Every March, there’s some college basketball team that climbs on the back of some player and makes a run deep into the tournament. It happens nearly every year and probably always has, but it’s burned into my memory with the Kansas Jayhawks’ championship run behind Danny Manning. Now known as “Danny and the Miracles,” Manning simply carried an inferior team to the top. Baseball has similar runs from time to time–Orel Hershiser’s amazing run through the 1988 season comes to mind. But as the Giants essay in BP04 shows, General Manager Brian Sabean and Assistant General Manager Ned Colletti are expecting more from Barry Bonds, even as he becomes less likely to be able to deliver. Bonds’ homers may defy gravity, but there’s a point where his body will no longer be able to defy age.
There aren’t many places to hide on a baseball field surrounded by 40,000 spectators, but one place you can enjoy relative anonymity is the coaching box. Most season ticket holders would have a hard time naming their team’s third base coach, never mind the casual fan.
So it isn’t necessarily a good sign that Cubs third base coach Wendell Kim is already well-known in Chicago after having spent just a year there. An even worse sign is that most Cubs fans know Kim best by his nickname: Wavin’ Wendell. Kim’s reputation for sending runners to their deaths at home plate preceded his arrival in Chicago, and it’s only grown since he’s been there.
Of course, reputations can be unfair, and reputations about baserunning in particular are difficult to check, since baserunning numbers don’t show up in the box score or the stats page. So who are the teams who make the most outs at home plate, and elsewhere on the bases?
My name is Nate, and I am a forecaster. I forecast how baseball players are going to perform. And I pretty much get the worst of it. Tell somebody that their childhood hero is going to hit .220 next year, or that the dude they just traded away from their fantasy team is due for a breakout, and you’re liable to get called all kinds of names. A bad prediction will inevitably be thrown in your face, (see also: Pena, Wily Mo) while a good one will be taken as self-evident, or worse still, lucky. The truth is, though, that those of us who make it our business to forecast the performance of baseball players have it pretty easy. For one thing, we’ve got an awesome set of data to work with; baseball statistics are almost as old as the game itself, and the records, for the most part, are remarkably accurate and complete. For another, it’s easy to test our predictions against real, tangible results. If we tell you that Adam Dunn is going to have a huge season, and instead he’s been demoted to Chattanooga after starting the year 2-for-53, the prediction is right there for everyone to see in all its manifest idiocy. Not so in many other fields, where the outcomes themselves are more subject to interpretation.
Talk of a World Cup of baseball, potentially starting as early as 2005, has inspired early speculation about what the lineups might look like. The team from the Dominican Republic promises to be a monster. Vlad, Manny, Pujols, Sosa, Pedro–yeah, that’s going to be tough. Tough enough to threaten the U.S.A.? I caught the Errol Morris documentary “Fog of War” recently, which offers 11 lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara, seven-year Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. McNamara, one of the celebrated “Whiz Kids” who brought the science of modern management to a struggling postwar Ford Motor Company, was an early adopter of quantitative analysis. McNamara’s Lesson Six: “Get the data.” A World Cup of baseball is hardly the Cold War, but the McNamara in me relishes any opportunity to take the 2004 PECOTA Weighted Mean Projections out for a spin. Data? We’ve got data.
Welcome to the Bronx, Gary–or should we say, welcome to Gary’s World, Yankees? Gary Sheffield has torn–not ruptured–ligaments in his thumb. It’s a very similar injury to that suffered by Derek Jeter last season and extremely similar to that of NBA star Ron Artest recently. Jeter skipped surgery, while Artest had surgery and missed only five games. While the thumb is certainly a concern, I side with Sheffield on this one. The injury seems to have been blown out of proportion. It could have been much worse for Jim Thome. His fracture nearly required the insertion of pins. That would have put him out well into April. Instead he should be back near Opening Day. Thome’s power stroke might be a bit rusty, but he’s already working on non-contact drills while in a soft cast. The rust might cost him a few hits and homers, but he remains an elite hitter. Remember that fluke fractures tend to not be long-term problems.
I’ve been looking for a gap in the Yankees armor this year, hoping to see where they might stumble and miss the playoffs. And, uh, it’s not looking really good for me.
It’s pretty easy for most teams. Despite the efforts of new GM Bill Bavasi, the Mariners can be taken apart pretty quickly: Edgar Martinez out for the season? Quinton McCracken subs at DH, and the offense dies. Bret Boone blows out his knee why playing weekend roller-hockey? Hello, Willie Bloomquist! An injury to Randy Winn or Ichiro Suzuki? Mmm, McCracken…we just can’t get enough.
The Yankees have problems, but there’s not much that causes a collapse. Last year we could look at the middle infield and see the lack of depth as a spike-filled pit, and when Derek Jeter got a knee dropped on his shoulder, in they fell. This year, a Jeter injury means the best shortstop ever goes back to his natural position. Sure, someone has to play third, but it’s not that hard to scrape together a stop-gap solution. Heck, they were about to do it before they decided to blow the doors off and bring in Alex. Aaron Boone the Honest could be back in time to bring adequacy to the position.
Does the addition of Richie Sexson balance the loss of Curt Schilling for the Diamondbacks? Phillies’ prospect Cole Hamels continues to mow hitters down like it ain’t no thing. And the Royals offense should be better in 2004, when all is said and done. All this and much more news from Arizona, Phildelphia, and Kansas City in your Thursday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
This team is in trouble. Why? You might notice a load of lights there in the pitching staff. Even the pitching-friendly confines of Safeco Field might not be enough to keep runs off the board if the M’s are forced to scramble all year for healthy arms. With swirling rumors about injuries, nightlife, and various other explanations, Freddy Garcia simply hasn’t performed the last two seasons. There’s a consistent track between his K rate and his velocity; as he fatigues, he loses effectiveness. Garcia needs to drastically increase his pitch efficiency to have the kind of year he desperately wants in his contract season.
The Braves may be handcuffing themselves by carrying Eddie Perez. The Twins could find a second-base solution in Michael Cuddyer. The Devil Rays have had a much tougher time developing pitchers than hitters. These and other news and notes in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
The Royals have an intriguing second-base battle cooking in the minors. The Yankees aren’t rushing to promote farmhand pitchers. The Padres could be short a shortstop at Triple-A. These and other happenings in today’s Transaction Analysis.
The concept of “clutch” is one of the clearest dividing lines between traditional coverage of baseball and what you’ll find here at Baseball Prospectus. In the mainstream, performance in important situations is often attributed to some wealth or deficit of character that causes a particular outcome. Here, we’re more likely to recognize that when the best baseball players in the world go head-to-head, someone has to win and someone has to lose, and it doesn’t mean that one side has better people than the other.
Clutch performances exist, to be sure; you can’t watch a day of baseball without seeing a well-timed hit, a big defensive play or a key strikeout that pushes a team towards victory. The biggest moments in baseball history are almost all examples of players doing extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances. Those moments make the game great and the players responsible for them deserve credit, and even adulation, for their heroics.
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.”