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.
“…and the tough-luck loser in tonight’s game is…”
We hear the above quote in dozens of post-game wrap-ups every year. A starting pitcher goes seven or eight innings and gives up only one or two runs, but his team’s offense can’t produce anything, so he gets stuck with an “L” next to his name in the box score. The fact that “tough-luck loser” is such a commonly invoked cliche suggests that it’s widely recognized that the “L” isn’t doing a very good job of measuring the starter’s contribution, at least in those situations. But that still doesn’t stop the W/L record from being possibly the most prominently used statistic to evaluate starting pitchers in major media baseball coverage.
The idea behind the pitcher’s W/L record is flawed on its face. Wins are a team thing, after all, not a pitcher thing. If the offense fails to put runs on the board, or if the bullpen melts down in the late innings, the starter won’t get the win no matter how well he pitches. Conversely, if the offense is having a great night (or if they’re going up against the Rangers, which is pretty much the same thing), the starter doesn’t have to do anything more than last five innings to get the W.
The Astros upgrade on their rotation. The Selig’s finally announce their sale of the Brewers. And the A’s project to improve their offense, despite losing their star shortstop to the most expensive fourth-place team in history. All this and much more news from Houston, Milwaukee, and Oakland in your Monday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Wright or Marte, Marte or Wright. I love ’em both. I’ve put Andy Marte ahead for the moment, because of the 10-month age difference and because scouts seem to like him a lot more, but I really feel strongly that David Wright’s as complete a prospect as there is in the game. I’d love to hear comments comparing the two, and Nate, I’d love to see what their PECOTA comps look like. Nobody else is that impressive. Dallas McPherson put up some serious numbers last year, and while some of that was in The Hangar in Rancho Cucamonga, he hit .314/.426/.569 in Arkansas. He doesn’t have a great defensive reputation, but it’s not terrible either, and he clearly outhit everyone else on this list. I don’t know if anyone else deserves Top 50 consideration. I know people love the Greek God of Walks, but he hit .165/.295/.248 in Triple-A, over a 32-game sample. Of course, his full-season OBP was still .446, so… Chad Tracy hit .324 and his defense took a big step forward, but he doesn’t do much more than hit singles, and it was Tucson. I respect that he’s had two good seasons in a row, but he was in El Paso in 2002, so I’m not sure that means anything either. And as much as I hyped him a year ago, I have to concede that Brendan Harris may not be quite as good as I thought he was. But he’s still a better prospect than almost anyone gives him credit for.
In preparing the annual top prospect list for Baseball Prospectus 2004, BP authors participated in the annual extended roundtable discussion of baseball’s top prospects. The ranking and review process balanced translated statistics, scouting reports, and injury reports with the strong personal opinions of BP’s finest…all with the goal of putting together the “best damn prospect list the world has ever seen.” In Part I today we’ll listen in on the discussion of the top prospects among pitchers, catchers, first basemen and second basemen. Parts II through IV will run Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. We’ll also unveil the final list Tuesday, with the Top 50 prospects (we’ve expanded from prior years’ Top 40) revealed. Rany Jazayerli will be along to discuss the Top 50 list and the process that went into compiling it in Tuesday night’s Chat.
The one young shortstop whose time was perceived to have come was Richard William Thon of the Houston Astros, “Dickie” from South Bend, Indiana. In spring training that year, The Sporting News surveyed the Astros on Thon. The shortstop’s teammates could have been expected to be supportive, but the ‘Stros were downright lavish: “When I see Dickie Thon, I see a future Hall of Famer.” – Astros GM Al Rosen. “I think Dickie has a good chance to become the MVP in our league.” – Craig Reynolds. “Dickie is the backbone of our team.” – Astros manager Bob Lillis. “I’m afraid to predict how great Dickie can become. I know I’d love to play second base for Houston the next 20 years and have Dickie by my side.” – Astros second baseman Bill Doran. “When I see Dickie play, my heart flutters in my chest like a caged bluebird trying to get free so it can sing paeans, soprano hosannas to the sparkling greatness that is the Thonster Monster.” – Phil Garner.