mid-season failure to improve for the stretch (“Fans, reward your tight-fisted pound-foolish ownership group by sending in a deposit on a 2004 season-ticket plan now, before you get your blood all angried up when the Mariners miss the playoffs”). They sold a couple thousand more when Safeco Field opened, but it’s been down since then. Now from there, there’s a ton of ticket-sharing (buy the tickets, split them two or more ways), and the Mariners sell 20-game packages that are cleverly balanced between the good and bad teams. I’m throwing this out there, but I figure that there’s a core of 40,000 fans who see 20 or more games a year–at least 800,000 clicks of the turnstiles over the course of a year. Meanwhile, unless the city gets fed up and stops going to see the team, the Mariners’ attendance this year will top 3.2 million stubs. So that would be nearly two-and-a-half million tickets purchased by fans far more casual than me.
Joe Mays will undergo Tommy John surgery on Thursday and will likely miss all of the 2004 campaign. Score one for PECOTA and take special note of his collapse rate. Given that 2005 is the next time Mays is likely to be physically capable of pitching in the big leagues, NOLAN (Nate’s Omniscient Laptop And Number-cruncher) says that Mays only has a one-in-three shot of coming back. That’s info worth knowing, despite the success rate of TJ surgery.
Trot Nixon will pay a visit to the Red Sox’ physicians in hopes of salvaging his season. Yes, the strained calf could be that serious, according to one source in Boston. Nixon injured himself running to first, and depending on the findings, will miss a minimum of one week, and potentially could be done well into the playoffs. Andy Abad, a guy who shredded the IL at age 31, stands to gain some playing time along with Gabe Kapler.
The Astros retook first place on Wednesday, but their hopes took a hit as Octavio Dotel’s ass isn’t getting any better. OK, gluteal muscle, if you must–but (no pun intended), it’s the backside of the back end of the bullpen that’s worrying right now. With Brad Lidge emerging from a slump and Dotel hoping that sitting on the bench won’t hurt, Ricky Stone is picking up the workload. Dotel is reportedly going to miss the important weekend Cardinals’ series, forcing Jimy Williams to rework his pitching roles and try to explain why Nathan Bland isn’t with the team.
The rotation hasn’t been the only problem in Anaheim this season. Mark Prior is a legitimate Cy Young candidate, despite being one of the youngest pitchers in the league. And the Mike Maroth finally lost his 20th game last week, hopefully eliminating Brian Kingman’s name from baseball trivia for the rest of eternity. All this and much more news from Anaheim, Chicago, and Detroit in your Thursday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
With three weeks left in the season, it’s the most wide-open playoff race in years. Half of the franchises in Major League Baseball are within three games of a playoff spot, and fans in places as unlikely as Kansas City, Miami, and the north side of Chicago are starting sentences with “If the postseason started today.” Of course, having so many teams in contention leads to lots of questions. What if the Yankees and Red Sox end up tied for the AL East lead? What if they have the same record as the Mariners? What if the Cubs, Cardinals and Astros end up tied for the NL Central lead? What if five teams tie for the Wild Card? Inquiring minds want to know. Many of these questions can be answered by reading through the playoff tie-breaker scenarios that Major League Baseball used to have on its Web site, but those rules have a couple of serious flaws: 1. Understanding them is about as easy as filling out a 1040 long form. 2. Major League Baseball has changed them, but hasn’t told anyone yet. Using the most current information from MLB, here are the possibilities. Additional reporting was conducted to fill in some of the gaps MLB left out.
It is an awfully good time to be a baseball fan in Chicago, with teams on both sides of town good bets to reach the post-season, something that hasn’t happened since the Cubs and Sox met in the World Series of Base Ball in 1906. In their honor, let’s take look at the dynamics of the two-team market in Chicago. It’s a well-established fact that teams that have a rival in their own market compete for scarce resources like television and radio contracts, media exposure, and fan loyalty. For those reasons, it’s safe to assume that a club in a two-team market will not make as much money, or draw as many fans, as if it had the market all to itself. But we want to get at a somewhat more specific question here: How much does the success or failure (as opposed to the mere presence) of the crosstown rival affect the success of the other club?
When in doubt, I know I have three things that always go in my favor. First, I have the crew at BP. Even when they’re working on their own incredible stuff, each member is always just a phone call or an email away. Second, I have my team of sources and advisors. Though recent events have shaken some of the weaker sources into clamming up (for now), I still have one of the best phone books in the biz. Finally, and most importantly, I have you, the subscribers. From asking for help getting velocity, to technical assistance, to the most intelligent emails, I’m always happy to look in my Inbox and find new stuff from you.
Now, I’m asking you for some more suggestions on how to turn UTK into something you want to read in the off-season. What would you like to see? Those of you that made the journey with me from UTK 1.0 last year know that the off-season is…well, pretty dry when it comes to injury info. So please send in your suggestions. Those of you that have gotten to know me in person at Feeds, through email, or vicariously through this column know that I don’t sleep, so please, keep me working through the (literally) dark days of the winter. Yes, first priority is getting the Velocity Project in some sort of presentable form and I have a big date circled for late November, but everything else…once again, I’m counting on you.
Powered by Warren Zevon in my iTunes, on to the injuries…
Will the last person out of Bank One Ballpark please turn out the lights?
The Diamondbacks have gone 21-29 since the All-Star break and look like they’ll be the next team to exit the NL’s wild-card race. With last night’s 3-1 loss to the Dodgers (and 20-year-old, MLB-debut-making Edwin Jackson), the Snakes are seven games out in the race and trailing five teams, which is as good a comp for “done” as you’ll find.
