Ned Colletti’s finishing his seventh season as Assistant General Manager of the San Francisco Giants. A former sportswriter who got his start in baseball in the Cubs public relations department, Colletti cut his teeth under Dallas Green and Jim Frey in Chicago and Bob Quinn and Brian Sabean in San Francisco. One of the most prolific contract negotiators in the game, he’s completed about 350 player contracts worth $750 million during his career, including the last two Barry Bonds contracts for the Giants. Colletti and GM Brian Sabean have presided over a Giants team that’s been eliminated from playoff contention for a total of 11 days over the last seven years, on track for a fourth playoff appearance this season. He recently chatted with BP about the role of an assistant GM, the Sidney Ponson trade, and why the Giants sign and trade for the players they do.
Everyone who knows me–or reads this column regularly–knows that I love Vegas, and think that Major League Baseball could flourish there. Well, apparently I’m not the only one, as Steve Stone has been secretly heading a group trying to buy the Expos and move them out west. As a Cubs fan, I’ve always enjoyed Steve’s work, especially when it comes to explaining the mental processes of pitching. I didn’t know it before meeting him on the field at Wrigley, but Stone is a close friend of Bud Selig–a fact that can’t hurt his chances of landing the team. Can Stone come up with the cash and a stadium? All reports have Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman on board, and that means things in town are a go. While I don’t like the implication of a winter where the two main stories will be the reinstatement of Pete Rose and a team moving to Vegas, I think one will definitely happen, and the other’s a coin flip.
Powered by Vince Vaughn’s performance in the movie Swingers, on to the injuries…
Dusty Baker thinks it’s better to burn out than it is to rust. Mark Prior is inclined to agree. Marquis Grissom believes Barry Bonds is the best. (We’re inclined to agree.) Delmon Young believes he can bring a championship to Tampa Bay before the decade is out. And Bud Selig is pleased with the way San Juan has worked for the Expos. All this and many more notable quotables from around the league in your Monday edition of The Week In Quotes.
The Astros enter the final two weeks of the season up two games in the NL Central. The Athletics’ outfield has tanked, but Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez have helped pick up the slack. Francisco Cordero good, Michael Young bad, Ryan Drese ugly in the Rangers’ second half. These and other news and notes out of Houston, Oakland, and Texas in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
Just before 1:00, I checked the program schedule and just about collapsed from the shock: no Game of the Week. Are you kidding me? Two weeks to go in the season, half the teams in baseball still chasing playoff spots, terrific matchups like White Sox/Red Sox and Braves/Marlins on the schedule, a nation of couch potatoes sitting in front of their televisions, and MLB takes this opportunity to fold its tent? I know it was likely Fox’s decision, predicated on not wanting to compete with either broadcast college football or its own Fox Sports Net package of gridiron games. So what? It’s MLB’s job to choose a broadcast partner that will help it promote the game, and that means more than setting up stupid gimmicks for the All-Star Game. Abandoning the national stage at a time when its product should be at its most attractive isn’t just stupid, it’s corporate malfeasance. This can’t be good for postseason ratings, either. What baseball should be doing is creating interest in the teams and players who will be taking the field beginning September 30. You want people getting excited about Barry Bonds and Mark Prior and Nomar Garciaparra now, so that when you stick their games in prime time next month, you have a greater chance of drawing an audience. If I’m understanding the schedule properly, there are no more over-the-air baseball games until the Division Series, which is one of the most bizarre, counterproductive, self-mutilating decisions I have ever seen.
How many different places will the Expos call home next season? Jose Cruz Jr.–he’s not quite Roberto Clemente yet. The Jays have decisions to make on some single-season temps. All this and more from Montreal, San Francisco, and Toronto in Friday’s Triple Play.
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! OK, it doesn’t work as well in UTK as it does for monster truck rallies and mud bog races, but Sunday is the day that many Twins fans have been waiting for. After serious knee surgery, it didn’t look like Eric Milton would be back in 2003, but on Sunday Milton will get the start, right in the heart of the most important stretch of games for the Twins all year. Milton has been mediocre in rehab starts, but has had solid command and velocity. He’ll supplant Carlos Pulido from the rotation, but will be on an innings limit when he faces the Indians.
