Wright power bounceback? Maybe not too likely
by Derek CartyJuly 03, 2009
Derek Carty is a Mets fan currently residing in New Jersey. In addition to writing for THT, his work has also run either currently or previously at Rotoworld, Sports Illustrated, and FOX Sports. He was the champion of the FOX Sports Experts Fantasy Baseball League in 2008 and will be competing in five expert competitions in 2009, including LABR NL. He welcomes questions via e-mail.
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Vazquez trade rumors
by Derek CartyJuly 03, 2009
Derek Carty is a Mets fan currently residing in New Jersey. In addition to writing for THT, his work has also run either currently or previously at Rotoworld, Sports Illustrated, and FOX Sports. He was the champion of the FOX Sports Experts Fantasy Baseball League in 2008 and will be competing in five expert competitions in 2009, including LABR NL. He welcomes questions via e-mail.
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My Morning in Exile
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 03, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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And That Happened
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 03, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Waiver Wire: NL
by Michael StreetJuly 03, 2009
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Waiver Wire: AL
by Rob McQuownJuly 03, 2009
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Master of fooling
by Max MarchiJuly 03, 2009
I'm not here to tell you he's a great pitcher—he has a bunch of Cy Young Awards and pitching Triple Crowns proving that.
And that he possesses one of the most devastating change-ups in baseball is old story.
What I'm trying to do in this article is give you a feeling of what happens to a batter when he is fooled by a change of pace.
To do that, I'll use the help of a great book, the work of some fellow writers (here at THT and elsewhere) and the "Master of Foolers," Mr. Johan Santana.
And, obviously, PITCHf/x data.
The fooling pitch
You can't sneak a low-80s pitch without much movement past major league hitters unless you can make them believe something else is coming at them (although Mark DiFelice seems to be trying to disprove the previous sentence). Upsetting time is the whole philosophy behind the change-up; look at the next couple of tables and you will get a feel for what upsetting time is.
Scenario: Santana (data from the full 2008 season) is on the mound, a righty is at the plate (the change-up is usually employed against opposite-handed batters) and the at-bat already has gone on for at least three pitches...
Here comes the change-up...
Pitch run value by number of fastballs already thrown during the at-bat #FB run value 1 -0.031 2 -0.035 3 -0.040
Pitch run value by number of change-ups already thrown during the a- bat #CH run value 0 -0.047 1 -0.045 2 -0.012
The best fooler
When Santana throws a change-up to a righty after a fastball, the run value of the pitch is -0.024. He went to that sequence 434 times in 2008, making it the most used combo by him after the fastball-fastball. Multiply those two numbers and you get -10.570, the number of runs created by opponent righties on Santana's change-ups following a fastball. As you can see from the next table, it has been by far the most lethal combination for him*.
*I'm sure this sentence is going to create confusion: I shouldn't have written combination, because I'm actually calculating run values for just the second pitch in the sequence.
Santana's combinations: run value of the second pitch.
pitch previous times pitch cumulative
pitch used run value run value
Change-up Fastball 434 -0.024 -10.57
Change-up Change-up 198 -0.022 -4.26
Fastball Fastball 638 -0.006 -3.55
Fastball Slider 43 -0.066 -2.83
Change-up Slider 38 -0.035 -1.33
Slider Change-up 26 -0.019 -0.5
Slider Fastball 43 -0.007 -0.28
Fastball Change-up 385 0.009 3.3And one of the most lethal in baseball.
Top MLB combinations: run value of the second pitch.
pitcher batter pitch previous times pitch cumulative
hand pitch used run value run value
M. Pelfrey R Fastball Fastball 721 -0.027 -19.22
C. Lee R Fastball Fastball 931 -0.017 -15.59
J.C. Romero L Fastball Fastball 264 -0.053 -13.98
R. Harden R Fastball Fastball 355 -0.033 -11.63
G. Balfour L Fastball Fastball 324 -0.035 -11.32
E. Santana R Slider Fastball 252 -0.044 -11.16
J. Santana R Change-up Fastball 434 -0.024 -10.57
J. Papelbon L Fastball Fastball 380 -0.028 -10.56
D. Davis R Cutter Cutter 300 -0.035 -10.39
J. Broxton R Fastball Fastball 244 -0.041 -10.03In front of Santana's change-up-following-fastball we have just back-to-back fastballs. Some of them are actually a mix of fastballs/sinkers combinations—and... another Santana.
Think time, swing time
The great book I alluded at at the beginning of this piece is Prof. Robert K. Adair's The Physics of Baseball.
Here I'm going to take advantage of his work, particularly chapter 3 and the figure 3.3 (these are references for the third edition).
Adair shows us that the batter begins to think about swinging (or not swinging... or getting out of the way in case of a brushback) around 225 milliseconds before he actually makes contact; 150 milliseconds before contact he is completely committed and already in motion, and he has only a little margin for adjusting his swing according to subsequent visual information.
If a batter has timed Santana's fastball, his thinking process gets under way when the ball is 28 feet from home plate, while he'll commit to swinging when it's 19 feet away. (These numbers are calculated on Santana's average fastball).
But when he has timed the heater, that's the right time to throw him the slow stuff! And where is the change-up at think time? fastball think time, I mean. And what about swing time?
Here's a lateral view of Santana's average fastball (blue circle) and average change-up (red).
The change-up is already trailing the fastball by 2.6 feet at think time and by 3.7 feet at swing time.
Unfortunately, that's not the angle the batter is seeing the pitch. Here is the flight from a catcher's point of view, not exactly the same as the batter's, but a lot closer.
From this angle it's a lot harder to distinguish the position of the change-up from that of the fastball, especially when you don't have the luxury of watching them together and colored in a different way (see below).
And that's just less than 250 milliseconds after the ball has left Santana's hand!
Looking at these pictures one has to wonder why hitters aren't even more helpless against Santana's fastball/change-up combo. A couple of things give some margin to the men at the plate: pitching motion and spin rate. You shouldn't have any trouble in distinguishing a sphere revolving at 2,500 rounds per minute from one at 2,000 in a quarter second span, right?
References and Resources
Robert K. Adair, The Physics of Baseball, third edition, Perennial 1990.
Standing on the shoulder of giants, Harry Pavlidis created this spreadsheet to plot pitch flights; standing on the shoulders of this Cub I drew the charts you see in this page.
Max has been writing about baseball for six years to an Italian audience. He can be reached via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
A conversation with Crazy Horse
by Bruce MarkusenJuly 03, 2009
Once the No. 1 pick in the 1968 amateur draft, Tim Foli forged a long tenure as a journeyman shortstop for the Mets, Expos, Giants, Pirates, Angels and Yankees. The highlight of his 16-year career occurred 30 years ago, when the Pirates acquired him in a trade with the Mets and installed him as their starting shortstop. Foli responded with his best offensive season ever, hitting .291 during the regular season and .333 in World Series play as the Pirates won the 1979 world championship.
Nicknamed “Crazy Horse” for his periodic flares in temper and his on-field fieriness, Foli has become a successful (and calmer) minor league manager in the Washington Nationals organization. As the skipper of the Triple-A Syracuse Chiefs (currently in second place in the International League’s North Division), Foli recently traveled with his team to Doubleday Field to take part in the second annual Cooperstown Classic. Before that afternoon’s game against the Pawtucket Red Sox, a thoughtful and well-spoken Foli talked to me about his influences, his managerial style and some of the famed players and managers he’s encountered along the way.
Markusen: Tim, as you look back on your playing career, you played for a number of teams and a number of managers, including some prominent men like Gil Hodges and Gene Mauch. As you look at your managerial style, are there one or two guys that you’ve borrowed from more, that you’re influenced by more than another?
Foli: Well, I try to borrow from all of them. But I also understand that it’s only dictated by the players. If they ask me, ‘What kind of manager are you gonna be, what kind of team are you gonna run?’ the players dictate that. If they have speed, then we’ll try to utilize that speed to put the other team in a defensive mode. And you use that speed to score runs. If you don’t have speed, you’re gonna have to play the game a little bigger, stay back and not run. If we have pitching, defense, we’re gonna try to execute early to get a run.
So yes, all those managers taught me a little something about the game. Gene Mauch taught me the most obviously, because I was with him the longest. But it’s a game where the players dictate the way that you play, not the manager.
Markusen: What about Gil Hodges, he was your first manager early on. What kind of an influence has he had?
Foli: He was a big influence. I was 19 years old, so I watched the way he ran the game. He didn’t talk much to me, like I would sit on the end of the bench and he would point at me and then point to the field, and say go ahead. And I’d just go out there. And if Bud Harrelson didn’t show up, or Ken Boswell (didn’t), or whoever it was, I went out there and played. I played all the infield positions. I was ready to play, I was excited, and it was a good experience.
Markusen: As a ballplayer, we know you were fiery and very aggressive. You played the little game very well. Do you bring those same qualities to the table as a manager, or have you changed?
Foli: I try to bring the same quality, I try to teach that to the people that need to play like that. If you’re not a power hitter, if you’re a good defensive player, and you need to get on base and make contact on the hit-and-run, if you need to learn how to bunt or steal bases, I can help you with that. And I try to make them understand that there’s a place for you.
A player like me is not an impact player; a player like me was a role player. A team needs to have role players to be successful. Basically I went my whole career and did the same things, and then I went to the ’79 Pirates and they needed a player like me to be a role player, to catch the ball on the infield, to protect Omar Moreno, to move runners so that (Willie) Stargell and (Dave) Parker could drive in runs. I wasn’t any better player (in Pittsburgh), I was just on a team that when I saved a run and we won a game, 2-1, it meant something. Before when I played on bad teams, when I saved a run in a 7-2 loss, it didn’t really mean that much.
Markusen: It seems like when you joined the Pirates, that was just the perfect situation that you came into.
Foli: It was perfect for me without a doubt. I just played my game and I was pretty good on defense. I just did those things and then I was in a lineup where my job was to advance Omar Moreno, whether it was with a hit or a bunt, no matter how I did it, my job was to advance Omar for the other guys who were impact players to drive in runs and it worked out fine.
Markusen: In terms of managing at this level, Triple-A or perhaps even Double-A, does it help that you’ve been a former major league player and also been on a world championship team in terms of giving you additional credibility with these players? Or does it not matter at all?
Foli: No, it doesn’t matter. I had a talk with Robin Yount when I was coaching in Milwaukee and Robin asked me at the end of my career, ‘I want to be a coach; what do I do?’ And I said that you have to acquire a lot of knowledge about the game, you have to learn the game, you have to be secure in what you know, so that you can teach it right. I said to him that you’re going to get the credibility because you’re going to be a Hall of Famer. I said that you’re going to get the credibility and the respect initially. But after a month or two, they’re still going to respect that you were a great player, but they’re not going to respect you as a coach unless you know what you’re doing. And you have to earn that respect. It’s no different for anybody. You go out here, whether it’s a Hall of Famer or somebody likes myself who was a guy who survived in the major leagues, it doesn’t really matter. You have to earn their respect; if you don’t earn it, you’re not gonna get it.
Markusen: What’s the best part of managing Triple-A ball?
Foli: Well, the best part for me is when I see a guy develop and he gets over the top and climbs that hurdle that gets him to the major leagues and then a guy has success in the major leagues. That’s the biggest thing for me. that’s the thing that I get more excitement from, when somebody I’ve worked with as a minor leaguer and maybe developed a little bit, and had a part in his development, and he goes up to be successful in the major leagues, that’s probably more gratifying to me than even winning the World Series.
Markusen: I would imagine telling a ballplayer that he’s been promoted to the major leagues, that’s a pretty good duty to have.
Foli: Well, it happens a lot here. You know, with the way our Nationals have been going, with guys getting hurt over the years, we made about 180 transactions last year between Washington and Triple-A, and we’re gonna be on pace to do the same again. But yes, it’s satisfying to tell a guy he’s going to the major leagues, and hopefully he just keeps doing what he’s been doing.
Markusen: Final question for Tim Foli. I’m working on a book about unusual and colorful characters in baseball history. I know that you had a lot of teammates over your career in the '70s and '80s. Is there one guy that really stood out as offbeat, quirky, funny to be around?
Foli: Bert Blyleven (a teammate with the Pirates). Bert Blyleven, when you looked at him, you laughed. And then he’d do stupid stuff all the time. I mean, he’d run out to the mound and trip over the first base line. He’d do something in the middle of 50,000 people, and you’d go, "Oh, Bert, no." He was a great guy (to have as a teammate) and he was special.
Markusen: A pretty good pitcher, too. Thanks, Tim. I appreciate your time.
Bruce Markusen is the author of seven books on baseball, including the award-winning A Baseball Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s, the recipient of the Seymour Medal from the Society for American Baseball Research. He has also written The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, Tales From The Mets Dugout, and The Orlando Cepeda Story.
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Tiger Stadium Snuff Film
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 02, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Rany is banned by the Royals (NOW WITH UPDATE)
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 02, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Meet Selena Roberts (and an actually worthy person too)
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 02, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Hicks in hock
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 02, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Jason Bay to become a U.S. Citizen
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 02, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Jim Leyritz continues to impress
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 02, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Minnesota Ice
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 02, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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My Morning in Exile
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 02, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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And That Happened
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 02, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Open secrets
by Jonathan HalketJuly 02, 2009
Jonathan Halket is graduate student in New York. He welcomes questions and comments here.
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Roster Doctor - 7/2/09
by Paul SingmanJuly 02, 2009
Have any questions, comments, compliments, concerns, criticisms, or suggestions? Tell me about them here.
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Stacking the middle
by Dan TurkenkopfJuly 02, 2009
It's yet another baseball cliche: championship teams are strong up the middle.
In his Gold Mine 2008, Bill James explains "Perhaps the first lick of old baseball wisdom that I ever encountered was the championship teams are strong up the middle."
In the article that follows that statement, James uses Win Shares to demonstrate that championship teams do tend to be stronger at catcher, second base, shortstop or center field than at first base, third base, left field or right field.
For each season of major league baseball from 1900 through 2003, James chose three teams from each league to represent a championship team, an average team and a bad team. He then compared the amount of value each team received at each position using Win Shares. The end result is that championship teams were 98 percent better than bad teams up the middle, and only 73 percent better than bad teams at the remainder of the positions.
The results were intuitive, but there are issues with the study that made me want to look a little deeper.
James answered the question, "Given that a team has won a championship, did it get strong performance up the middle?" This question looks backward in time to explain a championship. We know the team was successful and we're trying to ascertain why.
I'm more interested in the forward looking question: "Given that team has focused its strength up the middle, how successful will it be?"
You might argue that these questions aren't all that different, or that the answer to one is the answer to both, but choosing only championship teams may introduce a selection bias that we can eliminate with the later question.
The way we phrase the questions drives how we select the samples. James wanted to answer whether championship teams are strong up the middle, so he understandably identified championship teams. But that removes a lot of teams from the equation—teams good and bad, strong up the middle and weak. I want to know whether teams that get good production from middle of the field perform well in general, so I decided to classify teams by how much value they got from those positions.
Rather than use straight Win Shares, I decided to use Win Shares Above Bench (WSAB) which do a better job of determining the actual value of a given player. I know this is still technically a backwards looking study, but the lessons should apply equally going forward.
I took each team season since 2005 and determined what percentage of the team's total position player WSAB value could be attributed to the middle positions. Center field proved to be a little tricky because the WSAB calculations don't separate out the various outfield positions. I decided to let laziness be the better part of valor and simply counted the full WSAB value for the player who played the most games at center field.
The teams were divided into one of three categories based on the percentage of total position player value came from up the middle. Anything above 50 percent was considered high, and anything below 25 percent was low. The rest of the teams were in the middle. This made a nicely symmetrical distribution of 37 teams in both the high and low categories and 46 in the middle.
Let's take a look at the aggregate winning percentages for each of the levels:
| Category | Winning % |
|---|---|
| High | 0.526 |
| Middle | 0.498 |
| Low | 0.476 |
You can see quite clearly that teams that are stronger up the middle tend to win more than those who get more value out of the corners.
And this isn't a result of good teams having more Win Shares in general. We're not looking at total Win Shares here, but rather the percentage contribution of the position players up the middle.
How well does the relationship hold on the individual level?
The linear correlation (r-value) is 0.28 which makes for a mildly strong relationship. We see though, that the percentage of Win Shares attributed to pitching is correlated more highly with winning percentage at 0.33.
So it appears that Bill James and the baseball cliche are right, at least to an extent. Devoting more of your resources to better players up the middle does seem to give your team a better chance of winning.
The reason is most likely positional scarcity and the defensive spectrum (which are really two ways of saying the same thing). There are fewer athletes who can field the more difficult positions passably, and the most difficult positions tend to be up the middle.
It's just a lot easier to find quality players who can handle the corner positions, so it's harder to gain a big advantage over another team that way. Plus, up the middle players may actually cost less per win than corner players because defense and positional value appear to be relatively undervalued compared to big offensive numbers.
In actuality, the relationship appears to be a quadratic rather than linear. The actual data points are fairly scattered, but the quadratic best-fit line improves the correlation up to 0.40.
That may not mean a whole lot, but the key takeaway is that there's a point of diminishing returns where investing more in your up the middle spots. At the extreme, spending 100 percent of your resources on those four positions means a lot of balls are going to drop in for hits.
But the real point where it's not really worth it anymore is quite a bit lower. The 13 teams (from the total sample of 120) who got at least two thirds of their position player WSAB up the middle had an aggregate winning percentage of 0.489. Interestingly enough, the tipping point seems be right around the 50 percent mark, which perhaps means a balanced team is more important than anything else.
Despite the notion that a win is a win no matter where it comes from, concentrating your resources on players who play the skill positions seems to lead to more wins. This could be a real effect, or it could be Win Shares undervaluing tough defensive positions. It would be interesting to repeat this study using one of the available WAR measures and see if we get the same outcome. If so, the result may force us to reconsider how we currently value players.
References and Resources
Bill James is not the only person to have studied this question in the past.
Derek Zumsteg at Baseball Prospectus looked at the recent championship teams in 2004 and found strength up the middle to be nice but not a must have. He did suggest a similar approach to mine but chose to focus his interest on championship teams.
Matt Meyers wrote an article for ESPN Insider in February that used WARP to explore last year's league champions and make some predictions about the 2009 season.
There are many other articles that explore the notion with a less statistical approach, although many accept the assumption as proven before starting.
Dan Turkenkopf is a Yankees fan who spends way too much time poring over baseball statistics (at least according to his wife). He also writes for Beyond the Box Score and can be reached by email.
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Looking back at Satchel Paige
by Dave StudemanJuly 02, 2009
Back when the Hardball Times was still in its infancy, Steve Treder wrote a wonderful article about the wide-ranging baseball career of Bobo Newsom, a man who pitched nearly 6,000 innings of professional baseball over 25 years.
Impressive, true, but I wonder how a similar article about the legendary Satchel Paige would go? Satchel Paige not only pitched a lot—from local professional ball to traveling squads to the Dominican Republic to the Negro Leagues and finally to the majors—but he was an extraordinary hurler, possessing a combination of speed and control very rarely seen, with an outsized personality to match. Paige's story is one of the archetypal stories of 20th century baseball. What an article that would be.
Not just an article, as it turns out, but a book. Larry Tye has written that book, Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend
, and I wouldn't hesitate to call it a baseball fan's must-read.Who would you say have been the "biggest" personalities in the history of the game? I'm thinking of players or managers who, through a rare combination of extraordinary skill and outgoing public persona, have stood above the crowd of major league ballplayers in a nearly mythic sense. Grand personalities have always been central to our appreciation of the sport, though they are harder to find in this post-Ball Four world.
Regardless of who you'd put on your list (Babe Ruth, Casey Stengel, Dizzy Dean, etc. ) Paige would have to be there, right near the top. Yet you don't hear a lot about him these days. Our intense use of statistics to look back at baseball history has pretty much ignored Paige. We tend to use only clearly delineated major league stats, and Paige didn't make it to the majors until he was 42. The major leagues prohibited him from playing until he was past his prime.
So you won't find many Win Shares for Paige (in case you're wondering, he accrued 42 Win Shares in his brief career, 28 Win Shares Above Bench. He was a .600 player—not bad for a guy in his 40s). You won't find many Wins Above Replacement, WARP, VORP or any of those other accursed newfangled metrics. These don't capture the essence of Paige, because he wasn't there when he should have been.
