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.
In our introduction to the Baseball Prospectus Basics series we wrote, “We always want to improve our understanding of the game–each player, each play, each pitch, each throw, each hit–what does it really mean?” We have a storehouse of data to help us refine our understanding of how baseball really works and how it can be improved. We have a team of performance analysts who help us see things we might have never perceived on our own. But the unrefined essentials of what we use are harvested from the box scores you and I read every morning from April through October.
The title of this essay is misleading: there is no correct way to read a box score. Roto gamers approach a box score like it’s a greatest hits record. Retrosheet’s patrons dust each stroke of agate as if it was an artifact. You pay for the morning paper, you get to use your box scores however you wish, even as fishwrap.
Box scores now tell us nearly everything that occurs in a game. They tell us hot warm it was, the direction and speed of the wind, and how many people came out to the park. We can find out who the umpiring crew was. Baserunning blunders, substitution patterns, clutch hits, high-leverage relief appearances–it’s all in a good box score, along with groundballs, flyballs, balls, strikes, and pitch counts.
The Braves were wise to let their free agent hitters go. The Twins’ pen could stay on top even with the departure of Hawkins and Guardado. The Devil Rays have high hopes for their offense, but remain in pitching limbo. These and other news and notes in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
The Newark Star Ledger reported Feb. 10 that George Zoffinger, the CEO of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, recently met with senior officials of MLB to discuss the possibility of bringing a franchise to the Xanadu/Meadowlands Sports Complex. Xanadu, which is a planned 4.76 million-square-foot family entertainment, office and hotel complex to be built at the Meadowlands Sports Complex, also calls for the redevelopment of Continental Airlines Arena (current home of the N.J. Nets and N.J. Devils) and is a joint venture between affiliates of Mills Corporation and Mack-Cali.
The idea of Major League Baseball in New Jersey is not a new one. A long-time hotbed of International League and Negro National League action, the Brooklyn Dodgers relocated a total of 15 games to Jersey City’s Roosevelt Stadium in 1956 and 1957 as part of an effort to motivate New York City to give ground in difficult negotiations for a new Brooklyn ball park. The state has flirted with the Yankees for the past 20 years. In 1987 New Jersey was finally poised to redevelop the Meadowlands for baseball when voters soundly rejected the notion, a typical action for a state that pulls in so many directions at once that it’s a wonder that it doesn’t tear along the Pennsylvania border and sail down the Delaware into the Atlantic Ocean.
Let’s compare J.J. Hardy and Bobby Crosby:
Player Age EqBA/EqOBP/EqSLG
Hardy 20 .240/.316/.380
Crosby 23 .273/.356/.490
Adjusted for park and league context, Crosby’s numbers were much, much better. How to balance that against the age differential? I think the question becomes: How likely is it that Hardy will post a line of .273/.356/.490 or equivalent by the time that he’s 23? It’s possible, certainly, and it’s also possible that he’ll post a line even better than that. But I don’t think that it’s *probable*. That’s a lot of improvement to make. PECOTA would put the possibility at somewhere around 25%, I’d think, and I think that’s enough to render Crosby the stronger prospect.
If Joe Torre gets to write the above lineup on his card 130 times this season and gets 30 starts from each of his five starters, it will be a long season in Boston, but the odds of this happening look more like Powerball than baseball. I’ll be interested to see if any other team has as many red lights this season. It’s odd to see, but the most recent addition to the team–the misplaced third baseman–looks like the best bet for a healthy season.
After some 28,000 words of spirited debate in Parts I through IV of the Top 50 Roundtable, Baseball Prospectus unveils its Top 50 Prospects list. Rany Jazayerli will be along tonight to discuss.
The Dodgers’ hiring of Paul DePodesta inspires a partial conversion. The Pirates sign Raul Mondesi to ensure that Craig Wilson again has nowhere to play. Damon Minor returns to San Francisco–or at least Fresno. Albert Pujols cracks nine figures in St. Louis. These and other happenings in today’s Transaction Analysis.
Dayn Perry explained why various statistics–like batting average (AVG) and runs batted in (RBI)–were not as reliable as you’ve always been told, and why we at Baseball Prospectus don’t use them in our analysis terribly often. Today, we’re going to look into one of the statistics we do use: Equivalent Average, or EqA. In its rawest state, EqA is a simple combination of batting numbers, not so very different from OPS.
