November 8, 2009
Order Now The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2010 is now in development and will ship in mid November! This year's book will feature articles by THT's staff as well as Bill James, Tom Tango and Craig Wright. If you use this link to purchase the Annual, you will be in the first group to receive it and you'll be supporting THT. 
Rich Barbieri
John Barten Brian Borawski Craig Brown Evan Brunell David Gassko Jonathan Hale Brandon Isleib Chris Jaffe Max Marchi Bruce Markusen Harry Pavlidis Jeff Sackmann Dave Studeman Steve Treder Bryan Tsao Tuck! Dan Turkenkopf Colin Wyers Geoff Young John Brattain And here's the full roster.
Or you can search by:
Gear up for baseball season with Chicago White Sox tickets and New York Yankees tickets. LA Angels tickets, Houston Astros tickets, and Atlanta Braves tickets are hot sellers! You can get Boston Red Sox tickets, San Diego Padres tickets or Chicago Cubs tickets for your favorite baseball fan. Coast to Coast Tickets has the best MLB tickets like Minnesota Twins tickets, LA Dodgers tickets, Milwaukee Brewers tickets, New York Met tickets and St. Louis Cardinals tickets. Find premium Chicago Cubs tickets and other Chicago tickets at JustGreatTickets.com. Chicago Cubs Tickets Chicago Tickets  All content on this site (including text, graphs, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
Ten Things I Didn’t Know Last Weekby Dave StudemanSeptember 08, 2005 Oakland A's pitching prospects don't hurt their arms.Over at the USS Mariner, Derek Zumsteg has been building the pieces of an extensive review of minor league pitching injuries, and his most recent article pulled the pieces together into an insightful crescendo. The high note was finding that the Oakland A's have experienced no injuries among their top pitching prospects over the last 10 years. The Mariners have for many years had a “pitch through the pain” philosophy, the failure of which is likely best exemplified in Gil Meche’s struggles and the organization’s dim view of his complaints. They have in general seemed reluctant to shut a pitcher down and slow to diagnose serious problems, as with Rafael Soriano’s rest-and-rehab, the push to have him return early, and the eventual surgical outcome of that course. The Mariners have one of the worst records with keeping their pitchers healthy. Unfortunately, for A's fans, this doesn't erase the pain of injuries to their staff ace Rich Harden and their ace shortstop Bobby Crosby. The kids are making the difference in the NL East.The NL Wild Card race is coming down to the Houston Astros and the National League East. The remarkable development in the NL East this year has been the contributions made by the young players in this once-geriatric division. Consider...
Lloyd McClendon is no longer the Pirates' manager.I don't really know what to say about Lloyd McClendon, who never made an impression on me either way. Of course, whoever replaces McClendon probably won't have much of an impact on the team, but you can't blame the Pirates for shaking things up. This has been a summer of manager discontent. Jim Tracy's head has been called for many times this summer (a development Jon Weisman articulately addressed recently), concerns continue to be raised about Dusty Baker in Chicago, Met fans have been scratching their heads over Willie Randolph's strategic moves and Catfish Stew wonders if Oakland's Ken Macha (a native of Pittsburgh) will move on to replace McClendon. I'm sure I've missed a few. Andruw Jones is not even the Braves' MVP, let alone the league's.I wrote that one just to get your attention. We've gotten a lot of Win Shares questions lately. In particular, folks want to know why Andruw Jones only has 22 Win Shares, third on the team behind Marcus Giles (24) and Rafael Furcal (23). The answer is relatively easy: Andruw has not batted well with runners on base. Overall, Jones is batting .270, but he's batting only .213 with runners in scoring position (RISP). What's more, only 38% of his home runs have come with runners on base, even though 51% of his at-bats have been with runners on. So even though he may wind up with 50 home runs and well over 300 total bases, he hasn't had the impact many players with his stats have. That's how Win Shares sees things. On the other hand, when the game is on the line Andruw is batting .299/.368/.714, according to ESPN's splits. (See when the game is "close and late:" seventh inning or later, game within one run either way.) Plus, he's hit a home run nine out of 77 times in close and late situations. It appears that Andruw hasn't been hitting well with runners in scoring position, but he has been hitting well when the overall game is on the line. So, okay, maybe he is the Braves' MVP. But proclaiming Jones the league MVP when a certain Cardinal first baseman has 12 more Win Shares is sort of missing the big picture. Lloyd McClendon's team has hit well with RISP.A year ago, I wrote an article describing how teams score. I made a graph of three things for each league: how often runners reached scoring position, how well each team hit with RISP and how many home runs the team hit (the