Now, the easy thing is to look at the injuries the D’backs suffered this season and excuse their disappointing performance. Twenty million or so dollars invested in Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson have produced just 36 starts with an ERA of 3.54 and an SNVA of 5.4. That’s a lot of pitching to replace, and it would be difficult for any team to recover from that.
The O’s get a return on one of the their most valuable parts. The Rockies would be wise to sell high on Jay Payton. And Jason Phillips has been a nice surprise for a Mets team that’s been out of the race since Memorial Day. All this and much more news from Baltimore, Colorado, and New York in your Wednesday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Why isn’t Eric Gagne the top-ranked reliever in baseball according to Baseball Prospectus measures? Does Ichiro deserve to be included in discussion for AL MVP? What the heck is a GWHBPRBI? These questions and more discussed in a brand new edition of From The Mailbag.
Everett Memorial Stadium is an intimate neighborhood park, modest and unassuming, easy to look past. It holds a couple of thousand people, and it’s all metal stands with seats and bleachers, which enhances the prep feel of the place. After a good play, fans stomp their feet, producing a wide taka-taka-taka sound that makes me smile. The field’s nice. Like all minor league fields I’ve seen, I look at the surface and think “man, they need to get that color even, and fix that trim…” as if they’ve got the kind of money and manpower major league teams muster to produce their perfect fields.
The teams don’t have clubhouses in the park itself–they have to walk up to what is essentially a high school locker room, where the facilities are pretty bad. The lockers aren’t tall enough for a uniform, I hear, so they have to hang them up on wires that are strung across the aisles. But what are you going to do? This isn’t the Midwest League.
As I find myself writing more and more about pitchers, pitcher injuries, and theories about preventing said pitcher injuries, I find myself returning to a few themes. First, Keith Woolner and Rany Jazayerli have the best system, bar none, that has been tested. Ignore PAP3 at your own risk. Second, we ignore pitch efficiency. When Roy Halladay can go 10 innings and not crack 100 pitches, he’s on to something.
In fact, the more I think about it, pitch efficiency seems to be a victim of the era. Just 20 years ago, the ’86 Mets–a team that I see all too often on ESPN Classic–look like a bunch of pencil-necked geeks compared to the middle-infielders of today. Serve up a fat pitch to Ozzie Smith, or better, his backup, and at worst you get a double. After a while, that can add up to significantly fewer pitches per appearance. If you’re obsessed with complete games or want to figure out a way around that LaRussian third LOOGY, getting your starter to go 10 pitches an inning is a must. I’ll talk more about efficiency soon, but let’s get to what you’re here for.
Powered by my enforced punishment beverage, mead, by order of the Office of Arrogance and Elitism, on to the injuries…
I could talk about roster/lineup/role optimization all day, which is just one of the many reasons it’s a wonder I’m married. Back in the nascent days of baseballprospectus.com, I wrote a column called Lineupectomy (a couple of which actually show up in the archives), which got its name from something we used to do at Strat tournaments–taking people’s teams and creating optimal lineups. It’s a geek thing, and as has been pointed out, not remotely the right name for the process, but it’s something I spend a lot of time doing.
There’s a question as to how much the effort matters. It’s something of a stathead truth that the difference between the optimal lineup and a reasonably constructed one is small, less than a win per year. I don’t necessarily buy that; as Chris Kahrl pointed out in BP2K1, the simulations on which that idea is based are fairly old, done on ancient technology, and it’s possible that we just haven’t been able to model it properly yet. I find it hard to believe that doing simple things like getting your OBP guys in front of your SLG guys, making the lineup less vulnerable to attack relievers, and minimizing double plays aren’t worthwhile endeavors that can add not just a few runs, but a few wins a year.
My thought process on the Yankees goes something like this: they have seven good hitters, so one of those seven ends up at the back of the line. Ideally, you’d like that to be the worst of the seven, but that’s complicated by the fact that players don’t change roles as easily as Strat cards, and the collective media and fan base is poised to make a very big deal over any radical changes. Ask Theo Epstein.
The Red Sox face some pretty soft competition, going forward. Dave Miley has had a pretty rough time since taking over in Cincinnati. And the Padres have been playing spoiler, lately, to a number of contenders. All this and much more news from Boston, Cincinnati, and San Diego in your Tuesday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
The Marlins decide to pay Jeff Conine (.284/.332/.446) more than they would Kevin Millar (.283/.358/.489). The Yankees get overdue strong performances from David Wells and Bernie Williams. Jason Kendall’s still a Pirate, though probably not for much longer. These and other news and notes out of Florida, New York, and Pittsburgh in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
The National League playoff race has thinned out over the past few weeks, with the Rockies and, unfortunately, the Expos falling out of contention. Seven teams are still playing for two spots, however, which will mean plenty of meaningful baseball down the stretch. How does the remaining schedule affect the chase? As I’ve mentioned a few times, there’s no team in this race that can’t go 16-4 over three weeks, which is one of the things that makes the game great.
Check out the schedule for the week of the 15th. In the mid-week games, the Phillies and Marlins play in Philadelphia, the White Sox and Twins in Minnesota, and the Diamondbacks and Dodgers in L.A. That weekend, effectively showdown weekend, the Royals and Sox play in Chicago, the Astros and Cardinals in St. Louis, the Mariners and A’s hook up in Oakland, and the Dodgers and Giants–just one contender, but these two could be 55-95 and play a great series–are in L.A. I’m not a fan of the Wild Card, but if there’s ever going to be a week for the sport to steal the audience’s attention and get some positive focus on the tremendous excitement generated by races, it’s that week.