Dusty Baker doesn’t think much of walking; he also doesn’t think much of pitch counts. Reggie Jackson thinks modern-day sluggers are on ‘the juice,’ while Julio Franco admits to being on a juice of a different kind. Jim Hendry is old school, and proud of it. Torii Hunter is about the only non-Yankee in MLB who doesn’t hate George Steinbrenner. All this and many more quips from around the league in this edition of The Week In Quotes.
The Cards’ decision to make Albert Pujols the everyday first baseman opened a hole in left field, and no matter who stands out there on April 5, it’s going to be hard to argue that it’s been filled. None of the candidates for the platoon–and it will almost certainly be a platoon–has anything resembling a track record of success. Kerry Robinson and So Taguchi are fifth outfielders who bring defense and some speed and little else. Mark Quinn and Ray Lankford combined for 76 major-league at-bats in 2003. Emil Brown hasn’t played in the majors since 2001, but he’s 8-for-14 with two homers so far, so he’s in the mix. I don’t think there’s an acceptable solution here.
The Marlins may finally Free Ramon Castro!, to fine results. The Yankees’ pitching depth has thinned considerably. The Pirates could benefit from creative handling of their young pitchers. These and other news and notes in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
Was Jody Gerut really that much better than Hideki Matsui? The Dodgers are inviting a number of fresh faces to training camp in ’04. And the Mariners don’t have many options off the bench…to say the least. All this and much more news from Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Seattle in your Friday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
This is one of my favorite spring columns. Like any baseball fan, I love arguments over the relative merits of players and how teams should be aligning their talent. And each spring, those arguments get played out on fields across Florida and Arizona. This March brings a fresh batch of players dueling for playing time. I’ve picked out some of the more interesting ones for today’s column.
Every March, there’s some college basketball team that climbs on the back of some player and makes a run deep into the tournament. It happens nearly every year and probably always has, but it’s burned into my memory with the Kansas Jayhawks’ championship run behind Danny Manning. Now known as “Danny and the Miracles,” Manning simply carried an inferior team to the top. Baseball has similar runs from time to time–Orel Hershiser’s amazing run through the 1988 season comes to mind. But as the Giants essay in BP04 shows, General Manager Brian Sabean and Assistant General Manager Ned Colletti are expecting more from Barry Bonds, even as he becomes less likely to be able to deliver. Bonds’ homers may defy gravity, but there’s a point where his body will no longer be able to defy age.
There aren’t many places to hide on a baseball field surrounded by 40,000 spectators, but one place you can enjoy relative anonymity is the coaching box. Most season ticket holders would have a hard time naming their team’s third base coach, never mind the casual fan.
So it isn’t necessarily a good sign that Cubs third base coach Wendell Kim is already well-known in Chicago after having spent just a year there. An even worse sign is that most Cubs fans know Kim best by his nickname: Wavin’ Wendell. Kim’s reputation for sending runners to their deaths at home plate preceded his arrival in Chicago, and it’s only grown since he’s been there.
Of course, reputations can be unfair, and reputations about baserunning in particular are difficult to check, since baserunning numbers don’t show up in the box score or the stats page. So who are the teams who make the most outs at home plate, and elsewhere on the bases?
My name is Nate, and I am a forecaster. I forecast how baseball players are going to perform. And I pretty much get the worst of it. Tell somebody that their childhood hero is going to hit .220 next year, or that the dude they just traded away from their fantasy team is due for a breakout, and you’re liable to get called all kinds of names. A bad prediction will inevitably be thrown in your face, (see also: Pena, Wily Mo) while a good one will be taken as self-evident, or worse still, lucky. The truth is, though, that those of us who make it our business to forecast the performance of baseball players have it pretty easy. For one thing, we’ve got an awesome set of data to work with; baseball statistics are almost as old as the game itself, and the records, for the most part, are remarkably accurate and complete. For another, it’s easy to test our predictions against real, tangible results. If we tell you that Adam Dunn is going to have a huge season, and instead he’s been demoted to Chattanooga after starting the year 2-for-53, the prediction is right there for everyone to see in all its manifest idiocy. Not so in many other fields, where the outcomes themselves are more subject to interpretation.
