After being selected in the Rule 5 draft this winter and traded to the San Diego Padres, MIT graduate Jason Szuminski will have a chance to become the first person from his school to play in the major leagues. In addition to getting selected in the draft, Szuminski spent his winter working for the U.S. Air Force as an aerospace engineer, to fulfill his ROTC obligation. He hasn’t taken the traditional road to the big leagues, but Szuminski showed last year that has the stuff to be a contributor in a major league bullpen. While splitting time between three levels in the Cubs organization, Szuminski posted a combined 2.78 ERA in his best season as a professional. He impressed again in the Arizona Fall League, striking out 19 in 19.1 IP. Baseball Prospectus talked with Szuminski about pitching development, rocket science, and how he keeps hitters off balance and hitting the ball on the ground.
In Monday’s column, I picked on Keith Foulke a bit, expressing the opinion that I didn’t think he’d sustain his performance throughout the life of his new four-year contract. Buried in that criticism was the following: I haven’t looked too deeply at this yet, but I don’t think you can find a lot of relievers who stayed at Foulke’s recent level for a seven- or eight-year period. I think the best relievers in the modern era have short, high peaks before slipping. Mariano Rivera is the exception to this, but when you look around at the best relievers in baseball, by any standard, there just aren’t guys who are worth five or more WARP a year for most of a decade.
It seems there’s one case like this every year, but I can’t remember one that had the potential to be as significant. With Aaron Boone down and likely out for the season due to a significant tear to his left ACL, the Yankees are scrambling to not end up with Drew Henson at the hot corner. The Yanks will be calling all the usual suspects looking for some help, but Brian Cashman seems ready to play hardball to get some financial recompense. According to the AP, Cashman is ready to invoke a clause in the standard player contract that specifically cites basketball as a prohibited activity. The Yankees are reportedly waiting for final results, but since Boone damaged his knee nearly two weeks ago, this sounds like a stall.
While I’ll leave the fallout to the Yankees lineup to others in this site, I’ll look to the injury itself. The most similar injury I could find was the near complete tear of the ACL suffered by B.J. Surhoff in the early days of 2002. Surhoff missed the entire season, but was able to return for spring training 2003. Expect a similar timeframe for Boone.
The Yankees got better news on Steve Karsay. After shoulder surgery last year, Karsay was able to throw from a mound over the winter, but won’t throw breaking balls until pitchers and catchers report. That will be his big test and will determine whether Karsay will be immediately penciled in as one of the Yanks top set-up men or whether he’ll miss the start of spring training. Even if healthy now, Karsay remains one of the bigger risks in pitching.
Sometimes I’m easily confused. Watching Jane Campion films makes me feel like a monkey trying to open a coconut. I’m puzzled as to how Napster hopes to achieve substantive market penetration without having Ratt’s “Way Cool Junior” on its play list. Oh, and I’m also perplexed by what the Rockies are doing this winter–which is what this little piece of bandwidth is all about.
I’ve never met Roockies GM Dan O’Dowd, but I know people who have. By all accounts, he’s a heady, intellectually curious guy with an open mind. That’s why his club’s off-season machinations are especially troubling. The Rockies have–rightly, I think–perceived the NL West to be on a down cycle and, ergo, in a winnable condition. But how they’ve gone about positioning themselves as a contender makes no sense to me.
To wit, Colorado has gone out and signed Jeromy Burnitz, Vinny Castilla, and Royce Clayton. What’s more is that they apparently have starting jobs in mind for each member of this nefarious troika.
The regular seasons for the various winter leagues are over now, although the various league playoffs leading to the Caribbean World Series are still ongoing–a process that runs almost as long as their regular season, kind of like the NBA.
The Caribbean World Series is a contest between the winners of the four regional leagues: the Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Venezuelan winter leagues, plus the Mexican Pacific League. What I’m going to do here is to give an overview of those four leagues, plus the Arizona Fall League, with an emphasis on how to make sense of winter league statistics.
The process for working out the talent level of a league depends on, number one, having a large number of players in the circuit who have played in other leagues; and number two, knowledge of how good those other leagues are. Every player who has played here and elsewhere becomes a data point: You rate the player’s hitting (or pitching) level, relative to league average, with park adjustments when you have them, in both leagues. If his relative offensive level gets worse, that is a (slight) argument that the new league is tougher than the old. If it gets better, that’s an argument that the new league was easier.
