In a game that could have been lost many times, Dusty Baker did all the right things to win.
That line may not ring true, given how strenuously I criticized Baker in Thursday’s column and in a number of others this year. All of those criticisms still hold, which doesn’t change the fact that Baker made the right decisions Friday to help the Cubs take a 2-1 lead in the NLCS.
The biggest thing Baker did was use his best pitchers in the biggest situations. In the 11th inning, nursing a one-run lead, Baker rode Mike Remlinger through a series of Marlin hitters who hammer left-handers rather than go to the inferior right-handers left in his pen. Baker not only correctly overrode platoon considerations, but left the closer myth behind as well, choosing the guy with one save in three years ahead of former closers Antonio Alfonseca and Dave Veres.
BP: You’ve been the Padres GM for nine years, and you got your start in scouting. How have some of the scouting and player evaluation principles in the organization changed over the years? Towers: I think it’s cyclical. Between ’96 and ’98, we drafted younger players; we felt there was time to develop them. Bill Gayton came on board (as the new head of scouting), and we said then that we had to improve the system. We got too high school-happy in the mid-90s–it takes high school players a long time to develop. We also drafted pitching heavily in the early and mid-90s. It got pretty slim when it came to positional prospects after a while. We’ve switched the emphasis to position players, preferably college ones, where we feel we’ll get more of an immediate return. More clubs are now going the college route, doing what Oakland’s done, what Toronto’s done, what we’ve done–everybody’s starting to jump on the bandwagon. We may end up going back to high school kids after a while. In the next couple of years if we see heavy drafting of college players, we might then be able to land a Cole Hamels. When more and more clubs are doing the same thing, you’re going to have less to pick from among college players, so you might be able to get those kinds of pretty good bargains with high school talent. As far as our timing goes, we’re going to go with fewer younger players at the big league level, so we may use some college-drafted players and prospects to make trades, as we did this year to get Giles. In that sense, it’s more of a Giants philosophy. Hopefully we’ll have a run of four or five years where we don’t need many new, young players making major contributions, where we’re able to keep our core players on field. We could then use the added revenue from the new park more to sign players and use some of our drafted talent to trade for plugging holes.
In the wake of the A’s’ loss to the Red Sox in the Division Series, the fourth straight year in which they’ve bowed out in the first round, there’s been a maelstrom of psychoanalysis, criticism, and…oh, what’s a good Chris Kahrl word?…foofaral! Yes, there’s been foofaral a-plenty as talking heads, and some thinking ones, try to explain four straight series losses. Many of the rationalizations are flat-out wrong, even counterfactual. There’s still a popular notion that the A’s are a "sabermetric" team, following the walks-and-power, damn-the-defense approach that defined them back in the late 1990s. Actually, the A’s are a pitching-and-defense team, have been for two years now, and were especially so this year with the addition of Chris Singleton and the commitment to Mark Ellis at second base. Accusations that the A’s lose in the postseason because they can’t play defense are patently absurd. The A’s prevent runs far, far better than they score them. What they don’t do is score enough runs; in fact, the Red Sox triumph over the A’s should be see as a validation of troglodyte baseball. The Sox are much better offensively and don’t have a real good defensive team outside of a few players. They won, so where is all the praise for that approach? (I’ll leave it to the reader to discern where these facts intersect with the media’s preconceived notions.)
If Long can demand a trade, what’s to stop other, often better players from asking for crazy stuff? Mike Mussina wants an attractive female Ivy League Yankee intern to follow him around during the pre-game, reading aloud from Modern Library selections to stimulate his mind as he warms up the pitching arm. David Wells wants a stack of ham sandwiches exceeding his own height before every game. Al Martin wants an additional wife at the start of every homestand. Jeff Kent would like someone to wash his truck for him during games. Carl Everett could demand local natural history museums take their fake dinosaurs off display while his team’s in town. Are any of those demands any more ridiculous than a trade demand by Terrence Long?
All even. The Marlins and Red Sox get the split on the road, so for them, mission accomplished. Better, everyone should be healthy, and to some degree, rested. We’ll talk more about Kerry Wood, Johnny Damon, and others in just a bit, but there are patterns to teams that make it this far into the postseason. Most are either very lucky with their health or able to adjust around the injuries that they have. The Angels won, in large part, because they went through the 2002 season with almost no injuries. Meanwhile, the few they had, like Tim Salmon’s balky self, were compensated by the DH rule and good spare outfielders. As these four teams push for the ultimate goal, the Fall Classic, health should cease becoming an issue apart from collision and collapse. Escaping these, however, is never sure.