Talk of a World Cup of baseball, potentially starting as early as 2005, has inspired early speculation about what the lineups might look like. The team from the Dominican Republic promises to be a monster. Vlad, Manny, Pujols, Sosa, Pedro–yeah, that’s going to be tough. Tough enough to threaten the U.S.A.? I caught the Errol Morris documentary “Fog of War” recently, which offers 11 lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara, seven-year Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. McNamara, one of the celebrated “Whiz Kids” who brought the science of modern management to a struggling postwar Ford Motor Company, was an early adopter of quantitative analysis. McNamara’s Lesson Six: “Get the data.” A World Cup of baseball is hardly the Cold War, but the McNamara in me relishes any opportunity to take the 2004 PECOTA Weighted Mean Projections out for a spin. Data? We’ve got data.
Welcome to the Bronx, Gary–or should we say, welcome to Gary’s World, Yankees? Gary Sheffield has torn–not ruptured–ligaments in his thumb. It’s a very similar injury to that suffered by Derek Jeter last season and extremely similar to that of NBA star Ron Artest recently. Jeter skipped surgery, while Artest had surgery and missed only five games. While the thumb is certainly a concern, I side with Sheffield on this one. The injury seems to have been blown out of proportion. It could have been much worse for Jim Thome. His fracture nearly required the insertion of pins. That would have put him out well into April. Instead he should be back near Opening Day. Thome’s power stroke might be a bit rusty, but he’s already working on non-contact drills while in a soft cast. The rust might cost him a few hits and homers, but he remains an elite hitter. Remember that fluke fractures tend to not be long-term problems.
I’ve been looking for a gap in the Yankees armor this year, hoping to see where they might stumble and miss the playoffs. And, uh, it’s not looking really good for me.
It’s pretty easy for most teams. Despite the efforts of new GM Bill Bavasi, the Mariners can be taken apart pretty quickly: Edgar Martinez out for the season? Quinton McCracken subs at DH, and the offense dies. Bret Boone blows out his knee why playing weekend roller-hockey? Hello, Willie Bloomquist! An injury to Randy Winn or Ichiro Suzuki? Mmm, McCracken…we just can’t get enough.
The Yankees have problems, but there’s not much that causes a collapse. Last year we could look at the middle infield and see the lack of depth as a spike-filled pit, and when Derek Jeter got a knee dropped on his shoulder, in they fell. This year, a Jeter injury means the best shortstop ever goes back to his natural position. Sure, someone has to play third, but it’s not that hard to scrape together a stop-gap solution. Heck, they were about to do it before they decided to blow the doors off and bring in Alex. Aaron Boone the Honest could be back in time to bring adequacy to the position.
Does the addition of Richie Sexson balance the loss of Curt Schilling for the Diamondbacks? Phillies’ prospect Cole Hamels continues to mow hitters down like it ain’t no thing. And the Royals offense should be better in 2004, when all is said and done. All this and much more news from Arizona, Phildelphia, and Kansas City in your Thursday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
This team is in trouble. Why? You might notice a load of lights there in the pitching staff. Even the pitching-friendly confines of Safeco Field might not be enough to keep runs off the board if the M’s are forced to scramble all year for healthy arms. With swirling rumors about injuries, nightlife, and various other explanations, Freddy Garcia simply hasn’t performed the last two seasons. There’s a consistent track between his K rate and his velocity; as he fatigues, he loses effectiveness. Garcia needs to drastically increase his pitch efficiency to have the kind of year he desperately wants in his contract season.
The Braves may be handcuffing themselves by carrying Eddie Perez. The Twins could find a second-base solution in Michael Cuddyer. The Devil Rays have had a much tougher time developing pitchers than hitters. These and other news and notes in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.
The Royals have an intriguing second-base battle cooking in the minors. The Yankees aren’t rushing to promote farmhand pitchers. The Padres could be short a shortstop at Triple-A. These and other happenings in today’s Transaction Analysis.
The concept of “clutch” is one of the clearest dividing lines between traditional coverage of baseball and what you’ll find here at Baseball Prospectus. In the mainstream, performance in important situations is often attributed to some wealth or deficit of character that causes a particular outcome. Here, we’re more likely to recognize that when the best baseball players in the world go head-to-head, someone has to win and someone has to lose, and it doesn’t mean that one side has better people than the other.
Clutch performances exist, to be sure; you can’t watch a day of baseball without seeing a well-timed hit, a big defensive play or a key strikeout that pushes a team towards victory. The biggest moments in baseball history are almost all examples of players doing extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances. Those moments make the game great and the players responsible for them deserve credit, and even adulation, for their heroics.