What do these teams have in common this season: the Red Sox, Cubs, Reds, Expos, Yankees and Cardinals? They’re not all contenders, they’re not all pennant-race non-entities, they’re not all possessed of similar strengths and weaknesses, they’re not all of a the same economic strata, not all their mascots have feathers, fur or nylon stitching. So what could it be? The answer is that all of the aforementioned teams are poised to open the 2004 season without a lefty in their rotation. What’s more is that the Pirates, if they do indeed dispatch Oliver Perez to the minors to start the season, and the Blue Jays, if Ted Lilly’s wrist injury keeps him off the opening-day roster and he’s replaced by Vinny Chulk, will join their ranks.
I can’t really say whether this is a historical oddity, but my suspicion is that when more than a quarter of the league has not a single left-handed starter among them, something’s afoot. And, mind you, other than the Reds, these aren’t teams that have performed the industry equivalent of dumpster diving to assemble their pitching staffs. In fact, you’ll find among these sans-lefty squads the probable top three pitching staffs in all of baseball. Additionally, the Padres may become the first nominal contender since the ’94 Expos to go with an all right-handed bullpen for the bulk of the season. So is there any reason for this, ahem, southpaucity?
The Joe Mauer Express appears to be steaming down the tracks right now. The 21-year-old Twin has been named the game’s top prospect by both Baseball Prospectus and Baseball America, one of those rare confluences of agreement between the two that mark a player as a future star. ESPN.com had him on their main baseball page on Tuesday, and Peter Gammons wrote glowingly not only of Mauer’s skill, but of the high opinion in which the young catcher is held. I think Mauer is currently a good baseball player. He’s shown offensive and defensive development in his three professional seasons, and while I still think the Twins should have taken Mark Prior in 2001–how different might their two playoff losses have gone with the big right-hander?–clearly it’s not like they ended up with a bum. Mauer is going to eventually be a productive right-handed hitter; comparable to Mike Sweeney, with maybe a bit more power and patience. I just don’t agree that Mauer is a future star behind the plate, and it has everything to do with his height. Mauer is listed at 6’4″, and people that height or taller just don’t have long, successful careers at the catching position.
Ozzie Guillen wants to rely heavily upon his starters in Chicago. Are they ready? There are a number of position battles left in St. Louis. And the Rangers recently inked Hank Blalock to a long-term deal. Was it the right move? All this and much more news from Chicago, St. Louis, and Texas in your Tuesday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
One of the many cool things about this gig is knowing that you’ve introduced concepts that are going to be around for a very long time. For people like Michael Wolverton, Clay Davenport and Keith Woolner, it has to be greatly rewarding to have invented metrics that likely will be used by not just the next generation of baseball fans, but the ones to follow them. To create something both useful and enduring is one way to leave a mark, however small, on the world.
Me? I’m no SuperGenius (man, I miss Calvin) like those guys. To the extent that I’ve brought anything into the baseball world, it’s the second-best BP thing to ever be named after a mediocre middle infielder.
I’m talking about The DiSar Awards, now five years old and still honoring the best and brightest in the field of swinging at everything. The awards are named in tribute to former Angels shortstop Gary DiSarcina, who once remarked that he wanted to go an entire season without walking, and who finished his career with 154 free passes in 12 years and 3,744 at-bats.
With the rise of quantitative analysis in baseball and the prominence of Michael Lewis’s bestseller Moneyball (which, contrary to the ruminations of Joe Morgan, was not written by Oakland GM Billy Beane) there has been cultivated a turf rivalry of sorts between traditional scouting types and their propeller-head assailants. It’s my position (and the position of probably all of my colleagues here at Baseball Prospectus) that this rivalry is silly, unnecessary, and ultimately counterproductive. That’s because as organizations begin to recalibrate their approach to making player personnel decisions, they don’t need to be asking: which method do we choose? Instead, it should be: how do we integrate both approaches?
You see, there’s no need to replace traditional scouting with performance scouting (a term sometimes used to describe what we do here at Baseball Prospectus), and there’s no need to ignore the latter completely in blind preference to the former. In a column I wrote last year, I made a “beer and tacos” metaphor out of the dilemma. It’s a little like asking the question: “Which do you want, beer or tacos?” The answer, of course, is: “Both. Now, please.”
