As we’ve stated on a number of different occasions throughout the Baseball Prospectus Basics series, one of the goals of performance analysis is to separate perception from reality. Sometimes that means interpreting numbers, and sometimes that means interpreting events with our eyes. Either way, it’s about collecting information, and getting a little bit closer to the truth.
Evaluating the importance of strikeouts, especially for hitters, is something that has traditionally fallen into the second category. And it’s easy to understand why: baseball is a game that centers around the ongoing conflict between pitcher and batter, and there are few outcomes that capture the drama of that conflict better than a mighty whiff, followed by a long walk back to the bench. On the surface at least, a strikeout appears to be the ultimate failure for a hitter–infinitely worse than a Texas-leaguer or a fly-out to center.
Now that the ball is gone and Jamaal The Goat is next in line for explosive therapy, the Cubs may be in line for a World Series win that would finally end all the curse talk. Despite Joe Sheehan’s protestations, most Cubs fans think all that stands between them and October glory is the Astros and cruel, cruel fate.
Despite the best work of PECOTA, many still see the rotation as something akin to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or choosing from amongst five recent Playmates. To opponents, it’s pick your poison; to fans, it’s a matter of personal taste with no bad choice. Only Clement, surprisingly, avoids the yellow light. Without giving too much away from Saving the Pitcher, Clement’s mechanics are extremely good. If you want one key, watch how his glove stays steady over his plant foot.
Wait… Prior and Maddux have among the purest mechanics that motion capture has, well, captured. Why the yellow on those two? The answer is age. For Prior, he’s crossing the injury nexus after the heaviest per-outing workload of his career last season. For Maddux, he’s in a rare age bracket, one where there’s not much of a sample size. Maddux had a few minor injuries last season, but he’s hardly overworked in any sense. The problem with any system of prediction is in capturing the outliers. The Cubs have two of the most extreme on one staff. Cautionary yellows hold, but these two aren’t your average yellow-light players.
The Dodgers offered a number of $5 million, and Gagne’s rep, Scott Boras, offered $8 million. How come the lower number was so compelling? Sadly, the current CBA lacks a clause allowing unfettered access to the process to self-important analysts, so we have to posit a little, and ask around some front offices to hear possible explanations. One NL exec had this to say: “Boras overreached.” Not that there’s a whole lot of ambiguity in that statement, but after prodding, the exec clarified the statement: “Gagne’s in his first year of eligibility, and there’s a bunch of comparable guys. They’re not as good, but they’re a clear baseline from which it’d be easy to convince the panel to work.” This is true.
In my last column, I made a throwaway remark about the Blue Jays possibly and concomitantly being the third-place team in the AL East and the third-best team in all of baseball. It’s an intriguing notion–unassailable quality knuckling under to circumstance. Even so, it’s worth asking whether Toronto might have the goods to displace Boston or New York in the junior-circuit pecking order. With the Red Sox and Yankees already brimming with talent and throwing cash around like Marion Barry sans tracking collar, the Jays, in spite of their substantial merits, will likely be resigned to the brand of pre-October respectability to which they’ve accustomed in recent years. Nothing terribly wrong with that. That’s especially the case for a team on a hermetically sealed budget and facing an unbalanced schedule packed with tilts against the Sox, Yanks and the suddenly passable Orioles. Unaccommodating circumstances notwithstanding, one’s led to wonder: What would need to happen for the Jays, undeniably a fine team with a highly intelligent front office, to pass playoff muster this season?
Staring down the “Evil Empire” won’t be easy if part of the Rebel Alliance is banged up, broken, or otherwise in close proximity to Jim Rowe. While Theo Epstein has been bringing state-of-the-art ideas to the front office, he’s also been adjusting the risk tolerance of the organization. If one of the basic tenets of Moneyball-friendly organizations is getting the most bang for the buck, then watching any of those bucks sit on the shelf is waste. While the Red Sox could be wasteful with their revenue stream, they aren’t.
The key to the team is, of course, Pedro. Providing more than a third of the PECOTA projected VORP for this staff is pretty amazing considering the five-deep quality. But just as it’s been the case for the last few years, this team can only go as far as Pedro takes them. Pedro is watched more closely than any other pitcher, and the continuing focus on preparing his body to pitch makes Chris Correnti one of the real up-and-coming trainers in the business. New manager Terry Francona wasn’t known for a light touch with pitchers in his Philly gig, but this is Francona v2.0.
