Oakland Athletics outfielder Adam Piatt knows the stretch of I-80 between Oakland and Sacramento all too well. He’s driven the stretch of road a dozen times in the past three years, going back and forth on the Sacramento Shuttle between the A’s and the Triple-A River Cats. Driving the 90 miles between Network Associates Coliseum and Raley Field means a lot more than wear on your car; it means the difference between being in the majors and being one of thousands who are trying to get there.
“I didn’t quite understand the process when I got to the majors,” says Piatt. “I figured they had brought me up to play. Then I got optioned down, and it was hard for me. But by about the fifth or sixth time I got sent down, I learned that it wasn’t personal, that it’s just how the system works.”
The rules that govern baseball on the field are complex. But there is another rulebook, one that governs the movement of players and roster management. A large part of this book details the world of options and waivers, and we’re here to try and make these often-confusing subjects as simple as we can.
The Marlins are getting star production out of Dontrelle Willis. George Steinbrenner seems intent on wrecking the Yankees. Reggie Sanders has shackled the Pirates with a world of suckiness. Plus more Prospectus Triple Play news and notes out of Florida, New York, and Pittsburgh.
Darin Erstad returns to Anaheim just as Jeff DaVanon’s terrorizing the league. David Dellucci hits the DL just as he’d started to find a groove. Hee Seop Choi’s should be back healthy and playing after a scary moment at Wrigley. Vlad Guerrero’s DL stint has Expos fans clamoring for Terrmel “the Hammer” Sledge. News, notes, and Kahrlisms from 17 major league teams in this edition of Transaction Analysis.
Baseball could learn a lot from Don King. When Don King puts on a fight, there’s instantly a thin, greasy film of sleaze on it, but most of the time, King’s able to overcome the aversion and distrust inherent in his productions, and sell the damn tickets. When King promotes a fight, he works his butt off to transform the tomatoest of cans into a Mythic Warrior whose nobility and sense of purpose is matched only by his strength and cunning in the ring. Then, after the inevitable whooping of Steve Zouski by Drederick Tatum, the No. 3 contender of the Uzbekistan Boxing Council (not affiliated with the Uzbekistan Boxing Association), people feel ripped off, and know they were stupid for signing up for the $84.95 pay-per-view event–even though they kinda liked the two chicks beating the living crap out of each other on the undercard.
The promotion of the fight was great, but the fight itself, the actual product, was pretty lame.
Baseball’s in exactly the opposite situation. The product is amazing beyond description, providing a mix of rapid, short-term thrills with the mysterious narrative of a 162-game regular season that still actually counts. Collectively, MLB clubs have lost their focus on getting people to actually watch the game, be it on television or in person. Over the past 20 years, management’s developed an affinity for publicly trashing their own product, and in terms of holding onto the front of the sports fan’s mind, they’ve had their butts handed to them by Pete Rozelle, Paul Tagliabue, and even the Michael Lerneresque David Stern. From the Commissioner writing off a third of the clubs before the season starts in an attempt to get givebacks from the players, to George Steinbrenner talking about how dangerous it is to come to Yankee games, no stone’s gone unturned in the inexplicable quest to keep fans away. To date, no club has come up with “Persistently Infected Sore Night,” but at least one club did threaten Jason Tyner bobbleheads.
Joe Sheehan calls MLB’s efforts “anti-marketing,” which is certainly a solid enough label, even if it’s overly kind to MLB.
The odds are very good that you’ve read too many analyses of last week’s draft already. The odds are also very good that you have no idea that Jamie D’Antona’s OBP was .450 this year. I’d like to take a look at the season numbers for the Division I college players taken in the first two rounds last week, not as part of the questionable sport of prospect-watching, but as an exercise in learning how to interpret college numbers–putting them in context and separating the wheat from the chaff.
For the last hundred years or so, the professional thinking on how to evaluate players at the high school or college level was that it was a purely observational task. There was no real understanding of what college numbers meant, so deciding how good a player was needed to be done purely by sending a scout down to watch him and record his observations in the few games he saw. There’s still a lot of that in play, as the crowds of guys with clipboards and radar guns at any major conference game will attest, but major league clubs are starting to try to learn how to interpret college numbers and, as John Cougar once sang, “collate them all in their proper places.” Given that the notion that minor league numbers might actually mean something if discounted properly is only about 20 years old in most corners, the fact that the same transformation is only now taking place in the college scouting ranks is not surprising. The scouts aren’t going away, of course, and they shouldn’t, but most organizations are trying to add another set of tools to their preparation techniques (and quite a few of them seem to be trying to go back to gather old data for analysis as well).