The oft-recited assertion that “small markets can’t compete” in Major League Baseball is usually supported by a table showing that “winners” like the Yankees, Dodgers, and Red Sox spend far more on players than “losers” like the Devil Rays, Pirates, and Brewers. This argument is misleading in at least three respects. First, “small market” is often mistakenly used as a synonym for “low revenue.” A team’s revenue, and the size of the payroll it can support, is far more dependent on its recent success (and the terms of its stadium lease) than on the size of its market. According to MLB’s official revenue figures for 2001, the Seattle Mariners took in more money than any other club except the Yankees–over three times as much as the Florida Marlins, who play in a larger market. Playing in a 35-year-old stadium, the Cardinals outgrossed Baltimore, Philadelphia and Detroit, all of which occupy markets at least twice the size of St. Louis. Cleveland and Minneapolis-St. Paul are almost exactly the same size, but the Indians grossed $100 million more than the Twins. Second, a snapshot of one season’s “winners” and “losers” ignores the ebb and flow of team fortunes. If Major League Baseball had proposed contraction 10 years earlier, the Indians and Mariners would have been among the leading candidates for extermination. The Oakland Athletics, heroes of Moneyball for doing more with less, had the majors’ highest Opening Day payroll in 1991, the same year the Pirates won their third division title in a row. Over the past 20 years, the Padres and Twins have played in more World Series than the Dodgers or Red Sox. Most tellingly of all, the original list of eight clubs considered for contraction, prepared in December 2000, included all three of the clubs which have won the World Series since then. Third, and most importantly, some teams are better run than others.
As they did last year, the Marlins will need two ingredients to brew up another batch of Fish Fever: pitching and luck. Jack McKeon’s lucky cigar burned bright through the off-season after beating back Dusty’s magic toothpick, but does Ole Jack still have some luck left? Ironically it was some bad luck that turned around the Marlins season; there’s a much better and more thorough description in the Marlins chapter of BP2004, so I’ll spare myself some typing here. Beckett’s minor elbow problem, though greatly exaggerated at the time, did allow him to stay fresh enough to do yeoman’s work in the playoffs. He may just be the guy you don’t recognize in baseball’s television spots, but Beckett possesses electric stuff when healthy. Beckett is still young and has not faced a full season’s workload in his career, so his yellow is well earned. Add in a horrid attrition rate from PECOTA and Beckett borders on a red light. He’s precisely the type of pitcher you want on your team when you have a deep rotation.
Are these Rangers any more than a placeholder in someone’s memory? Probably not. Deserting the plan that tried to build a team around the game’s best young player, the team now is in an odd transition between John Hart and Grady Fuson. It has young and old, good and bad, durable and fragile. Acquisitions Brian Jordan and Brad Fullmer both come in limping. The injuries are partially responsible for their new lockers, allowing them to fit under a pre-flexible salary structure and possessing enough upside to hope for comeback seasons. Fullmer will be challenged to come back from a dreadful patellar tendon rupture, but he should get plenty of rest in the DH slot. Fullmer also never relied on speed, so losing a step isn’t a terrible loss. Jordan, on the other hand, is almost on his last legs. While his patellar tendon problem was not as serious as Fullmer’s, the loss of a step or three affects what athletic talents Jordan was once able to use. He has failed several required tests this spring, so the prognosis is decidedly cloudy. Hiding him at DH, even occasionally, is unlikely with Fullmer, Teixeira, and eventually Adrian Gonzalez in the mix.
Dave Nilsson is back in the bigs, this time with the Braves. Damaso Marte and Joe Nathan would get extra bucks from the White Sox and Twins depending on their managers’ whims. Geoff Jenkins’ three-year deal with the Brewers may become another Milwaukee millstone. These and other happenings in today’s Transaction Analysis.
Gene Orza thinks smoking is worse than juicing. Not everyone agrees. Peter Magowan thinks the Yankees are out of control. Jason Isringhausen wishes Scott Kazmir the best of luck in New York. Ozzie Guillen wants to win by doing the little things. And Jose Lima just is glad to be in a major league uniform. All this and many more quips in the latest edition of The Week In Quotes.
The Houston bullpen looks to take a pretty significant step back, according to PECOTA. The Brewers are already looking two years down the road … or least they should be. And the A’s have quite the bunch of misfits invited to Spring Training in Arizona. All this and much more news from Houston, Milwaukee, and Oakland in your Monday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
The history of spring training is one of ongoing professionalization and standardization, which is a 13-syllable way of saying, “All eccentricities have been stomped out of it.” In the early days of spring training, teams lacked set destinations. There were no permanent Florida or Arizona complexes, the Dodger installation at Vero Beach not coming until mid-century. Depending on the year and where the manager felt like spending his spring, teams trained in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Catalina Island, California, the Dominican Republic. Ernest Hemingway figures in a number of spring training stories because the hard-drinking Papa frequently crossed paths with the hard-drinking Dodgers when they trained in Cuba during the 1940s. Most of the stories revolve around Hemingway and closer Hugh Casey getting drunk and beating the heck out of each other. As Papa wrote in The Sun Also Rises: “Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Today, teams have expensive stadiums waiting for them, some appendages of theme parks. There are no more holdouts, no Rickey Hendersons who report late because they can’t be bothered to start on time. But for Dominicans with visa problems, punctuality is the rule. If the training season is used for anything more fun than training, it’s kept on the down low.