Tye has listed what statistics there are in the back of his book.
{exp:list_maker}Paige was 103-61 in the Negro Leagues and struck out 1,231 batters while walking 253. His career spanned 20 years starting in the late 1920s, primarily with the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Kansas City Monarchs.
He was 35-2 in the mid 1930s for Bismarck, a place virtually free of Jim Crow.
56-7 in the California Winter League.
23-11 in the Latin leagues. The Dominican Republic was the scene of some hair-raising political shenanigans that led to his team being quickly hustled off the island.
And 28-31 in the major leagues, where he finally made it in 1948 and pitched in 1965, when he was 59 years old. 59. His ERA+ in the majors, when he was in his 40s and 50s, was 124.{/exp:list_maker}To truly get a sense of how good Paige was, you have to listen to the stories. The payoff of Tye's book is that he has researched these stories fairly diligently. As a reader you may not be convinced that everything in the book is "true"—Tye has a tendency to fall into hyperbole of his own—but it's probably a good general reflection of reality. Although they're still stories, they impress.
Consider two stories, courtesy of Whitey Herzog, which illustrate Paige's arm strength and extraordinary control. First, Herzog once won a distance-throwing contest in the minor leagues by hurling a ball 380 feet. Satchel told him "I can throw farther than that" and hurled it 400 feet the next night. Almost from the outfield wall to the backstop.
Herzog also used to playfully try to throw a ball through a hole in the outfield fence in their minor league park. The hole was just big enough to accommodate a baseball, and Herzog wasn't able to do it. Paige bet Herzog that he could do it in three tries, from 60 feet, 6 inches away. He did it on his second try.
Here's the kicker: Herzog was 26. Paige was over 50.
Satchel Paige is central to a clear understanding of the baseball scene from 1930 to 1950. Between 1934 to 1945, Paige and Dizzy Dean engaged in a series of traveling exhibitions that were landmark events. The first time he faced Dean's squad (which was actually Cleveland's top minor league team), Paige was so pumped up that he retired every batter he faced before his manager pulled him after the sixth inning. Thirteen of the 18 outs were strikeouts. A later matchup between the two was a game that Bill Veeck called "the greatest pitchers' battle I have ever seen."
Dean and Paige were the perfect competitive pairing. As Tye says, "Each preferred his nickname to his real one, and his own rules to his team's, league's or society's. ... Their fractured aphorisms were so alike it seemed that Satchel and Dizzy were writing each other's lines, or perhaps stealing them."
Paige's exhibitions against Dean, and later Bob Feller, as well as countless tournaments and exhibitions throughout the country, helped to establish Negro League players as legitimate and worthy of major league status. And Paige's outgoing personality was just as crucial to attracting crowds and catching the attention of black baseball fans and, yes, white ones too. Buck O'Neil said, "I always say that Satchel Paige wasn't just one franchise, he was a whole lot of franchises."
Dean gave an example of what a competitive showman Paige was.
We was barnstorming at Dayton, Ohio, and playin' at Ducks Park when I popped a blue darter over first and got myself three bases outta it. The fans were yelling their head off for me when ol' Satch walks over and says to me, 'I hope all your friends brought plenty to eat, Diz, because if they wait for you to score, they're gonna be here past dark. You ain't goin' no further.' Then he fanned the next three.
Showman, yes, but it ain't bragging if you can do it.
There's also the legendary telegraph that a scout sent to his bosses in the Bronx: DIMAGGIO IS ALL WE HOPED HE'D BE. HIT SATCH ONE FOR FOUR. Tye claims that DiMaggio repeatedly called Paige the best pitcher he ever faced.
So, yes, the legends, vetted as much as possible by Tye, are all there. But the other strength of Tye's book is how well he tells the story behind the legend. The story of Jim Crow, segregated baseball and what it took for a black ball player to succeed in those days.
Paige was born in Mobile, Alabama, where he was the seventh of 12 children (one of whom died at birth). Tye tells of Paige's early years at the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers in Mount Meigs, Alabama (Paige was sent there for stealing from a five-and-dime store when he was 12) and how Edward Byrd, the baseball coach, took Paige under his wing. Byrd saw the talent in the wayward young young man and helped him develop his game and his unique pitching style, with the left leg held high in the air.
It was interesting to me how closely Paige's formative years paralleled Babe Ruth's time at St. Mary's Industrial School and his relationship with Brother Matthias. Perhaps this is how legends are born.
Anyway, Paige returned home but soon after followed his dream (and the money) by leaving Mobile and pitching professionally. The obstacles were many, of course, set by Jim Crow laws, segregated baseball and the general discrimination of the times. Even in towns relatively free of Jim Crow, like Bismarck, discrimination still lived. Paige's entire life was one of fighting against the odds set by those troubled attitudes and times.
Paige pitched and pitched and pitched. He earned his income by pitching, and he was willing to pitch for anyone who would pay him. In another fit of hyperbole, Tye says "No player barnstormed as wide or far, for as long, as Leroy 'Satchel' Paige." Actually, this might not be hyperbole. He was a true baseball nomad, going wherever he could make a buck and making Bobo Newsom seem like a homebody. Cause Paige also liked his money. He liked to buy fine things and he liked his women, marrying several of them, and Tye has the scoop on his confusing marital records.
Then there was the final date of destiny, when Paige was signed by Bill Veeck's Indians only after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby had broken the color barrier. There was a generational gap between them, typical of many black relationships at the time. Robinson and Doby were serious young men and Paige was perceived as a comic, more of a clown than someone to be taken seriously. The distinction was especially acute between Doby and Paige because they were on the same team.
Tye chronicles it all very well and compellingly. He also spends a lot of time on something that I never knew about: the year that Paige's arm totally gave out in 1939 and Paige saw his livelihood vanish. Just as mysteriously, it returned to form after about a year.
As I said, Tye slips into his own hyperbole at times (claiming, for instance, that Satchel was "the most celebrated sobriquet in sports." Did he ever hear of "Babe?"), which undermines the perceived authenticity of his book. That's a real shame, because Paige deserves an uncontested place at the top of the baseball's true pitching legends. Tye's book puts him there, but doesn't quite close the case because you're not sure at the end that the author kept his perspective on his subject. That's a quibble, probably a small one, but it bothered me nevertheless.
Satchel Paige's six rules for staying young
For some reason, these are in the footnotes instead of the main text, probably because Paige didn't originally write them himself (you'll have to read the book to get that scoop). Still, Satchel Paige's six rules for staying young were one of the first things I learned as a young baseball fan, and they're worth remembering.
1. Avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood;
2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts;
3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move;
4. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain't restful.
5. Avoid running at all times.
6. Don't look back, something may be gaining on you.
References and Resources
Satchel's Wikipedia page.
The Satchel Paige website.
Satchel's New York Times obituary, by Joe Durso
YouTube outtake from Ken Burns' Baseball about Satchel
Video interview with Larry Tye.
Dave is the manager of the Baseball Graphs website.. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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TUCK! sez: Tony’s true tweet
by TuckJuly 02, 2009
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THT Daily: A Saves Milestone
by Matthew CarruthJuly 02, 2009
Major League News for July 2
Player News
Yesterday’s Results
Today’s Games
Standings
Top Minor League Performances
You can always find the most recent THT Daily at http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/content/thtdaily/
Player News
Player Headlines are courtesy of RotoworldHank Blalock homered twice, including a two-run walkoff shot, in a 9-7 win over the Angels on Wednesday night.
Blalock was 3-for-5 with three RBI and three runs scored in the walkoff win. The two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth bailed out Frank Francisco, who blew a save opportunity in the previous half inning. Thanks to interleague play, Blalock had just 56 at-bats during the month of June. As such, he has already equaled his home run total from last month. His 16 homers are impressive, but a .245 batting average for a .272 career hitter just isn't cutting it.
Alexei Ramirez will undergo X-rays on his right middle finger after leaving Wednesday night's game in the eighth inning.
Ramirez injured the finger while fielding a ground ball earlier in the series, but the swelling continued to increase. He will miss at least Thursday's game and then will be re-evaluated based on the results of the X-rays. Gordon Beckham could see some time at shortstop in his place.
Jair Jurrjens held the Phillies to one run on one hit over seven innings in an 11-1 win on Wednesday night.
Jurrjens actually gave up a run before he gave up a hit. Jason Werth, who reached on a walk in the fourth inning, made his way to third on a throwing error by Jurrjens and then came around to score on a sacrifice fly by Greg Dobbs. Jurrjens didn't give up his first hit until Paul Bako lined a two-out single to right in the seventh. Jurrjens fanned six and walked four, improving to 6-6. He has a fine 2.73 ERA, 1.24 WHIP and .239 BAA in 17 starts this season.
Alex Rodriguez hit a decisive two-run homer in a win over the Mariners on Wednesday night.
In the sixth inning? How un-clutch of him. His two-run shot broke pushed the Yankees ahead 4-2. In the lineup as the designated hitter, Rodriguez went 2-for-4. He now has 13 homers and has went deep in four of his last six games.
Adrian Gonzalez is back in the starting lineup Wednesday after leaving Tuesday's game with a strained right knee.
Gonzalez slightly strained the knee while sliding into third with a triple. "When I woke up this morning, I felt fine, no pain, no swelling," Gonzalez said Wednesday. "But getting off the knee and out of the game Wednesday night probably helped me today."
Rangers manager Ron Washington announced Wednesday that Frank Francisco has been re-installed as the team's closer.
Francisco has been handling setup duties for C.J. Wilson since returning from the disabled list two weeks ago. Washington indicated that Francisco can now go on back-to-back days but will probably not pitch in three consecutive games. Wilson, who was 7-for-8 in save situations, will close when Francisco is unavailable.
According to Bernie Miklasz of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mark DeRosa is "day-to-day" with a mild sprain of his left wrist.
DeRosa will be out for a few days, but is expected to avoid the disabled list. He tweaked his left wrist Tuesday during an at-bat and was seen wearing a brace Wednesday afternoon. Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa said there is "reason for optimism." Look for Joe Thurston to fill in while he's sidelined.
Jonathan Papelbon took over as Boston's all-time saves leader after pitching a scoreless 11th inning Wednesday in the Red Sox's 6-5 win over the Orioles.
The Red Sox, who blew a 10-1 lead after a rain delay Tuesday, overcame a 5-1 deficit in the ninth to win today. The Red Sox went ahead in the 11th when Julio Lugo singled in Jacoby Ellsbury, and Papelbon, pitching on a third straight day for the first time all year, finished the Orioles with his 20th save of 2009 and 133rd since debuting, moving him past Bob Stanley into the franchise lead.
Justin Morneau was removed from Wednesday's game in the seventh inning because of a groin injury.
The Twins can't afford to be without Morneau for any length of time. Brian Buscher is their backup at first base.
Yesterday’s Results
For the full scoop regarding yesterday's games, read "And That Happened" at Shysterball.American League BOS 6 BAL 5 (Recap and Boxscore) NYA 4 SEA 2 (Recap and Boxscore) TOR 5 TB 0 (Recap and Boxscore) CHA 6 CLE 2 (Recap and Boxscore) MIN 5 KC 1 (Recap and Boxscore) OAK 5 DET 1 (Recap and Boxscore) TEX 9 LAA 7 (Recap and Boxscore) National League ATL 11 PHI 1 (Recap and Boxscore) FLA 5 WAS 3 (Recap and Boxscore) CIN 1 ARI 0 (Recap and Boxscore) NYN 1 MIL 0 (Recap and Boxscore) CHN 4 PIT 1 (Recap and Boxscore) STL 2 SF 1 (Recap and Boxscore) LAN 1 COL 0 (Recap and Boxscore) HOU 7 SD 1 (Recap and Boxscore)Check out Fangraphs' scoreboard to see all the games in action.
Today’s Games
National League --------------- Arizona Diamondbacks at Cincinnati Reds, 12:35 PM (L) Doug Davis (3-8) vs. (R) Aaron Harang (5-8) New York Mets at Pittsburgh Pirates, 12:35 PM (R) Tim Redding (1-3) vs. (L) Paul Maholm (5-4) Houston Astros at San Diego Padres, 3:35 PM (L) Wandy Rodriguez (6-6) vs. (R) Kevin Correia (5-5) Philadelphia Phillies at Atlanta Braves, 7:10 PM (L) J.A. Happ (5-0) vs. (R) Javier Vazquez (5-7) San Francisco Giants at St. Louis Cardinals, 7:15 PM (L) Barry Zito (4-7) vs. (R) Todd Wellemeyer (6-7) Milwaukee Brewers at Chicago Cubs, 8:05 PM (R) Seth McClung (3-1) vs. (R) Ryan Dempster (4-5) American League --------------- Seattle Mariners at New York Yankees, 7:05 PM (L) Jason Vargas (3-3) vs. (L) CC Sabathia (7-4) Chicago White Sox at Kansas City Royals, 8:10 PM (L) Mark Buehrle (7-2) vs. (L) Bruce Chen (0-1) Baltimore Orioles at LA Angels of Anaheim, 10:05 PM (R) Jeremy Guthrie (6-7) vs. (R) John Lackey (2-3)
Standings
The graphics next to each team are called "sparklines.” They depict each team’s performance over the last month. Each "up" bar is a victory and a "down" bar is a loss. There are horizontal lines for home games and red bars represent games decided by two runs or less. "PWins" is short for Projected Wins, based on each team’s Run Differential, and is often a better measure of a team’s true strength. Other team graphs and stats can be found on our Team Page.American League East Pwins Diff BOS 48 30 .615 0.0 46 2NYA 45 32 .584 2.5 44 1
TB 44 36 .550 5.0 48 -4
TOR 42 38 .525 7.0 44 -2
BAL 35 43 .449 13.0 34 1
American League Central DET 43 35 .551 0.0 41 2
CHA 40 38 .513 3.0 39 1
MIN 41 39 .513 3.0 43 -2
KC 33 44 .429 9.5 32 1
CLE 31 49 .388 13.0 36 -5
American League West LAA 42 34 .553 0.0 39 3
TEX 42 35 .545 0.5 41 1
SEA 39 38 .506 3.5 36 3
OAK 33 44 .429 9.5 35 -2
National League East Pwins Diff PHI 39 36 .520 0.0 39 0
FLA 41 39 .513 0.5 38 3
NYN 38 39 .494 2.0 37 1
ATL 37 40 .481 3.0 37 0
WAS 22 54 .289 17.5 29 -7
National League Central MIL 42 36 .538 0.0 40 2
STL 42 38 .525 1.0 41 1
CIN 38 38 .500 3.0 36 2
CHN 37 38 .493 3.5 38 -1
HOU 37 39 .487 4.0 36 1
PIT 36 42 .462 6.0 39 -3
National League West LAN 50 29 .633 0.0 48 2
SF 42 35 .545 7.0 41 1
COL 41 37 .526 8.5 42 -1
SD 34 43 .442 15.0 29 5
ARI 31 47 .397 18.5 35 -4
Top Minor League Games
The following list, provided by First Inning, includes the top minor league batting (based on Runs Created) and pitching (based on Game Score) performances from yesterday.ORG LVL PLAYER AB H 2B 3B HR BB SO Notes MIL A Brett Lawrie...... 3 2 1 1 0 2 0 SD A Allan Dykstra..... 4 2 1 0 1 1 0 3 R FLA AA Michael Stanton... 5 2 0 0 2 0 1 NYY AA Jesus Montero..... 3 2 1 0 1 1 0 SD A Blake Tekotte..... 4 4 0 0 0 1 0 2 SB HOU A Jay Austin........ 5 3 0 0 1 0 0 3 LD FLA AA Logan Morrison.... 4 2 0 0 1 1 1 WAN A+ C. Marrero........ 2 1 0 0 1 2 0 BOS A+ Yamaico Navarro... 4 3 0 0 1 0 0 PHI AA Michael Taylor.... 4 2 0 0 1 0 1 DET AA Garth Iorg........ 3 2 0 0 1 0 0 DET AAA Wilkin Ramirez.... 4 2 0 0 1 1 0 ORG LVL PLAYER IP H R ER SO BB HR Notes BOS AA Junichi Tazawa.... 5 6 3 1 6 0 0 CHW AA Daniel Hudson..... 6 7 5 5 5 1 0 MIL A Wily Peralta...... 3 0 0 0 6 3 0 BOS A Stolmy Pimentel... 5 8 5 5 7 0 1 PIT A+ Bryan Morris...... 4 4 4 0 5 1 0 SD A Simon Castro...... 5 4 3 2 8 4 1 LAA A Manuarys Correa... 7 5 2 0 1 1 0 13 GB NYY AA Z. McAllister..... 4 2 1 1 6 3 1 PHI AA Kyle Drabek....... 6 7 3 3 4 3 0 BAL A- Brandon Erbe...... 4 3 3 1 2 1 0 KC A Timothy Melville.. 4 7 4 4 5 3 0 8 OF TEX A Neil Ramirez...... 5 3 2 1 4 5 0
| First Inning's Major and Minor League Daily Reports: |
Matthew Carruth is an editor for The Hardball Times. He welcomes any and all sorts of communication at his email.
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How reliable is UZR?
by Colin WyersJuly 01, 2009
Colin Wyers knows exactly how much of a nerd he is. He is very interested in hearing about any other concerns you may have; you can reach him by e-mail, and he will try his best to respond in a timely fashion. He also blogs at Statistically Speaking.
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If they get traded…
by Paul SingmanJuly 01, 2009
Have any questions, comments, compliments, concerns, criticisms, or suggestions? Tell me about them here.
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Just shut him down now
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 01, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Mariano the Tiger
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 01, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Worst Monday: Week 4 results
by John BurnsonJuly 01, 2009
Compiled by THT Staff.
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My Morning in Exile
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 01, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Jack Clark taunts the Mets
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 01, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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New and improved IIATMS
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 01, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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And That Happened
by Craig CalcaterraJuly 01, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Adrian takes a walk
by Geoff YoungJuly 01, 2009
At the beginning of June, Adrian Gonzalez did something most unusual: he drew two or more walks in eight straight games. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, Gonzalez is the first player to do that since at least 1920.
That's right; the first. As in, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Barry Bonds never did it. Well, maybe Ruth; he did have around 1,300 plate appearances before the time frame in question. Then again, he hadn't yet started knocking 40+ homers a year, so maybe not.
Just to be safe, let's say that Ruth probably never walked twice or more in eight straight games. Williams and Bonds definitely never did. Neither did a lot of other great players.
A hitter matures
A couple years ago, I asked the question, "How good is Adrian Gonzalez?" My answer then was, "Pretty darned good." Well, now he's even better and everyone knows it, including opposing pitchers, who have stopped pitching to him.
Consider for a moment Gonzalez's first full big-league season, when he hit .304/.362/.500 at age 24 while playing half his games in a venue that destroys offense. Not bad, huh? Now compare this with what he's done in less than half a season at age 27:
| Year | G | PA | BA | OBP | SLG | HR | BB | OPS+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Statistics are through games of June 26, 2009 | ||||||||
| 2006 | 156 | 630 | .304 | .362 | .500 | 24 | 52 | 127 |
| 2009 | 72 | 311 | .273 | .418 | .594 | 24 | 61 | 179 |
Aside from the huge uptick in OBP and SLG (despite a 10 percent drop in BA), what jumps out at me is this: with 90 games remaining on the schedule, Gonzalez has reached his home run total of three years ago and exceeded his walk total. And it's not like he wasn't any good back in '06, when he was hitting like, say, Don Mattingly or Jim Rice.
More power leads to fewer opportunities
Gonzalez got off to a blistering start this season, knocking 20 home runs in the first two months and drawing 31 walks. The walk rate was higher than his career norm, but things didn't get crazy until June, when two things happened:
- Opposing pitchers and managers realized that Gonzalez is really good.
- Scott Hairston landed on the DL, removing the only other consistent threat from the Padres' lineup.
