In the late 90s, D’Angelo Jiménez was considered one of the best prospects in baseball. Minor league experts ranging from ESPN.com’s John Sickels to BP’s Rany Jazayerli rated Jiménez as a better prospect than Alfonso Soriano, another young infielder in the Yankee system. But in January of 2000, Jiménez suffered severe injuries when his car collided with a bus on a highway in the Dominican. The injuries sustained robbed him the opportunity to compete for a position in the Yankees infield, as Jiménez was coming off big seasons in the Triple-A International and Dominican Winter leagues, and was expected to make the big club that season. He’s since moved through the White Sox and Padres organizations, with both clubs souring on him due to periodic struggles at the plate and on defense. His overall profile remains that of an effective hitter with moderate power and good plate discipline, making Jiménez one of the most underappreciated players in the game. In 2003 he landed in Cincinnati, putting up a solid line of .290/.365/.421 in 290 at-bats with the Reds. This winter in the Dominican the 26-year-old infielder had arguably the best offensive season for a second baseman in the history of the league, winning the batting title (.360), flirting with the single-season OBP record before finishing at .485, and also slugging an even .500, all while playing half his games in a pitcher’s park. Baseball Prospectus recently chatted with Jiménez before a game between the Azucareros del Este and the Licey Tigers.
Ivan Rodriguez and Greg Maddux are still on the market. For that matter, so are Mark McLemore, Shawn Estes, Todd Zeile, and Dave Veres. But I think we’ve seen enough to evaluate this winter’s free-agent signings. Today, the best. Tomorrow, the worst.
This past December, the Texas Rangers and Boston Red Sox almost pulled off a swap of Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, with assorted lesser players and suitcases of cash also reportedly involved. While this was going on, there were countless media references to this deal being “the biggest trade in baseball history.” This is a pretty bold statement, obviously, but these are some pretty big names so you didn’t hear a lot of protest or debate about the claim.
Teams have been trading baseball players for 140 years or so, and many of these trades have involved 10 or more players changing sides. Of course, that is not what makes the A-Rod/Manny trade “big”; its bigness rests with its star power, with both principles being among the best players in the game and somewhere near mid-career. Setting aside Ramirez for a moment, how often is a player of the caliber of Alex Rodriguez traded at all? Not bloody often, obviously, since there have not been very many players as good as Rodriguez, traded or not.
This article will attempt to identify these rare deals, where a team has a superstar talent and decides to trade it away. For our purposes a “trade” requires one or more players to move in each direction. Babe Ruth was not traded from the Red Sox to the Yankees, he was sold. Eddie Collins and Frank Baker were sold by the Athletics. What’s more, we are not interested in deals where money was an overriding component of the transaction. In 1935, Jimmie Foxx was dealt from the Athletics to the Red Sox in a two-for-two trade, but a check for $150,000 came the other way. The players the A’s received were of little import–Connie Mack wanted the 150 grand. This codicil similarly eliminates deals involving such superstars as Tris Speaker, Joe Jackson, Pete Alexander, Lefty Grove, and Johnny Mize.
The Angels go on a spending spree. The Dodgers frustrate their fans. The A’s wheel and deal. The Padres are bullish about 2004. Our tour of major league transactions continues with a visit out West.
Last year at this time, when we were first unveiling PECOTA, I was besieged with questions about the system’s accuracy. From the very start, the system has always had its believers and its skeptics; all of them wanted to know whether the damn thing worked. My evasive answers to these questions must surely have seemed like a transparent bit of spin doctoring. One of my readers suggested to me, quite seriously, that I had a future in PR or politics. But I was convinced–and remain convinced–that a forecasting system should not be judged by its results alone. The method, too, is important, and PECOTA’s methodology is sound. It presents information in a way that other systems don’t, explicitly providing an error range for each of its forecasts–which, importantly, can differ for different types of players (rookies, for example, have a larger forecast range than veterans). Its mechanism of using comparable players to generate its predictions is, I think, a highly intuitive way to go about forecasting. Besides, all of the BP guys seemed to appreciate the system, and getting the bunch of us to agree on much of anything is an accomplishment in and of itself. Now that it has a season under its belt, however, we can do the good and proper thing and compare PECOTA against its competition.
