In last week’s Lies, Damned Lies, I reviewed Adam Dunn’s major league career one plate appearance at a time, in order to determine how his performance changed when facing the same pitcher multiple times. For those of you who, like me, did some damage to your short-term memory over the long weekend, the idea was to discover whether, per Michael Lewis’ discussion in Moneyball, Dunn is a hitter with a hole in his swing that gets continually more exploited in repeated trials.
In Dunn’s case, the answer was a tentative “no”, but a lot of people mailed me to ask that I broaden the scope of the analysis. As D.H. writes:
“I like your research, but my problem is that you’ve presented no baseline. It
reminded me of a STATS Baseball Scoreboard article on whether Greg Maddux did
better the more times he faced a particular batter because he’s so “smart.” The
data showed that the hitters improved as time went on. But, like in your study,
there was no baseline to compare against. Adam Dunn may show a drop-off the
more he faces a particular pitcher, but maybe all players exhibit identical
drops. Or, maybe all players exhibit more precipitous drops, and only the good
ones (like Dunn) stick around because they only lose 20% of their value.”
In other words, is there any systematic advantage to the pitcher or the hitter given repeated trials? Doesn’t seem likely, I wrote back, not if the league is going to remain at some kind of equilibrium for very long. But D.H. is correct that it’s a question that deserves further study, much like why on Earth I didn’t wear sunscreen to the ballgame on Sunday.
As I mentioned in the Dunn piece, there is publicly available play-by-play data for each season from 2000-2002. In order to make sure that the players we’re working with formed a closed system, I limited the analysis to players who made their major league debuts in 2000 or later. It was then possible to look at all possible ‘pairings’ of the batters and pitchers within this group–what happens when Billy Batter faces Pete Pitcher for the first time? For the fifth time? For the 20th time, after Bill Batter has dropped the -y from his name and grown a mustache, and Pete Pitcher is discovered to be three years older than listed and actually named Pedro Pichardo?
Psst, wanna see a freak?
You see, Major League Baseball this year has given us something so twisted, so extraordinary, so enigmatic that it belongs in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. So put on your best gawk and prepare to be amazed.
Right next to General Tom Thumb, Robert Wadlow and the great Frank Lentini you’ll find a burly creature with a half dozen arms that don’t work known as the 2003 Cincinnati Reds–the worst contending baseball team in history.
As of today, the Reds sport a 25-27 record while allowing the opposition to outscore them by a whopping 58 runs. They’re on pace to be outscored by 181 runs over the course of the season. A simple Pythagorean equation would predict a team like the Reds would finish with a record of 66-96 playing that kind of baseball. Technically they should be 21-31 at the moment.
Yet there they are, hovering within striking distance of a division lead at 3.5 games out, record-wise playing respectable baseball. It’s thoroughly abnormal. They should be an afterthought by this point of the season.
As I reported yesterday, Eric Hinske is out for four to six weeks after electing to have surgery. The doctors will remove his fractured right hamate bone and he should return pain-free. While this is a blow to the Jays, Hinske (-.112 MLVr) has been hitting well below both last year’s performance (.146) and his PECOTA projection (.147). Mike Bordick (-.077) is actually a slight upgrade based on current performance, but without the pesky upside.
With young pitchers, erring on the side of caution is seldom a bad move. For
the Royals, keeping Runelvys Hernandez healthy for the long term is
much more important than his missing one or even two starts in May. Hernandez
had a fine bullpen session, but after a discussion with Tony Pena and John
Cumberland, the Royals placed the right-hander on the DL with elbow tendinitis. He is eligible to return on June 5, meaning he should miss only one start.
This time, it happened on the field. David Wells will miss a start
after exhibiting a “giant [bleep]ing bruise” on his right calf, the
result of a Josh Phelps screamer Sunday afternoon. Wells will be fine
long-term, and his absence means we’ll get a good look at Jose
Contreras in his first start. Oddly, this
will be the first missed start by a Yankees pitcher this season, a fact that
surprised me when I saw it at Rotowire.
The Braves offense is annihilating everything in sight. The Twins bullpen has been lights-out for the second straight season. The Devil Rays will have plenty of options at the draft table. Plus more news and notes out of Atlanta, Minnesota, and Tampa.
Some days, you can’t swing a dead cat without running into stupid human tricks.