Gonzalez then drew 30 walks in his next 22 games. He has hit just four home runs this month, mainly because he hasn't seen many strikes. As I recently showed at Ducksnorts, this is especially true with runners in scoring position. Compare Gonzalez's walk rate with RISP versus with the bases empty since he became a full-time player:
| with RISP | Bases empty | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | PA | BB | IBB | BB/PA | PA | BB | IBB | BB/PA |
| Statistics are through games of June 26, 2009 | ||||||||
| 2006 | 164 | 19 | 9 | .116 | 342 | 22 | 0 | .060 |
| 2007 | 174 | 20 | 9 | .115 | 387 | 32 | 0 | .083 |
| 2008 | 194 | 30 | 18 | .155 | 346 | 26 | 0 | .075 |
| 2009 | 82 | 30 | 10 | .366 | 164 | 22 | 0 | .134 |
Those first two years, Gonzalez's walk rates were pretty steady. In 2008, he started walking more when batting with RISP (although the higher walk rate was due entirely to an increase in intentional passes). This year, he is drawing more walks in all situations, but pitchers really want nothing to do with Gonzalez when he can do serious damage, and who can blame them?. Even Albert Pujols hasn't walked as frequently this year with RISP, and he's being intentionally walked twice as often:
| PA | BB | IBB | BB/PA | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Statistics are through games of June 26, 2009 | ||||
| Gonzalez | 82 | 30 | 10 | .366 |
| Pujols | 89 | 29 | 22 | .326 |
This is all well and good, but what about Gonzalez's streak? Relax; we're getting there. I just wanted to give a little context for what he's doing before we get to the whole historical thing.
Previous multiwalk streaks
Okay, we're not quite done with context. I can't go all the way back to 1920, but I can go back to 1954. Here are some of Gonzalez's predecessors, decade by decade (thanks to Baseball-Reference's slick Batting Streak Finder):
1950s: The Mick
From July 2 to July 7, 1957, Mickey Mantle drew two or more walks in seven straight games. (Details of this and the other streaks noted here are included in the References and Resources section at the end of the article.) For the season, Mantle hit .365/.512/.665, with 34 homers and a league-leading 146 walks. He won his second straight AL MVP award at the ripe old age of 25.
Eddie Yost had a five-game streak in August 1956. Five players (including Yost) had four-game streaks during the latter half of the decade.
1960s: Mantle and Wynn
Mantle again? Well, the guy was good. This streak ran from April 14 to April 21, 1962. Mantle hit .321/.486/.605 in '62, with 30 homers and a league-leading 122 walks.
The other five-game streak during this decade belongs to one of the great unsung hitters of his era, Jimmy Wynn. The Toy Cannon's streak stretched from July 6 to July 10, 1969.
What I love about this streak is that when he wasn't drawing walks, Wynn absolutely crushed the ball, knocking four homers. On the season, he hit .269/.436/.507 with 33 home runs and a league-leading 148 walks.
Seven players had four-game multiwalk streaks during the '60s. The most notable names were Hank Aaron (August 1961) and Willie Mays (September 1965).
1970s: Thornton and Evans
This decade featured two more five-game streaks. The first came from Darrell Evans (for whom I will always have a soft spot because he was on my first Rotisserie League team), whose streak stretched from June 10 to June 13, 1973. For the season, Evans hit .281/.403/.556 with 41 homers and—sing it with me—a league-leading 124 walks.
The second came from Andre Thornton, who did it over parts of two seasons (September 26, 1975 to April 10, 1976). I'm not sure if that really counts, but Thornton was a pretty good hitter (253 career homers, 122 OPS+) back in the day, so we'll give it to him. He hit .293/.428/.516 in '75 before plummeting to .194/.323/.373 the next year.
1980s: You don't know Jack
Almost exactly 30 years after Mantle had been the last man to draw two walks or more in seven straight games, Jack Clark duplicated the feat. From July 8 to July 17, 1987, Clark went 6-for-18 with two homers and 17 walks.
This streak was fun because Clark also fanned eight times. In 35 plate appearances, he homered, walked, or struck out 27 times for a TTO percentage of .771. I don't care if it's a small sample, that is epic.
Clark also had the second longest streak of the decade, six games. It happened in the same season. In fact, it happened a couple weeks after the seven-game streak. Clark hit .286/.459/.597 in '87.
On a tangential note, Clark finished third in NL MVP voting despite leading the league in OBP, SLG, and walks, and playing for the best team in the league. The award went instead to Andre Dawson, who provided tremendous "value" for a team that was out of contention by the All-Star break and that finished in last place.
1990s: Justice is served
David Justice matched Clark's effort just four years later. Justice's streak lasted from September 22 to September 29, 1991. His season was comparatively pedestrian; he hit "just" .275/.377/.503 with 21 homers and 65 walks. (Twenty-three percent of his walks in '91 came within a span that accounted for 6.5 percent of his games played.)
The second longest streak of the decade was five games. Two players achieved it: John Kruk (June/July 1994) and Jim Thome (April/May 1997).
Gonzalez walks alone
In June 2004, Bonds matched the streaks of Mantle, Clark, and Justice. This should come as no surprise, seeing as how Bonds drew an MLB record 232 walks that season.
But from June 1 to June 9, 2009, Gonzalez did Bonds (and everyone else) one better, walking twice or more in eight straight games. his one comes with an asterisk, though. In the sixth game, Gonzalez didn't draw his second walk until the 15th inning. Still, nobody else has accomplished the feat in at least 89 years.
Here's a closer look at Gonzalez's multiwalk streak:
| Date | Opp | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | K | Pit | Str |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6/1 | Phi | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 16 | 5 |
| 6/2 | Phi | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 23 | 10 |
| 6/3 | Phi | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 17 | 6 |
| 6/5 | Ari | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 16 | 3 |
| 6/6 | Ari | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 20 | 9 |
| 6/7 | Ari | 6 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 31 | 15 |
| 6/8 | Ari | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 21 | 6 |
| 6/9 | LAD | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 19 | 9 |
Gonzalez saw more balls than strikes in each of the eight games. Over the course of the entire streak, he saw a total of 163 pitches, of which 63 (39 percent) were strikes.
Concluding thoughts
There isn't a neat way to wrap this up because I'm kind of wandering all over the place. In closing, I'll just offer a few random thoughts:
- Gonzalez has been a quietly productive player for some time, but this year he's taken his game to another level and it's become more difficult to overlook his performance.
- With little else to fear in the Padres lineup, pitchers have avoided pitching to Gonzalez, especially when he's in a position to drive in runs.
- It's fun to look through the list of previous multiwalk streaks and find names—Wynn, Evans, Thornton, Clark—that maybe aren't remembered as well as they should be.
References and Resources
As always, thanks to Baseball-Reference. For grins, here is a breakdown of the top multiwalk streaks by decade:
| Player | Year | G | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | K | BA | OBP | SLG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mantle | 1957 | 7 | 14 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 18 | 2 | .071 | .576 | .071 |
| Mantle | 1962 | 5 | 10 | 6 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 12 | 2 | .400 | .727 | .900 |
| Wynn | 1969 | 5 | 14 | 6 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 6 | 10 | 1 | .357 | .625 | 1.214 |
| Evans | 1973 | 5 | 11 | 6 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 6 | 11 | 0 | .727 | .826 | 1.273 |
| Thornton | 1975-76 | 5 | 10 | 4 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 12 | 1 | .500 | .773 | 1.200 |
| Clark | 1987 | 7 | 18 | 5 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 7 | 17 | 8 | .333 | .657 | .667 |
| Justice | 1991 | 7 | 18 | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 15 | 4 | .222 | .576 | .389 |
| Gonzalez | 2009 | 8 | 20 | 5 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 18 | 2 | .200 | .579 | .550 |
Geoff Young covers the San Diego Padres at Ducksnorts and is a regular contributor to Baseball Daily Digest. He has written three books about the Padres, the most recent being the Ducksnorts 2009 Baseball Annual. Feel free to send Geoff comments via email.
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THT Daily: HUGE comeback
by Dave StudemanJuly 01, 2009
Major League News for July 1
Player News
Yesterday’s Results
Today’s Games
Standings
Top Minor League Performances
You can always find the most recent THT Daily at http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/content/thtdaily/
Player News
Player Headlines are courtesy of RotoworldJason Marquis became the first National League pitcher to reach 10 wins with a two-hit complete game shutout against the Dodgers on Tuesday night.
The Rockies won the game 3-0. Marquis needed just 86 pitches to do it. He faced just two batters over the minimum -- no walks -- and retired 19 consecutive batters at one point. He struck out three in the win. Marquis even helped himself a little with a two-run single in the seventh inning. He is now 10-5 with a 3.87 ERA through 16 starts this season. We doubt he can keep this up, but he's made for quite a story in the first half.
Nick Markakis hit a two-run double in the bottom of the eighth inning to complete the biggest comeback in team history, as the Orioles topped the Red Sox 11-10.
Just incredible. The Orioles trailed 10-1 as they entered the bottom of the seventh, but chipped away with five runs off Justin Masterson. They added five more in the eighth against the combined efforts of Hideki Okajima, Takashi Saito and Jonathan Papelbon to stun the Red Sox. The comeback, capped by the two-run doubled by Markakis, was their biggest since September 2, 1956 when they fought from eight runs down to defeat Boston.
Hanley Ramirez homered and drove in four runs in a rain-shortened win over the Nationals on Tuesday night.
Ramirez just keeps trucking right along. He has driven in at least one run in nine straight games. His 33 RBI this month are second only to Albert Pujols, who has 35 of them this month. With the 2-for-4 night, Ramirez is nipping on the heels of league-leader David Wright with a .341 batting average.
Albert Pujols homered twice in a loss to the Giants on Tuesday night.
Okay, now this is getting ridiculous. Pujols now has 30 multi-homer games in his career, including seven -- SEVEN -- this season alone. He is leading the majors with 30 homers and 77 RBI and is currently on pace for a scary 62 bombs and 159 RBI.
Dan Haren limited the Reds to one run over seven innings in a 6-2 win on Tuesday night.
Haren just wasn't going to allow himself to lose this game. He was perfect over the first 3 2/3 innings before issuing a walk to Joey Votto. He didn't give up his first hit until a Jay Bruce single two outs into the fifth. Haren gave up four hits in all, striking out nine while issuing one walk. He had a perfect night with the bat, as well, going 2-for-2 with a double and his first home run of the year to move his batting average to .286 this season. He has now held the opposition to two runs or less in seven consecutive starts. He has a 2.19 ERA to go along with an astounding 0.81 WHIP in 115 innings this season. His 113/15 K/BB ratio is laughably great.
Josh Hamilton (abdomen) is expected to return to the Rangers lineup as soon as this weekend.
Hamilton says his surgically repaired abdomen is not sore, and he didn't have any problems in Monday night's rehab game at Double-A Frisco. He joins Triple-A Oklahoma City for a series that starts on Wednesday.
Jake Peavy's return is being pushed back after a re-examination of his ankle placed him back in a protective boot for two weeks.
Peavy was hoping he'd be cleared to begin throwing and working out after the examination, but he's now expected to be out at least five to six more weeks. Since he won't be back in uniform until mid-August, the Padres hands' are effectively tied in potential trade talks.
Pirates acquired OF Lastings Milledge and RHP Joel Hanrahan from the Nationals for OF Nyjer Morgan and LHP Sean Burnett.
Milledge, a 24-year-old former first-round pick of the Mets, is currently rehabbing from a broken finger. He is expected to be healthy in the next week or two. Milledge started the '09 season 4-for-24 and was quickly demoted to Triple-A, but is still one heck of a talent. If he's ever able to pull it all together, the Pirates could be in for a real treat.
Yankees acquired outfielder Eric Hinske from the Pirates for RHP Casey Erickson and catcher-outfielder Eric Fryer.
The Yankees also received about $400,000 to cover over half of Hinske's remaining contract. The 32-year-old outfielder, upset with his lack of playing time, reportedly asked for a trade out of Pittsburgh last week. He won't get many more at-bats with the Yanks, but at least he's now on a contender. Hinske hit .255/.373/.368 with one home run and 11 RBI in 106 at-bats for the Pirates.
Yesterday’s Results
For the full scoop regarding yesterday's games, read "And That Happened" at Shysterball.American League BAL 11 BOS 10 (Recap and Boxscore) NYA 8 SEA 5 (Recap and Boxscore) TB 4 TOR 1 (Recap and Boxscore) CHA 11 CLE 4 (Recap and Boxscore) MIN 2 KC 1 (Recap and Boxscore) DET 5 OAK 3 (Recap and Boxscore) TEX 9 LAA 5 (Recap and Boxscore) National League ATL 5 PHI 4 (Recap and Boxscore) FLA 7 WAS 5 (Recap and Boxscore) ARI 6 CIN 2 (Recap and Boxscore) MIL 6 NYN 3 (Recap and Boxscore) PIT 3 CHN 0 (Recap and Boxscore) SF 6 STL 3 (Recap and Boxscore) COL 3 LAN 0 (Recap and Boxscore) SD 4 HOU 3 (Recap and Boxscore)Check out Fangraphs' scoreboard to see all the games in action.
Today’s Games
National League --------------- Washington Nationals at Florida Marlins, 12:10 PM (R) Jordan Zimmermann (3-3) vs. (R) Josh Johnson (7-1) New York Mets at Milwaukee Brewers, 2:05 PM (R) Mike Pelfrey (5-3) vs. (R) Yovani Gallardo (8-4) Colorado Rockies at Los Angeles Dodgers, 3:10 PM (R) Jason Hammel (5-3) vs. (L) Clayton Kershaw (5-5) Chicago Cubs at Pittsburgh Pirates, 7:05 PM (R) Randy Wells (2-3) vs. (R) Virgil Vasquez (1-0) Arizona Diamondbacks at Cincinnati Reds, 7:10 PM (R) Jon Garland (4-7) vs. (R) Johnny Cueto (7-4) Philadelphia Phillies at Atlanta Braves, 7:10 PM (L) Cole Hamels (4-4) vs. (R) Jair Jurrjens (5-6) San Francisco Giants at St. Louis Cardinals, 8:15 PM (R) Matt Cain (9-2) vs. (R) Adam Wainwright (8-5) Houston Astros at San Diego Padres, 10:05 PM (R) Brian Moehler (4-4) vs. (R) Walter Silva (0-1) American League --------------- Tampa Bay Rays at Toronto Blue Jays, 1:07 PM (R) James Shields (6-5) vs. (L) Ricky Romero (5-3) Boston Red Sox at Baltimore Orioles, 1:35 PM (R) Josh Beckett (9-3) vs. (R) Brad Bergesen (5-2) Minnesota Twins at Kansas City Royals, 2:10 PM (L) Glen Perkins (3-4) vs. (R) Gil Meche (4-7) Detroit Tigers at Oakland Athletics, 3:35 PM (R) Justin Verlander (8-3) vs. (L) Dallas Braden (5-7) Seattle Mariners at New York Yankees, 7:05 PM (L) Jarrod Washburn (4-5) vs. (L) Andy Pettitte (7-3) Chicago White Sox at Cleveland Indians, 7:05 PM (R) Jose Contreras (2-7) vs. (L) Jeremy Sowers (2-5) LA Angels of Anaheim at Texas Rangers, 8:05 PM (R) Jered Weaver (8-3) vs. (R) Kevin Millwood (8-5) 06/30 16:14:53
Standings
The graphics next to each team are called "sparklines.” They depict each team’s performance over the last month. Each "up" bar is a victory and a "down" bar is a loss. There are horizontal lines for home games and red bars represent games decided by two runs or less. "PWins" is short for Projected Wins, based on each team’s Run Differential, and is often a better measure of a team’s true strength. Other team graphs and stats can be found on our Team Page.American League East Pwins Diff BOS 47 30 .610 0.0 46 1NYA 44 32 .579 2.5 43 1
TB 44 35 .557 4.0 48 -4
TOR 41 38 .519 7.0 43 -2
BAL 35 42 .455 12.0 34 1
American League Central DET 43 34 .558 0.0 41 2
CHA 39 38 .506 4.0 38 1
MIN 40 39 .506 4.0 42 -2
KC 33 43 .434 9.5 32 1
CLE 31 48 .392 13.0 36 -5
American League West LAA 42 33 .560 0.0 39 3
TEX 41 35 .539 1.5 40 1
SEA 39 37 .513 3.5 36 3
OAK 32 44 .421 10.5 34 -2
National League East Pwins Diff PHI 39 35 .527 0.0 39 0
FLA 40 39 .506 1.5 37 3
NYN 37 39 .487 3.0 37 0
ATL 36 40 .474 4.0 36 0
WAS 22 53 .293 17.5 28 -6
National League Central MIL 42 35 .545 0.0 40 2
STL 41 38 .519 2.0 40 1
CIN 37 38 .493 4.0 36 1
CHN 36 38 .486 4.5 37 -1
HOU 36 39 .480 5.0 35 1
PIT 36 41 .468 6.0 39 -3
National League West LAN 49 29 .628 0.0 48 1
SF 42 34 .553 6.0 41 1
COL 41 36 .532 7.5 42 -1
SD 34 42 .447 14.0 29 5
ARI 31 46 .403 17.5 34 -3
Top Minor League Games
The following list, provided by First Inning, includes the top minor league batting (based on Runs Created) and pitching (based on Game Score) performances from yesterday.ORG LVL PLAYER AB H 2B 3B HR BB SO Notes TB AAA Matthew Joyce..... 5 4 2 0 1 0 1 3 R CIN AAA Chris Heisey...... 4 3 2 0 1 0 1 SF A+ Thomas Neal....... 5 3 2 1 0 0 1 NYY AA Jesus Montero..... 3 2 0 0 2 1 0 BOS A+ Yamaico Navarro... 5 3 1 0 1 0 0 SEA A+ Alex Liddi........ 5 3 2 0 0 0 1 3 R STL AAA Brett Wallace..... 4 3 1 0 1 0 0 TOR A T. Pastornicky.... 3 2 1 1 0 0 0 SEA A+ Tyson Gillies..... 6 4 0 0 0 0 2 3 SB KC A+ Mike Moustakas.... 3 3 1 0 0 1 0 BAL A+ Pedro Florimon.... 3 2 2 0 0 0 0 LA A Kyle Russell...... 3 2 0 0 1 1 1 ORG LVL PLAYER IP H R ER SO BB HR Notes PHI A Jason Knapp....... 5 2 1 1 12 2 0 CHC AAA Mitch Atkins...... 8 3 1 1 7 0 0 CLE AA Fausto Carmona.... 7 4 1 1 5 0 1 TB A Joseph Cruz....... 6 5 1 1 4 0 0 12 GB OAK AAA Chad Reineke...... 7 5 0 0 4 1 0 12 GB ATL AAA Todd Redmond...... 6 6 5 3 8 0 2 NYM AAA Jonathon Niese.... 8 5 3 2 4 1 1 17 GB SF AAA Kevin Pucetas..... 7 3 1 0 2 1 0 13 GB CIN A J.C. Sulbaran..... 4 2 3 0 6 3 0 NYY A- Arodys Vizcaino... 4 3 2 2 7 2 1 HOU A Ross Seaton....... 5 6 3 3 5 2 0 SF AA Henry Sosa........ 5 4 0 0 3 1 0
| First Inning's Major and Minor League Daily Reports: |
Dave is the manager of the Baseball Graphs website.. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
Why I can’t stand Tony La Russa
by Craig CalcaterraJune 30, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Faster than the speed of Wikipedia
by Craig CalcaterraJune 30, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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The Hardball Times
Deep Thoughts
by Craig CalcaterraJune 30, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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The Hardball Times
Great Moments in Selection Bias
by Craig CalcaterraJune 30, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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My Morning in Exile
by Craig CalcaterraJune 30, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Worst Monday: Balloting open
by John BurnsonJune 30, 2009
Compiled by THT Staff.
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Great Moments in Bloggy Ethics
by Craig CalcaterraJune 30, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Radio show appearance
by Derek CartyJune 30, 2009
Derek Carty is a Mets fan currently residing in New Jersey. In addition to writing for THT, his work has also run either currently or previously at Rotoworld, Sports Illustrated, and FOX Sports. He was the champion of the FOX Sports Experts Fantasy Baseball League in 2008 and will be competing in five expert competitions in 2009, including LABR NL. He welcomes questions via e-mail.
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And That Happened
by Craig CalcaterraJune 30, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Fantasy Fallout: DeRosa to Cards
by Paul SingmanJune 30, 2009
Have any questions, comments, compliments, concerns, criticisms, or suggestions? Tell me about them here.
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Players to watch as the MLB trading deadline approaches
by Eriq GardnerJune 30, 2009
Eriq Gardner is a New York-based writer and founder of Fantasy Ball Junkie, a website for advanced fantasy baseball enthusiasts.
