The Yankees’ minor-league cupboard is nearly bare, but Drew Henson isn’t part of the solution. The Marlins play rotation Yahtzee after Burnett and Redman go down. Plus the Pirates’ offense continues to struggle sans Giles et avec Lofton.
By the time you read this, it’s possible that I’ll be moving faster than a heater from Roger Clemens or Kerry Wood, faster than Mark Prior or Randy Johnson, or even faster than a Jamie Moyer plus a Doug Jones. How is this possible? In my duties covering the Indianapolis 500 for ESPN 950, I’ll be the backup “driver” for one of the two-seat Indy Cars that are set to take select journalists around the fabled track. I’m still hoping Greg Rakestraw gets the shot he deserves, but after standing on the “yard of bricks” at the start/finish line today, I would be lying to say I didn’t want the chance to go around at speed.
Watching those cars fly by at twice the speed of a Billy Wagner fastball–with some to spare–is truly one of the most amazing things I’ve seen. Here’s a couple of links of what I might just be doing tomorrow. Let’s just hope the next UTK isn’t “Will Carroll smashed into the SAFER barrier at 200 mph, fracturing every bone in his body.” There’s a lot of things I don’t have in common with Jason Priestley and some of them, I’d like to keep that way.
The Angels won’t have as big a hole to fill with Darrin Erstad out as they think, the Orioles could actually benefit from Segui and Cordova going on the shelf, Jody Gerut and Gerald Laird get well-earned opportunities, while Jermaine Clark doesn’t.
Jim Evans broke into Major League Baseball in 1972 as the youngest umpire ever at age 23. His career spanned 28 seasons, including 18 as a crew chief. He umpired four World Series, eight League Championship Series, three All-Star games, and was the plate umpire for Nolan Ryan’s first no-hitter. Currently, Jim is the owner and chief instructor of the leading professional umpire-training academy, the Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring, founded in 1989. He recently chatted with BP about his career in the bigs, the intricacies of the rule book, and a few dustups with ornery managers.
On Tuesday, Florida Marlins’ starter A.J. Burnett underwent Tommy John surgery, after exploration of the elbow revealed a torn ulnar collateral ligament. The surgery went well, and Burnett’s expected to return fully healthy down the road. Previously, pitchers who have had this surgery take about a year, maybe a year and a half, to get back on the mound and eventually return to form. The procedure and rehab have become something of a commonplace miracle, despite the fact that the rehabilitation regimen’s about as appealing as a porta-potty at the Stockton Asparagus Festival.
The real issue here isn’t Burnett, however unfortunate his injury is. We wish him the best, and I have no doubts that he’ll push the rehab envelope and get back as soon as he can. The real issue here is painfully obvious–was this avoidable? You’ve already seen a number of perspectives about pitcher abuse, injury likelihood, and the very nature of pitching itself, so I won’t go into too much detail here. I think the real interesting issue here is a long-underlying one that’s been talked about, but never really addressed. That issue is the balance between performance, overwork, responsibility, and accountability when it comes to handling pitchers. So let’s put aside the specific case of Burnett, and examine the issue.
Milton Bradley reminds us why we shouldn’t give up on good prospects, Fred McGriff has fallen off the face of the Earth, and Greg Colbrunn was last seen wearing cement sandals at the bottom of Puget Sound. Plus other happenings with the Indians, Dodgers, and Mariners.
Will Carroll mopes about the A.J. Burnett flap, hopes for a position move for Mike Piazza and a call-up for Jose Reyes, gropes for a cure to Rich Aurilia’s vision woes, and ropes a kick-ass Mark Prior quote.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: reader feedback is one of the great parts of this job. I’m lucky–everyone at BP is lucky–to write for an audience that provides thoughtful, articulate responses. It keeps reading e-mail from being a cringeworthy job, and turns it into an informative experience.
I read every piece of mail I get, from two-liners to two chapters. That I don’t respond to it all is a flaw in my game, like my inability to handle a good fastball or make the throw from the hole. I’ll keep working on it.
For today, here’s a sample of the feedback, and a promise to spend an afternoon next week going through my “Reader Mail” folder and getting back to you.
Things I’ve Learned Watching Baseball on TiVo:
This year after talking to Jonah Keri and his wife, I put down money to buy a TiVo before the season started, and I’ve found that besides its general life-enhancing qualities, it’s taught me a lot about baseball. I love, for instance, being able to do the instant eight-second replay on third-out close plays when the broadcast goes almost immediately to commercial. So here’s what having unlimited replay capability, along with slow-motion and freeze-frame, and all the other amazing TiVo features, has revealed to me.
First, ties do not go to the runner. Ties go to the defense. The runner needs to clearly beat the throw to the glove to be safe at first. After that, there is an enormous swing in the out threshold of different umpires. Baseball has hugely increased the quality of the umpires in the last few years–you’ll see second base umps run out to cover fly balls and make better calls on traps than they ever did before, for instance–but there are as many standards for caught stealing as there are men who put on the uniform. I’ve seen the standard on out-calling take many forms:
I got to spend the day at the ballpark yesterday, and was immediately reminded that no matter what happens, nothing can go wrong when the sun is out, there’s a high blue sky, and my refinancing clears so I can have a cold one. I sat in the not-so-cheap seats at Victory Field here in Indy, watching Lee Stevens play his last game. It wasn’t the storybook ending for a player that is the definition of “journeyman hitter.” He might be remembered for his hot streak in ’96, or the three-way deal that brought him to Montreal in 2000 or his freakish contract later that year, but Stevens understood that his day in the sun was over and walked out on his own terms. No walk-off home run, no cheering crowds, and not even a win or a hit–but he had class. If only all of baseball could be like that: perfect days and lots of class. On to the injuries…
Byung-Hyun Kim has done well as a starter, but you wouldn’t know it from his W/L record. The Diamondbacks offense can’t hit, while the Royals’ and Phillies’ bullpens are springing holes. Plus closer looks at Kyle Snyder and Marlon Byrd.