You might recall that last year I wrote a trio of articles that examined the minor league pitching statistics of two distinct populations of major league hurlers. One group was manifestly successful at the highest level, while the other group, while not as bad as a Slim Whitman concept album, still didn’t fare to well in the bigs. While far from conclusive, the findings of the study were more confounding and counterintuitive than anything else. It provided more questions than answers, which is usually what happens when you give a former English major the keys to Excel. It was quite surprising to find that Group B outperformed Group A in several key measures like K/BB ratio, K/9 and BB/9. In short, they struck out hitters at a higher clip, had better control and demonstrated more command. The only thing Group A did do better, albeit modestly, was keep the ball in the park and prevent hits (and the latter probably wasn’t entirely of their own making). As such, I’ve decided to revisit this matter with an eye toward home runs and hits allowed–the two measures that favored Group A in the original study. Additionally, this time I’ll remedy an oversight in the first study and bring age into the equation.
The Indians are not only one of the top medhead teams around, but also one of the best-organized front offices. From their pioneering use of databases to the way they have dealt with the Kaz Tadano situation, this franchise is first-rate. My sidekick on Baseball Prospectus Radio, Scott McCauley, is a big Tribe fan. Often, he’ll look like a dog that’s been kicked when we discuss the Indians, but I keep telling him that things are looking up. As the dawn of hope starts to light the horizon, it can appear very dark. Even in the AL Central, that lineup isn’t going to cause a lot of fear, and the rotation has a ton of question marks. Still, as Rob Neyer pointed out, this team could sneak up on people. They won’t be the Yankees, Red Sox or even the A’s, but in the AL Central, they don’t need to be. If they sneak into the playoffs some time soon…well, we all know how to play craps, right?
One of the objectives of the Basics series is to sort of rehash everything that is very basic: what we know now, and how did we get to the point that we know it? Filling in some of the back-story of what’s up in terms of player analysis serves a few important purposes. First, it helps eradicate some of the potential barriers anyone might have to analysis: take a look, and you that this isn’t all rocket science. If even a non-math person and ex-Teamster like me can get it or get some of it, I’m willing to bet that everybody else can too.
But if you like the flavor and you want more, there’s a really important second goal the Basics series can achieve if you’re new to this. Or, if you’re already familiar with this sort of stuff, the series serves as a general reminder to those of us who think we know it all. That second lesson is: When in doubt, don’t quit early.
Whether you call the line of inquiry about baseball that we’re involved in here “performance analysis” or “sabermetrics” or snarky and insufferable, one of the perils of working within this community is that it’s stocked with bright people devising ever-better mousetraps to define player value statistically, particularly offensive value. As a result, you run the risk of getting lost in the inevitable alphabet soup of different newfangled metrics. And rather than try to sort through them all, it’s perhaps easier to settle for a figure that some people refer to as simple and elegant: OPS, or On-base percentage Plus Slugging percentage. And perhaps worse yet, if you’re an analyst, it’s probably easiest to use OPS, because it’s the easiest to explain. As we mentioned earlier in the series, OPS winds up doing a pretty decent job of mimicking a description of overall offensive value. So it works, right? And if it works, and it’s simple, why not use it as a gateway stat to introduce fans to the broader, more diverse world of statistical analysis?
I got an interesting response to Monday’s Hope and Faith piece:
“As one who wrote to complain about your writing off the Marlins last year, I have to say that I mostly agree with your list this year.
My only slight quibble would be with the Diamondbacks’ listing. If Barry Bonds gets hurt, the Giants aren’t too much better than the D’Backs. I think that if a team starts with Randy Johnson and Brandon Webb, maybe if Casey Fossum steps up a little (look at his by-team breakdown and it seems that getting shelled by Toronto twice in SkyDome inflated his stats), if Steve Sparks keeps close to .500, they are not so far off. I hate to see them giving 30 starts to Shane Reynolds, but if they can get someone to take his place and also finish .500, they have a chance to win more than 81 games. (Instead of putting a demonstrably bad pitcher like Reynolds in there every fifth day, I’d much rather see them convert one of their many good middle relievers to the starting staff.)
Sure, they have holes but if you have a couple of top pitchers to build around, and good middle relief, you can’t be written off. A team with Johnson and Webb at the top of the rotation can hope to patch something together and exceed expectations. That’s the same reason I wrote to you last year to suggest you were short-shrifting the Marlins. They had enough good young pitchers that the pieces had a chance to fall in place.
–B.C.”
I don’t really disagree, which is why I had the Diamondbacks in the gray area in Monday’s column.