Aaron Boone hurt his ACL playing basketball on Monday, which could mean that he’s out for the season. His contract isn’t guaranteed if he plays basketball, which he did, so the Yankees aren’t going to pay him his full salary, which they shouldn’t. It may be a different situation if it’s a minor tear and he’ll be healthy for spring training in less than 30 days, though, so we’ll have to wait and see. (I can’t express the jolt of joy I just felt typing “spring training in less than 30 days,” by the way–only a month of this seemingly interminable purgatory remains, where I’m forced to watch whatever my wife has found on one of the 80 different home improvement channels DirecTV was kind enough to cram into my package.) If it’s minor and he’ll miss a little time, the Yankees might decide that 90% of Boone is worth 100% of the deal he signed (though that seems difficult to justify). But more likely they’re going to set fire to his contract and then mail him the ashes. Boone at $5.75 million for a year was high when he signed it, and considering comparable signings this offseason (Adrian Beltre was the only close signing, and he’s way younger, though BP’s PECOTA forecasts have Boone hitting better in 2004, while others like Scott Spiezio came much cheaper). The Yankees might just even call do-over and see what Boone will take, now that almost everyone else has signed their third basemen and are probably not going to offer Boone anything close to what he was scheduled to receive.
Boone, who recently agreed to a one-year, $5.75 million contract, has freely admitted that the injury he sustained occurred during an activity not related to the playing of, or training for, Major League Baseball. Brian Cashman has already gone on record saying that basketball is a prohibited activity under Boone’s contract. In a fairy tale world of grand rewards for moral behavior, Boone would get credit for admitting his error without having fabricated some Jeff Kent-style story in which he tore up his knee after slipping off the top of Roger Clemens’ Hummer while polishing the foghorn. Unfortunately, New York is the place where contract language trumps contrition every time out; truth is no defense when you’ve signed on the dotted line.
To say that Eric Gagne’s adjective-inducing 2003 performance was just another season would be akin to the notion that the Beatles were just another rock band. The truth of the matter, at least in the case of Gagne, is that his season’s performance was one for the ages. The all-world reliever was not merely good, he was “Nintendo.”
Traditional metrics alone, such as his 55 saves and sporty 1.20 ERA, showed enough to make the goggle-wearing Dodger closer the sexy pick for the National League Cy Young Award, while he further impressed by striking out an astronomical 137 over-matched batters in only 82.3 innings. Further proof that his performance was from another world (and no, I don’t mean Canada) was his limiting opponents to an eye-popping .133 batting average against.
As is most often the case, the traditional metrics prove to be only the tip of the iceberg in discussing Gagne’s 2003. For all the strikeouts and saves, the bottom line may best be seen through the realization that Gagne was the best reliever in baseball in terms of preventing runs. His 32.6 Adjusted Runs Prevented, based on the analysis of Michael Wolverton at Baseball Prospectus, represents the idea that Gagne prevented approximately 33 runs more than what would have been prevented by the average major league reliever during the course of his specific 82.3 innings pitched. That’s an incredible difference of 3.6 runs for every nine innings pitched.
The American Sports Medicine Institute kicks off its 22nd annual “Injuries in Baseball” course Jan. 29 in Orlando. Today we continue from Part I of our discussion with ASMI’s Smith and Nephew Chair of Research, Dr. Glenn Fleisig.
I’m going to pull some of the good stuff from my Inbox for today’s column. Before I get into it, though, I want to thank all the people who wrote in with feedback on the Pete Rose piece. I meandered into that minefield with some trepidation, but the response from the readership was tremendous.
I can only hope that Bud Selig is hearing the same kind of groundswell against reinstating Rose that I am.
On to the more interesting stuff.
Dr. Glenn Fleisig is the Smith and Nephew Chair of Research at the American Sports Medicine Institute, an organization founded by noted orthopedic surgeon Dr. James Andrews dedicated to improving the understanding, prevention, and treatment of sports-related injuries through research and education. Fleisig has worked closely with players and coaches at all levels, from youth leagues to the big leagues, teaching performance optimization and injury prevention methods. With the 22nd annual “Injuries in Baseball” course starting Jan. 29 in Orlando, Fleisig chatted with BP about the growth of ASMI, warning signs for pitching injuries, and the challenge of generating awareness among major league teams.