With Ramiro Mendoza and Brandon Lyon combining to allow two runs
Wednesday, the Red Sox bullpen has now given up 16 runs in 23 9th innings.
They’ve used seven different pitchers to protect 9th-inning leads (plus
Jason Shiell to hold a 14th-inning bulge), and the question of who will
pitch the ninth is a question that every member of Red Sox Nation has been
obsessing about since long before Opening Day.
Much of this stems from a misunderstanding of the “no-closer”
bullpen that the Red Sox assembled this winter. While the strategy downplays
the save statistic, it’s not about random roles for pitchers, which is how
many people have interpreted it. Roughly speaking, the idea is that the
bullpen’s best pitcher will throw the highest-leverage innings, rather than
being used solely in save situations. This is done in part by trading off
low-leverage save situations—-three-run leads in the ninth inning that can be
protected by lesser pitchers—-for higher-leverage situations earlier in the
game.
There are other principles in play as well, such as minimizing the use of
one-batter specialists, and allowing effective relievers to pitch multiple
innings, but the basic idea is to allow game situations, not Jerome Holtzman’s
legacy, to dictate how the bullpen’s best pitcher is used.
The standings present multiple realities.
At the top, of course, there is the genuine reality, the bottom line, the real deal, terra firma: the actual wins and losses of each team. To a statistician, the actual results are just a little boring: they don’t necessarily reflect the likelihoods that this particular result would happen. The Indians, for instance, are 7-20, as of this morning. Ho-hum.
So the second reality, or the first alternate reality, is found by looking at how many games the team should have won, given how many runs they scored and allowed. There are plenty of ways to make that estimate–Rob Neyer, for one, regularly tracks the standings using Bill James’ “Pythagorean” theorem (in fact, Rob recently wrote an article on pretty much exactly what I’m doing here–and believe it or not, I didn’t read that article until after I’d finished drafting this. It must have been in the air). We’ll be just a little different.
If you think tonight’s UTK is shorter than normal, blame it on me. I’ve spent half the day researching A.J. Burnett’s injury, answering email regarding Burnett’s surgery, and writing what is becoming a really long article on Tim Kremchek. The result: my carpal tunnel is acting up more than normal, and I’ll need to try to stop by my chiropractor (yeah, a chiropractor for carpal tunnel…I never would have believed it either) some time this week. For now, please bear with me in this less verbose edition.
The worst-case scenario came true. As Jim Andrews peered into A.J. Burnett’s elbow, he saw a completely torn–by some accounts, “shredded, destroyed”–ulnar collateral ligament. The ligament was replaced and the clock started. We’ll see Burnett again in about six months and he should be back to his old self in 2005, just in time for free agency. By then, he should have a new manager, but for the Marlins’ sake, I hope it’s much sooner than that.
You’ve been hanging ’round these parts long enough. You’ve heard the party line, once or twice or 20 times: Higher payrolls don’t result in higher ticket prices. Correlation is not causation. Salaries don’t shift demand curves. It’s Economics 101. Simple, textbook stuff.
The problem with this line of argument–the problem with a lot of economically-based arguments–is that it’s easy to let the theory get ahead of the data. Well, I should state that more precisely: It’s easy to let an oversimplified theory get ahead of the data. A lot of what you learn in Economics 102, and Economics 201, and graduate-level classes that I was too busy drinking Boone’s Farm to take advantage of, is that much of the theory you master in an intro-level class is based on a particular set of assumptions that can prove to be quite robust in certain cases, and utterly misleading in others.
A lot of people shun economics for this very reason–we’ve all had coffee shop conversations with the scruffy, Skynard-mangling philosophy major who is fond of spewing out faux-profundities about the irrationality of human nature. He’s missing the point, of course, but so too is the Ayn Rand-spouting prepster from down the residence hall who conflates assumptions with hard rules.
In either case, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Economics, though it sometimes harbors pretensions to the contrary, is above all else a behavioral science, and an empirical science. If the theory doesn’t match the data–well, it’s not the data’s fault. This is especially important to keep in mind when evaluating something like ticket prices to baseball games, a commodity that is unusual in many ways. As we’ve stressed frequently, ticket prices ought to be almost wholly determined by demand-side behavior–the marginal cost of allowing another butt in the seats is negligible. But baseball tickets are unusual in other ways, too: They’re very much a luxury good, and their prices are determined by a finite number of decision-makers who may be subject to conflicts of interest. It’s certainly worth evaluating the available data to see whether we can put our money where our mouth is.
BP favorites Marcus Giles and Bobby Kielty finally get their due, but Johan Santana’s imprisonment threatens to start a new revolution. Plus notes on the Braves’ bullpen usage, Torii Hunter’s slump, the bizarre tale of Josh Hamilton, and Lou Piniella’s quest for an aura-emitting closer.