Red Sox pitcher Charlie Zink is a rarity among pitchers: a 24-year-old knuckleballer. As a traditional pitcher in the Sally League, Zink put up a 1.68 ERA in relief in 2002 before the big club converted him to a full-time knuckleball pitcher. Zink posted a 3.90 ERA in High-A last year before improving on that with a 3.43 ERA in 39 innings at AA. This year, he cracked BP’s Top 50 Prospects list. We sat down with Zink last week before a road game against the New Britain Rock Cats, and asked him about life as one of baseball’s rarest breeds.
Adam Dunn is O.P.T. draw 162 walks on the season, which would be the fourth-highest total of all-time.
Dunn, who’s abusing the ball to the tune of .271/.457/.564 and is tied for third in the NL with a .348 EqA, has often been criticized for being too patient at the plate. It’s possible there’s merit to that idea, but he’s knocking the snot out of the ball and he has more unintentional/quasi-unintentional walks than Barry Bonds. If he keeps this up, comparisons to a mid-’90s Frank Thomas won’t be off base.
Leave it to Randy Johnson to ruin a perfectly good trivia question. At the
end of my previous article on “Hidden
Perfect Games,” I included a trivia question on the remaining pitcher who
tossed two perfect games (hidden or not), having already named Pedro Martinez and Tom Browning. In the meantime, Randy Johnson threw an “official” perfect game on May 18th, to go along
with a hidden perfect game in 1998, to add his name to list of those attaining multiple perfection.
In response to the original question, many people sent in their guesses…
Here’s a nod to Buck Showalter, who moved Hank Blalock
down to sixth in the lineup last night against Scott
Schoeneweis, after batting him second against everyone for the entire
season (and most of ’03). Blalock has improved slightly against left-handers,
enough to warrant his continued playing time against them, but not enough to
justify batting him second. Moving him down in the lineup acknowledges the
team’s need to score runs while allowing Blalock to keep getting reps against
southpaws.
More teams should find this middle ground, rather than either stubbornly
batting guys who can’t hit one side in the same lineup spot all the time, or
giving up and sticking them into a platoon.
I found out about Doug Pappas’ tragic passing on Friday. There were phone messages on both my cell phone and home phone from a number of people, all with a more serious tone to their voices than you’d really like to hear. None of the people actually left the momentous news, but rather some version of “Give me a call the second you get this message.” Moments later, I checked my e-mail, and a barrage of messages with the header “Sad News” scrolled up my screen.
Doug Pappas had passed away. My friend, a colleague for whom I have immense respect, and all-around good guy, had departed from us too soon. My initial response was the same during those horrid times when another friend had died; it sounds strange, but my first impulse is to give him a call and find out what was really going on. It can’t be right, you know? This has got to be some sort of misunderstanding, right? Doug’s only 43, in good health, and a standup guy. Must be someone else. There’s definitely a big ball of confusion out there, and this is completely out of left field. I felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach and stolen the air from the room, but I knew it was a mistake. Had to be.
It wasn’t. And we are all diminished because of it. Doug’s particular chosen role was a particularly difficult one–to call the powerful on the inaccuracy or dishonesty of their public statements. That’s not easy. Over the years, Doug came out and publicly pointed out the inaccuracies, contradictions, and misleading nature of Major League Baseball’s financial disclosures. He did his homework, explained his position, made sure that the MLB functionary’s agenda was understood by the public, and stood by his work. It was an often thankless and misunderstood role, but the public interest was well served because Doug was willing to vigorously undertake it.
With all the injuries the Angels have been dealing with, the one that’s perhaps the most concerning to them is that of Bartolo Colon’s mysterious loss of velocity. Colon’s apparent lack of fitness has never deterred him from being an ace-level starter and one of an elite few that actually gain velocity as the game goes on. Like Mark Prior and Livan Hernandez, Colon doesn’t throw with full effort on every pitch, something often done in previous eras. However, over the last few starts, Colon has started around 90 mph–and then gone down. Velocity loss is a measure of fatigue in the best case and an omen of shoulder injury in the worst, so the Angels are watching him closely. You should as well.
There are some pained e-mails from Cubs fans determined to “prove” that the Cubs are lying about Kerry Wood. Why would he have a good result from the bone scan, then have it released that he’d be out another two weeks? Simply put, there are two things going on here. The Cubs realize they botched the public relations part of the Mark Prior injury, so they’re trending toward to the cautious. They’re also being more cautious with their two aces’ arms, perhaps realizing that it’s not worth the risk, and saves innings they could need even more in October. The results they’ve had with the rest of the staff and the current standings give them the luxury to be conservative.
Walking down Occidental to a Mariners game is a great experience. There’s the smell of brats on grills, roasted peanuts and kettle corn, the bad music of persistent street musicians and the chatter of fellow fans walking south to the stadium…
…And guys selling programs. Independent programs. Many teams only have one program, the one the team puts out, but in Seattle, we have a choice.
I bought both this week to compare, and the results…man, I pity people in cities without competition, if their team-issued programs are anything like this.
Zack Greinke finally gets the call in Kansas City. Jason Giambi hits the DL for the Yanks. Richie Sexson comes off and returns to the DL for the D’backs within a matter of days. Ben Petrick retires after revealing he’s been battling a horrible disease for the past three years. And Dennis Tankersley gets another shot in San Diego. All this and much more news from around the league in your Tuesday edition of Transaction Analysis.