It’s possible to be selfish and arrogant and help your team. If a player hits a home run in an arrogant matter, that’s still worth at least one run. If Rickey selfishly stole second, that puts his team in a better position to score. Certainly, if he got himself thrown out all the time, he’d have been a detriment, but he was successful more than 75% of the time in his record-setting, 130-steal year. Baseball’s one of the most individual team sports. The game’s crux is a one-one-one battle, batter against pitcher, and even the most complex plays are serial actions–pitcher to batter to shortstop to first for the out. If everyone on a team was as good as Rickey and acted selfishly, they’d score 2,000 runs a year. In a strike-shortened season, where every game was rained out after the fifth inning. Playing in the Astrodome.
Rose violated rule 21(d) countless times and is serving the appropriate
penalty for doing so. Reinstating him would be an embarrassment to the game,
and a kick in the teeth to every player who obeyed the rule. There’s a
rationale in play that Rose’s admission is a step in the direction to
reinstatement. I actually see it as the validation of all the work Bart
Giamatti, John Dowd, and Fay Vincent did in researching Rose’s activities and
their evaluation of them. It was only the small possibility that he actually
was innocent that had been the one bullet in Rose’s gun.
That’s gone now. Rose violated 21(d). The punishment for that is permanent
ineligibility. There isn’t any gray area left.
BOSTON, Mass. — I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. When I go to a rock show I expect to see someone onstage howling like a banshee and whaling away on the rhythm guitar. I just don’t expect that someone to be Peter Gammons.
Sunday night’s “Hot Stove, Cool Music” show at the Paradise Rock Club featured not just Gammons onstage, but a slew of baseball rockers and an audience full of VIP baseball guests. It was the fourth annual event, but the first for me. I’ll admit to being star struck–the following is what I can make of my notes…
The Baseball Writers of America’s standards on what constitute a Hall of Fame pitcher are in a curious spot now, both when it comes to starters and relievers. Spoiled by a group of contemporaries who won 300 games from the mid-’60s to the mid-’80s (Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton, Gaylord Perry, Don Sutton, Nolan Ryan, Phil Niekro), the writers haven’t elected a non-300-winning starter since Fergie Jenkins in 1991. That Perry, Sutton and Niekro took a combined 13 ballots to reach the Hall while Ryan waltzed in on his first ballot with the all-time highest percentage of votes is even more puzzling. Apparently what impresses the BBWAA can be summarized as “Just Wins, Baby”–which is bad news for every active pitcher this side of Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux.
Of the 59 enshrined pitchers with major-league experience, only two of them–Hoyt Wilhelm and Rollie Fingers–are in Cooperstown for what they accomplished as relievers. While the standards for starters are somewhat easy to discern (if lately a bit unrealistic), the growing number of quality relievers on the ballot, the continuous evolution of the relief role, and the paucity of standards to measure them by present some interesting challenges to voters.
If there’s an area in which performance analysis has struggled mightily against mainstream baseball thought, it’s in hammering home the concept that the pitcher doesn’t have as much control over the outcome of ballgames–as reflected in his Won-Loss totals–or even individual at-bats–hits on balls in play–as he’s generally given credit for. Good run support and good defense can make big winners of mediocre pitchers on good teams, and .500 pitchers of good hurlers on mediocre teams. As such, it’s important to examine the things over which a pitcher has control and account for those he does not. Once again, the Davenport system rides to the rescue.
Our tour of major-league transactions continues with a visit to the Central divisions.
With my contributions to Baseball Prospectus 2004 safely behind me, it’s time to get back to filling this space with observations and analysis. Or attempts at same. I’ve missed writing my column, and while there’s no way I’ll get completely caught up on the events of the last two months, I can have fun trying.
I’m not a resolutions guy, but I am making two commitments for 2004: to emphasize a more quantitative viewpoint in my analysis, and to spend more time answering reader mail. The former I’ll just have to work on every time I write, but the latter has now been dedicated a “Task” in Outlook. Nothing in my life is real until Outlook starts nagging me about it, so hopefully that will help me be better about a weak spot in my game the last few years. I can’t answer all my e-mail, but I can get to more of it than I have been.
The big news over the weekend was that Vladimir Guerrero surprised everyone by signing with the Angels. No one saw this coming; the Angels had been rumored to be interested earlier this winter, but had faded into the background after signing Jose Guillen in December. Over the last week, the Mets and Orioles had been engaged in a low-scale bidding war for Guerrero, a weird situation in which the goal seemed to be to guarantee the fewest years and the lowest amount of money while showing the least interest. Throw in raging insecurity and a lousy sense of fashion and you’d have the way women “pursued” me in college. It was this atmosphere that allowed Moreno and the Angels to come in and pick up a Hall of Fame talent at a price that almost seems like a typo.
After a long hiatus, Transaction Analysis returns with a look at the moves in two of the most active divisions in the majors this off-season.