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Roster Doctor - 6/30/09
by Eriq GardnerJune 30, 2009
Eriq Gardner is a New York-based writer and founder of Fantasy Ball Junkie, a website for advanced fantasy baseball enthusiasts.
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The Hardball Times
THT Awards
by John BartenJune 30, 2009
Welcome to the awards.
For award definitions and background on the column itself, please consult the Primer.
All weekly stats are for the period of Monday, June 22 though Sunday, June 28. All season stats are through Sunday.
This week’s proof that assigning wins and losses to a pitcher is an arcane practice that must stop
Good Luck Division:
Evidently it wasn’t enough for Matt Palmer to demonstrate the principle of “Any sufficiently advanced defense is indistinguishable from pitching” when it is working (as opposed to the examples a few paragraphs from now). He also had to win the game while allowing six runs in five frames. And if you feel the urge to look for the highlights of this game, do yourself a favor and go do anything else with your time. It is just about the ugliest game you will ever have the displeasure of watching.
Johnny Cueto got touched up for five runs in six innings by the Blue Jays, but Joey Votto and Jonny Gomes used Brett Cecil as a punching bag and Cueto was the benefactor, walking away with a win.
Bad Luck Division
Well at least this time Cliff Lee could blame his own oh-for-three performance at the plate for his quality start no-decision outing. Of course outside of Victor Martinez, nobody else seemed very intent on helping the Cleveland ace.
John Lackey and Doug Davis did good work against bad offenses, combining for 14 combined innings and each allowing one run. Lackey struck out nine, walking three; Davis struck out eight and walked three. Neither starter factored into the decision.
Vulture alert! Vulture alert!
Zach Miner looted a win by blowing the save and then watching from the dugout as the Tigers offense handed him back the lead. He was in good company as Joakim Soria followed suit.
Trevor Hoffman entered a tied game in the ninth, went single, single, single, sac fly, intentional walk, sac fly, can of corn. Despite making a 4-4 game into a 6-4 game, he got the win because Price Fielder and his friends saved the day for southeastern Wisconsin.
Wes Littleton Award
Kerry Wood allowed an RBI single, an RBI double and two walks, let Andrew McCutchen steal a base, retired only two of the six batters he faced, and still walked away from the game with a save. Can we now close the books on three-run saves being an actual accomplishment to be praised? Can we agree that you can be bad at your job for that day and still walk away successful?
Box score of the year
There are many here who might not pay close attention to California League box scores. Those of us who do ran across a game on Monday morning that made us spit coffee all over our monitors. If you ever wondered what it would look like if we played baseball in a small back yard in Lima, Peru, then wonder no more. You know it is a wild game when a starter who gives up 11 runs still gets a no-decision. Nine pitchers were charged with at least three runs.
But the craziest thing is that the batter who led the Cal League in RBI was not involved in the High Desert massacre. No, that was lightly regarded Stockton Ports third baseman Matt Smith, who drove in seven on his third and fourth home runs of the season and bumped his slugging percentage up to .386 in a 18-2 blowout of Lancaster.
Minor league baseball is the best value in sports. And if you’re willing to brave a windstorm in 100-degree weather in California, then you stand a good chance of seeing something you have never seen before.
Any sufficiently advanced defense is indistinguishable from pitching
Joel Pineiro spun a complete game shutout of the Mets while striking out only one batter (David Wright, who Pineiro also hit with a pitch), getting dinged with only one hit along the way.
It really doesn’t meet my usual standards in terms of low strikeout rate in a game, but I need to mention somewhere when you win a game while walking walk three and a half times as many batters as you strike out. Sorry, Homer.
Joe Carter Award
Brendan Harris drove in an amazing eight runs while going without an extra base hit in 26 at-bats. A .269/.241/.269 line is not impressive, especially in comparison to Jermaine Dye, who drove in six while slugging 1.042. Remember kids, if you’re going decide to get a hit, make sure you tell your teammates so they can get on base ahead of you. That’s what they call playing baseball the right way.
The infielder Harris was traded for a year and a half ago, Jason Bartlett also had a week in which he was lucky enough to time his hits when men were on base. Bartlett can at least brag about a pair of extra base hits, but he was still only hitting .292/.292/.375.
Rey Sanchez Award
We won’t have Adrian Beltre to kick around for six to eight weeks after he went to have the bone chips taken out of his shoulder. But meanwhile, we can give him a farewell by recognizing his .292/.320/.375 week for the Mariners.
Elsewhere, Carlos Lee had a .286/.348/.333 power outage in 21 at-bats.
Harmon Killebrew Award
Placido Polanco seems an unlikely candidate here, but strange things happen in small samples. Polanco hit .222/.364/.500 in 18 at-bats.
Steve Balboni Award
Jack Cust went a mighty .174/.240/.174 with 12 strikeouts in 23 at-bats. With four hits on 11 balls in play, he actually had a very reasonable .364 batting average on balls in play. Contact matters.
Milton Bradley whiffed nine times in 16 at bats for a .063/.318/.063 week.
Three true outcomes alert!!!
Andre Ethier hit three home runs, drew four walks, and struck out five times in 18 at-bats.
This week’s MVP
AL: Jermaine Dye had a spectacular week, with five singles and seven extra base hits on his way to a .500/.520/1.042 line.
NL: Pablo Sandoval always makes me think of Arturo Sandoval, but with the good work he is doing with his bat this year, his name will soon be pretty famous in its own right. The portly Venezuelan is hitting .337/.389/.570 this season and went off this week to the tune of (See what I did there? Yeah, you did.) .364/.440/.909. Coupled with Nate Schierholtz and his .500/.520/.792, it is a bit of a puzzle how the Giants only won half of their six games.
John Barten writes the THT Awards weekly feature. Please send suggestions, comments, corrections, and input to his email address.
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The Hardball Times
Using HITf/x to measure skill
by Peter JensenJune 30, 2009
Ever watch a ballgame and see three fielders converge on a pop fly before it ends up dropping for a base hit? Did you think that batter didn’t deserve a hit? Or perhaps the second baseman dove to the shortstop side of second base to catch a screaming line drive and your first thought was "that hitter was robbed." Well HITf/x was designed for you. Because we now can have measures of a hitter’s or a pitcher’s ability based not on the vagaries of the plays that the fielders did or did not make, but on the quality of the batter’s hit ball.
What is HITf/x and how can it help?
HITf/x uses the same camera-based technology and video footage that Sportvision uses with PITCHf/x to give accurate pitch speed and flight path information for MLB’s Gameday. As a result, the system is able to provide the same accuracy for the hit ball speed and the initial parameters of the ball’s flight path (the vertical and horizontal angles of the ball as it leaves the bat), as PITCHf/x provides for a pitched ball.
I know that some of you are disappointed that HITf/x cannot also tell us accurately where the ball eventually lands and how long it takes to get there, but that would have required additional cameras to cover the entire field. Although coverage like that eventually will happen, the additional information that HITf/x can give us without additional cameras is very useful.
Another benefit is that HITf/x can be calculated from the existing video already captured for PITCHf/x analysis over the last two and a half years, so we will have a usable database of information much more quickly. Now, we have HITf/x data only for most of the games in April of 2009, but that is enough to demonstrate its power.
The act of batting is a contest between the batter and the pitcher. The batter wants the outcome of the plate appearance to improve his team's chances of winning and the pitcher wants the opposite. In most cases, producing the most wins for the batter's team means maximizing the number of runs his team will score during the inning. This is what Runs Created, Linear Weights and the other advanced batting metrics estimate.
Until, almost all of these metrics have used the run value of the event outcome—out, single, double, triple, home run, walk, etc.—to determine a hitter’s offensive contribution. But, as we have long known and as I demonstrated above, the event outcome is not always the best measure of a player’s skill. The data from HITf/x, including speed off the bat (SOB), vertical angle (VA), and horizontal angle (HA), give us a better method of describing the skill component of the hit ball outcomes of a batter’s plate appearance than event outcomes. Harry Pavlidis recently took an early look at some of these parameters.
The formula
The methodology for a skill-based batting metric is relatively simple: Use the usual linear weight values for the non-hit ball events—strikeouts, non-intentional walks. intentional walks and hit-by-pitches—but substitute the average outcome of a hit ball described by its SOB, VA and HA for all hit ball events. I call this metric SDBR, Skill Dependent Batting Runs. The formula is:
SDBR = K_LW + NIBB_LW + IBB_LW + HBP_LW + HIT_BALL_FX_LW
For the period 2005-2008, K_LW = -.29, NIBB_LW = .32, HBP_LW =.34. The value that has been usually given for an intentional walk has been .17 runs. Here I have calculated the IBB value by a different method (see Valuing the Intentional Walk) to give a value of .09 runs that more accurately reflects the average number of runs that will score after an intentional walk.
The HIT_BALL_FX_LW was calculated by dividing the 14,625 non-bunt hit balls in the HITf/x Database into 198 different bins based on each hit ball’s SOB, VA, and HA.
{exp:list_maker}For speed off the bat, I defined the bins as 5 mph increments from 80 mph to 100 mph plus a bin for all balls hit less than 80 mph and another for all balls hit above 100 mph.
For vertical angles I used 5 degree increments from -5 degrees to 40 degrees plus a bin for less than -5 and another for more than 40.
For horizontal angles I used three bins; Pulled, Center and Opposite. {/exp:list_maker}
These are obviously arbitrary decisions. There will always be a tradeoff between having too many bins that may be measuring random variations rather than real data differences, and too few bins that miss statistically meaningful differences. Probably the most controversial decision I made is using only three bins for the horizontal angle. This may underestimate the ability of some batters to control the horizontal angle of their hit balls on the pulled side because certain batters may be able to direct their hit balls into gaps. When we have more HITf/x data and if further research proves this to be true, then it may be necessary to incorporate more horizontal angle bins.
We also may decide eventually to create separate bins for left-handed and right-handed batters. I opted for a more conservative approach at this time. More HITf/x data also will stabilize the run values for each bin, which are calculated by averaging the linear weight run value of outs, double plays, reached-on-errors, fielder's choices, infield singles, outfield singles, doubles, triples and home runs that occurred in each bin. The complete HIT_BALL_FX_LW table is included in a spreadsheet you can download at the end of the article. There are only 197 bins because one bin had no hit balls.
The results
Here's an example of what you can see in the data. This is the average Linear Weight Value of all hit balls based on the speed of the ball and its horizontal angle off the bat.
Speed Pull Center Opposite TOT <80 -0.14 -0.14 -0.10 -0.13 80 - 85 -0.05 -0.12 -0.09 -0.09 85 - 90 -0.03 -0.11 -0.07 -0.07 90 - 95 0.14 -0.03 0.00 0.04 95 - 100 0.27 0.11 0.18 0.18 >100 0.53 0.44 0.36 0.47 TOT 0.08 0.02 -0.02 0.03As you can see (look in the total column and row), the value of a hit ball goes up as the speed off the bat increases. Also, pulled hits have more value than hits to the opposite field for all but the most slowly hit balls.
Over the course of two or three years, a batter’s SDBR will be very close to his traditional linear weight runs. The reason is that all those "robbed" base hits and the "gimme" base hits will cancel each other out in the larger sample size. The advantage of SDBR is that it should stabilize over a much smaller sample size than LW-based runs—possibly in as few as 200 to 300 plate appearances. We won’t know for sure until we have longer runs of HITf/x data, but if SDBR does stabilize more quickly, then it will provide a much more accurate basis for aging studies and player projections, and it will identify actual changes in a player’s skill level more quickly.
Another advantage is that the formula for calculating Skill-Dependent Pitching Runs (SDPR) is exactly the same as for SDBR, at least for starting pitchers. The reason is given in the first sentence of the third paragraph: "The act of batting is a contest between the batter and the pitcher." When we define the result of that contest in a way that excludes the fielders’ contributions, as SDBR and SDPR do, then the runs that the batter receives when he wins the "contest" are exactly the same as the runs the pitcher loses, and vice versa.
You probably recognize the similarity of the SDPR/SDBR formula to the more advanced formulas for pitching value that have been derived from Voros McCracken’s DIPS theory. SDPR values a pitcher’s actual strikeouts, non-intentional walks, intentional walks, and HBPs just like DIPS, FIP, tRA, xFIP, and LIPS do.
The difference between SDRP and those formulas is in how SDRP values hit balls in play and HRs. SDRP values both by their linear weights determined by their initial Hitf/x parameters. The other formulas use various methods based on event outcomes. The question of whether to give any predictive value to a pitcher’s balls in play has been controversial since Voros introduced the DIPS concept. When more data become available through Hitf/x, SDPR should be able to provide a definitive answer to the controversy.
For relief pitchers, SDPR provides a good basis for projected value because it accurately defines a pitcher's skill in runs. However, to project his overall future value to his team, it is necessary to adjust his SDPR to account for the leverage of the situations in which he will be used. This can be done by multiplying his SDPR by the average leverage value of the role in which he will be used using Tom Tango’s Leverage Index.
In closing, here are a few lists made possible by the HITf/x data. These were April's "luckiest" batters according to the HITf/x data. Note that the list includes some of the best groundball hitters in the majors.
First Last Diff Carl Crawford 5.9 Akinori Iwamura 5.8 Kevin Youkilis 5.8 Adam Jones 5.7 Denard Span 5.7 Nyjer Morgan 5.6 Chris Getz 5.1 Jason Kubel 4.8 Chase Utley 4.6 Brad Hawpe 4.5And here are the "unluckiest" major league batters.
First Last Diff Brian Giles -9.7 J.J. Hardy -6.9 Carlos Guillen -6.4 Nelson Cruz -5.8 Grady Sizemore -5.6 Brandon Phillips -5.4 Adrian Beltre -4.7 Yunel Escobar -4.7 Randy Winn -4.7 Russell Martin -4.2You knew Brian Giles wasn't that bad, right? Now, onto the pitchers. First up, the "luckiest" hurlers:
First Last Diff Tim Wakefield -8.9 Glen Perkins -7.6 Ross Ohlendorf -7.1 John Maine -6.0 Jair Jurrjens -5.9 Joba Chamberlain -5.6 Kevin Millwood -5.6 James Shields -5.6 Koji Uehara -5.6 Zack Greinke -5.3You can see DIPS theory at work here, as successful major league knuckleballers tend to have more favorable outcomes on batted balls. Finally, the "unlucky" ones.
First Last Diff Vicente Padilla 5.4 Brett Myers 4.8 Jon Lester 4.6 Mark Hendrickson 4.3 Tim Lincecum 4.0 Scott Olsen 4.0 Aaron Cook 3.9 Andy Sonnanstine 3.9 Kevin Slowey 3.8 Ian Snell 3.2I wouldn't feel right if Ian Snell weren't on this list.
References and Resources
SDPR and SDBR are included for players in this spreadsheet. The sum of a player’s K, NIBB, IBB and HBP linear weights are shown as his FIP_LW for both pitchers and batters. Also shown is a player’s EVENT_LW minus his HIT_BALL_FX_LW which gives an indication were either lucky or unlucky in April (positive numbers being lucky for batters and unlucky for pitchers). This is an extremely small sample size and has not much more meaning than any other one-month sample. It is shown to illustrate the methodology only.
The information here was provided by Sportvision and MLB.com’s Gameday for research purposes only. Sportvision and MLB.com retain all copyright rights.
When he was ten, Peter caught a foul ball hit by Ted Williams at Griffiths Stadium. He keeps hoping, but so far life hasn't gotten any better than that.
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The Hardball Times
THT Daily: Ethier delivers again
by Dave StudemanJune 30, 2009
Major League News for June 30
Player News
Yesterday’s Results
Today’s Games
Standings
Top Minor League Performances
You can always find the most recent THT Daily at http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/content/thtdaily/
Player News
Player Headlines are courtesy of RotoworldAccording to the Los Angeles Daily News, Manny Ramirez's minor league rehab assignment has concluded.
Ramirez went 1-for-3 with two strikeouts Monday for Single-A Inland Empire. He was going to play in Tuesday's game as well, but the Dodgers have decided to scratch that plan. "I don't think one more game is going to make that much difference," said general manager Ned Colletti, who was on the scene for Manny's final rehab appearance. He'll join up with his Dodger teammates Tuesday and return to the lineup Friday, July 3.
Orioles manager Dave Trembley acknowledged Monday that Cesar Izturis (appendicitis) might not return to the club until late July, at the earliest.
Izturis jogged and sprinted in the outfield Monday and took 30 swings off a tee. "Big progress," he said afterward. "I'm feeling stronger, and today was a big day." He's hoping to hit live pitching as early as Wednesday with an eye on beginning a rehab assignment right around the All-Star break.
Ervin Santana (triceps) returned to the Angels Monday after a three-inning rehab outing in the Arizona Summer League.
Santana will stick around for the next few games. He'll throw a bullpen session Wednesday and, if all goes well, could be slotted back into the rotation by the weekend. There's a chance the Angels will ask him to make one final rehab start, but it's doubtful.
According to the New York Post, Carlos Beltran's season, and possibly career, could be in jeopardy if he requires microfracture knee surgery.
The 32-year-old Beltran has already required arthroscopic surgery on both knees, and the microfracture procedure is still rather experimental. NBA players Jamal Mashburn and Terrell Brandon were forced into retirement not too long after having it done. We'll keep you updated with his diagnosis.
According to the Boston Herald, Mike Lowell (hip) could return to the starting lineup as soon as Friday.
Lowell will begin rehabbing in Boston on Tuesday and will be re-evaluated by the club's medical staff Thursday. "The worst-case scenario, he goes on the DL," said manager Terry Francona, "just to buy us a couple of weeks where he can get a second wind for the second part of the season. We can also wait a few days and let him play, if that’s OK, too. We’re just kind of in a waiting mode." Check back soon for an update.
Josh Hamilton went 1-for-4 with an RBI, a walk and a stolen base Monday in his first rehab game with Double-A Frisco.
Hamilton was only allowed to DH, but displayed his agility on the base paths and would appear ready for major league action. He'll join Triple-A Oklahoma City on Wednesday for a few more starts, and even some outfield action. The Texas slugger has been out since June 9.
Tim Lincecum delivered a complete-game shutout Monday as the Giants trounced the Cardinals 10-0 in St. Louis.
Lincecum was spot-on, surrendering just two hits while fanning eight Cardinals hitters and walking none. He lowered his ERA from 2.57 to 2.37 and his WHIP fell to a season-low 1.07. It was the 25-year-old's third complete game of the season, but he needed just 95 pitches Monday and hasn't been totally overworked. That bodes well for even more impressive stats in the second-half of this '09 campaign.
Raul Ibanez (groin) is unlikely to be activated from the disabled list on Friday.
Ibanez recently said that his groin has improved, but Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. said, "One day he can be doing great, and another day not as great. We have to keep our minds open there." Amaro said Ibanez will be reevaluated this week and will likely not come off the DL on Friday, the day he is eligible. "We'll reevaluate him and see whether he's physically able to start some type of rehab," Amaro said.
Jimmy Rollins is expected to return to the lineup on Tuesday.
Rollins will return to the lineup and bat leadoff against the Braves "unless something really changes between now and then," manager Charlie Manuel told The Philadelphia Inquirer. Rollins is hitless in his last 19 at-bats and did not take batting practice during his four-game break. But he did take soft toss and hit from a tee. "I'm getting the right stroke down, which is good. I've been doing very well," Rollins said, according to The Delaware Daily Times. "It's like, 'There it is, you dodo brain ... it took you so long to remember that?'" Rollins is hitting .211/.254/.328 this year.
Yesterday’s Results
For the full scoop regarding yesterday's games, read "And That Happened" at Shysterball.American League BOS 4 BAL 0 (Recap and Boxscore) TB 4 TOR 1 (Recap and Boxscore) CHA 6 CLE 3 (Recap and Boxscore) KC 4 MIN 2 (Recap and Boxscore) OAK 7 DET 1 (Recap and Boxscore) LAA 5 TEX 2 (Recap and Boxscore) National League FLA 4 WAS 2 (Recap and Boxscore) MIL 10 NYN 6 (Recap and Boxscore) CHN 3 PIT 1 (Recap and Boxscore) SF 10 STL 0 (Recap and Boxscore) LAN 4 COL 2 (Recap and Boxscore) HOU 3 SD 1 (Recap and Boxscore)Check out Fangraphs' scoreboard to see all the games in action.
