Steven Goldman takes on the Tigers’ and Padres’ flirting with a .300 winning percentage with a history lesson on some of baseball’s most renowned losing clubs.
If you’re following the College World Series for the first time, you’ve picked a really great year to do it. The format has changed this year so that the TV-inspired one-game crapshoot final of the past fifteen years has been replaced with a best-of-three round between the winners of the two half-brackets. Given that most college teams are built around the idea of winning a three-game series, this should show the teams at their best. On top of that, there have already been some great games this week, and the final comes down to two of the three best teams in the country, so I’m really excited about this weekend. So you can share that excitement, I want to give you a viewer’s guide to this weekend’s series.
Despite years of Kids’ Inning mishaps, the Mariners announce they’re bringing the kids again this year to run the show. Derek Zumsteg recounts a few kids’ horror stories, including the real reason Lou Piniella left town.
The Diamondbacks keep cycling through injuries. The Red Sox keep cycling through relievers. Lima Time has Royals fans cowering. Izzy returns to a battered bullpen. News, notes, and Kahrlisms from 21 major league teams in the latest edition of Transaction Analysis.
Will Carroll offers the latest injury news on Vladimir Guerrero, Matt Morris, and Seth McClung in today’s edition of Under The Knife.
The Angels staff has been tateriffic; Mark Bellhorn is getting the cold shoulder in Chicago; and the Tigers have shifted their lineup around, with the hope of reaching 50 wins. All this and much more from Anaheim, Chicago, and Detroit.
The focus on pitcher workloads–largely through tracking pitch counts–is perhaps the most heated area of contention between old-school baseball people and outside performance analysts. Baseball Prospectus has been a big part of the debate, with Rany Jazayerli and Keith Woolner developing and refining tools that measure workload and investigating the effects, short- and long-term, of throwing a lot of pitches.
At the other end of the spectrum are coaches and ex-players, many of whom have been in the game since before Woolner and Jazayerli were born. These men believe that pitch counts are a secondary tool at best, and at the extreme, proffer the notion that the real problem is that pitchers today are babied, not like the men years ago who always went nine innings. Or 12. Or even 26.
Lost in that line of thought is the fact that pitching is harder now. No one counted pitches 90 years ago because, to a certain extent, there was no need to do so. Pitching a baseball game from start to finish required a level of effort well within the ability of the men assigned to do so. Now, pitching nine innings of baseball at the major-league level requires a much greater effort, one that may be too much for one human arm to handle.
Baseball is full of bounces, and not just the path of a Jacque Jones double as it skips across the Metrodome turf (or a Carlos Martinez homer as it skips off Jose Canseco’s head). Rather, teams can expect a bounce in attendance when they move into a new facility, facilitating a higher payroll, a more competitive club, and ultimately, it is hoped, a couple of pennants to hang on the outfield wall.
Or at least, once upon a time, they could have. The standing-room-only precedent established in places like Toronto and Baltimore and Cleveland no longer seems to hold. Attendance in Detroit, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh has already regressed to the levels those teams had grown accustomed to prior to the opening of their new stadiums. Attendance in Cincinnati is up, but only barely–and this with reasonable ticket prices and a fun team on the field. Nobody expects the honeymoon to last forever, but the reinvigorated relationships between ballpark and city that the new stadiums were supposed to engender have lasted shorter than a Liz Taylor nuptial.
Since the debut of SkyDome in 1989, 13 of the 26 teams in existence at that time have opened new parks. Two more will open new facilities next year. It has been the longest sustained period of new stadium construction in baseball history. Call them mallparks or, as I prefer, Retroplexes. Either way, there’s plenty of evidence that the ball isn’t bouncing quite as highly these days.
There are days when I wonder why I didn’t call this column Under The Needle or something similar. The reason for this is steroids; it seems that no matter what the topic is or where I am, when people talk baseball with me, they’ll bring the conversation back to steroids, and likely to Barry Bonds. Sure, I opened myself to this with my offer to help Barry get tested (which was politely declined by the MLBPA) last year after Bonds said that he wanted to be tested. Why did I offer? I wanted to make a point much different that the Rick Reillys of the world.
I am reasonably sure that Bonds would have passed.
Completely sure? No. Heck, I could have had something in my meatless chicken patty tonight that would trip the light on a urinalysis. The steroid issue is clouded by a couple issues–it’s easier to say ‘steroids’ than Beta-2 agonists or chorionic gonadotrphin, and it’s simpler to explain changes. Ignore new bats, new ballparks, better techniques, dietitans, personal trainers, video breakdowns, and a year-round focus, but blame some drug that’s been lapped by the field. Easy, but wrong.
A Monday night at the park with Pedro Martinez and the Boston Red Sox. Ryan Wagner looks like a reach for the Reds. The Padres are finally rolling with the rotation they wanted all along. All this and more news and notes from San Diego, Cincinnati and Boston in this edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Sometimes a big epiphany just leads you back to a better understanding of a mundane truth. Let me walk you through one of mine.