The Cubs don’t need an injury, and Matt Clement’s came at the worst time–right in the midst of a no-hitter (yes, Lee, I know, I know…). Clement’s strained calf was enough to throw his control off almost completely, so a bullpen session tomorrow will go a long way towards knowing if he’ll be ready for his next start. All indications are that he will be ready to go.
I’ve yet to write much about the award races this season, save for some notes about Barry Bonds a couple of months back and a column about the NL Cy Young. It’s a very interesting season in that all six major awards are under dispute, whether warranted or not, and in some cases there’s considerable doubt about who the front-runner should be, even with less than three weeks to go in the season.
Because I got an e-mail this week dissecting the AL Cy Young situation, I’ll take a stab at that one today.
When it comes to picking the best pitchers in the league. I look at two things: how much did you pitch, and how well did you keep runs off the board? I disregard the accounting categories of “wins,” and “losses” because the statistics are misleading, a relic of a time when complete games accounted for nearly 100% of all starts and it actually made sense to assign whole wins and losses to starting pitchers.
With apologies to Mark Mulder, here are the five candidates for the AL Cy Young Award.
Last week, I laid out a reading list for new and potential GMs. This week, I want to draw attention to another excellent book, one with a slightly different viewpoint, but with a number of important and actionable concepts. Bear with me during this lengthy quote…
“Micromanagement is risk free as long as you have the power to assign blame to the innocent. If your galactic incompetence ends up micromanaging a perfectly good project into swamp, blame the closest employee for not “speaking up” sooner.” –Dogbert, nee Scott Adams, Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook
Which, of course, brings me to Peter Ueberroth.
It never fails to amaze me that people who demonstrate incompetence on a massive, majestic scale actually gain credibility, either within their own organization, or in an entirely new arena, where they’re given approximately the same responsibilities which they bungled so horribly in the first place. In case you missed it, former Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, who had positioned himself as a responsible, proven leader running a dignified campaign in the Hunter Thompson-inspired California Gubernatorial Race, dropped out of that race on Tuesday, leaving the field wide open for the remaining “candidates.”
Last week I laid out my All-Surprise Team. Since I much prefer going negative, I thought this week I’d rear my ugly head upon the All-Disappointment Team. Once again, it’s with the help of Nate Silver’s PECOTA projection system. First a bit of housekeeping: A couple of readers pointed out that Baltimore’s Melvin Mora deserved a spot on the All-Surprise Team. I’m inclined to agree. I left him off mostly because I was on a crack bender for much of the week, but I’m fine now and fully possessed of my faculties. The All-Disappointment Team, forthwith…
Every time a shuttle bus back from a game pulls into a stop, the line to pay and get off snags. “How much is it?” people ask, fumbling for more change, and then three fans later, same deal. The Mariners have played 73 games at home so far this season, the shuttles have run for years, and even this late in the season, after years of popular baseball, there are people who don’t know it’s $2.50. It’s another sign of the huge casual fan base teams enjoy. I see more than 40 games a year at Safeco Field, as part of a season-ticket plan I split plus games I head to on my own. I’m atypical though. The Mariners have about 20,000 season-ticket holders, and they push season-ticket packages aggressively starting just after their annual mid-season failure to improve for the stretch (“Fans, reward your tight-fisted pound-foolish ownership group by sending in a deposit on a 2004 season-ticket plan now, before you get your blood all angried up when the Mariners miss the playoffs”). They sold a couple thousand more when Safeco Field opened, but it’s been down since then. Now from there, there’s a ton of ticket-sharing (buy the tickets, split them two or more ways), and the Mariners sell 20-game packages that are cleverly balanced between the good and bad teams. I’m throwing this out there, but I figure that there’s a core of 40,000 fans who see 20 or more games a year–at least 800,000 clicks of the turnstiles over the course of a year. Meanwhile, unless the city gets fed up and stops going to see the team, the Mariners’ attendance this year will top 3.2 million stubs. So that would be nearly two-and-a-half million tickets purchased by fans far more casual than me.