Today’s Games
National League --------------- Chicago Cubs at Pittsburgh Pirates, 7:05 PM (L) Ted Lilly (7-5) vs. (R) Ross Ohlendorf (6-6) Arizona Diamondbacks at Cincinnati Reds, 7:10 PM (R) Dan Haren (6-5) vs. (R) Bronson Arroyo (8-6) Washington Nationals at Florida Marlins, 7:10 PM (R) Craig Stammen (1-3) vs. (L) Sean West (3-2) Philadelphia Phillies at Atlanta Braves, 7:10 PM (R) Joe Blanton (4-4) vs. (R) Derek Lowe (7-6) New York Mets at Milwaukee Brewers, 8:05 PM (L) Johan Santana (9-5) vs. (R) Mike Burns (0-1) San Francisco Giants at St. Louis Cardinals, 8:15 PM (L) Randy Johnson (7-5) vs. (R) Chris Carpenter (5-2) Houston Astros at San Diego Padres, 10:05 PM (L) Mike Hampton (4-5) vs. (R) Josh Banks (0-0) Colorado Rockies at Los Angeles Dodgers, 10:10 PM (R) Jason Marquis (9-5) vs. (R) Chad Billingsley (9-3) American League --------------- Boston Red Sox at Baltimore Orioles, 7:05 PM (R) John Smoltz (0-1) vs. (L) Rich Hill (3-2) Seattle Mariners at New York Yankees, 7:05 PM (R) Brandon Morrow (0-3) vs. (R) Joba Chamberlain (4-2) Chicago White Sox at Cleveland Indians, 7:05 PM (L) Clayton Richard (2-1) vs. (L) Cliff Lee (4-6) Tampa Bay Rays at Toronto Blue Jays, 7:07 PM (R) Matt Garza (5-5) vs. (R) Scott Richmond (6-4) LA Angels of Anaheim at Texas Rangers, 8:05 PM (L) Joe Saunders (8-4) vs. (R) Scott Feldman (5-2) Minnesota Twins at Kansas City Royals, 8:10 PM (R) Scott Baker (5-6) vs. (R) Brian Bannister (5-5) Detroit Tigers at Oakland Athletics, 10:05 PM (R) Armando Galarraga (4-7) vs. (L) Gio Gonzalez (0-1)
Standings
The graphics next to each team are called "sparklines.” They depict each team’s performance over the last month. Each "up" bar is a victory and a "down" bar is a loss. There are horizontal lines for home games and red bars represent games decided by two runs or less. "PWins" is short for Projected Wins, based on each team’s Run Differential, and is often a better measure of a team’s true strength. Other team graphs and stats can be found on our Team Page.American League East Pwins Diff BOS 47 29 .618 0.0 45 2NYA 43 32 .573 3.5 43 0
TB 43 35 .551 5.0 48 -5
TOR 41 37 .526 7.0 43 -2
BAL 34 42 .447 13.0 33 1
American League Central DET 42 34 .553 0.0 40 2
CHA 38 38 .500 4.0 37 1
MIN 39 39 .500 4.0 42 -3
KC 33 42 .440 8.5 32 1
CLE 31 47 .397 12.0 36 -5
American League West LAA 42 32 .568 0.0 39 3
TEX 40 35 .533 2.5 39 1
SEA 39 36 .520 3.5 36 3
OAK 32 43 .427 10.5 34 -2
National League East Pwins Diff PHI 39 34 .534 0.0 39 0
FLA 39 39 .500 2.5 36 3
NYN 37 38 .493 3.0 37 0
ATL 35 40 .467 5.0 35 0
WAS 22 52 .297 17.5 28 -6
National League Central MIL 41 35 .539 0.0 39 2
STL 41 37 .526 1.0 40 1
CIN 37 37 .500 3.0 36 1
CHN 36 37 .493 3.5 37 -1
HOU 36 38 .486 4.0 35 1
PIT 35 41 .461 6.0 38 -3
National League West LAN 49 28 .636 0.0 47 2
SF 41 34 .547 7.0 40 1
COL 40 36 .526 8.5 41 -1
SD 33 42 .440 15.0 29 4
ARI 30 46 .395 18.5 33 -3
Top Minor League Games
The following list, provided by First Inning, includes the top minor league batting (based on Runs Created) and pitching (based on Game Score) performances from yesterday.ORG LVL PLAYER AB H 2B 3B HR BB SO Notes MIL A+ Caleb Gindl....... 4 4 2 0 1 0 0 3 R BOS A- Derrik Gibson..... 3 3 1 0 0 2 0 2 SB TB AAA Reid Brignac...... 4 3 3 0 0 0 0 WAN AAA Justin Maxwell.... 7 3 0 1 1 0 2 WAN A+ C. Marrero........ 5 3 1 0 1 0 1 PHI AA Michael Taylor.... 5 4 2 0 0 0 1 3 LD WAN A+ Michael Burgess... 4 2 1 0 1 0 1 NYY A+ Austin Romine..... 5 2 1 0 1 0 0 DET AAA Scott Sizemore.... 5 3 2 0 0 0 0 BOS AA Ryan Kalish....... 5 4 0 0 0 0 0 2 SB BOS AA Lars Anderson..... 3 1 0 0 1 2 1 TOR AA David Cooper...... 3 2 0 0 1 1 1 3 R ORG LVL PLAYER IP H R ER SO BB HR Notes BAL A+ Zachary Britton... 6 6 3 3 9 1 0 NYM A Jeurys Familia.... 6 2 1 1 7 3 0 11 GB TOR AAA Marc Rzepczynski.. 6 5 1 1 7 1 0 BOS A+ Kyle Weiland...... 6 4 0 0 7 3 0 NYY AAA Ivan Nova......... 6 1 0 0 5 3 0 CHC AA Casey Coleman..... 7 7 2 2 6 2 0 CHC A+ Dan McDaniel...... 6 5 1 0 4 1 0 SD AA Cory Luebke....... 5 4 1 1 4 1 0 MIN A+ David Bromberg.... 6 5 1 1 3 1 0 NYY A+ D.J. Mitchell..... 6 5 1 1 4 2 0 NYY A Manuel Banuelos... 7 7 0 0 3 1 0 TB AAA Wade Davis........ 6 6 3 2 4 2 0
| First Inning's Major and Minor League Daily Reports: |
Dave is the manager of the Baseball Graphs website.. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
Fantasy Baseball Roundtable link
by Derek CartyJune 29, 2009
Derek Carty is a Mets fan currently residing in New Jersey. In addition to writing for THT, his work has also run either currently or previously at Rotoworld, Sports Illustrated, and FOX Sports. He was the champion of the FOX Sports Experts Fantasy Baseball League in 2008 and will be competing in five expert competitions in 2009, including LABR NL. He welcomes questions via e-mail.
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Even more self-promotion
by Craig CalcaterraJune 29, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Bullpen Usage Reports
by Derek CartyJune 29, 2009
Derek Carty is a Mets fan currently residing in New Jersey. In addition to writing for THT, his work has also run either currently or previously at Rotoworld, Sports Illustrated, and FOX Sports. He was the champion of the FOX Sports Experts Fantasy Baseball League in 2008 and will be competing in five expert competitions in 2009, including LABR NL. He welcomes questions via e-mail.
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What do we make of CitiField?
by Derek CartyJune 29, 2009
Derek Carty is a Mets fan currently residing in New Jersey. In addition to writing for THT, his work has also run either currently or previously at Rotoworld, Sports Illustrated, and FOX Sports. He was the champion of the FOX Sports Experts Fantasy Baseball League in 2008 and will be competing in five expert competitions in 2009, including LABR NL. He welcomes questions via e-mail.
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DeRosa to Cards
by Derek CartyJune 29, 2009
Derek Carty is a Mets fan currently residing in New Jersey. In addition to writing for THT, his work has also run either currently or previously at Rotoworld, Sports Illustrated, and FOX Sports. He was the champion of the FOX Sports Experts Fantasy Baseball League in 2008 and will be competing in five expert competitions in 2009, including LABR NL. He welcomes questions via e-mail.
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Programming Note
by Craig CalcaterraJune 29, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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How to handle league-switchers in AL and NL-only leagues
by Derek CartyJune 29, 2009
Derek Carty is a Mets fan currently residing in New Jersey. In addition to writing for THT, his work has also run either currently or previously at Rotoworld, Sports Illustrated, and FOX Sports. He was the champion of the FOX Sports Experts Fantasy Baseball League in 2008 and will be competing in five expert competitions in 2009, including LABR NL. He welcomes questions via e-mail.
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More Self Promotion
by Craig CalcaterraJune 29, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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My Morning in Exile
by Craig CalcaterraJune 29, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Mystery
by Craig CalcaterraJune 29, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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The Guttridge-Wang trade model
by Adam GuttridgeJune 29, 2009
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties believe they will benefit.
–Milton Freidman
Both as a fan and a professional, I’ve seen trades assembled and evaluated from an a subjective and all-too-imprecise platform.
Take this hypothetical quote for an example. It may be what you’d read in a newspaper or what you’d hear if you had an executive on the phone:
We're trading this veteran because he's getting too expensive and we're not contending. He's still a good player, but we're getting a decent pitcher who's under control for four more years, and their #2 prospect who was a first-rounder. We forfeit the draft picks we'd get for him next June, but I think it's worth it. Besides, we've got a good replacement waiting in the wings.
Obviously, nobody is making a trade based on the above statement alone—it's an oversimplification, though it's at least partially representative of the way many decisions are made. But what you have above is a multitude of disparate information. When considering such a deal it will be impossible to precisely gauge the value of each bit of information, balance it, and compare it to alternative strategies without a framework to evaluate and organize the risks and benefits.
Even holding a spreadsheet with the most accurate five-year total value forecasts of the players involved, I think it would still be virtually impossible to balance the relative value of the divergent aspects of such a scheme (unless the deal was just comically lopsided, and those cases are very rare). Don't believe that?
Then tell me, what's the value of the fact that the pitcher in the above deal is in arbitration for four more years? Is the discount he will receive by virtue of being in the arbitration process a more valuable or less valuable than receiving Type A compensation picks? And that's just a single and relatively minor point of a much more complex deal.
What's being advocated is basically managerial (in other words, internal) accounting. In industry, we make a decision according to the bottom line. "I have to pay $x million for this piece of equipment, which depreciates at a rate of $n per year. I could sell the old unit for $y. I expect to get $r per year in additional revenue from the superior productivity, which is a better return on investment than I get elsewhere. But we'd have a month of downtime, which costs us $p, and we'd have to add an employee to operate it at the cost of $q."
Again, can you imagine how muddled this decision would get if the manager(s) in charge simply evaluated the information more or less in their head, without the aid of the balance sheet?
It is clear that one person, or a group of people, will not be able to precisely evaluate and balance all the information contained in a trade (let alone multiple offers) without a prevailing framework to organize, sort, and balance the inputs.
I created such a framework, which became part of the 'toolbox' I showed to prospective employers (MLB executives) during the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas. I had been initially flattered by their response. That is until one executive responded "Oh, cool… kind of like they do at The Hardball Times." Damn—here I was thinking I had been original.
Victor Wang was the author of the work the exec had been referencing. Incidentally, Victor contacted me after my Winter Meetings article as a fellow job-seeker soliciting advice. He was glad to hear the news that his work had caught the attention of a prominent executive, and we gradually began comparing notes on our respective models.
Victor and I agreed on the major points:
A) That virtually all pertinent aspects of a trade can be converted into economic values. This is obvious in the major cases; a 3 WAR player has an inherent market value (currently around $13m per year). But we can also derive economic values for potential compensation picks, contract risk, prospects in A-ball, and more.
B) That surplus value is the currency of exchange. For example, suppose teams are paying $4.5m per win on the open market. You have a 2 WAR third baseman who is under contract for $6m. Thus, he carries $3m in surplus value; he is a $9m value that you only have to pay $6m for. In a vacuum, you should not trade him unless you receive $3m surplus value in return. If you were to trade him straight-up for another third baseman worth $6m and earning $6m (again, in a vacuum, and assuming these players are both on one-year deals) you have unquestionably decreased your assets.
C) Trades are not zero-sum equations. Primarily due to the fact that teams have divergent near-term strategies (and also varying ability to replace a player) it is entirely possible—even common—that both teams in a trade benefit.
There were some areas of disagreement.
1) For prospects, I had simply been running a current projection and projecting forth using a standard aging curve. This is problematic, due to the fact that (when using proper figures) virtually no 22-year-old will project as an All Star if he simply follows the standard aging curve from the present to his peak. Virtually all top-caliber performers have 'jumped' that curve at some point in their careers.
I first thought this impediment to be a fair penalty based on the inherent risk of prospects, but Victor had come up with a better solution. By studying past prospect lists of major publications, Victor was able to assign economic values to different 'slots' of prospects. As in, if Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, and John Sickels seem to agree that Jhoulys Chacin is between the 15th and 25th best pitching prospect in the game, we can use Victor's research (and a few basic financial calculations) to determine the present economic value of that grade. You can see Victor's work on these valuations here.
2) I've convinced Victor to adopt my future value discount and inflation figures. The way he had been calculating things was incorrectly inflating the net present surplus value of future receipts, because he had inflation set higher than his discount rate. To convert that into plain English; what is more valuable—2.5 WAR projected for 2010 or 2.5 WAR projected for 2013? 2010, of course, for two reasons:
&8226; You get to realize the value more quickly,
&8226; There's far less risk in a projection one year away than four years away.
The model now makes a more accurate account of this, and it makes a huge difference.
&8226; As far as organization (which is the whole point), we're combining models. The "process tree" framework Victor used to illustrate potential outcomes will be used, with some tweaking of the "branch"-level coefficients. For the projected values along the timeline, we will use using my spreadsheet model, now with Victor's prospect valuation.
Using the Matt Holliday trade as an example, here's how the Guttridge-Wang model looks:
For some explanation: The change in contention odds and its value is sort of a "dumb" calculation, in that it's not intended to be precise. Baseball Prospectus estimated that making the playoffs is worth, all told, $40m to an organization. For the purposes of this calculation, teams are just subjectively slotted as contenders or non-contenders.
This is because...
{exp:list_maker}It's not practical, nor desirable, to use a current projection (like 84.6 wins) as a starting point. Especially during the offseason, so much can change in terms of roster construction and competition between the time of a deal and the season that it doesn't make sense to fixate on a particular number, and
I'm confident we can do a decent job of subjectively slotting a team as contenders or not. {/exp:list_maker}
Thus, to calculate the change in contention odds, we're going with a simple premise. A team who wins 83 games has only the slightest chance of making the playoffs. A team who wins 95 has only the slightest chance of not making it. In that sense, you could say each marginal win added to a contending team increases their playoff chances by about 8%. (Yes, I'm aware it's not actually that simple. But it's a pretty good estimate).
Holliday improves the A's, whom I slotted as a contender (I had them right around 81 wins pre-trade, but the Angels were looking quite weak) by about 2.4 wins. Thus, they're about 19 percent more likely to make the playoffs than before the deal—quite a large figure. So, being 19.1 percent more likely to earn $40m means he has added an expected surplus value of around $7.5m to the A's.
Now, onto my spreadsheet model:
As you can see, this mock-up is from the Rockies' perspective. Remember that because of divergent goals and varying ability to replace players, the deals aren't zero-sum equations; the fact that I assess the Rockies at a loss of $4.25m does not mean the A's gained the same amount. I presented Victor's process-tree from the A's perspective and my spreadsheet model from the Rockies perspective, just to present a taste of each—to fully evaluate a trade, you need to assess each side.
Now, as far as that $4.25m loss for the Rockies… is that the real value of this model—being able to say that a team "lost" $4.25m (as opposed to, say, $3.81m), or gained $4.1m in their franchise value?
Well, only sort of. It is valuable for that reason. Even if we accept that the projected values and salaries are only 90 percent accurate to their optimal baseline (which would be a very low threshold that I'm positive we've met), there's a great deal of value in being able to establish that bottom line.
However, the real beauty of this model is how it allows an organization to examine all the possibilities. What if the Rockies' scouts are big believers in Carlos Gonzalez, and believe there's a good chance he'll be an All-Star caliber player by 2011 (a highly implausible scenario in my opinion, but that's beside the point)? Well, we can plug that scenario into the model, and see how the trade would look if it panned out that way:
If things work out that way, it's a great deal for the Rockies. Now, what if the "stall" experienced by Gonzalez during '07-'08 is indicative of a very early peak, and he's really just a toolsy 5th-outfielder, a la Reggie Taylor (which I regard as equally implausible as the All-Star scenario)? Plugging it into the model, we would see that it would be a horrible deal for the Rockies.
What if murmurs of Huston Street having some shoulder issues are true? What if he misses half a season at some point prior to free agency? Plug that into the model, and see how it affects the bottom line. What if Greg Smith develops into a passable 3rd starter instead of a 5th starter? Plug it in. What if we feel Seth Smith is far more valuable than the projection is giving him credit for? Plug it in.
This is the real value of this model for an organization; you must take the baseline as a starting point, sure—but plugging all the reasonable or anticipated deviations will allow you to get a clear picture of the range of possibilities, put a quantifiable value on the subjective parts of the evaluation, and let you pick your spots in terms of risk most effectively.
The above models don't contain anything any team isn't already considering in a trade; no new information is really being introduced. It's just that the information, instead of being disparate, non-quantified, and unorganized, is now tied into a single platform with a single unit of value and presented in a now-intelligible manner. Where once it was too overwhelming to accurately account for, it is now clear, flexible, and actionable.
The hypothetical trade I quoted in the opening represents the way our minds distill these disparate inputs, probabilities, and values. General managers, unlike their counterparts in industry, never really used the balance sheet, primarily because we've never viewed major league players, minor league players, draft picks, and playoff value within a single plane of tangible value (both present and future). Those who learn to do so effectively will gain a massive leg up in the information wars.
Adam Guttridge is a recent graduate seeking to continue his baseball career. Employment offers can be sent to (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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The 10 worst lineups ever no-hit
by Chris JaffeJune 29, 2009
Last year I wrote a column here at THT of which I was quite proud: "The ten most impressive no-hitters of all-time." With the help of the internet and my local library, I tried to determine the best hitting lineups held utterly hitless. I really liked that piece, but I made one big mistake. Like the mope that I am, I submitted it for publication on the last Monday in May, otherwise known as Memorial Day. That assured as small a readership for it as possible. D'OH!
Well, I can't undo that mishap, but I can learn from that lesson with this sequel. After all, if it's possible to find the 10 most impressive lineups ever to suffer the indignity of a no-hitter, I should be able to look up the 10 least impressive bunch of clodhoppers ever to go a game without a hit. Frankly, I'm surprised I didn't instinctively start with the downbeat column last time, what with me being a Cubs fan and all.
I should note, in last year's column, as a special addendum, I listed the single worst lineup ever no-hit, so the end result to this one won't come as a surprise to those who read last year's model. Then again, if you're willing to read me on holidays, well: 1) thanks!, and 2) you're probably going to read this one anyway. Besides, even if the first one has been listed, the rest of the list hasn't.
Ground rules
The stat to focus on is good old fashioned batting average. Sure, other stats are more advanced in capturing a player's overall value, but we're not looking at that. Ability to get hits is what matters, and that's precisely what AVG measures.
That said, a few other factors affect who makes this list. First is playing time. A lineup full of guys who went 6-for-20 on the season would be a lineup full of .300 hitters, but if any of them were really that good, they would've had more than 20 at-bats. No lineup exactly like that has taken the field, but sometimes there is a player or two like that out there.
Second, I'd like as broad a representation across the eras as possible. It's more interesting that way. Also, an assemblage of .230 hitters from 2008 is a bit more embarrassing than a slew of .240 hitters from 1908. Then again, let's not get carried away with this enforcing this guideline. There should be more from the deadball era than more hitter-happy periods.
Finally, please note that like all lists, this is purely subjective. There is no point making a list like this unless it's going to be fun.
The Bats of Bleach: the worst lineups ever no-hit
I'm sure there are some I missed, but from those I didn't, here are the lineups most predictably held hitless.