In Atlanta, Bob Boone demonstrated the death grip he has on baseball strategy of the late 19th century by benching the major-league leader in home runs, Adam Dunn, for the second straight day, this time against right-hander Shane Reynolds. The benching came one day after Dunn popped a pinch-hit grand slam in the 11th inning to propel the Reds to a 7-6 victory.
I don’t really care what kind of rationale Boone pulls out of his nether regions. The fact is, he’s limiting Dunn’s playing time for two reasons: batting average and strikeouts. We’re more than 20 years into a more modern way of looking at baseball, and Bob Boone can’t see far enough past batting average and strikeouts to notice that he’s sitting his second- or third-best hitter.
Fresh from a Memorial Day breather, Prospectus Triple Play returns with a double edition. BP looks at the happenings and trends for six big-league teams: the White Sox, Astros, Brewers, A’s, Cardinals, and Rangers.
It’s a little funny that on one of the distinctly American summer holidays, two of the best stories in baseball come from a place where Monday was just another day. The Montreal Expos took five of six on a brief homestand to come into Memorial Day at 32-18, just two games behind the Braves in the NL East. The Toronto Blue Jays? All they did was sweep a four-game series at Yankee Stadium for the first time ever, moving to 27-24 and closing within four games of first place in the suddenly very competitive AL East.
I admit going into this piece that it’s a “write it while you can” job. While the Expos and Jays are currently among the hottest teams in baseball, and right there in their divisional races, I don’t think either will be in such a lofty place in two months. For now, though, each is making noise, and doing so in completely different ways.
This has been one heck of a month of May. Between injury news and the Indy
500, I’ve been a busy man. Thanks to ESPN 950 for allowing me access to the
one of the coolest events of my life.
With the race behind me, I am ready to return my full focus to baseball, and
have a couple of features coming up, including one on Dr. Tim Kremchek of the
Cincinnati Reds that will run this week.
I looked at the standings page of my local sports section for the first time this weekend, having watched games with only a general sense of team success. I was looking to see the Cubs under Baker, the reloaded Phillies, and a couple of other easy stories. My how things have changed.
One of the stathead tenets is that there’s a ton of freely available talent floating arouns out there: guys you can pick up for minimal cost who will do a servicable job. Granted, these aren’t All-Stars or anything–they’re replacement level, or just good enough to be on a major-league roster. This fact is expressed in all the good player valuation stats, and it’s generally applied as “If you can field the Tigers for $5 million, any money spent over that should make you better than the Tigers.”
That said, the Pirates this season are providing an interesting study in stathead application. Faced with a bad team and declining attendance at PNC Park, the Pirates front office decided to make playing .500 ball an organizational priority to try and attract fans. They brought in free agents on one-year deals fix their worst problems–like Kenny Lofton to play center field–but in the process they’ve pushing back their best young hitter, Craig Wilson, to the point where he’s now fighting for playing time.
In his second major-league season and first year as a rotation regular for the Montreal Expos, Zach Day has emerged as one of baseball’s biggest early-season surprises. The right-hander, who turns 25 next month, has posted a 2.63 ERA so far this year, eighth-best in the National League. Day’s bread-and-butter pitch, the sinker, has helped him put up the highest groundball-to-flyball ratio in the majors at 3.74 (well ahead of second-place Derek Lowe’s 3.16). Day recently made headlines after getting ejected Saturday in Colorado for putting superglue on his fingers in an attempt to cover a blister. Day recently chatted with BP about Gluegate, the challenges of being a sinkerballer, and the keys to keeping hitters off balance.
There’s an awful lot of stuff in baseball analysis that’s just a complete waste of time. Some people love doing studies that take a look at something either esoteric, rare, or with no potential practical application when it comes to the actual game of baseball. That’s great; there’s nothing wrong with those kinds of diversions. We’ve all got those kinds of activities in our lives. But in terms of practical application on a real life baseball team, a “sabermetric” biography of the 1952 Yankees isn’t particularly useful. That sort of stuff has never spun my wheels, and it’s one reason I tend to yell and scream at BP writers who mention ballplayers from before Kristy Swanson was born.
Historians and fans of sepia tones will undoubtedly pipe in with: “Of course you can learn something from history!” (Derisively insert sound of adults in Charlie Brown cartoons here.) No one’s saying that’s not the case. But we prefer to focus on ideas that actually have practical applications on the field, and can directly and visibly translate into more wins, which means more championships, more money, etc. We’ve taken a fair amount of flak over the years for not making more things public, and not fully embracing an academic model for the serious study of baseball. Some of the criticism is well-deserved, some of it’s simply a disagreement over what people in the field are really doing. We like the idea of innovating to gain a competitive advantage and beat the snot out of opponents, rather than having the material published in some peer-reviewed journal.