Playoffs Update
After the first five games of the Round Robin, the surprising Cibao Giants are in first place with 4 wins and 1 loss. The Aguilas follows with 3 and 2, Licey is 2 and 3, and Azucareros is 1 and 4.
The Tigers won their first two games, but lost two consecutive against the Aguilas over the weekend, in front of full crowds at Santo Domingo and Santiago. Monday’s game at Santiago was a typical classic of these two powerhouses. The Aguilas scored seven runs in the first inning against Randy Keisler and Wilton Chavez, but Licey proceeded to score 10 unanswered runs to take a three-run lead. D’Angelo Jimenez hit a three-run homer off Brett Laxton to crown a five-run rally in the fifth inning, putting the Tigers ahead.
Unfortunately for the Tigers, their defense failed miserably in the last two innings, and the Aguilas scored five runs to win the game 12-11. Jimenez went from hero to goat when he botched a groundball for a potential game-ending double play in the ninth, and after a strike out to pinch-hitter Felix Martinez, Victor Diaz followed with a walk-off two-run double off Guillermo Mota to leave the Tigers on the field.
The Tigers have now lost their last three games while the Aguilas have won their last three.
I’m a little ashamed to admit this now, but I used to hate Rickey Henderson. I grew up following the Giants and the Mariners, and Rickey beat the hell out of the Mariners on his way to making the Giants look stupid. And growing up in a rival city, you hear all the bad and not much of the good: Rickey’s arrogant, but not that he’s got a sense of humor.
Rickey changed baseball, too. Not for the better, unless you enjoy the motions of throwing back to first 20 times to make sure Edgar Martinez doesn’t steal second late to ignite a come-from-behind rally in an 8-1 game the M’s are losing.
We haven’t seen much base-stealing lately, for reasons that manage to hurt the understanding of how great both players were. Ruth’s marks don’t seem so impressive when even the bat boy hits 10 out a year. And power has eclipsed speed. While some (Luis Castillo,Juan Pierre) have gotten into the 60s, it’s largely forgotten that there were players like Henderson and Vince Coleman who reeled off a series of years where they swiped over 100 bases a year.
For quite a while now, teams with little hope of contending have been rightly ridiculed for throwing cash at high-end free agents despite a roster full of surrounding chaff. The Mets of the early ’90s and Devil Rays for most years of their miserable existence as ball club-cum-novelty act are prominent examples of this phenomenon. Teams that indulged in this approach often squandered precious draft picks by signing free agents that had been offered salary arbitration by their former employers and also provided themselves with plenty of disincentive against trading high-salary veterans off for prospects. As you can see, in previous years, such an off-season approach would strike a pair of potent blows against the rebuilding process. Well, this may no longer be such a ham-fisted way of operating.
As has been detailed here and elsewhere from various and sundry angles, baseball’s economic landscape is now altogether different. Whether it’s collusive in nature or merely a market correction isn’t my concern at this time, but it is a market that bears scant resemblance to the one only two winters ago. A new wrinkle is that teams aren’t offering arbitration to those free agents that, even a year ago, would’ve been no-brainers: Vlad Guerrero, Gary Sheffield, Mike Cameron, Greg Maddux, Bartolo Colon, Ivan Rodriguez, Javy Lopez, among a host of others. The idea being that the market for free agents is so depressed that there’s now a substantive chance the player will accept arbitration and take his team to the cleaners, at least relative to what he’d command on the open market. The upshot of this development is that the overwhelming majority of free agents can now be signed without forfeiting high compensatory draft picks to his former club.
With the 2004 STATLG-L Hall of Fame balloting now in the books, and the results of the BBWAA voting slated to be released this afternoon, there are few topics more prominent in baseball fans’ minds than “Which players will make it to Cooperstown in 2004?”
And rightfully so. Enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame is the highest honor a former-player can receive, and most fans are protective of that: a fact that has spurned countless heated debates over the years–rational, objective, and otherwise.
With that being said, I thought it would interesting to see what some of Baseball Prospectus’ newly updated measures of player evaluation had to say on the topic. For the uninitiated, BP’s Davenport Translated Player Cards measure a player’s value above replacement level for offense, defense, and pitching while adjusting for context–park effects, level of offense, era, length of season, and in Clay’s own words, “the distortions caused by not having to face your own team’s defense.” The Davenport Cards offer the most sophisticated statistical summaries available; if you can adjust for it, it’s in there. The basic currencies of the Davenport system, whether it’s offense, defense, or pitching, are runs and wins, more specifically, runs above replacement level and wins above replacement level.