Brandon Phillips is struggling; Odalis Perez has been surprisingly unlucky; and Jeff Cirillo’s been better than a lot of people realize. All this and much more from Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Seattle, in your Friday the 13th edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
Are we sure that Friday the 13th didn’t come early this year? The Yankees are melting down, Steve Phillips was shown the gate, a no-hitter falls from the sky, and I can’t get guests for BPR. In the end, everything will be OK. I think. Maybe. If nothing else, it was a great night out at the ballpark in Indy and, as always, we still have injuries…
While the Cardinals have fallen apart around him, Matt Morris (aside from that annoying ligament replacement a couple years ago) has been the one rock of consistency. Any injury to an ace, let alone a shoulder problem, would not just be a crushing blow for the Cardinals, it would have been the crushing blow. Morris is having a muscular problem–probably centered on his subscapularis, which is part of the rotator cuff. While not considered serious, the Cards will need to be cautious with any concern surrounding Morris. Looking back at his velocity data, it appears it may have been affecting him in at least his last start.
The serious rehab for Vladimir Guerrero’s herniated disc began this week. He’ll be ready in about six, but early reports say that Guerrero is working extra hard and his great physical condition could change that timeline rapidly. Of course, I’ll be watching this one closely.
Matt Williams announced his
retirement, a little over a week after being released by the Diamondbacks.
It’s a bit of a shame in that his career is ending with such a whimper.
There are many teams who would be helped by a third baseman who can hit lefties
while making the minimum. Williams was hitting .302/.396/.581 against
southpaws this season, and regularly hits .300 with good power against
them. He can play both infield corners passably, although he’s no longer a
top-notch glove man at third base.
Just noodling here…the Yankees would be far better off with Williams than
with Todd Zeile. The Twins could actually bat him cleanup
against lefties. The A’s have to be questioning whether Eric Chavez
will ever hit lefties (.147/.188/.333 this year; .224/.272/.372 from 2000-2002); they need runs badly and would be well-served to employ Williams. The Expos could add him to their corner mix and be improved, as could the
Reds.
The BP Mailbag returns with questions for Will Carroll, Chris Kahrl, Nate Silver, and more. How did the Mets avoid losing a first-round draft pick this year after signing free agents? Are the Padres unlucky or could their injuries have been prevented? What were the Tigers thinking when they traded for Alex Sanchez? Dig in and find out.
The Diamondbacks and Royals take a surprising turn toward elite college talent in their drafting. The Phillies underachieving hitters have held them back from a run at the playoffs. Plus more Prospectus Triple Play news and notes out of Arizona, Kansas City, and Philadelphia.
Derek Zumsteg’s latest Breaking Balls takes a closer look at Edgar Martinez’s Hall of Fame candidacy, sparked by an onslaught of e-mail.
It’s not quite a Phil Nevin thing, in that you’ll have to take my word for it, but earlier today I was reading this article where Roy Oswalt was discussing his new adjustment to his pitching motion, a slight turn of his right (push) foot. My immediate thought was “Angle? Man, he’s going to hurt himself.” I won’t try to explain the mechanics of it in this short space, but stand up and try it yourself. Push off an invisible rubber with your foot both parallel and at an angle. Make sure you drive your leg and get a good hip rotation. Feel that? Yeah, so did Oswalt.
No determination has been made, but comments Oswalt made after the game seem to indicate that he’s headed back to the DL. Remember that red light? This clearly wasn’t what I was expecting, but longer term, the groin injury could take some of the stress off his arm. The Astros obviously have a great bullpen, but with their ace down again, that bullpen and the back of the rotation will be taxed. The extra workload could be a big factor in September.