Compared to OPS, it counts walks and HBP a little higher (at 1.5 instead of 1), it has stolen bases, and hits and extra bases are counted a little less (since they are divided by plate appearances, not just walks). What, then, makes EqA different from the other statistics? Simply put, its more accurate, its unbiased, and it models the scale of batting average, so it’s easy for a new fan understand.
In just four short years, the White Sox have gone from Pride of Chicago to second fiddle. The Cardinals look to improve a bit in 2004, if only because they’ve managed to shed some dead weight. And the Rangers, once again, looked to be a weaker sister of the AL West. All this and much more news from Chicago, St. Louis, and Texas in your Tuesday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
At the end of Friday’s column on the Cubs, I tacked on a line about how the team wasn’t clearly better than the Astros and Cardinals. No one questioned the inclusion of the Astros, with their revamped rotation, in that sentence, but I got a few questions about the Cardinals.
I’ll admit that the I didn’t think too carefully about them while writing the column; over the past half-decade, I’ve just gotten used to considering the Houston and St. Louis ballclubs as the teams to beat in the NL Central, and it seemed natural that the trend would continue.
Are the Cards really deserving of comparison to the Cubs? Or is the Central down to two reasonable contenders?
Had Baseball Prospectus existed in 1984, there are a number of topics we would not have been talking about. The debate about how best to use a closer wouldn’t have existed because the “one inning and only with a lead” doctrine had yet to be invented. 1984 closers who pitched more innings than 2003 National League Cy Young Award winner Eric Gagne: all of them. Twenty relievers threw over 100 innings that year. The reason that Willie Hernandez was perceived to be so important to the Tigers, why Goose Gossage was considered the last piece in the Padres puzzle, was because they pitched in high-leverage situations. They could have saved 45 games if they had been used that way, but managers of the time thought it would be more useful if they pitched when the game was on the line. Like all pitchers, some relievers are durable and some are not. Bruce Sutter averaged 99 innings a season through 1984. After that year, in which he recorded a record 45 saves and had a 1.54 ERA, he became a free agent and was signed to a large contract by the Braves. Consistent with the Ted Turner touch o’ gold that persisted throughout the second half of the 1980s, Sutter’s arm immediately fell off. That was his problem. It was Eddie Haas’ problem, Turner’s problem. Twenty years later, it should not be Eric Gagne’s problem. Sutter was no cautionary tale–pitchers are largely immune from generalization. Each should be exploited according to the extent of his ability to remain healthy (with consideration being given to frequency of use, mechanics, weather conditions, pitches per appearance and the like), rather than at some mythical lowest common denominator level of work which is deemed “safe.”
Jeremy Reed had the best year of any player in the minors last year and has a very high probability of being an excellent player. I think a top-five ranking would be a just reward, and consistent with our emphasis on performance rather than tools. I absolutely do not understand why Reed would rank below Alexis Rios. He is Rios’ equal in every attribute except for plate discipline, where he has a substantial advantage, and his PECOTA profile is considerably better. I don’t think a couple of good weeks in Puerto Rico are enough to overcome that. Weeks is a stud and I think the objections to him are a bit overstated. I would like to get a scouting report or two on his defense, since his numbers were quite bad. I’m also not on board with the fear of ranking pitching prospects highly, though I’m sure there will be advocates for the opposite point of view. I think the *top* tier of pitching prospects is unusually good this year as compared with the top tier of hitting prospects, and I think we should make adjustments accordingly. If you want to get a bit more analytical about it, I don’t think it’s a matter of our overrating the risk associated with pitching prospects so much as it is our *underrating* the risk associated with offensive prospects, especially offensive prospects who have yet to reach Double-A. I like Marte a lot, and he has no real negatives, but placing him as high as #2 implies a scouting judgment of sorts; his numbers were good, but not overwhelming.
Since the recent signing of Greg Maddux by the Cubs, a flurry of “who’s got the best rotation” navel-gazing has ensued. In mainstream circles, the debate has generally come down to a derby comprising the Red Sox, Cubs, A’s and Astros, with the Yankees thrown in on occasion. Rather than listen to me pontificate on who I think has the best starting five, let’s see what the PECOTA 2004 Weighted-Mean Projections say. We’ll take the VORP for each projected member of the rotation and use the team totals to determine the rankings. For some clubs, the back spot or two of the rotation is up for grabs, but, irrespective of who comes out of the spring-training wash, the rankings aren’t likely to be substantially altered.