If Pedro can do what he did last year, the Red Sox will have more than a fighting chance in baseball’s version of Spy vs. Spy. Pedro gets a yellow light based on injury history, but honestly, he’s much less likely than last year to come up lame.
Think of stealing bases as a bit like one of those commercials for breakfast cereal. You know, the ones where they say it takes 14 bowls of Cereal X to equal what you get from one bowl of Cereal Y. In this case, it takes three stolen bases to equal one walk of shame back to the dugout. If you’re stealing at less than a 75% success rate, you’re better off never going at all.
The Yankees pick up Travis Lee, while cutting Aaron Boone loose. The Blue Jays sell Pete Walker to the Yokohama Baystars. And the Devil Rays place Seth McClung on the 60-day DL. All this a much more exciting news from around the league in your Friday edition of Transaction Analysis.
The Indians look to take a big step forward, even if much it can be chalked up to the fabled “Ugueto Effect.” The Dodgers biggest off-season acquisition didn’t come on the field, it came in the front office. And the Mariners enter 2004 with a checklist a mile long. All this and much more news from Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Seattle in your Friday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Thus the main import of Yawkey’s largesse was mostly symbolic. As a competitive program, he and Collins were misguided. As is now grudgingly accepted, the difference between a star and an average player may only be a few wins a year. There is no player, pair of players, or trio of players, that is capable of taking a team staffed by replacement-level players and turning it into a pennant winner. Improved talent must be diffused throughout the roster. In the 1933-1936 period, the Red Sox never came close to achieving this goal. Two key problems: The Yawkey/Collins program never got around to addressing the outfield; the Sox annually presented the most punchless pasture aggregation in the league; after Grove and Ferrell, the Red Sox were unable to dig up anything like another eight decent pitchers, or even another three. One lesson to be drawn is that even in an environment in which rival teams are “freely” giving away talent, it’s almost impossible to buy enough to staff an entire ballclub. Not only will the pool of available talent, at its deepest, be unequal to the demand (note that even this year’s Yankees, who have acquired a number of big-ticket items from more conservative clubs, have not been able to buy certainty for their starting rotation) but buying off the rack forces a team to be overly dependent on making the right selections–that is, on luck. A team that chooses to bank on stars rather than on depth faces a greater risk of having no fallback should their star prove to be infirm, unreliable, or simply on the way down. The large influx of talent that comes with developing a strong minor league system gives a team the depth to survive its own misjudgments.
February is like being stuck in a footlocker with Katie Holmes: Short, cramped, and full of distractions.
I can’t stretch out my arm in February without hitting some date of importance. I guess I could blame my mom, who pitched me out into the world 33 years ago yesterday, setting the stage for the month to hold a bunch of birthdays: my closest cousin’s, both my parents-in-law, and a number of other relatives on both sides of the family. Valentine’s Day is wedged in there, of course, a day that requires weeks of planning and meticulous…oh, heck, Sophia doesn’t read my column…a day that requires my attention.
The month features less enjoyable markers as well. While I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve lost just a small number of loved ones over the years, many of those have died in February, some recently enough to still cause pain as the anniversaries approach.
Memorable dates aside, February has less emotional ways to turn my head. I have a passion for college basketball–Jonah, Will and I often kid about launching College Basketball Prospectus–and the game holds my attention throughout the shortest month. While I don’t play the game as much as I used to, the February arrival of the new Strat-O-Matic cards is a time sink that will probably be with me until I can’t see anymore.
The point of all this is to say that as I sit at my laptop at 5:15 a.m. on Friday morning, I genuinely have no idea what to write about. That happens maybe a half-dozen times a year, and you’ll usually recognize those times as columns with an awful lot of bullet points or reader mail. I have concepts, I have great and wonderful writing ideas, but they’re not making through the process today, caught up in the mind along with memories of a birthday wine-tasting, analysis of bubble teams, missing my grandparents, and the jaw-dropping power of an Eric Gagne Strat card.