10. Nick Maddox vs. the Brooklyn Dodgers, September 20, 1907.
Before Brooklyn was "Dem Bums" they were just bums. This season came smack in the middle of an 11-year stretch without a winning record. As a team the Dodgers hit .232 in 1907, and while that's terrible, it's also better than their team average in each of the next three seasons. Here is the lineup (and batting averages) for the squad on this day.
Name Avg Casey, 3B 0.231 Lewis, SS 0.248 Jordan, 1B 0.274 Hummel, 2B 0.234 Batch, LF 0.247 Burch, RF 0.292 Maloney, CF 0.229 Bergen, C 0.159 Stricklett, P 0.148
Sure, it looks bad, but not tremendously bad. Seven of them are .229 or higher. Aye, but while few individuals are truly wretched, almost none are that good. Only two are above .250. Al Burch, who has the lineup's best batting average at .292, was actually a part-time player having a flukishly high average. He spent the first half of the year with the Cards, where he hit .227. His career average was .254.
In turns out that almost every lineup has a couple of quality bats. That's even true of those that are no-hit. This group possessed only one real bat of note, if you consider a bruising .274 offensive clip to be "of note."
This lineup has one other element going for it that pushes it above all the contenders for this bottom rung: the presence of Bill Bergen. The man made Mario Mendoza look like Barry Bonds. Bergen was the worst offensive player ever. Not only was his career batting average under .200 (.170), but in nearly 1,000 games played, his OBP was even below that low water marker (.194). At least he had that ferocious .201 SLG to help himself out.
9. Virgil Trucks vs. the Washington Senators, May 15, 1952.
The 1952 Senators had a .239 team batting average, which was the worst by any no-hit club between 1917 and 1963. That helps the following lineup gain its admission here:
Name Avg Yost, 3B 0.233 Busby, CF 0.244 Jensen, RF 0.286 Vernon, 1B 0.251 Runnels, SS 0.285 Coan, LF 0.205 Marsh, 2B 0.042 Kluttz, C 0.229 Porterfield, P 0.190
Again, this isn't necessarily a terrible lineup. It's just one with little that impresses. They have some quality hitters here, but even some of them come with asterisks. Eddie Yost was a walk-driven OBP machine, but walks aren't the issue here. Mickey Vernon won the batting title in 1953, but something went horribly wrong for him in 1952. Pete Runnels later won multiple batting titles, but this was his first full season.
Ultimately, only two guys batted over .251 that year. Meanwhile, the bottom portion of the lineup really was the bottom. How often does someone hit .042? OK, fine—it's a bit of a fluke caused by small sample size. It's still less than one-fourth Bill Bergen's career mark.
As it happens, this was one of two no-hitters Trucks threw on the year. His other one made last year's column, tied for seventh place as one of the most impressive lineups ever no-hit. Incredibly, he's not the only hurler to make both lists.
8. Pud Galvin vs. the Detroit Wolverines, August 4, 1884.
This one is a bit tricky. My main source for this article is a book on no-hitters that goes back to 1900. For older ones, I first found out what nineteenth century teams that got no-hit had the worst lineup, and then used Proquest at my local library to see who took the field on the day in question.
Detroit hit .208 in 1884, which ties for the lowest mark in NL history. That got them on the Proquest list. However, papers back then didn't list the modern boxscore. I only know who some of the players were for Detroit that day, and I don't know at all who filled what slot in the batting order. For the slots I'm guessing on, I'll put a question mark.
As near as I can tell, here are the men Pud Galvin no-hit:
Name Avg Scott, 1B 0.247 Farrell, 3B 0.226 Hanlon, OF 0.264 Wood, OF 0.252 Meinke, P 0.164 Buker, UT 0.135 Bennett, C 0.264 Wiedman?, OF 0.163 Geiss?, UT 0.177
The paper did list items such as who struck out or drew walks or committed errors, as well as the pitchers. Based on that, I determined seven of the nine slots.
I'm pretty confident I got the other two right. First, starting pitcher Frank Meinke doubled as the team's starting shortstop. Since he obviously wasn't at second base, and because the record shows normal utility infielder Harry Buker played, that makes it quite likely that regular starting second baseman Bill Geiss was in the game. Stump Wiedman might be wrong, but he's the best guess for the final outfield slot.
As for the lineup, four bats under .180 and none higher than .264 equals the most pathetic hitless lineup of the Gilded Age.
7. Hideo Nomo vs. the Baltimore Orioles, April 4, 2001.
Hideo Nomo showed up in last year's column as well, with his Coors Field no-hitter coming in second place (and looking back it may have belonged in first). If nothing else, he's had the greatest discrepancy in no-hitter degrees of difficulty.
Here's the Boys from Baltimore:
Name Avg Anderson, LF 0.202 Bordick, SS 0.249 DeShields, DH 0.197 Segui, 1B 0.301 Richard, RF 0.265 Mora, CF 0.250 Ripken, 3B 0.239 Fordyce, C 0.209 Hairston, 2B 0.233
Perhaps it wasn't as bad as the Wolverine lineup above, but at least I know who actually started here. How in hell in this day and age does a team produce a lineup where a majority of its starters end up batting below .240 for the season?
David Segui, who possessed the only good batting average of the bunch, played in only 82 games that year. Everyone else penciled in batted below the AL's league-wide average (.267). That ain't good. The man with the second best batting average on the day, 27-year-old Chris Richard, lasted just two more seasons in MLB.
Fun fact: when April ended, the Orioles were only hitting .228.
6. Len Barker vs. the Toronto Blue Jays, May 15, 1981.
This wasn't just a no-hitter, it was also a perfect game. Thus it qualifies as the worst lineup ever held without a baserunner. Toronto's starters on the day were:
Name Avg Griffin, SS 0.209 Moseby, RF 0.233 Bell, LF 0.233 Mayberry, 1B 0.248 Upshaw, DH 0.171 Garcia, 2B 0.252 Bosetti, CF 0.234 Ainge, 3B 0.187 Martinez, C 0.227
You know, the averages might suck but that is a tremendously talented bunch. This might be the best batch of bad bats ever beheld. None were particularly good in 1981 (most were too young), but almost all of them had impressive careers.
Most of them made All Star games. George Bell was a three-time All Star and won an MVP award. While it was a very ill-deserved MVP, it takes quite of bit of talent to gain one of those trophies. Veteran slugging first baseman and singles-hitting Damaso Garcia both made two. Alfredo Griffin was Rookie of the Year two years prior. Twenty-one-year-old Lloyd Moseby became part of baseball's best outfield in the 1980s. Even Danny Ainge made an All Star team. OK, fine, so he did it in the NBA.
Even the other guys were pretty good, though. Willie Upshaw never made an all-star game, but he was good enough to garner some token vote MVP support one year. Buck Martinez lasted three decades as a catcher. Then there's Rick Bosetti. He once led the league in games played. For the least remarkable guy in a lineup, that's rather remarkable.
Regardless, these guys really sucked that year. The team batted .226, a full 30 points below the league average, and also the worst mark by any team in the 1980s. Actually, it is the lowest batting average by any team in the last 37 years. That's especially bad given that they had a designated hitter.
5. Eric Milton vs. the Anaheim Angels, September 11, 1999.
In some ways, this no-hitter is the real inspiration for both this and last year's column. I remember Rob Neyer wrote a column about what a dreadful lineup it was, full of forgettable September call-ups and batting-impaired regulars. That planted the seed in my brain to compare no-hit batting orders.
So who were the men who so annoyed Neyer? These guys (because several had such little playing time, I'll include a column for games):
Name Avg G Davanon, RF 0.200 7 Palmerio, CF 0.278 109 Greene, LF 0.243 97 Glaus, 3B 0.240 154 Decker, DH 0.238 28 Luke, 1B 0.300 18 Hemphill, C 0.143 12 Durrington, 2B 0.180 43 Sheets, SS 0.197 87
Yup, that's a lineup even Eric Milton could no-hit. (OK, that's not fair as Milton was a very talented young'un before he devolved into a master of the gopher ball.)
Sure, Matt Luke hit .300, but he played in 18 stinkin' games (and had only 32 plate appearances in them). The year before, in real playing time, he hit .213. Also, 1999 was his last year.
Not only were they a bunch of kids, but it's safe to say a decade later that they didn't exactly pan out. Troy Glaus is a fearsome hitter, but he's better at slugging and drawing walks than at hitting. Purely in terms of getting a hit, the most talented man in the lineup was Orlando Palmerio. That is an astoundingly pathetic sentence to write.
On the bench that day were Tim Salmon, Garret Anderson, Randy Velarde, Mo Vaughn, and Darin Erstad. Then again, so was Gary DiSarcina, so I suppose there was some upside to the day.
4. Frank Smith vs. the Philadelphia A's, September 20, 1908.
This is a fun one because not only did Frank Smith hurl a no-hitter when his White Sox were in the midst of one of baseball's greatest pennant races, but 12 days later his team of "hitless wonders" were on the wrong end of a perfect game. (The losing pitcher in that game, Smith's teammate Ed Walsh, struck out 15 and only allowed four hits, losing 1-0 in baseball's greatest pitchers' duel.)
Back to the game in question, though. Here is the lineup Connie Mack penciled in vs. Chicago:
Name Avg Nichols, SS 0.216 Oldring, LF 0.221 Murphy, 1B 0.265 Coombs, CF 0.255 Seybold, RF 0.215 Manusch, 3B 0.156 Barr, 2B 0.143 Lapp, C 0.143 Plank, P 0.180
The A's hit .223 in 1908, easily the worst in franchise history. They won over 60 percent of their games in 1907 and 1909, but their offensive meltdown put them second in the division in 1908. They also rested some of their best bats on the day, most notably second baseman Eddie Collins, but also their outfielder Topsy Hartsel and slugging infielder Harry Davis.
You know it's a bad lineup when a pitcher—a routine-hitting pitcher—deserves to bat sixth in the lineup.
3. Juan Marichal vs. the Houston Astros, June 15, 1963.
The 1963 Astros hit .220 as a team; which is the second-worst figure by any NL team in the last 100 seasons. (The worst team was the 1963 Mets. That's what happens when terrible expansion teams play in low-scoring leagues.)
Here was their lineup on the 15th of June:
Name Avg Fazio, 2B 0.184 Davis, CF 0.200 Aspromonte, 3B 0.214 Warwick, RF 0.254 Staub, 1B 0.224 Spangle, LF 0.281 Lillis, SS 0.198 Bateman, C 0.210 Drott, D 0.130
Former wunderkind Dick Drott tossed a helluva game himself, holding a Giants lineup featuring Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, and Felipe Alou to three hits and one run. Alas for him, it was four more hits than he could afford to give up with these bozos backing him up.
Another random fact: in the ninth inning, aging veteran Pete Runnels appeared for Houston as a pinch hitter (and struck out). It isn't particularly amazing that one player would play for two of these terrible lineups. It is rather striking that the person to do it won multiple batting titles.
Oh, Runnels hit .253 on the year. Normally that's unimpressive but he looked like a baseball freaking demigod compared to most of his teammates.
2. Bill Stoneman vs. the New York Mets, October 2, 1972.
Remember how the 1981 Jays had the worst batting average of any team in the last 37 years? Well, the 1972 Mets were the team from 37 years ago with an even worse batting average: .225. Here's their lineup on Bill Stoneman's big day:
Name Avg Barnes, 2B 0.236 Fregosi, 3B 0.232 Milner, LF 0.238 Kranepool, 1B 0.269 Sudakis, C 0.143 Schneck, CF 0.187 Hahn, RF 0.162 Martinez, T, SS 0.224 McAndrew, P 0.047
What dreck.
Please note that not only does Ed Kranepool possess the above lineup's best batting average, but he has a lead of over 30 points on anyone else. That should never happen. I don't care if Kranepool is the Mets' franchise all-time leader in career games played, at-bats, plate appearances, doubles, hits, singles, and total bases, there's still no excuse for having a lineup where no one's within 30 points of him.
1. Addie Joss vs. the Chicago White Sox, April 20, 1910.
This is the perfect team to end the list with. In 1910, the White Sox hit .211 as a team, which is the worst team-wide batting average in the last 120 years. How could they not be no-hit?
At any rate, here was the lineup they trotted out on their day of infamy:
Name Avg Hahn, RF 0.113 Zeider, 2B 0.217 Gandil, 1B 0.193 Burrows, LF 0.200 Parent, CF 0.178 Purtell, 3B 0.234 Blackburne, SS 0.174 Payne, C 0.218 White, P 0.198
Folks, this is the only lineup in history that could see its average rise as a result of being no-hit. Only one guy over .220. Really? And a leadoff man .120? Criminey. Just four years off its first world title, this team won fewer than 70 games, transforming from hitless wonders to merely hitless. They are the saddest of all possible lineups: one in desperate need of Ed Kranepool.
As bad as it looks, it could've been worse. Doc White wasn't a bad hitter, for a pitcher. (Or for a 1910 White Sox for that matter.) If Fred Olmstead (.154 average) or Irv Young (.114) had their turn that day, it would've been even more embarrassing.
It's worth noting this was one of the last games for Hall of Famer Addie Joss. He suffered from a terminal illness that not only ended his career but killed him within a year of this game. This lineup couldn't even get a hit off a dying man. Had this lineup faced Joss a year later, it might've been an even match.
References and Resources
Coberly, Rich. The No-Hit Hall of Fame: No-Hitters of the Twentieth Century. Newport Beach, Calif: Triple Play Productions, 1985.
The Play Index at baseball-reference.com gave me a list of no-hitters since 1986 as well as access to their box scores.
ProQuest came in handy for the nineteenth century no-hitter listed.
History instructor by day, statnerd by night, Chris Jaffe leads one of the most exciting double lives imaginable; with the exception of every other double life possible to imagine. Despite his lack of comic-book-hero-worthiness, Chris enjoys farting around with this stuff. His new book, Evaluating Baseball's Managers is available for pre-order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.
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Clone Wars: Jacoby Ellsbury and Juan Pierre
by Troy PattersonJune 29, 2009
Check out more work from Troy at RotoSavants. You can contact him with questions or recommendations email me
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THT Dartboard: Week Twelve
by Matthew CarruthJune 29, 2009
Dartboard
Divisional Picture
Dartboard
Welcome to The Hardball Times Dartboard, our weekly attempt to rank all the teams in baseball. The Dartboard Factor is how many wins a team would be expected to have at the end of the season if it played a neutral schedule. Next to that, you'll find the Dartboard Factor from the previous week. An explanation of our method can be found here.
#1 Los Angeles Dodgers (Dartboard Factor = 103, 103): Andre Ethier jumps out against the Mariners in the weekend series opener with a three home run effort, but the Dodgers still end up dropping the series at home. With Colorado and San Francisco surging, getting Manny Ramirez back is becoming more needed.
#2 Boston Red Sox (Dartboard Factor = 97, 95): Three more home runs for David Ortiz, a welcome sign in Beantown, nearly equaled that of the entire rest of the team.
#3 New York Yankees (Dartboard Factor = 93, 92): Some signs of recovery from Chien-Ming Wang and Alex Rodriguez responds with a 1.055 OPS on the week and a pair of home runs.
#4 Tampa Bay Rays (Dartboard Factor = 93, 90): David Price still has some work left to develop. On the good side, B.J. Upton lead the Rays with a whopping five doubles and threw in four walks and dinger to boot.
#5 Toronto Blue Jays (Dartboard Factor = 91, 90): Big weeks from Brian Tallet (seven Ks, one BB over 6 IPs) and Ricky Romero (13 Ks, four BBs over 14 IPs) neither of whom allowed a home run. Adam Lind had a nice week at the plate walking seven times to just one punch out.
#6 Los Angeles Angels (Dartboard Factor = 89, 89): No regular exceeded a .500 slugging percentage on the week and the starting rotation and bullpen were both merely average. Yet the Angels manage to hold on and now have usurped the struggling Rangers for the AL West lead.
#7 Detroit Tigers (Dartboard Factor = 88, 84): A thoroughly run of the mill week for the Tigers' pitching staff coupled with a good week from the offense to boost the Tigers up in the AL Central.
#8 Texas Rangers (Dartboard Factor = 88, 88): Another poor week for the Rangers' offense highlighted by Brandon Boggs. Boggs came to the plate 10 times this week and never reached base, striking out a whopping six times.
#9 Colorado Rockies (Dartboard Factor = 86, 84): The second highest rated National League team, the Rockies have avoided a drop off after the end of their remarkable winning streak. Seth Smith needs to find more at bats.
#10 Minnesota Twins (Dartboard Factor = 86, 85): Joe Crede and Michael Cuddyer help cover for poor weeks from the Mauer/Morneau work horses.
#11 St Louis Cardinals (Dartboard Factor = 85, 86): Trading Chris Perez and what is being quoted as a "significant" PTBNL for Mark DeRosa and then not using him to supplant the abonimanable Skip Schumaker at second base? I'm confused.
#12 New York Mets (Dartboard Factor = 83, 86): Just four home runs as a team for the Mets this week and not much offense overall. Mike Pelfrey struck out seven, walked just two and kept 59% of his batted balls on the ground and yet was tagged with eight runs in ten innings.
#13 Chicago Cubs (Dartboard Factor = 82, 83): A touch of the long ball strikes the Cubs starting pitchers this week with eight allowed over 43.2 innings.
#14 Milwaukee Brewers (Dartboard Factor = 82, 84): Five walks, a pair of doubles and an absolute steal of catch this week for Mike Cameron. Par for the course for one of the most under heralded stars of the past decade.
#15 Seattle Mariners (Dartboard Factor = 81, 79): Welcome back, King Felix Hernandez. On the hitting side, Ichiro Suzuki continues to do it all with another 16 hits this week in 27 at bats.
#16 Florida Marlins (Dartboard Factor = 79, 75): Hanley Ramirez , .400/.464/1.000 for the week, good for a .580 wOBA and roughly six runs over average.
#17 Philadelphia Phillies (Dartboard Factor = 78, 83): The bats went deathly quiet this week, notably Carlos Ruiz (.333 OPS), Eric Bruntlett (never reached base in 12 PAs), and Jimmy Rollings (never reached base in 13 PAs).
#18 San Francisco Giants (Dartboard Factor = 78, 77): Pablo Sandoval launches three home runs and four doubles and draws four walks as well leading to a 1.500 OPS on the week. Tim Lincecum with a ho-hum nine-inning, 12-strikeout gem.
#19 Chicago White Sox (Dartboard Factor = 77, 73): Chris Getz came to bat 21 times this week and reached base just twice, both via walk. Lucky for Chicago, a big week from Jermaine Dye, with six extra base hits, help overcome Getz's performance.
#20 Atlanta Braves (Dartboard Factor = 76, 78): Rough outing for Derek Lowe with three walks, no strikeouts and a home run allowed in three innings.
#21 Pittsburgh Pirates (Dartboard Factor = 75, 75): Jack Wilson (22 PAs) and Nyger Morgan (22 PAs) combined to strike out zero times this past week. Along the way they netted 12 singles, two doubles, two home runs and five walks.
#22 Cincinnati Reds (Dartboard Factor = 74, 78): A dreadful week for the Reds' starting rotation. 31 runs allowed, and nine home runs, over just 32 innings pitched. At least Jonny Gomes provided some offense with his .577 OBP and .700 SLG.
#23 Cleveland Indians (Dartboard Factor = 74, 75): Tomo Ohka continues his not so splendid MLB return with a four inning, four walk performance. A week after hitting three home runs, Luis Valbuena puts up a .136/.136/.182 line.
#24 Baltimore Orioles (Dartboard Factor = 73, 72): A good week for George Sherrill out of the Oriole pen as he struck out two and of the eight balls in paly that he allowed, four were on the ground and three were infield pop ups.
#25 Houston Astros (Dartboard Factor = 72, 71): 1.342 OPS on the week from Lance Berkman paced the offense and some solid work on the mound give the Astros a slight boost this week.
#26 Kansas City Royals (Dartboard Factor = 72, 73): Zack Greinke continues to steamroll through baseball, but Gil Meche took a big step back this week with five walks, four home runs and 13 total runs allowed over 8.1 innings.
#27 Oakland Athletics (Dartboard Factor = 72, 72): The entire Oakland offense hit three home runs on the week, two from Kurt Suzuki and one from Jason Giambi. Trevor Cahill allowed five all by himself in just 10.2 innings of work.
#28 Arizona Diamondbacks (Dartboard Factor = 71, 74): Esmerling Vasquez had a miserable week, walking two and allowing a pair of home runs over his 2.2 innings.