The White Sox are scoring runs in bunches this year, thanks in no small part to…Juan Uribe? The A’s acquisition of Eric Karros isn’t looking too good, especially when you consider that Graham Koonce is still waiting in the wings. And the Phillies have finally grabbed a piece of first place in the NL East after a month of unperforming. All this and much more news from Chicago, Oakland, and Philadelphia in your Tuesday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
I was checking out BP’s Adjusted Standings report this morning. I think we’re
far enough into the season that the report is useful in indicating which
teams’ win-loss records are clouding their true performance, for better or
worse. Schedules are pretty unbalanced–how many games have the Red Sox played
in Skydome this year? Six? Seventeen? Twenty-five?–and the effects of under- or overperforming
Pythagenport, or being particularly efficient or inefficient in generating
runs out of offensive events, are beginning to be felt. It’s interesting to
look at these gaps and find the performance issues–great, now I’m going to
trip spam filters–that cause them.
Take those Red Sox, for instance. With 228 runs scored and 180 runs allowed,
their record of 27-17 is a match for their Pythag mark. But according to Clay
Davenport’s calculations, the Sox should have a 241-167 edge in runs. The
offensive gap, which has cost them at least one win, is mostly explained by
the team’s early-season struggles with runners on base: 251/.342/.403, as
opposed to a whopping .281/.364/.468 with the bases empty. There’s no reason
to believe that the Sox have some inability to hit with runners on–most teams
hit a bit better in that situation–and their performance in May has been much
better than what they did in April, so they should be find going forward.
We have a Nick Johnson sighting! So often, even the slightest Johnson news seems almost too cruel with a legion of people that drafted him high (myself included) hoping against hope that they’ll see some return–not to mention the team that traded for him in real life. Johnson is finally making progress, but again, I’m not going to say that he couldn’t blink wrong and end up starting the rehab process again. Still, a 3-5 day with a homer is a major positive. If all goes well this week, he could make his Montreal debut near Memorial Day.
Jose Reyes is also making progress in extended spring training. (Jeez, if both Reyes and Johnson make it back in June, what will I write about?) Reyes has had good results in back-to-back extended spring training games, hitting and running well. There’s still some room for improvement, but it appears that the changes made in his rehab program are paying off. If all goes well, Reyes will likely make a quick rehab stop in the minors and could be back in the Mets lineup by the first week of June.
Randy Johnson describes what it’s like to be perfect. Jason Schmidt and Tom Glavine describe what it’s like to come close. Bud Selig thinks the Expos will find a new home soon. Reggie Jackson is honored by a few of his peers. And Kevin McClatchy wants to build the Pirates into a winner through a fruitful farm system. All this and many more quips from around the league in your Monday edition of The Week In Quotes.
HOUSTON ASTROS
Adam Everett leads the majors with 10 sacrifice bunts. That’s from the #2 hole, which means that Mr. Williams is shortening the innings in which his best bats come up. With slugging and on-base percentages in the threes (OBP low-threes), there’s no reason to keep Everett up there, except for the stubborn belief that he’s “changed.” This concludes this week’s Jimy Williams bash.
Moving from the mundane to the sublime, Roger Clemens is doing something that has very little in the way of precedent. Perhaps it’s an obvious point, but most 41-year-old pitchers don’t perform at this level. Heck, most 41-year-old pitchers aren’t pitchers. The closest parallels are Cy Young, who posted a 1.26 ERA (LERA of 2.39) in 299 innings for the 1908 Red Sox, Ted Lyons’ wonderful “Sunday Pitcher” performance of 1942, Warren Spahn’s last hurrah in 1963, and, most appropriately, Nolan Ryan, who struck out 301 batters in 1989 at the age of 42. None of them had quite the year the Rocket has had to this point… There’s a moment in “Bonnie and Clyde” where Clyde says: “Hi! We’re Bunny and Claude. We steal carrots.” Houston version: “Hi! We’re the Houston Astros. We blow saves.” GRADE: B-
Three days after first getting the news of it, the death of Doug Pappas seems
no more real than it did on Friday. I know that denial is a stage of grief,
but it’s easy to get stuck there when you find your friend quoted in the
paper, as Doug was in yesterday’s Denver Post, the words from an
interview conducted well before his passing.
That Doug would be sharing knowledge even after his death is appropriate. The
man is gone, and we’re all less for that loss, but what remains, what will
remain, is his amazing work. From his efforts as part of the Society for American
Baseball Research to his writing for Baseball Prospectus to his nascent
Weblog, Doug spent much of his life sharing knowledge with others. Without fanfare, every day Doug made the world a little smarter, a little better, and
did so for nothing more than the fact that he enjoyed it.
For years now, the words “Cardinals” and “promising prospects” have seemed as incongruous and unrelated as “concept album” and “enjoyable listening experience.” On a system-wide level, that’s still the case; the Cards remain saddled with one of the weaker stables of minor league talent in baseball. That said, they are cobbling together a promising corps of young starters. In no particular order, let’s take a look at a few of them:
The Dodgers’ offense has cooled in the month of May. The Twins’ rotation has had its ups and downs already this season. And the after trying out third base, first base, and, yes, right field, the Giants will be starting Pedro Feliz at shortstop this week, in place of Neifi Perez. All this and much more news from Los Angeles, Minnesota, and San Francisco in your Friday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.