Kevin Millwood celebrates his no-no, Todd Helton lobbies for Mark Prior Boulevard, A.J. Burnett becomes Brad Arnberg’s latest injury victim, and Juan Pierre laments pro wrestler Buff Bagwell…er…Fernando Vina’s 20th inning single.
Sometimes, the game loves you back.
I spent last week on the road, first on a trip with my wife, Sophia, then off to see an old friend from the East Coast who was out on this one. I didn’t see much baseball from the 19th through the 26th, even missing the highlight shows most of the time. It was a good break; I remarked to Sophia on Tuesday, as a game aired on a television in the back of a restaurant, that I was really starting to miss the game. While I was enjoying our trip, I was also looking forward to getting back to “normal” life a little, immersing myself in the game and writing again.
With my travel complete, yesterday was the first time in a while I’d had a chance to follow a day of baseball the way I usually do, watching games on television and following the untelevised ones online. I picked a pretty good day to return, because almost as if the game missed me and wanted to show me just how much, baseball provided a ridiculously entertaining day of highs and lows.
Welcome to Part 2 of our look at the importance of hot starts. If you haven’t already, read Part 1 first. We’ll wait for you to get back.
Last time, I looked at how teams fared at season’s end after starting the season with a particular record, varying the data by looking at starts of varying lengths. While I pointed out general trends in the data (as well as the exceptions that proved the rule), I did not sum up the data concisely into a single, coherent formula to predict a team’s final record. That’s what today’s article is about. In Part 3–yes, there will be a Part 3–I want to examine how the interaction between a team’s record at the start of the season, and its record the previous season, affects its final winning percentage.
Yesterday, Commissioner Bud Selig announced his intention to retire when his current five-year term expires on December 31, 2006. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Selig claims never to have wanted the Commissionership. Less than a month after becoming Acting Commissioner on September 9, 1992–after leading the insurgency which forced his predecessor Fay Vincent to resign in midterm–Selig told Hal Bodley of USA Today that he planned to remain in office “two to four months.” In December 1992, he assured Claire Smith of the New York Times that he had “zero interest in the job.”
Jose Vidro is The Man in Montreal–or wherever the Expos are calling home these days. The best hitter on the planet might also be the fastest man on the Giants roster, and that fits right in with manager Felipe Alou’s baserunning philosophies. Frankencatcher is a valuable Jays contributor, while Kelvim Escobar might be a double-agent. Quick updates on minor-leaguers of note for each team.
If Dr. Tim Kremchek sends me a bill for the two hours he spent out of surgery today–discussing everything from his love for the game to the ins-and-outs of building a world-class medical facility with everything from an MRI on site to an indoor field where Bill Doran and Tom Browning offer instruction–I’ll be more than happy to fork over the cash. (Well, not really, but you know what I mean.)
That said, my talk with Dr. Kremchek was really enlightening. There will be a feature coming next week, but I’ll say in this forum what I said to Dr. Kremchek today: much of what I’ve written about him may have been an incorrect interpretation of information. Given the proper context, Kremchek’s work can be taken a completely different way without changing the basic facts.
Major-league third catchers face adversity. Appier, Fogg, and the Big Unit hit the DL. The brand-spanking-new bereavement list begins to see some action around the league.
Garret Anderson takes aim at the Earl of Doubles while playoff heroes John Lackey and K-Rod struggle in the early going for the Angels. Mark Prior Cy Young, Hee Seop Choi Rookie of the Year, Mark Bellhorn benchwarmer? Could happen. And the Tigers try to avoid making history while Alan Trammell works Ramon Santiago, Omar Infante and other kids into the league’s worst lineup.
Even when I try to be “short and sweet”–tough for a guy who’s six feet tall and arrogant as hell–it seldom works. What I don’t say in UTK often ends up in emails, and since I have this near pathologic need to answer every email, I skipped some yesterday. (I apologize if one of yours was one of them.) One reader challenged me to expand on my “Tony Gwynn is full of crap” statement–and I’ll agree, what I said was abbreviated and had the bare minimum in the way of explanation. To fully say what I think, though, I would have to deviate further from my format as a Gammonsesque “notes” column, and end up with literary loose bowels.
Now, does the situation deserve a more full account? Yes. The drug situation does not need knee-jerk reactions. When I helped write the piece on Steve Bechler’s death, I stayed as far away from the mainstream coverage as possible, trying to take as many factors as possible into account to get to the facts of the situation. I’ve taken on the use/abuse of creatine since the genesis of this column. Now, my take on drugs in baseball is moving from something I can’t ignore to a feature and potentially something in a longer format. Ideally, it will come out later this year or even perhaps as a BP2K4 piece. Yes, the issue demands a proper response…so please give me time to do it right.