Although it’s been blamed for everything from higher salaries to the decline of the American family, arbitration has been a net benefit for the baseball industry. It has eliminated holdouts, which were an annual event in the not-so-long-ago days when salary negotiations were a one-sided affair. The romantic memories of the good old days of baseball tend to leave out the vicious treatment of holdout players by management, media and fans. General managers are often quoted as saying that they hate the arbitration process because it’s confrontational. I don’t mean to state the obvious, but salary negotiations are confrontational. The process of asking for a certain amount of money, and trying to employ someone for a lesser amount, is necessarily going to be adversarial. To point at arbitration and declare that it drives a wedge between player and team without acknowledging that it replaces a process that was responsible for some of the most divisive player/management confrontations in the game’s history is both ignorant of that history and more than a little deceptive. The salary increases many players see through arbitration have more to do with the transition from having no leverage–the condition of all players in their first three seasons–to having some, as opposed to some structural problem in the system. Over the next month, you’ll read about how some player lost his arbitration case and settled for a $3 million raise. (This is often reported as a percentage: "Jones lost his case and will be stuck with a 400% increase over last year’s salary.") The eye roll is implied in print, explicit on television, but the skewed number isn’t the new salary, but the old one, which is held down by the rules which leave players without recourse until they reach three years of service time.
Bulk in baseball is a source of constant amusement. Just think about late-career Cecil Fielder, or the guy who ate Mo Vaughn. How amusing was it to watch those bulky fellows try to move around the basepaths. And yet, for too long this has been a neglected area of research. Until now. Today, Baseball Prospectus proudly presents VORPSkin, a new innovation in performance analysis that attempts to answer the questions “Who is the biggest waste of skin in baseball?” and “What happens when Keith Woolner gets really bored during the offseason?”
One of the effects of the depressed labor market is that there are fewer bad signings by teams. The game’s middle class, that group of players with more service time than value, has been taking it in the shorts the past couple of winters, and that’s the subset that usually produces more howlers than any other. Nevertheless, we can still point to some free-agent deals and scratch our heads. Some things, I’d imagine, will never change.
Kris Benson had a difficult end to his season in 2003, spending the last two months not only on the shelf, but answering hard questions about the injury–or, as the Pirates medical staff insinuated, lack thereof. Benson finally got back on the mound last week, pronouncing himself fit and pain-free. While the Pirates don’t expect to contend, their hopes lie in Benson asserting himself as the ace everyone expected him to be coming out of Clemson the better part of a decade ago. If Benson can prove himself healthy and effective–something he hasn’t been since returning from Tommy John surgery–he could be this year’s version of Sidney Ponson: a comeback candidate who’ll likely finish the season on a contender.
The Pirates are also hoping two acquisitions from last season–Jason Bay and Bobby Hill–will be ready to go for Spring Training. Both were unable to participate in a recent mini-camp. Bay is recovering from labrum surgery while Hill is still not cleared for baseball activity after suffering a stress fracture in his lower back.
Robb Nen comes back to his closer role this spring after missing the entire 2003 season. While he is throwing pain-free and from the mound, it’s still a long road back from labrum surgery. At this point, we’re simply left to guess–and pay close attention during Spring Training–if Nen in 2004 will be anything close to the Nen in 2002 who was so key to the Giants’ run to the Series. With a much thinner pen, the Giants need him.
Baseball’s adoption of interleague play and the unbalanced schedule has presented analysts with some new challenges. Quality-of-competition concerns have mostly been overstated, but they do exert a substantive influence over what happens on the field. Frankly, the way the schedule is arranged doesn’t make a whit of sense, considering teams from different divisions compete for a single Wild Card spot, but that’s the system we’ve been given. Much has already been done in terms of calibrating statistics to reflect the injustice of MLB’s scheduling policies, but one thing I’ve yet to see addressed is the quality of defenses lineups are facing around the league. That leads me to TAD. You might recall James Click’s piece on Team Adjusted Defense (TAD) from a few months ago. By dint of some mathematical acrobatics, James has added some sorely needed alterations to Bill James’ defensive efficiency metric. What we’re left with is a valuable snapshot of team defense. In any event, what I’m attempting to do this week is come up with strength-of-schedule rankings based on the quality of the defenses they’ve faced.