When Rany Jazayerli came back from a Pizza Feed a few weeks back and mentioned that he had talked to a couple of front office guys about a different kind of platoon, my chin hit the virtual floor. The idea he had mentioned, and which was apparently perceived as novel, was at least 20 years old, and Gary Huckabay had been approached about studying the idea by a major league club back in 1998. (Even more surprising is that the club that wanted this issue studied is not largely perceived as a progressive organization.) This supposedly novel idea had also been mentioned in one of the old Elias Analysts, but was never really fleshed out in those pages.
What kind of platoon are we talking about? Using the groundball/flyball tendencies of pitchers and hitters to determine and acquire the most favorable possible matchups.
The Expos bench has helped fuel the team’s best start in history. The Giants bullpen’s suffering through the PTP curse. Vernon Wells is earning his pay. Plus more news and notes out of Montreal, San Francisco, and Toronto.
Jerry Hairston’s injury lets the Orioles be creative–too bad they’d rather play Deivi Cruz. The Royals’ young starting rotation starts to show signs of wear. Jose Contreras is Spanish for Ed Whitson. Plus news, notes, and Kahrlisms from nine major league teams.
Last night was a night full of team troubles–the type of night that separates the contenders from the pretenders. The good teams will deal with it by using their depth and remaining flexible, while the bad ones will fall apart and blame things like chemistry. I have to say, I’m beginning to root for a collapse for some teams, because at rock-bottom might come the desperation that could lead to a team being run by Paul DePodesta, a Brad Kullman, or a Josh Byrnes. If injury is the ruinous road to riches…well, I’ll be the tour guide. Onto the injuries…
Darin Erstad’s hamstring is not just failing to heal on a normal timetable, it’s actually getting worse. According to team sources, the strain (and remember that a strain of any type involves tearing) is near the very bottom of his hamstring. A cortisone injection is very uncommon for this type of injury and there may be no comparable injury in baseball. A physician from the UTK Advisory Board said: “They’re acknowledging that they’re going way out, that the tendon could be damaged by this injection, but the next step might be surgery. Given that, a bit of thinking differently is worth the chance.” Erstad is at best still weeks away and the chance continues to increase that he may lose a very significant portion, if not all, of the 2003 season. That extension he signed late last year is looking like a bad deal for the Angels.
Orioles fans haven’t had much to cheer for so far, but the play of Jerry Hairston Jr. has been solid in the leadoff slot. One foul ball to the foot later, Hairston is lost for eight weeks. The fracture of his fifth (outside) metatarsal bone should not affect him long-term, even with his speed game. In the scheme of things, a fracture is the most easily projected injury –bones heal properly in almost every case and unlike muscles, tendons or ligaments, they leave little changed in their wake.
The Dodgers won yet another close game last night, holding the Rockies to a pair of runs in a 3-2 win. That’s an offensive explosion by the recent standards of Dodger opponents: The Blue Crew had given up just one run in five
consecutive games dating to May 14. Thanks to Keith Woolner’s latest creation,
“Team
Records and Streaks,” we know that they lead or are tied for the lead
in the number of games won when scoring two runs or four runs, and trail only the Braves in winning games in which they score three runs.
Overall, the Dodgers have allowed a freakishly low 137 runs, 36 runs fewer than the Expos and 18 fewer than the A’s. According to Michael Wolverton’s analysis, which factors in the very good pitcher’s park in which they play half their games, the Dodgers have the fourth-best
rotation and the fourth-best
bullpen in the game.
Don’t get too crazy about this idea, but the Dodgers are on pace to allow just 482 runs this season. That just isn’t done. In fact, just three teams in the last 10 years have allowed fewer than 600 runs in a full season: the Braves of 1997, 1998 and 2002. The last team to break 500? The Orioles (430) and A’s (457) did it in the strike-shortened season of 1972. (The A’s missed
seven games and may have turned the trick anyway; the Orioles missed eight,
and would certainly have stayed under 500 in a full season.) Four teams–the
Cardinals, Mets, Orioles and Tigers–did it in the last year of the modern dead-ball era, 1968. Even if the Dodgers can’t maintain their pace, they’re well on their way to being one of the top run-prevention teams of my lifetime.