February 10, 2012
Now Available for 2012 THT Essentials: Now Available The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2012, an annual "must buy" for all baseball fans, is now shipping. Read this article to learn more about it.
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Tuesday, February 23, 2010Olympic quote of the dayRead the quote below, and think about how strange this sounds if applied to a sport like baseball: “I have seen skaters forget to change lanes, but I have never seen a coach forget to tell a skater to change,” said Dan Jansen, who won the 1,000-meters gold medal for the United States at Lillehammer in 1994. “I really like [Netherlands Speed Skating coach] Gerard Kemkers, but unfortunately I think this was his mistake.” Put into baseball terms, that reads something like, "I have seen players make mistakes on the basepaths, but I have never seen a coach make a mistake." There are of course many different versions of that same analogy. But can you even imagine that sentence being spoken on an MLB postgame show? Updates: Forgot to include the link. And Geoff Young had probably a better analogy than I did in the comments. BA’s Top 100 Prospects: Something’s wrongBaseball America released their newest Top 100 Prospects list today, and of course I'm now here to complain. BA ranked OF Fernando Martinez 77th overall, a forty-seven rank drop from last season. Why? Let's take a look at Martinez's 2009 season: Triple-A (190 Plate Appearances): .290/.337/.540, .316 BABIP MLB (100 Plate Appearances): .176/.242/.275, .197 BABIP So he raked in Triple-A and stunk in the majors, although his BABIP is partly to blame. Guess what? He's 20 years old! How can you drop forty-seven slots when you put up those numbers in the highest level of minor league ball as a twenty year old? I guess the only answer is that there are some other awesome prospects that overtook him. Let's take a look: 3B Josh Vitters was ranked 70th overall, seven slots ahead of F-Mart. A year younger than Martinez, here was Vitters' 2009 season in which he was nineteen years old: Single-A (288 Plate Appearances): .316/.351/.535, .326 BABIP High-A (196 Plate Appearances): .238/.260/.344, .256 BABIP When you consider not only that Martinez can play all three outfield positions, whereas Vitters is a third baseman, it makes this situation all the more absurd. In his age-nineteen season, Martinez hit .287/.340/.432...in Double-A! I mean, this is really funny. In their recently released top prospect list, Project Prospect ranked F-Mart tenth overall, whereas Vitters didn't even crack the top 100. OF Austin Jackson was ranked one spot ahead of Martinez. Here was Jackson's 2009 season, in which he was twenty-two years old, two years older than F-Mart: Triple-A: .300/.354/.405, .384 BABIP Seriously...that's it? Talk about going gaga for tools and batting average. Jackson, who was dealt by the Yankees to the Tigers in the Curtis Granderson deal, had an OPS .121 lower than Martinez last year, at the same minor league level, playing the same position, all while being two years older. Here's Jackson's age twenty-one season: Double-A: .285/.354/.419, .346 BABIP That's almost the exact same OPS as F-Mart's in Double-A, only that Jackson was two years older than Martinez at the time he was playing. There are some other seriously questionable guys ranked higher than Martinez, including Brett Lawrie (#59) and Jiovanni Mier (#73). However, this one takes the cake: OF Jared Mitchell was ranked 55th overall. Mitchell is three days older than Fernando Martinez, and mustered an OPS .025 points lower than Martinez playing in A-Ball! I mean, that is so laughable as to be silly. You have a guy older than Martinez performing about equally at a much lower level in the minors, whereas Martinez is at the highest level, and you call the guy twenty-five spots better than F-Mart. Update: Sam Page of Amazin Avenue pointed out in the comments section here and at AA that the drop is because of F-Mart's injuries. However, AA's own prospect guy Mark Himmelstein responded well: Dropping him because he can’t stay healthy, which seems a little silly, being that none of his injuries have been related, and the most serious one was a few years ago now when he broke his hamate bone. If anything, that should have earned him at least a season of good grace to get his power back, even forgetting he was in a level way to advanced for him at the time. And of course, now that he finally showed he got his power back by crushing Triple-A pitching for two months, now its time to start writing him off and dropping him spots. I also noted that Martinez's Triple-A and Caribbean Series manager, Ken Oberkfell, said this:
Martinez won the MVP of the Caribbean Series. Joe Girardi, sabermetricianVia the LoHud Yankees Blog: Cano hit just .207 with runners in scoring position last year, but Girardi wasn’t upset with his approach in those situations. “There was a streak when he had made about 10 or 11 outs in a row with runners in scoring position, and he hit nine bullets,” Girardi said. “Over the long term that usually irons itself out, but when you don’t have 600,000 at-bats, it doesn’t iron out. His at-bats, a lot of times were very good with runners in scoring position. I didn’t think he had a lot of luck last year” A Call to ArmsPrompted by Richard Lederer's article at TBA, in which he discusses how the Angels have consistently outperformed their PECOTA-predicted record, and the discussion that has ensued over at The Book Blog, I have a simple request for the baseball community: Somebody figure out what the heck is up with the Angels. If this has been done before, then point me in the direction. My hunch is that is is more "marginal secret something + statistical noise" than an extreme of either. But anyway, I'm wondering what everyone thinks. Bill James ThingsThe latest Bill James Gold Mine will be shipping soon. The Gold Mine is full of Bill's essays—the "pure gold" part of the book—as well as ten-to-fifteen special statistical insights for each team—the nuggets. Yours truly contributed nuggets for five teams; see if you can guess which ones. The Gold Mine is available from ACTA or Amazon  .Most of the essays in the Gold Mine are reprints of articles he has posted on Bill James Online (BJOL). BJOL is a subscription site, but it may be worth the price for you. For example, Bill's latest essay, I Knew It!, uncovers something I hadn't even thought about: We all know that the number of "long" outings by starting pitchers has declined, but it turns out that the number of "short" outings has declined, too. Here's how Bill explains it: People think that modern managers are only concerned, and are over-concerned, with not over-working their starting pitchers. That’s not exactly true. Rather, in the modern world we believe in regular workloads. Whereas managers in the fifties and sixties believed that some days pitchers just didn’t “have it”, and jerked the pitcher out of the game quickly when they thought he didn’t have it, we believe now that you get maximum production and minimal risk of injury with a regular, predictable workload. And, really, this is progress, because the whole thing about the pitcher just “not having it today” is mostly just nonsense. Bill also has a series about the best pitching duels of each decade going, which is also fun reading. (Full disclosure: I also work for Bill on BJOL.) Finally, reader Ken Cale has been playing around with Bill's Win Shares system and developed his own way of ranking players with Win Shares. You can download Ken's system in this PDF file. THT doesn't "endorse" Ken's system, but some of you may find it interesting. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