Looking at outfield defenses, I found that the difference between the best and the worst outfield defenses worked out to around 150 hits, given an average pitching staff and equal chances. These are the fly balls that skip past Carl Everett and are devoured by Darin Erstad.
For purposes of this column, figure 33% of those go for doubles. Generally, doubles are about 20% of all hits, including ground-ball hits, so if anything, that’s a little conservative. And also for purposes of this example, we’re playing in an average park with an average pitching staff backed up by an average infield. The average AL team last year hit .264/.327/.424, while the average NL team hit .259/.327/.410.
Let’s say that you’re in the NL, with an average outfield, and you replace those players with all-stick immobile outfielders and punt outfield defense–we’ll call these guys the Kahrls. What happens to your pitchers?
Joe Sheehan looks back at Morris to see if he really could pitch to the score.
Silicone. Margarine. O’Doul’s. Why fool around with watered-down imitations when you’ve got the real thing ready and available?
Rightly or wrongly, a lot of attention has been focused on pitch counts in the past several years. That’s partly because of the efforts of people like Rob Neyer, Keith Woolner, and Will Carroll, not to mention those coaches, executives and agents who understand the importance of protecting their golden-armed investments. Pitch counts have become easy to take for granted because pitch count data is more readily available now than it ever was in the past. These days, just about any self-respecting box score lists pitch counts alongside the rest of a pitcher’s line, a far cry from the dirty newsprint days of yore, when pitch count references were about as common as mentions of Reality TV or the Information Superhighway.
But what about when you don’t have pitch count information available? Like, say, you’re at a ballgame, and wondering whether Dusty Baker should send Kerry Wood out for another inning? Or you’re perusing through minor league stats? Or you’re looking at old boxes on Retrosheet, which wonderful as they might be (this, folks, was the first game I ever attended), don’t contain any information on pitch counts?
Well, it turns out that it’s not that difficult to make a reasonable guess at pitch counts based on other information that’s much easier to come by. Looking at a complete set of data from the 2001 and 2002 seasons as provided by Keith Woolner, I ran a simple linear regression of pitches thrown against various other characteristics of a pitcher’s stat line. Here was the formula that I came up with:
The Mets’ season already looks like a mess, though Jose Reyes, Aaron Heilman, and yes, even Ty Wigginton could brighten the picture. Jose Jimenez has gone from solid, unheralded reliever to arsonist; Shawn Chacon has gone from arsonist to early ace. The Orioles are bad at the big-league level, bad at the minor-league level, and may finally start to feel the economic pinch too.
Jimmy Anderson proves yet again that he’s Triple-A fodder, Dean Palmer’s three years past being a lost cause, the division-leading Royals get Beltran back, and Johnny Estrada takes a swig of Mr. PIBBB.
Normally, I open light and breezy. I talk about coffee, beer, or even the heavy stuff (NyQuil–and I’m feeling much better, thank you). UTK is my way of talking to a bunch of people all at once, and anyone who’s met me knows that I talk and talk and talk. Today, however, I’m going to say that Tony Gwynn is as full of crap as Jose Canseco or Ken Caminiti, and simply leave it at that.
The word “steroids” is becoming de facto shorthand for performance enhancing drugs, both legal and illegal. It’s also becoming de facto way for lazy journalists to point at a game and players they’ve come to loathe and besmirch it with an air of community service. Buster Olney is a really good writer (with a very interesting interview over at Bronx Banter), but he’s fallen into the same trap as many before him: Find an ex-player with an agenda, find someone within the game willing to back him up for an unquestioned reason, and play at public perceptions that baseball players really aren’t more talented than you or me–they’re just on drugs.
Today, I want to look at the relevance of a hot start on a team’s overall winning record. (I know–where do I get these ideas?)
As I write this, the aliens who have collectively taken over the Kansas City Royals’ entire roster are 14-3, the best start in team history. Not to be outdone, the Yankees are 15-3 and have outhomered their opponents this year by the miniscule margin of 35 to 4, which is a stat that deserves its own DTN article, if not its own episode of The X-Files. And both teams are trying to keep up with the Giants, who after Sunday’s loss are 15-3 despite outscoring their opponents by the downright-reasonable margin of just 107 to 81.
The topic of the meaningfulness of hot starts has intrigued analysts since the Tigers’ remarkable 35-5 start in 1984 persuaded Bill James to look at the subject in his 1985 Abstract. One of the major problems with this sort of data analysis is just getting the data for the day-by-day standings for every day in baseball history. James, working by hand, only had data from 1965 to 1984, but then he did not have the services of the incomparable, indispensable David W. Smith (the W. stands for “Support Project Retrosheet!”), who graciously provided me with just the data I needed.