Powered by Side Two of Outkast’s “The Love Below,” the best Prince album Prince didn’t make, onto the injuries…
Miguel Batista could be in for a big payday. The Royals are suffering with the regrets of the morning after. And Larry Bowa, as you might have guessed, is seeing red. All this and much more news from Arizona, Kansas City, and Philadelphia in your Friday edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Evaluating defense has always been one of the more difficult tasks for performance analysts. The first reason for this is that looks can be deceiving. Sure, that acrobatic shortstop playing in the country’s largest market might appear to be a superior defender to the untrained eye, but all too often we draw our conclusions by putting emphasis on the outcome rather than the process of fielding the ball, itself. The second reason is the still-severe limitations we face with regard to collecting data, and how to properly interpret that data once we get a meaningful amount of it. Granted, there are some statistics that can be used when evaluating defense–errors, fielding percentage, Range Factor, Zone Rating, etc.–but none of them is without its flaws.
Which bring us to one of Bill James’ measures for quantifying defensive performance: Defensive Efficiency (provided here by Keith Woolner). Defensive Efficiency is a metric that measures a team’s ability to turn balls-in-play into outs, using the formula (TotalOuts – Strikeouts)/(BIP-HR).
Despite being raw and only applying to entire teams, Defensive Efficiency is a fair measure of overall defensive performance. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.
Kevin Towers completed his ninth season as General Manager of the San Diego Padres this year. Since advancing to the World Series in 1998, the Padres have traded or let go of several big names, while investing in the draft and farm system as part of the rebuilding process. The team now looks ahead to a higher revenue stream with the opening of Petco Park for Opening Day 2004. Towers recently chatted with BP about the future of the team, the new ballpark, and the Brian Giles trade.
Judging from my Inbox, I’m supposed to be upset because Fox dictated to MLB that the two LCS games last night would be played simultaneously, with one shown on the cable channel FX. I might have ranted about it a couple of years ago, but to be honest, this is a minor, understandable move. Afternoon baseball games during the week don’t draw very good ratings and are difficult for fans in broad swaths of the nation to see. Even motivated fans on the west coast who might be able to shake free from work to catch a 5 p.m. start are pretty much screwed by a game at 1 p.m.
A lot of the frustration over various scheduling decisions is justifiable, because the decisions are driven primarily by television and often run counter to logic. However, neither Fox nor MLB can do anything about the fact that the continental United States spans four time zones. None of the solutions will placate everyone, so the one that allows the widest possible audience to watch the games is acceptable. Rest assured that if a similar conflict occurs next Wednesday, Game Six of the Red Sox/Yankees series will be played at 4 p.m. Eastern, clearing the night for the Cubs/Marlins Game Seven.
As it turns out, the Cubs solved yesterday’s problem by about 6:15 Pacific time, pushing ahead of the Marlins 5-0 after two innings. Brad Penny didn’t have much command and Sammy Sosa punished him for it with a three-run bomb to an el station somewhere in the Loop. Everything after that, including two Alex Gonzalez home runs (see? I told you he’d be a great player some day!), was gravy.
Why is an account required to vote in the Internet Baseball Awards? Where did the write-ins go? And why isn’t Rafael Soriano on the AL Rookie of the Year Ballot? Your IBA questions answered in this edition of From The Mailbag.
When the season begins each spring, the ivy on the outfield wall at Wrigley Field is not a lush green, but a vine-bare patch of brick and brown. Botany is not among my hobbies, and I do not know whether this condition results from some half-intentional negligence, or the natural distaste of Parthenocissus tricuspidata for the cool Midwestern spring. But in either event, the effect is unsettling: that feeling you get in a dream when you see a place familiar but vaguely and profoundly incomplete. That was the feeling I had on Friday night when I walked through Gate F at Clark and Addison Streets and into the nation’s most beloved ballpark. Though the architecture of Wrigley Field is the same as always–an array of ascending ramps, chain-linked fences, city vistas, and dank inner concourses pierced by streaks of evening sunlight–the atmosphere is palpably different. Gone are the rowdies, the drunks, the tourists; present instead is the eerie timbre of quiet before battle. It is the playoffs, the third game of the first series against the Atlanta Braves, and whether owning to the somber, rainy weather, the melancholy brought on by raised expectations, or, more likely, the Trans-Atlantic airline fares that have passed as market rates for scalped tickets, these fans were here to win.