Joe Mays will undergo Tommy John surgery on Thursday and will likely miss all of the 2004 campaign. Score one for PECOTA and take special note of his collapse rate. Given that 2005 is the next time Mays is likely to be physically capable of pitching in the big leagues, NOLAN (Nate’s Omniscient Laptop And Number-cruncher) says that Mays only has a one-in-three shot of coming back. That’s info worth knowing, despite the success rate of TJ surgery.
Trot Nixon will pay a visit to the Red Sox’ physicians in hopes of salvaging his season. Yes, the strained calf could be that serious, according to one source in Boston. Nixon injured himself running to first, and depending on the findings, will miss a minimum of one week, and potentially could be done well into the playoffs. Andy Abad, a guy who shredded the IL at age 31, stands to gain some playing time along with Gabe Kapler.
The Astros retook first place on Wednesday, but their hopes took a hit as Octavio Dotel’s ass isn’t getting any better. OK, gluteal muscle, if you must–but (no pun intended), it’s the backside of the back end of the bullpen that’s worrying right now. With Brad Lidge emerging from a slump and Dotel hoping that sitting on the bench won’t hurt, Ricky Stone is picking up the workload. Dotel is reportedly going to miss the important weekend Cardinals’ series, forcing Jimy Williams to rework his pitching roles and try to explain why Nathan Bland isn’t with the team.
The rotation hasn’t been the only problem in Anaheim this season. Mark Prior is a legitimate Cy Young candidate, despite being one of the youngest pitchers in the league. And the Mike Maroth finally lost his 20th game last week, hopefully eliminating Brian Kingman’s name from baseball trivia for the rest of eternity. All this and much more news from Anaheim, Chicago, and Detroit in your Thursday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
With three weeks left in the season, it’s the most wide-open playoff race in years. Half of the franchises in Major League Baseball are within three games of a playoff spot, and fans in places as unlikely as Kansas City, Miami, and the north side of Chicago are starting sentences with “If the postseason started today.” Of course, having so many teams in contention leads to lots of questions. What if the Yankees and Red Sox end up tied for the AL East lead? What if they have the same record as the Mariners? What if the Cubs, Cardinals and Astros end up tied for the NL Central lead? What if five teams tie for the Wild Card? Inquiring minds want to know. Many of these questions can be answered by reading through the playoff tie-breaker scenarios that Major League Baseball used to have on its Web site, but those rules have a couple of serious flaws: 1. Understanding them is about as easy as filling out a 1040 long form. 2. Major League Baseball has changed them, but hasn’t told anyone yet. Using the most current information from MLB, here are the possibilities. Additional reporting was conducted to fill in some of the gaps MLB left out.
It is an awfully good time to be a baseball fan in Chicago, with teams on both sides of town good bets to reach the post-season, something that hasn’t happened since the Cubs and Sox met in the World Series of Base Ball in 1906. In their honor, let’s take look at the dynamics of the two-team market in Chicago. It’s a well-established fact that teams that have a rival in their own market compete for scarce resources like television and radio contracts, media exposure, and fan loyalty. For those reasons, it’s safe to assume that a club in a two-team market will not make as much money, or draw as many fans, as if it had the market all to itself. But we want to get at a somewhat more specific question here: How much does the success or failure (as opposed to the mere presence) of the crosstown rival affect the success of the other club?
When in doubt, I know I have three things that always go in my favor. First, I have the crew at BP. Even when they’re working on their own incredible stuff, each member is always just a phone call or an email away. Second, I have my team of sources and advisors. Though recent events have shaken some of the weaker sources into clamming up (for now), I still have one of the best phone books in the biz. Finally, and most importantly, I have you, the subscribers. From asking for help getting velocity, to technical assistance, to the most intelligent emails, I’m always happy to look in my Inbox and find new stuff from you.
Now, I’m asking you for some more suggestions on how to turn UTK into something you want to read in the off-season. What would you like to see? Those of you that made the journey with me from UTK 1.0 last year know that the off-season is…well, pretty dry when it comes to injury info. So please send in your suggestions. Those of you that have gotten to know me in person at Feeds, through email, or vicariously through this column know that I don’t sleep, so please, keep me working through the (literally) dark days of the winter. Yes, first priority is getting the Velocity Project in some sort of presentable form and I have a big date circled for late November, but everything else…once again, I’m counting on you.
Powered by Warren Zevon in my iTunes, on to the injuries…