#29 San Diego Padres (Dartboard Factor = 69, 71): Kevin Correia strikes out 16, nine looking, over his two starts this week and at one point between his starts from June 10th to June 21st had a streak going of 52 consecutive batters pitched to without pitching from the stretch.
#30 Washington Nationals (Dartboard Factor = 57, 58): Felt the need to get rid of Ryan Langerhans, a terrific defensive outfielder sporting a .381 wOBA in Triple-A Syracuse this season for Mike Morse, a terrible defensive everything with roughly the same offensive output.
Divisional Picture
The playoff picture takes the above ranking and reforms the teams back into their leagues and divisions including the wild card. This is in no ways a prediction, this is an assessment of how teams have played so far this season, not how each team is going to play.
AL EAST
Red Sox - 97
Yankees - 93
Rays - 93
Blue Jays - 91
Orioles - 73
AL CENTRAL
Tigers - 88
Twins - 86
White Sox - 77
Indians - 74
Royals - 72
AL WEST
Angels - 89
Rangers - 88
Mariners - 81
Athletics - 72
NL EAST
Mets - 83
Marlins - 79
Phillies - 78
Braves - 76
Nationals - 57
NL CENTRAL
Cardinals - 85
Cubs - 82
Brewers - 82
Pirates - 75
Reds - 74
Astros - 72
NL WEST
Dodgers - 103
Rockies - 86
Giants - 78
Diamondbacks - 71
Padres - 69
Matthew Carruth is an editor for The Hardball Times. He welcomes any and all sorts of communication at his email.
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And That Happened
by Craig CalcaterraJune 29, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Valuing the intentional walk
by Peter JensenJune 28, 2009
When he was ten, Peter caught a foul ball hit by Ted Williams at Griffiths Stadium. He keeps hoping, but so far life hasn't gotten any better than that.
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Bullpen usage chart
by Dave StudemanJune 28, 2009
Dave is the manager of the Baseball Graphs website.. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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Citi Field’s new dimensions
by Dave StudemanJune 28, 2009
Dave is the manager of the Baseball Graphs website.. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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THT Daily: Ninth inning comebacks
by Dave StudemanJune 28, 2009
Major League News for June 28
Player News
Yesterday’s Results
Today’s Games
Standings
Top Minor League Performances
You can always find the most recent THT Daily at http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/content/thtdaily/
Player News
Player Headlines are courtesy of RotoworldCardinals acquired utilityman Mark DeRosa for RHP Chris Perez and a player to be named later.
The Cardinals scored a nice one here. While getting back at the division rival Cubs by adding a Chicago fan-favorite, the Birds also scooped up a versatile position player that can slide in at third base or play the outfield. On top of his jack-of-all-trades defensive abilities, the 34-year-old was batting a solid .270/.342/.457 with 13 home runs and 50 RBI in 278 at-bats for the Indians. He'll be in St. Louis Sunday.
Homer Bailey allowed three earned runs on three hits and seven walks Saturday in his return to the Reds' starting rotation.
A better offense would have really hammered him. Bailey is up to his same old tricks, putting up great numbers at the Triple-A level only to have them nullified once he reaches the bigs. We wouldn't trust him -- or at least not until he does something positive at the major league level.
A.J. Burnett fanned 10 over seven innings and combined with two relievers on a one-hit shutout of the Mets on Saturday.
Alex Cora's sixth-inning single broke up the no-hit bid. Burnett walked three and threw 108 pitches in his seven innings. Brian Bruney and David Robertson went on to finish up the 5-0 game. Burnett also pitched seven scoreless innings against the Mets on June 14. He's awfully inconsistent, but he's on a nice run now and it could last for a while.
Gordon Beckham hit a walk-off RBI single in the bottom of the ninth inning Saturday as the White Sox took down the Cubs 8-7.
Beckham struggled out of the gate upon his promoted in early June, and is still having trouble putting it all together. He finished 2-for-5 with a run scored Saturday on top of the ninth inning heroics, but it's becoming clear that he might not be a fantasy asset until 2010 or 2011.
Adrian Beltre has decided to undergo surgery next week to remove the bone chips from his right shoulder.
The exact date hasn't been decided, but he'll be out up to eight weeks once he goes under the knife. Beltre has been trying to play through the discomfort. "It would be different if I was helping the team, but I'm not," he said Saturday. The procedure, and its required rehab time, make the third baseman virtually untradeable.
Tim Wakefield hurled six shutout innings Saturday as the Red Sox captured a 1-0 victory against the Braves.
Wakefield continued his dominance on Saturday afternoon in Atlanta, surrendering only three hits and one walk. He fanned just a single batter, but fantasy owners already know what to expect from Wakefield in the strikeout department. The veteran is now 10-3 on the season with a 4.18 ERA and a 1.36 WHIP.
Albert Pujols was 2-for-2 with a pair of two-run homers in a win over the Twins on Saturday afternoon.
He also walked twice in the 5-3 win. Pujols now has 29 multi-homer games in his career, including six this season. El Hombre leads the majors with 28 bombs and 74 RBI.
J.A. Happ threw his first career complete game shutout against the Blue Jays on Saturday afternoon.
Happ needed exactly 100 pitches to do it. He gave up just five hits -- four of them singles -- while striking out four and not issuing a walk. The rookie southpaw now has a perfect 5-0 record to go along with a 3.00 ERA and 1.23 WHIP. The complete game effort broke a three game losing streak for the Phillies. Happ will face the division-rival Mets in his next start.
Yesterday’s Results
For the full scoop regarding yesterday's games, read "And That Happened" at Shysterball.American League BAL 6 WAS 3 (Recap and Boxscore) TB 3 FLA 2 (Recap and Boxscore) PHI 10 TOR 0 (Recap and Boxscore) CHA 8 CHN 7 (Recap and Boxscore) CIN 7 CLE 3 (Recap and Boxscore) COL 11 OAK 9 (Recap and Boxscore) SD 7 TEX 3 (Recap and Boxscore) National League BOS 1 ATL 0 (Recap and Boxscore) NYA 5 NYN 0 (Recap and Boxscore) HOU 8 DET 1 (Recap and Boxscore) MIL 7 SF 6 (Recap and Boxscore) PIT 6 KC 2 (Recap and Boxscore) STL 5 MIN 3 (Recap and Boxscore) LAA 2 ARI 1 (Recap and Boxscore) SEA 5 LAN 1 (Recap and Boxscore)Check out Fangraphs' scoreboard to see all the games in action.
Today’s Games
National League --------------- San Francisco Giants at Milwaukee Brewers, 2:05 PM (L) Jonathan Sanchez (2-8) vs. (R) Jeff Suppan (5-5) Inter-League ------------ Cincinnati Reds at Cleveland Indians, 1:05 PM (R) Micah Owings (4-8) vs. (L) David Huff (3-2) Philadelphia Phillies at Toronto Blue Jays, 1:07 PM (L) Jamie Moyer (5-6) vs. (L) Brian Tallet (5-4) Washington Nationals at Baltimore Orioles, 1:35 PM (L) John Lannan (4-5) vs. (R) David Hernandez (1-1) Kansas City Royals at Pittsburgh Pirates, 1:35 PM (R) Zack Greinke (9-3) vs. (R) Charlie Morton (0-0) Boston Red Sox at Atlanta Braves, 1:35 PM (R) Brad Penny (6-2) vs. (R) Tommy Hanson (3-0) Florida Marlins at Tampa Bay Rays, 1:38 PM (L) Andrew Miller (2-3) vs. (L) David Price (1-2) Detroit Tigers at Houston Astros, 2:05 PM (R) Edwin Jackson (6-4) vs. (R) Russ Ortiz (3-3) Chicago Cubs at Chicago White Sox, 2:05 PM (R) Carlos Zambrano (4-2) vs. (L) John Danks (5-6) Minnesota Twins at St. Louis Cardinals, 2:15 PM (L) Francisco Liriano (3-8) vs. (R) Joel Pineiro (6-8) Colorado Rockies at Oakland Athletics, 4:05 PM (R) Aaron Cook (7-3) vs. (R) Vin Mazzaro (2-2) LA Angels of Anaheim at Arizona Diamondbacks, 4:10 PM (R) Matt Palmer (6-1) vs. (R) Max Scherzer (5-4) Seattle Mariners at Los Angeles Dodgers, 4:10 PM (L) Garrett Olson (2-2) vs. (R) Hiroki Kuroda (2-3) New York Yankees at New York Mets, 8:05 PM (R) Chien-Ming Wang (0-6) vs. (R) Livan Hernandez (5-2) San Diego Padres at Texas Rangers, 8:05 PM (R) Chad Gaudin (3-6) vs. (L) Matt Harrison (4-5)
Standings
The graphics next to each team are called "sparklines.” They depict each team’s performance over the last month. Each "up" bar is a victory and a "down" bar is a loss. There are horizontal lines for home games and red bars represent games decided by two runs or less. "PWins" is short for Projected Wins, based on each team’s Run Differential, and is often a better measure of a team’s true strength. Other team graphs and stats can be found on our Team Page.American League East Pwins Diff BOS 46 28 .622 0.0 44 2NYA 42 32 .568 4.0 42 0
TB 41 35 .539 6.0 46 -5
TOR 41 35 .539 6.0 42 -1
BAL 34 40 .459 12.0 32 2
American League Central DET 41 33 .554 0.0 40 1
MIN 38 38 .500 4.0 40 -2
CHA 36 38 .486 5.0 35 1
KC 31 42 .425 9.5 30 1
CLE 31 45 .408 11.0 36 -5
American League West LAA 40 32 .556 0.0 37 3
TEX 40 33 .548 0.5 38 2
SEA 38 36 .514 3.0 35 3
OAK 31 42 .425 9.5 32 -1
National League East Pwins Diff PHI 38 34 .528 0.0 38 0
NYN 37 36 .507 1.5 36 1
FLA 38 38 .500 2.0 36 2
ATL 34 40 .459 5.0 35 -1
WAS 21 51 .292 17.0 27 -6
National League Central MIL 40 34 .541 0.0 38 2
STL 41 35 .539 0.0 41 0
CIN 36 37 .493 3.5 35 1
CHN 35 36 .493 3.5 36 -1
HOU 35 37 .486 4.0 33 2
PIT 35 39 .473 5.0 38 -3
National League West LAN 48 27 .640 0.0 46 2
SF 39 34 .534 8.0 37 2
COL 39 35 .527 8.5 40 -1
SD 32 41 .438 15.0 28 4
ARI 30 45 .400 18.0 33 -3
Top Minor League Games
The following list, provided by First Inning, includes the top minor league batting (based on Runs Created) and pitching (based on Game Score) performances from yesterday.ORG LVL PLAYER AB H 2B 3B HR BB SO Notes SF A+ Roger Kieschnick.. 4 3 1 0 2 1 0 6 RBI ! SEA A+ Alex Liddi........ 4 3 0 0 2 1 0 5 RBI ! STL AAA Brett Wallace..... 4 3 1 0 1 0 0 LAA AAA Howie Kendrick.... 5 3 0 1 1 0 0 3 R CHC A Josh Vitters...... 6 3 0 0 1 0 2 TB AAA Matthew Joyce..... 5 2 2 0 0 0 1 HOU AAA Justin Towles..... 4 3 2 0 0 0 1 3 R OAK AAA Aaron Cunningham.. 3 2 0 0 1 2 0 3 R SEA AAA Jeff Clement...... 4 2 1 0 1 0 2 LA A A. Delmonico...... 6 2 2 0 0 0 2 MIL A Brett Lawrie...... 6 2 2 0 0 0 1 CHC A+ Brandon Guyer..... 5 2 1 1 0 0 1 ORG LVL PLAYER IP H R ER SO BB HR Notes PIT AAA Tom Gorzelanny.... 5 4 2 0 12 2 0 LA A+ Steven Johnson.... 7 3 0 0 7 1 0 BOS A+ Casey Kelly....... 7 1 0 0 4 0 0 12 GB MIL A Cody Scarpetta.... 5 4 0 0 6 0 0 HOU A+ C. Hicks.......... 7 4 1 1 5 1 0 TB AA J. Hellickson..... 5 4 2 2 6 1 0 DET A+ Mauricio Robles... 6 6 4 4 10 1 2 BOS AAA Clay Buchholz..... 6 4 2 1 6 2 0 TB A Matthew Moore..... 5 4 0 0 7 2 0 LAA AAA Trevor Bell....... 7 4 1 1 4 1 0 CIN A Matthew Fairel.... 6 4 2 2 6 2 1 BAL AA Brian Matusz...... 5 3 1 1 5 3 0 9 GB
| First Inning's Major and Minor League Daily Reports: |
Dave is the manager of the Baseball Graphs website.. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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This year’s drama
by Dave StudemanJune 27, 2009
Dave is the manager of the Baseball Graphs website.. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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THT Daily: into the Ethier
by Dave StudemanJune 27, 2009
Major League News for June 27
Player News
Yesterday’s Results
Today’s Games
Standings
Top Minor League Performances
You can always find the most recent THT Daily at http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/content/thtdaily/
Player News
Player Headlines are courtesy of RotoworldAndre Ethier had his first ever three-homer game and drove in six runs Friday to lead the Dodgers to an 8-2 win over the Mariners.
Incredibly, it's Ethier's fifth multihomer game of the season. He has 14 homers, but he's homered in just eight of the 72 games in which he's played. He had just one multihomer game in his career prior to this season. With the six RBI, he's now tied for James Loney for the Dodger lead at 49. Casey Blake is one behind.
Josh Beckett improved to 9-3 on the season with seven shutout innings in a 4-1 win over the Braves on Friday night.
Figuring in his complete game shutout against the Braves last time out, that makes 16 consecutive scoreless innings against them. Beckett was brilliant, scattering just six hits while striking out six and not issuing a walk. He has a solid 94/32 K/BB ratio in 98 1/3 innings this season. His ERA is down to 3.48 -- it's lowest point since his second start of the year. Beckett has won seven out of his last eight decisions.
Ricky Romero didn't allow a hit over the first six innings, but threw seven scoreless in a 6-0 win over the Phillies on Friday night.
Chase Utley lined a single to right to break up the no-hit bid to lead off the seventh inning. Romero finished allowing just two hits while fanning seven and walking one. The 24-year-old southpaw has allowed three runs or less in five straight starts to bring his ERA down to 3.20 in the win. Romero has a pretty nice 54/20 K/BB ratio in 64 2/3 innings this season. He's worth a start in mixed leagues right now.
According to the New York Post, Xavier Nady will require Tommy John surgery to repair his ailing right elbow and is done for the season.
Nady is also questionable for most of 2010. "It's disappointing," said Yankees manager Joe Girardi. "I am more disappointed for him than I am the club. You would love to have him back. He has put a lot of time into this. I know how bad he wants to play." He's a free agent after this season, so it's probably safe to assume his time with the Yankees is up.
Aramis Ramirez (shoulder) is hoping to begin a rehab assignment soon.
Ramirez felt strong enough to take batting practice with the rest of his teammates at U.S. Cellular Field on Friday. "I think this is the final step in his rehab," Cubs manager Lou Piniella said. "I think he'll need three or four games, and maybe [be the designated hitter once], third base a few times. Then we'll get him back in our lineup." He should return before the All-Star break
Roy Halladay (groin) tossed a 50-pitch bullpen session Friday and afterward declared himself ready to go.
Doc said his groin discomfort is "completely gone." Barring some unforeseen setback, he'll be activated from the disabled list Monday to start against the Rays. He'll return to a 10-1 record, a 2.53 ERA and a 1.04 WHIP.
The Mets scratched John Maine from his Saturday rehab start.
Maine had a cortisone shot, and said he expects to be back after the All-Star break, though how soon remains to be seen. None of the estimates have come to pass so far, and he'll be dealing with pain regardless, so don't expect a healthy Maine for a while.
Yesterday’s Results
For the full scoop regarding yesterday's games, read "And That Happened" at Shysterball.American League BAL 11 WAS 1 (Recap and Boxscore) TB 7 FLA 3 (Recap and Boxscore) TOR 6 PHI 1 (Recap and Boxscore) CHN 5 CHA 4 (Recap and Boxscore) CLE 9 CIN 2 (Recap and Boxscore) COL 4 OAK 2 (Recap and Boxscore) TEX 12 SD 2 (Recap and Boxscore) National League BOS 4 ATL 1 (Recap and Boxscore) NYA 9 NYN 1 (Recap and Boxscore) HOU 5 DET 4 (Recap and Boxscore) MIL 5 SF 1 (Recap and Boxscore) PIT 5 KC 3 (Recap and Boxscore) MIN 3 STL 1 (Recap and Boxscore) LAA 12 ARI 3 (Recap and Boxscore) LAN 8 SEA 2 (Recap and Boxscore)Check out Fangraphs' scoreboard to see all the games in action.
Today’s Games
National League --------------- San Francisco Giants at Milwaukee Brewers, 7:05 PM (L) Barry Zito (4-7) vs. (R) Seth McClung (3-1) Inter-League ------------ Philadelphia Phillies at Toronto Blue Jays, 1:07 PM (L) J.A. Happ (4-0) vs. (L) Brad Mills (0-0) Minnesota Twins at St. Louis Cardinals, 1:10 PM (R) Kevin Slowey (10-2) vs. (R) Todd Wellemeyer (6-7) Chicago Cubs at Chicago White Sox, 4:05 PM (R) Ryan Dempster (4-5) vs. (L) Mark Buehrle (7-2) LA Angels of Anaheim at Arizona Diamondbacks, 4:10 PM (R) John Lackey (2-3) vs. (L) Doug Davis (3-8) Boston Red Sox at Atlanta Braves, 4:10 PM (R) Tim Wakefield (9-3) vs. (R) Javier Vazquez (5-6) Cincinnati Reds at Cleveland Indians, 7:05 PM (R) Homer Bailey (0-0) vs. (R) Tomo Ohka (0-1) Detroit Tigers at Houston Astros, 7:05 PM (R) Alfredo Figaro (1-0) vs. (R) Felipe Paulino (1-4) Washington Nationals at Baltimore Orioles, 7:05 PM (R) Shairon Martis (5-2) vs. (R) Jeremy Guthrie (5-7) Kansas City Royals at Pittsburgh Pirates, 7:05 PM (L) Bruce Chen (0-0) vs. (L) Paul Maholm (4-4) Florida Marlins at Tampa Bay Rays, 7:08 PM (R) Chris Volstad (5-7) vs. (R) Jeff Niemann (6-4) New York Yankees at New York Mets, 7:10 PM (R) A.J. Burnett (5-4) vs. (R) Tim Redding (1-2) San Diego Padres at Texas Rangers, 8:05 PM (R) Kevin Correia (4-5) vs. (L) Derek Holland (1-4) Colorado Rockies at Oakland Athletics, 9:05 PM (L) Jorge De La Rosa (3-7) vs. (R) Trevor Cahill (5-5) Seattle Mariners at Los Angeles Dodgers, 10:10 PM (R) Felix Hernandez (7-3) vs. (L) Eric Milton (2-0)
Standings
The graphics next to each team are called "sparklines.” They depict each team’s performance over the last month. Each "up" bar is a victory and a "down" bar is a loss. There are horizontal lines for home games and red bars represent games decided by two runs or less. "PWins" is short for Projected Wins, based on each team’s Run Differential, and is often a better measure of a team’s true strength. Other team graphs and stats can be found on our Team Page.American League East Pwins Diff BOS 45 28 .616 0.0 43 2NYA 41 32 .562 4.0 41 0
TOR 41 34 .547 5.0 43 -2
TB 40 35 .533 6.0 45 -5
BAL 33 40 .452 12.0 32 1
American League Central DET 41 32 .562 0.0 40 1
MIN 38 37 .507 4.0 40 -2
CHA 35 38 .479 6.0 34 1
KC 31 41 .431 9.5 30 1
CLE 31 44 .413 11.0 36 -5
American League West TEX 40 32 .556 0.0 38 2
LAA 39 32 .549 0.5 37 2
SEA 37 36 .507 3.5 34 3
OAK 31 41 .431 9.0 32 -1
National League East Pwins Diff PHI 37 34 .521 0.0 37 0
NYN 37 35 .514 0.5 36 1
FLA 38 37 .507 1.0 35 3
ATL 34 39 .466 4.0 34 0
WAS 21 50 .296 16.0 27 -6
National League Central MIL 39 34 .534 0.0 37 2
STL 40 35 .533 0.0 40 0
CHN 35 35 .500 2.5 36 -1
CIN 35 37 .486 3.5 34 1
HOU 34 37 .479 4.0 32 2
PIT 34 39 .466 5.0 37 -3
National League West LAN 48 26 .649 0.0 46 2
SF 39 33 .542 8.0 37 2
COL 38 35 .521 9.5 39 -1
SD 31 41 .431 16.0 27 4
ARI 30 44 .405 18.0 33 -3
Top Minor League Games
The following list, provided by First Inning, includes the top minor league batting (based on Runs Created) and pitching (based on Game Score) performances from yesterday.ORG LVL PLAYER AB H 2B 3B HR BB SO Notes SD AA Cedric Hunter..... 5 4 2 0 0 0 0 3 LD DET AA Alexander Avila... 3 2 1 0 1 1 1 SD A Blake Tekotte..... 4 2 1 0 1 0 0 CHC A+ Starlin Castro.... 4 2 1 1 0 1 0 5 RBI ! KC A+ Mike Moustakas.... 2 2 1 0 0 1 0 3 R SD AA Logan Forsythe.... 4 3 1 0 0 1 1 3 LD NYM A Wilmer Flores..... 4 3 1 0 0 0 0 LA A Kyle Russell...... 4 3 1 0 0 0 1 CHC A Josh Vitters...... 4 2 0 0 1 0 1 BOS A+ Tim Federowicz.... 5 3 1 0 0 0 0 KC A+ J. Giavotella..... 4 2 1 0 0 0 1 LA A+ Pedro Baez........ 4 2 1 0 0 1 0 ORG LVL PLAYER IP H R ER SO BB HR Notes SEA A+ Steven Hensley.... 8 4 1 1 11 1 0 SF A+ Scott Barnes...... 6 5 2 0 10 0 0 MIL A+ Evan Anundsen..... 7 5 3 3 9 2 0 ATL A+ Jacob Thompson.... 7 3 0 0 8 2 0 SF A Eric Surkamp...... 7 5 1 1 7 1 0 MIL A Wily Peralta...... 6 5 2 2 10 1 1 LAA AA Jordan Walden..... 7 6 2 2 6 0 0 CLE A T.J. House........ 6 7 2 1 5 0 0 ARI AAA Bryan Augenstein.. 4 5 2 2 6 0 0 CLE AAA Chuck Lofgren..... 7 10 5 4 5 0 0 WAN AAA Collin Balester... 7 6 3 1 5 2 0 PHI AAA Carlos Carrasco... 6 7 1 1 7 3 0
| First Inning's Major and Minor League Daily Reports: |
Dave is the manager of the Baseball Graphs website.. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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X-Man out
by Paul SingmanJune 26, 2009
Have any questions, comments, compliments, concerns, criticisms, or suggestions? Tell me about them here.