A few months back, I finally hit upon a useful algorithm for determining reasonably accurate park factors for all 287 NCAA Division I baseball programs. Given that, in any given year, a given team will only play 25-30 of the other teams, and that over half of those matchups will not be home-and-home contracts but will involve a smaller program playing only at a larger one (which is of no benefit in determining park factors), I was quite pleased with this discovery.
Current major league park factors, relatively speaking, are a little dull. Sure, you have Coors Field, which routinely comes in around 160. The rest of them, though, hover within about 20% of each other from top to bottom. It matters if you’re picking at the fine details of performance analysis, but for a lot of fans it causes the issue to just resolve down to “the Rockies and everyone else.” College park factors, on the other hand, have a good bit more range in them, from the lows down in the 60s up to New Mexico, at an astounding 211. In other words, a theoretical game played at New Mexico will produce more than twice as many runs as the same game played at a neutral park like Fresno State.
I then set about finding practical applications for these park factors. The most common use for park factors is to take performance metrics, both team and individual, and place them in a neutral context. So I began thinking of ways to park-adjust statistics and look for players and teams who were actually better or worse than they appeared at face value. Suddenly, it occurred to me that the park factor for runs scored was not the same as the park factor for OBP, and that the relationship between the two was not linear; it was exponential. In other words, if the park factor for OBP increased from 130 to 140, that would result in a greater increase in runs scored than 100 to 110.
It hasn’t yet gotten to this point yet, but it might make the Reds and their fans feel better. In Monday’s game with the Cubs, Ken Griffey Jr. reached up to wave at the home run that put the Reds down and banged into the wall. For most players, the move to rub his shoulder would be a non-item, but this is Griffey–at one time one of the best players in baseball, and now the hope of a proud franchise. Griffey is OK, no more or less sore than any other player who ran into a wall, hoping to find a way to help his team with a miracle catch.
There’s nothing I like seeing like an old-fashioned pitching duel. Good pitching should not be “old-fashioned,” it should be a part of many ballgames–poor pitching should be the exception. But in today’s game, 1-0 contests are few and far between. Monday’s Mets/Marlins game didn’t really have the makings of a great game, but I dialed it up on TiVo and watched for signs of Tom Glavine’s poor health. I got none of those expected signs. Apparently, Glavine’s elbow has responded extremely well to treatment and he was very effective. If Glavine can come back from this start and make one more solid one, I’ll have to back off–slightly–on my doomed predictions of impending implosion.
Just days after notching his 300th win, Roger Clemens is back
to garnering bad press. Clemens, who spent his first 13 seasons with the Red
Sox, claims he will skip his Hall of Fame induction ceremony unless his plaque
shows him wearing a Yankee cap. Clemens, whose malice towards his first team
is well known, became a free agent after the 1996 season and signed with the
Toronto Blue Jays, with the Sox making just a token offer for his services.
He’s been largely disliked in Boston since then, and the feeling is mutual.
This could be a pretty good battle, if the Hall elects to pick a fight over
it. I mean, Roger Clemens versus the Hall of Fame? These two are to public
relations what the Tigers and Devil Rays are to quality baseball. By the time
it’s over, the Hall might be a burning pile of rubble, and Clemens on the lam
in South America, a man without a country.
I’m inclined to side with Clemens. If an organization wants to honor someone
by hanging their image on its walls until the glaciers melt, the person should
have control over that image. Within reason, I think players should be allowed
to choose their own cap or, as Catfish Hunter did, to have
no team logo. Clemens has spent a significant chunk of his career in
pinstripes, winning two championships, a Cy Young Award and No. 300, which is
more than enough to warrant his identification with the Yankees.
Derek Zumsteg reaches into his bag of useful ideas to bring you this handy-dandy guide to marketing the game of baseball. Not to be taken internally.
The Astros express elation over throwing a no-hitter, while the Yankees express their disgust; Roger Clemens is happy about getting his 300th win, but not so happy about the idea of going into Cooperstown as a member of the Red Sox (let alone Blue Jays); and Lou Piniella tries to connect to a younger generation. All this and much more in the newest edition of The Week In Quotes.
After a dozen seasons of tremendous baseball, of winning their division in
every full season, reaching five World Series and winning one championship,
the Braves were supposed to be done. Last December’s budget-paring decisions
to let Tom Glavine leave and to trade Kevin
Millwood to Philadelphia for aging catching prospect Johnny
Estrada were the final steps in the process. The Braves would be just
another team, owned by corporate penny-pinchers and run by a front office no
better or worse than most others. The Phillies would ascend, led by expensive
acquisitions and some homegrown pitching, and the transition–anticipated for a
number of years–would be complete.
Not so fast.