For Game Five of the ALDS, the Red Sox, despite facing one of the toughest portsiders in the game, trotted out Trot Nixon, Todd Walker and David Ortiz–all of whom have notable platoon weaknesses. (Also hammering home similar division-of-labor lessons was that pin factory in “Wealth of Nations,” and the annual faulty deployment of Gil Gerard and Loretta Swit in “Battle of the Network Stars.”)
That the Red Sox, one of the headiest, most progressive organizations in all of baseball, playing in a game of critical importance, didn’t tap into their well-stocked bench in this situation reinforced something for me: the failure to platoon players with notable weaknesses against one side is one of the last great organizational blind spots. And every organization is guilty of it–even those we associate with high levels of efficiency, like the Red Sox, A’s, Yankees, Mariners, and Braves.
Mark Grudzielanek made an early run at being this series’ Jose Cruz Jr. with two poor efforts in the ninth inning, one mental, one physical. On the first, when he bobbled a Luis Castillo ground ball and never did tag Juan Pierre, I don’t understand why he didn’t throw to second base for the force play. He had to know he’d blown the tag–great call by Fieldin Culbreth–and in that situation you must get one out. Not doing so was critical, because there’s a huge difference between two outs and two on, and one out and three on. The next play didn’t get the attention, but it highlighted the Cubs’ main problem coming into this series. Ivan Rodriguez hit a line drive past Grudzielanek that, had he just fallen down from where he stood, he might have caught and at least would have kept in the infield. The Cubs don’t play defense well. It hurt them last night, and it’s going to haunt them in every game of this series. Speaking of Rodriguez, when do you think word will get out that he can hit fastballs up and on the outside edge? Someone, somewhere, may wish to try a different approach. That, or kryptonite.
If anyone ever asks me why I love baseball, I can just replay them the inevitable playoff highlights from this postseason. We’re barely into the LCS and there are already more great moments than I can remember. Sure, as a Cubs fan, maybe I’m a bit more into it than normal, but not by much. With the Yankees/Sox starting up tonight, we can count on that always heated rivalry giving us something more to remember and likely someone earning a reputation as something… another Bill Buckner, another Bucky F. Dent, another Reggie Jackson. We’re never sure what, but we always know we’re going to see something amazing. This is why we love baseball and why it seems no one can make the game go wrong, no matter how much they try. I’m just glad I have FX and a split-screen.
On to the injuries…
The Yanks took far more balls per plate appearance than any other playoff team, but relatively few strikes. That’s a sign of a mature, disciplined team. Taking bad pitches could be especially beneficial against the Red Sox: Boston’s two best starters, Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe, are not known for their stamina, and the bullpen is in tatters between Byung-Hyun Kim’s breakdown and their heavy use in the Oakland series. Knocking Pedro out an inning earlier because of higher pitch counts could well be a game-winning strategy. Despite their refined approach at the plate, the Yankees don’t have a better offense than the Red Sox, who outscored them by nearly 100 runs during the regular season. The Sox remain the best offense in baseball, with a lineup that has absolutely no weaknesses in it. Both of these teams have the capability to knock a starter out early and put up crooked numbers in multiple innings. Even if you don’t want to get into the numbers, think only about the two main criticisms of these offenses over the course of the year: Yankees: “Alfonso Soriano isn’t suited to hit leadoff.” Red Sox: “Walker, Ortiz, and Nixon can’t hit lefties.” Think about that. The problem for the Yankees is that the leadoff guy has too many extra-base hits, and too few walks. The Red Sox somehow have to work around the issue that their three worst hitters, who average about a .950 OPS against righties, don’t hit lefties particularly well. Think the Tiger front office would like those problems?
There may be no glory in winning with a $100 million payroll, as Michael Lewis said last week on BPR, but I don’t think anyone in Red Sox Nation cares as much about glory as they do about beating the Yankees. The Yankees were hoping the A’s would pull things out with half their rotation on the shelf, while the Sox head into the ALCS with momentum, energy, and a wrath-of-God offense that Gary Huckabay so richly evoked in his ALDS preview.
Watching the brutal collision between Johnny Damon and Damian Jackson has me wondering why neither player could use the low-tech solution of calling for the ball, or why something more high-tech like headset communicators aren’t being implemented (think how fast the game could move if we could eliminate mound conferences). The collision clearly knocked Damon out for perhaps as long as two minutes, much more than what Marcus Giles suffered in his run-in with Mark Prior. Damon’s availability is in serious question, making Theo Epstein work hard as he readies his ALCS roster. Damon is likely to be available, but likely will miss at least the first two games in New York, giving the Sox a short bench. I’m also closely watching Jackson. I have absolutely no idea why the Sox sent him back out after clearly being concussed. Post-concussion syndrome is still a possibility for both players.