While the Mariners are certainly one of the more creative teams when it comes to dealing with the DL, this latest tale surrounding Kaz Sasaki is perhaps too strange to be anything but true. If the suitcase story holds, then Sasaki should miss near the minimum. If not, and this is some cover for the back injury–or shoulder injury that many think Sasaki is dealing with–then it’s all up in the air. As in his last stint, we’ll know nothing from the normal channels on how to assess this.
It’s a cliché to say that the great thing about baseball is that you can always see something you’ve never seen before. Of course, comments like that reach the point of cliche because they’re true.
Last night, the Houston Astros lost their ace starter, Roy Oswalt, in the second inning to a groin injury. This messed them up so much that they went on to use five relievers in completing the first no-hitter against the Yankees in almost 45 years. Peter Munro, Kirk Saarloos, Brad Lidge, Octavio Dotel, and Billy Wagner combined to strike out 11 batters in tossing the first six-pitcher no-no in MLB history.
I’m a Yankee fan, and while I’m frustrated by this team’s lack of depth and its terrible problems scoring runs, this was just cool. There’s not a ton of analysis to be done here. No-hitters happen, and while the Astros’ bullpen is probably more likely to do it than your average starting pitcher–getting lots of strikeouts helps, and the five relievers who threw average 10.1 Ks per nine innings–it’s not like you can predict something like this. It was just one of those great baseball events, the kind of game that makes memories for the faithful and turns the uninitiated into fans.
As one might expect, the success of Michael Lewis’s great new book, Moneyball, has led to a number criticisms of Oakland Athletics’ GM Billy Beane, his staff, and their entire organizational philosophy. These criticisms should not have come as a surprise: Lewis presents Beane as a brilliant visionary operating in an antiquated system peopled, for the most part, with morons. There may be a great deal of truth to this, but the idea that some of Beane’s competitors would be defensive is understandable.
The most interesting criticism of the Athletics’ success is that as impressive as their regular season results have been, their style of play cannot succeed in the playoffs against quality competition. Sure, the Athletics win 100 games every year with one of the lowest payrolls in the game, but if they can’t win in the post-season, what good is it? This turns out to be a convenient critique since the A’s have lost in the first round of the playoffs for the past three seasons.
This criticism is not new, of course. Joe Morgan has been saying similar things for the last year or so: The A’s offense, which has relied mainly on reaching base and hitting home runs, is not effective in the post-season facing quality pitching. A team needs to be able to “manufacture runs”–steal bases, bunt, hit behind the runner, etc. The A’s do not, or cannot, do these things, so they are doomed to fall short in the playoffs. Or so the argument goes.
Continuing his series on the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, Doug Pappas looks at the ins and outs of MLB scheduling.
Don’t tell anyone, but I really enjoy watching Randall Simon hit. The loose, goofy motion in his stance as the ball approaches the plate; the flyswatter swing; the big-stepping follow through, his blubber, after half a second in gelatin-like suspension, mimicking the motion of his bat. It’s a lot of fun to watch, especially when Simon manages to make contact, which happens more often than you’d ever expect.
I’ve had the occasion, however, to watch Simon against Kerry Wood a couple of times this year, and from Randall’s point of view, the results have been disastrous: zero-for-six with four strikeouts. Not just any kind of strikeouts, mind you, but ugly, pirouetting, breeze-generating, no-chance-in-hell strikeouts, the sort that make you think that Simon could face Wood 500 times and go oh-fer.
I didn’t mind this, really; Wood is one of my favorite pitchers. But this particular matchup was interesting to watch because Simon and Wood are such an odd couple: Simon swings at everything, and never draws any walks, but by virtue of his superior hand-eye coordination, manages to keep his strikeout rate very low. Wood, on the other hand, is one of the toughest pitchers in the league to make contact against–though sometimes that’s because he isn’t throwing the ball anywhere near the strike zone. In any event, Simon’s performance against Wood looked so bad than I began to wonder whether the batter isn’t at some sort of systematic disadvantage in pairings of these types of players.
To study the question, I’ll leverage from a technique that Gary Huckabay and I introduced last month in a 6-4-3 column, comparing the actual performance observed when certain types of batter-pitcher pairings occur against the results predicted by Bill James’ log5 formula. Instead of dividing players up based on groundball and flyball rates, this time we’ll look at a quick-and-dirty index of plate discipline.