Closers are an aberration in baseball’s history, a massive misallocation of resources, and eventually will go the way of the dinosaurs Carl Everett doesn’t believe in. A pure closer is a reliever who only comes in to protect a one- to three-run lead, only in the ninth. The worst pitcher in baseball stands a great chance of pitching the ninth inning without giving up three runs. With no outs, a team with an average offense against an average pitcher can expect to score half a run. The best offense in baseball last year, the Red Sox, averaged about .65 runs/half inning over the course of the season. The worst reliever in the major leagues last year was Jaret Wright, who gave up 46 runs in just over 56 innings of work–.82 runs an inning. Given a three-run lead in the ninth, pitching against the Red Sox, Wright could reasonably be expected to give up an average of a run each appearance, and if he did it all season, he’d rack up 20 saves, be anointed a proven closer, and sign with the Mets for $4 million a year.
The D’backs made an early splash in the Hot Stove league by dealing Curt Schilling to the Red Sox and getting Richie Sexson from the Brewers. The Royals, whether we believe it or not, are now employing one of the more savvy GMs in baseball. And the Phillies spent the off-season making themselves the favorite in the National League East. All this and much more news from Arizona, Kansas City, and Philadelphia in your Thursday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Season one in the Great American Ballpark wasn’t what the Reds had hoped for. While the team flailed on the field, the front office suffered through its own turmoil, and too many fans came to the park dressed as empty seats. Yet looking at the lineup above, we see many of the same names we saw last year. The Reds may have the least turnover of any team in the NL.
Last season, I thought the Reds would have a shot at the NL Central crown. Oops. Instead, injuries once again tore down the team’s chances as more than half the starters were on the DL at one point near the end of the season. Instead of what could have been an historically good outfield, two-thirds of that trifecta spent the better part of the season on the DL, and the other turned into a modern Dave Kingman. Was that a fluke, or is that what the Reds can expect this season? For the medical staff of the Reds, this could be considered a make-or-break season.
Reports from Braves camp indicate that John Smoltz is in mid-season form. He was at full velocity during a bullpen session and reported no more than normal soreness following the workout. There are two things we can draw from this. First, Smoltz’s elbow is doing well after the late-season problems. Second, the Braves and Smoltz are more concerned about that elbow than they’ve been letting on. The only reason for testing the elbow so early is to gauge whether or not John Schuerholz needed to go work the phones for bullpen depth. Expect Smoltz to be used differently this season–the Braves want to use him in pure save situations only, while Smoltz is asking to go longer. The first Phillies camp for Billy Wagner started off poorly, but the soft-tissue injury in his middle fingers doesn’t look to be a long-term concern. There’s no real consensus on a cause, which is mildly concerning, but the Phillies have depth to deal with any minor injuries to their flamethrower.
I was reminded of the game Go when the Red Sox and Yankees got into again over who’s the worst evil. John Henry, who made his fortune trading stocks and commodities on the free market, argued in favor of market restrictions to restrain his rival, while Steinbrenner fired back standard Boss comments. I was thinking of a shicho, where one side, trapped, continues to spend resources as they race towards the edge of the board, where they’re caught and lose everything they expended, and everyone else watches them chase. Curt Schilling to Alex Rodriguez…Jose Vidro next? Then what, Alfonso Soriano to Boston? Can these two teams run up on $600 million in combined payroll before spring training’s out? How would Bud Selig pocket all that revenue-sharing money? Will he have to buy a new coat?
The Astros keep running the same core out there every year, and it just keeps getting older and further from its glory days. This team is starting to remind me of the mid-1990s Orioles or recent-vintage Mets, where the defense was going to hell in a handbasket, the offense was declining, and no one was coming through the system to help. I thought this Astros team was done two years ago, but they keep adding past-prime players in an effort to hang on, and to the extent that “hanging on” is a goal, they’re accomplishing it.
It’s a funny game, though. Larry Dierker managed the Astros to four division titles in five years and was forced out. Jimy Williams inherited basically the same roster, managed it to consecutive second-place, playoff-free seasons, and keeps his job.
Baseball, like life, is not a meritocracy.
Enough setup; here’s what PECOTA has for the 2004 Astros.