Can Nate Silver break down the most common managerial dilemma in the game–the decision to replace a starter with a less-effective reliever? Of course he can.
A stroll through the most interesting performances of 2004.
These teams meet in the first round for the fourth time in eight years. Will this matchup turn out any differently than the first three did?
Barry Larkin plans to come back for the 2005 season, delaying his candidacy for the Hall of Fame by another year. Should he get in once eligible?
While not as prolific a hitter as Barry Bonds is, Ichiro Suzuki is productive, exciting, and as big an outlier in his own way. Nate Silver explains.
David Wright exceeded expectations, while James Loney was a disappointment. All the hitters in our Top 50 Prospects list are put under the microscope in today’s Lies, Damned Lies.
Stepping back from graphs and charts, Nate Silver looks at how far along sabermetrics has come, and what challenges are ahead in the short term.
You might think that the National League, which is dominating the performance lists, is the stronger circuit this year. Nate Silver has done the research and come to a different conclusion.
Taking a whack at the concept of success cycles, the Tiger Plan has proven an effective strategy in Motown. Nate Silver takes a closer look.
How did Theo Epstein get to a place where he believed that trading Nomar Garciaparra was the solution? Nate Silver examines some of the non-baseball reasons why general managers do the things they do. Warning: some football content.
The PECOTA projection that has garnered the most attention this year is the one for the Reds’ Wily Mo Pena. Nate Silver breaks down how PECOTA arrived at such an optimistic–and accurate–prediction.
The Padres reacted harshly to news of No. 1 draft pick Matt Bush’s arrest on underage drinking and assault charges last week, suspending him indefinitely and threatening to void his signing bonus (Bush’s assault charges have subsequently been dropped). I don’t want to minimize the stupidity of Bush’s behavior, nor to suggest that the Padres would have been better served by adopting a boys-will-be-boys approach–if Ryan Wilkins were caught, say, dropping his pants in front of a police officer while sipping from a Jagermeister and OxyContin Slurpee, we’d probably take a similar course of action.
But let’s get a few things straight…
As much as it annoyed me, being a Pistons fan, to see that coverage of the NBA Finals was focused far more on the Lakers’ demise (MEDVEDENKO TO TEST FREE AGENT WATERS!) as it was on Detroit’s ascent (blue team wins championship in five games), there’s a lot to be said for the presence of a villain. The Lakers have been so good for so long–so annoyingly, purple-and-goldenly good–for so long, that it was one hell of a story to see them go down to defeat, even if it came at the hands of a largely unfamiliar and anonymous team whose low-scoring style made them the basketball equivalent of the 1906 Cubs.
Lest you accuse me of some sort of Midwestern provincialism, it’s worth noting that the rest of the country agreed–the Finals were the highest-rated in years. David Stern agreed too, and it was refreshing to hear him confess, during a halftime interview, that the presence of a franchise like the Lakers was good for his league, drawing lots of eyeballs and putting lots of butts in the seats.
Now that baseball has the sports stage more or less to itself–the NHL finals concluded two weeks ago, with the Dayton (OH) Green Hornets defeating the Saskatoon Moosecatchers in a thrilling seven-game series–it’s worth considering whether a similar phenomenon manifests itself in our preferred sport.
One of the entertaining elements to following the Cubs this year is witnessing just how the city’s reactions have changed in light of the lofty expectations foisted on the team prior to the start of the season. Ordinarily, a 30-28 record during the first 90-degree week of the summer would be cause for celebration. This time around, it has triggered grave concern, as the red-on-blue Cub flag flies feebly beneath those of the Reds, Cards and Astros atop the center field scoreboard at Wrigley. One of the problems, it seems, is not that the Cubs aren’t scoring enough runs, but that they aren’t scoring them at the right times.
Two months ago, the Oakland Athletics signed Eric Chavez to a six-year, $66 million contract extension that will keep him with the club through 2010. Despite some head-scratching from the public, there are good reasons behind why Billy Beane campaigned to do for Chavez what he hadn’t done for former MVP shortstop Miguel Tejada. Unlike Tejada, Chavez is a player whose skills, like his fine defense and his ever-improving plate discipline, are likely to be undervalued by the market. On top of which, Chavez has continued to demonstrate growth season after season, and PECOTA thinks that he’s a very safe bet going forward.
It is no secret, however, that Chavez has a tragic flaw: he can’t hit left-handed pitching. From 2001-2003, Chavez managed a stellar line of .306/.375/.579 against right-handers, but a Mathenian .229/.278/.395 against southpaws. The A’s, recognizing his defensive value and perhaps hoping that repetition would breed improvement, continued to start him anyway, in spite of a rotating array of viable platoon alternatives.
This year, indeed, has brought about a turnaround–Chavez is crushing lefties so far on the season (.288/.373/.561), while performing well below his career averages against righties (.214/.358/.398). Whether there’s any rationale for the change other than sample size, I’m not certain (I don’t get to see the West Coast teams play as often as I’d like to). What is clear, however, is that if such a change becomes permanent–if Chavez learns how to hit left-handed pitching at the age of 26–it would be a relatively unprecedented development. In most cases, a platoon split for a left-handed hitter is something like a finger print or a dental record: it remains a readily identifiable and more or less unchanging part of his profile throughout the different stages of his playing life. A left-handed hitter with a big platoon split early in his career is, in all likelihood, going to have a big platoon split later in his career.
Some pitchers’ most readily-identifiable characteristic is their ability to induce groundballs. Indeed, for pitchers like Lowe, Zambrano, and Brandon Webb, inducing groundballs is an essential part of their game plan. Zambrano, for instance, can get away with maintaining a relatively high walk rate because he induces a lot of double plays, and avoids giving up home runs, which are especially costly with runners on base.