circle size). Here's the same graph, updated for 2005:  As you can see, the Pirates' problem hasn't been batting with runners in scoring position; it's been getting them into scoring position in the first place. At the same time, St. Louis leads the league in both batting with RISP and getting runners into scoring position. There are a lot of other insights that can be pulled from this graph (check out how few home runs the Marlins have hit). But I'll leave that to you. ARod is one of the greatest ever.So now I'm stating the blatantly obvious. But Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez is having another MVP-type of season. He's batting .321/.422/.605 with nine runs created a game and 29 Win Shares (tied for the league lead) overall. If he finishes with 34 Win Shares (just a guess) ARod will have a career total of 315. Only 10 players have had a greater career total at the age of 29. Here's the list of all 300+ Win Share holders at the age of 29, including only players who played after 1900: Player WS Ty Cobb 418 Babe Ruth 413 Mickey Mantle 401 Mel Ott 352 Walter Johnson 349 Tris Speaker 343 Rogers Hornsby 336 Hank Aaron 322 Eddie Mathews 319 Eddie Collins 317 Jimmie Foxx 314 Christy Mathewson 305That's pretty good company. Albert Pujols will probably have around 183 Win Shares at the end of this year. At 25 years old, that would put him on the same pace as ARod (184) despite having started a year later. I knew you were going to ask. You can find the career Win Shares of all current players on our Win Shares page. IRod ain't walking.I found the batting equivalent of Carlos Silva, and he plays in Detroit. Catcher Ivan Rodriquez has walked only seven times this year, an incredibly small amount for a regular player. In fact, it's half the next-lowest major league total (players with at least 400 at bats) of 14, held by Angel Berroa and Robinson Cano. That's the company IRod has kept this year. While IRod has never been a patient hitter, he's at least received 16 walks in his worst year, and he walked 55 times just two years ago. Here's a sparkline of his number of walks each year of his career:  The good news for Tiger fans is that IRod has been his old self behind the plate, throwing out 48% of baserunners after nabbing only 29% last year. But his deterioration at the plate—he's creating only 3.9 runs a game—doesn't bode well for the value of that long-term contract. Remember, players tend to improve their batting eye with age. Rodriguez hasn't.Neither are the White Sox.I haven't heard much about small ball or smart ball or Ozzie ball lately. Which is a good thing. The White Sox's offense has been just terrible. Take a look at this "how teams score" graph for the 2005 American League:  The White Sox have the second-lowest walk total in the American League which, along with their poor batting average, means they have had the fewest at-bats with runners in scoring position, by far. Once again, I'll let you draw your own conclusions about other AL teams. Defense sure has been indifferent lately.Retrosheet's David Smith posted a wonderful list in the SABR-L mailing list a year ago, and it was recently resurrected during one of those typically great SABR chats. It's the number of "defensive indifference" stolen bases that have occurred over the last umpteen years. Defensive indifference is when the defense doesn't contest a runner stealing a base, so the official scorer doesn't give the baserunner credit for a stolen base. Year DI 2004 247 2003 219 2002 201 2001 213 2000 199 1999 166 1998 54 1997 122 1996 124 1995 88 1994 82 1993 85 1992 85 1991 78 1990 42 1989 50 1988 36 1987 5 1986 1 1985 4 1984 3 1983 7 1982 12 1981 3 1980 3I rarely remember hearing about defensive indifference in my younger days, and now I see why. We can all rest easy knowing that we're being safeguarded from inflationary stolen base numbers! Best oufield arms.Protrade recently ran an article about runners advancing on fly balls and which outfielders have been most successful at foiling them. The article included two great features:
Spoeaking of great outfield arms, the Braves' Francoeur is tied for the National League outfield lead (with Floyd and Cabrera) with 11 outfield assists. The thing is, he's racked up his total in 404 innings, while Floyd and Cabrera have played over 1,000 innings. Think they'll stop running on him soon? RIP, Maynard G. Krebs. References and Resources Thanks to the Balls, Sticks and Stuff guy for pointing out the ProTrade article. Dave was called a "national treasure" by Rob Neyer. Seriously. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail. Commenting is not available in this weblog entry. Do you have a general question or comment for one of THT's writers? Send it in to our weekly mailbag We also welcome unsolicited op-ed pieces of approximately 500 words for consideration. We reserve the right to edit for length, clarity and consistency of style. Please include your whole name and location to be considered. If you have a comment about this specific article, please email the writer. Next Article: Blast From The Past: The Empire Strikes Back>> <<Previous Article: You Can Count on It |