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Great Moments in Self-Promotion
by Craig CalcaterraJune 26, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Sidney Ponson the victim of a cruel hoax
by Craig CalcaterraJune 26, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Great Moments in Notes Columns
by Craig CalcaterraJune 26, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Dead Center Camera
by Craig CalcaterraJune 26, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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The manager bump
by Adam GuttridgeJune 26, 2009
Adam Guttridge is a recent graduate seeking to continue his baseball career. Employment offers can be sent to (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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THT Daily: June 26, 2009
by Matthew CarruthJune 26, 2009
Matthew Carruth is an editor for The Hardball Times. He welcomes any and all sorts of communication at his email.
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My Morning in Exile
by Craig CalcaterraJune 26, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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MLB on Jackson
by Craig CalcaterraJune 26, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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And That Happened
by Craig CalcaterraJune 26, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Waiver Wire: AL
by Rob McQuownJune 26, 2009
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Waiver Wire: NL
by Michael StreetJune 26, 2009
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The WPA Inquirer
by Dave StudemanJune 26, 2009
A few years ago, I wrote an article called The One About Win Probability. It was meant to serve as a reference article, something that writers could easily link to when they wanted to explain WPA to their audience. It's been pretty successful at that—I'm pretty sure it's the most linked-to article in THT history. Several sites, such as Lookout Landing, link to it nearly every day.
But something has always bothered me about that article. I used Chris Shea's Win Expectancy Finder as a hands-on way of demonstrating WPA in action. Chris' application uses historical baseball games to show how win expectancy (another name for win probability) has actually played out during major league games, which is pretty cool.
However, there are some problems with that approach. Most importantly, there are "sample size" issues. For example, there are only 118 games in the dataset (all games from 1977 to 2006) that had a bottom-of-the-ninth situation, with the home team down by one, no outs and runners on the corners. The home team managed to win 76 times in the 118 games (64 percent of the time).
You can also find that the home team won 42 of 62 games (68 percent) in the same situation, but with runners on second and third instead of first and third. That might lead you to say that the WPA value of a stolen base is 4 percent. (68 percent minus 64 percent).
But that wouldn't be quite right. As the following table shows, the "better" win probabilities are 72 percent and 66 percent, for a difference of 6 percent.
| The Situation | Win Probability | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs/Game | Inning | Bases | Outs | Score Diff | Home Team | Visitors | LI |
| 4.50 | Bottom of the ninth | Runners on first and third | 0 | -1 | 0.6610 | 0.3390 | 4.47 |
| 4.50 | Bottom of the ninth | Runners on second and third | 0 | -1 | 0.7237 | 0.2763 | 4.59 |
The Win Probability Added of the second situation is 0.0627
Where did I get this information? From the Hardball Times' newest baseball tool, the WPA Inquirer.
The WPA Inquirer represents a step forward from Chris' Win Expectancy Finder because it is based on the mathematical model behind the best implementations of WPA. When you use math, you don't run into sample size issues. You can feel confident that each situation you investigate is the best interpretation of the WPA model.
You may think that the difference between 4 percent and 6 percent isn't a lot, and you'd be right. Chris' WE Finder is a mighty good tool. But if you were to track an entire game using the data in the WE Finder, you wouldn't finish with a full win allocated to the winning team. That's because there is no continuity between each historical situation—you're pulling data from many different games. If you want something with more precision, use the WPA Inquirer.
Another reason the WPA Inquirer output is "better" is that history isn't free of context. In the above examples, the historical win outcomes for the home team in the bottom of the ninth were actually lower than the theoretical win probability. That's because opposing teams used their best closers in those situations, lowering the home teams' ultimate success. Because the WPA Inquirer is built on straight math, it doesn't assume anything about the opposing team's strategy.
Plus, the WPA Inquirer has a few more bells and whistles. You might have noticed that we included the Leverage Index of the two above situations. Of course, the bottom of the ninth of a one-run game is a very critical situation, with an LI over 4.0 in these cases.
Another feature of the WPA Inquirer is that you can set the run environment. Chris' WE Finder uses data from many years and many ballparks, each with their unique run environment. In the WPA Inquirer, you choose the run environment. As this table shows, it can make a real difference:
| The Situation | Win Probability | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs/Game | Inning | Bases | Outs | Score Diff | Home Team | Visitors | LI |
| 3.00 | Bottom of the ninth | Runner on first | 0 | 0 | 0.6779 | 0.3221 | 3.38 |
| 6.50 | Bottom of the ninth | Runner on first | 0 | 0 | 0.7480 | 0.2520 | 3.00 |
Same critical situation in the bottom of the ninth (no outs, runner on first, tie game), but the home team's win probability is higher (seven points difference) in the higher run-scoring environment because they're more likely to score.
Here's another typical use of the WPA Inquirer, the sacrifice bunt. Most standard analytic tools will tell you that the sacrifice bunt isn't usually a good move, and our new tool is no different. With a runner on first and no outs in the bottom of the ninth, a successful sacrifice actually lowers the home team's chance of winning.
| The Situation | Win Probability | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs/Game | Inning | Bases | Outs | Score Diff | Home Team | Visitors | LI |
| 4.50 | Bottom of the ninth | Runner on first | 0 | 0 | 0.7112 | 0.2888 | 3.19 |
| 4.50 | Bottom of the ninth | Runner on second | 1 | 0 | 0.6981 | 0.3019 | 3.17 |
This is a superficial analysis of the sacrifice bunt, however. James Click did some very thorough analysis of bunting situations at Baseball Prospectus a couple of years ago, and MGL took the sacrifice bunt question even further in The Book. So you can use the WPA Inquirer for this sort of analysis, but don't rely on it very much. The real answer depends on the quality of the batters at the plate and on deck.
Actually, there is (at least) one situation in which the WPA Inquirer does recommend a sacrifice bunt: tie game in the bottom of the ninth, no outs, runner on second:
| The Situation | Win Probability | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs/Game | Inning | Bases | Outs | Score Diff | Home Team | Visitors | LI |
| 4.50 | Bottom of the ninth | Runner on second | 0 | 0 | 0.8105 | 0.1895 | 2.58 |
| 4.50 | Bottom of the ninth | Runner on third | 1 | 0 | 0.8274 | 0.1726 | 4.72 |
The Win Probability Added of the second situation is 0.0169
You can also use the WPA Inquirer to confirm something you already suspected, that sacrifice bunts make more sense in a low-scoring environment. Here's the same situation, but in a low-scoring environment:
| The Situation | Win Probability | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs/Game | Inning | Bases | Outs | Score Diff | Home Team | Visitors | LI |
| 3.00 | Bottom of the ninth | Runner on second | 0 | 0 | 0.7799 | 0.2201 | 2.85 |
| 3.00 | Bottom of the ninth | Runner on third | 1 | 0 | 0.8082 | 0.1918 | 5.43 |
The Win Probability Added of the second situation is 0.0283
As you can see, the WPA of the successful sacrifice bunt has a bigger impact when there are only three runs scored per game instead of 4.5.
Feel free to use the WPA Inquirer to explore the many nuances of WPA. According to WPA, for instance, a one-run home run that gives a visiting team a one-run lead is more important in the ninth inning than the first. Now you can calculate how much more. The first-inning homer is worth about ten WPA points:
| The Situation | Win Probability | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs/Game | Inning | Bases | Outs | Score Diff | Home Team | Visitors | LI |
| 4.50 | Top of the first | Bases empty | 0 | 0 | 0.5000 | 0.5000 | 0.87 |
| 4.50 | Top of the first | Bases empty | 0 | -1 | 0.4018 | 0.5982 | 0.79 |
The Win Probability Added of the second situation is -0.0982
While the same home run, with the same impact on the score, is worth more than three times as much in the ninth inning:
| The Situation | Win Probability | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs/Game | Inning | Bases | Outs | Score Diff | Home Team | Visitors | LI |
| 4.50 | Top of the ninth | Bases empty | 0 | 0 | 0.5000 | 0.5000 | 2.32 |
| 4.50 | Top of the ninth | Bases empty | 0 | -1 | 0.1622 | 0.8378 | 0.66 |
The Win Probability Added of the second situation is -0.3378
You can also use the Inquirer to calculate the impact of different situations on Leverage Index. I like this example: top of the ninth of a tie game at the beginning of the inning vs. having a runner on third and two out. The Win Probability of the two situations are virtually the same, but the Leverage Index of the second one is much higher:
| The Situation | Win Probability | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs/Game | Inning | Bases | Outs | Score Diff | Home Team | Visitors | LI |
| 4.50 | Top of the ninth | Bases empty | 0 | 0 | 0.5000 | 0.5000 | 2.32 |
| 4.50 | Top of the ninth | Runner on third | 2 | 0 | 0.5170 | 0.4830 | 4.40 |
The Win Probability Added of the second situation is 0.017
I'll let you play with the tool yourself now. Here it is. Have fun.
References and Resources
Many thanks to Tangotiger, who donated the tables behind the Inquirer.
Dave is the manager of the Baseball Graphs website.. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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Joel Pineiro’s scorched-earth policy
by Craig BrownJune 26, 2009
By now you’ve heard about Joel Pineiro’s gem he hurled against the New York Mets on Tuesday night at Citi Field in Queens. In his second complete game shutout of the season, (his first coming on May 19 against the Cubs) Pineiro threw just 100 pitches in tossing a ground ball tour-de-force.
Pineiro didn't set any records, although it was the second most GB outs recorded by a starter since Brandon Webb had 23 in 2003 in a game against the Detroit Tigers. That was against a Tigers team that would hit .240/.300/.375, finishing last in the AL in all categories en route to 119 losses.
The Mets, on the other hand, (despite the injuries to Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado) have a decent offense. As a team they’re hitting .280 with a .357 OBP, both marks tops in the NL. They’re scoring 4.7 runs per game, which is second in the league. Their power is down—they’re slugging just .398 since the beginning of June—but with a .277 team average and .342 OBP during that time, they’re still creating opportunities. They’re just having difficulty cashing those opportunities in for runs. (Like I have to point this out to Mets fans.)
So while the Mets of 2009 clearly swing the bats better than the Tigers of 2003, that doesn't mean they're not prone to the occasional clunker at the plate. However, it would be wrong to pin the blame on the outcome of this particular game entirely on their lumber. Pinero located his pitches amazingly well and gave his opposition nothing to hit all evening. It was a perfect storm of a pitcher developing and executing an outstanding game plan, combined with some over-anxious bats. The result wasn’t a perfect game… but it was close.
Let's look at the game as it developed.
Innings 1-3
Pineiro started strong, facing six Mets and getting six ground ball outs in the first two innings. Then, a monsoon interrupted play for about an hour with the Cardinals hitting in the top of the third. Pineiro had thrown only 22 pitches to that point, so it would seem there was never any doubt that Tony LaRussa would bring him back to the mound once the game resumed.
Pineiro isn’t a hard thrower by any stretch of the imagination. As David Golebiewski pointed out at FanGraphs, he’s sacrificed speed for a more pronounced break on his sinking fastball. This year he’s throwing his fastball at an average speed of 88.5 mph, down from the 90.8 mph he threw back in 2007. Not only does he gain movement via his reduction in velocity, it makes him a great candidate to sit out a long rain delay (or inning) and pick up right where he left off.
(His pitch speed graph from his start is courtesy BrooksBaseball.net. The red line at his 23rd pitch of the evening represents his return to the mound after the rain delay.)
The fact that the Mets came up swinging in the bottom of the third certainly helped. Pineiro, despite giving up a single to Luis Castillo (the hardest-hit ground ball to this point), needed only eight pitches to complete the inning.
Below is a graphical representation of where Cardinals fielders picked up the batted ball in each of the first three innings. The most difficult play was the grounder David Murphy hit to shortstop Brendan Ryan, who had to charge the ball hit slightly to his right and make a strong throw to retire the Mets first baseman. The ground ball to center in the third inning was the Castillo five-hopper back up the middle. The ground ball off the mound was the Livan Hernandez sacrifice bunt to push Castillo to second following his single.
Through three innings, Pineiro faced 10 hitters and all 10 put the ball on the ground.
Innings 4-6
In the bottom of the fourth, Pineiro induced only two ground balls because he recorded the second out of the inning when David Wright swung and missed an 0-2 change-up that fell out of the strike zone. It was one of only two times all evening a Mets batter swung and missed a Pineiro pitch. Read that again. Of the 100 pitches Pineiro threw in this game, only twice did the Mets completely miss when swinging the bat. Broken down even further, Pineiro threw 62 strikes. Of those, 24 were called strikes by home plate umpire Jerry Meals, 36 were offered at and either fouled off or put into play and then there were those two that were completely missed.
In the fifth inning, the first Mets hitter got the ball in the air. Omir Santos hit a breaking ball that hung in the zone (one of the rare hangers Pineiro threw all night) and lofted a harmless fly to center. The location was key for Pineiro all evening. That’s obvious, but consider that no pitcher is perfect in that he can spot his pitches in the exact location he would like every time the ball leaves his hand. So even on a night when the sinking action on his fastball is working marvelously, there will still be opportunities for the hitters to pounce on a mistake.
Except Pineiro didn’t make a mistake all evening. The pitches he threw outside the strike zone were away from left-handed hitters and down to right-handed hitters, and they were far enough out of the zone that there was no way a hitter could make solid contact. He didn’t leave any pitches in the hitter’s wheelhouse. The chart at left (again, courtesy of BrooksBaseball.net) plots all 100 of Pineiro's pitches. It illustrates how well he was locating all evening. The pitches he left out of the strike zone (whether on purpose or not) were in such that if the Mets hitters were swinging (and they were swinging) there was no way they were going to make solid contact. Pineiro was pitching on his terms all night long.
Pineiro faltered a bit in the sixth, walking Castillo on six pitches to lead off the inning. Not only was it Pineiro’s first walk of the night, it was the first time he went to a three-ball count. When Mets manager Jerry Manuel decided to hit-and-run with his pitcher at the plate, Hernandez swung and missed (there’s the only other miss) on a pitch down in the zone and Castillo was thrown out by Yadier Molina. The fly out behind second base was on another pitch that was low, but Alex Cora dropped the bat head and managed a feeble pop.
Through six innings, Pineiro had faced 19 hitters, thrown 61 pitches and retired 14 on ground balls.
Innings 7-9
One pitch that got away from Pineiro was an 86 mph fastball that drilled Wright in the shoulder with one out in the seventh. Then he threw two almost identical fastballs to Fernando Tatis to get a double play and got out of the inning by throwing only eight pitches. That was tied for his second most effective inning of the night behind the seven-pitch effort in the fourth.
The hardest-hit ball of the evening for the Mets came in the ninth inning with one out when pinch-hitter Jeremy Reed lined a change-up into center field. He advanced to second on a weak Cora ground out and was stranded when Murphy ended the game with… another ground out.
When a pitcher is inducing a high rate of ground balls, it’s obviously imperative that he have a stout defense backing him up on the infield. The Cardinals' team UZR is just 1.1, which makes their team defense decidedly average. On the infield, the great Albert Pujols is masterful with the glove at first. Up the middle Skip Schumaker is probably a little below average at second but Ryan covers more than his share of ground at short. Then you have Khalil Green, a decidedly average shortstop who was making only the fifth start of his major league career at third. The defense might have been a factor if any Met had been able to square up and drive the ball. Instead, almost all the ground outs were four-hoppers, hit within one or two steps of where the fielders were positioned, that could only be considered routine.
Before this yea,r if you had 10 guesses as to who would throw 20 or more ground ball outs in a game, there’s no way you would have chosen Pineiro. In fact, he’s always been more of a flyball pitcher, although barely. While he’s never trended more to the groundball side, his career 0.89 GB/FB ratio reveals a fairly even split. His 0.99 GB/FB ratio from 2007 was the closest he’s ever come to the groundball side in his nine previous seasons. This year however, that’s all changed. After Tuesday’s gem, his ratio currently stands at 1.59. And his 2.3 ground out to fly out ratio is likewise the highest of his career. Here's how Pineiro has evolved over the last three seasons:
Year SO% BB% XBH% GB/FB AO/FO Contact % 2007 14.3 6.2 10.7 0.99 1.32 84 2008 12.6 5.4 11.5 0.92 1.69 84 2009 10.7 3.2 8.3 1.59 2.31 87 Career 14.7 7 8.6 0.89 1.27 83
It would seem he's mastered the art of the sinking fastball and is allowing hitters to make contact, put the ball on the ground and basically get themselves out. He's striking out hitters at a career low rate, yet his walk rate is at a career low as well. However his 3.33 K/BB ratio is the best of his career. His infield defense isn't spectacular, but it's not going to cost him many runs either. He's kept hitters off balance all season, allowing just two home runs in 92 innings on the way to a 3.83 xFIP, which ranks him 11th among NL starters.
It's taken Pineiro 10 years, but it looks like he's discovered a formula for success. Defying the cliche, I guess you can teach an old pitcher new tricks.
Pineiro's June 23 start by the numbers
29 Batters faced
22 Ground balls
3 Fly balls
1 Line drive
1 Strikeout
1 Walk
1 HBP
2 Swinging strikes
2 Singles
3 3-ball counts
4 The number of pitches thrown to Fernando Tatis in three plate appearances.
83 Game Score
References and Resources
Baseball Reference and Brooks Baseball provided the bulk of info for this article. Plus, I discovered while researching this piece that these two dynamos have combined forces—if you click on the pitch count on a pitcher's Game Log at BR, it will take you to the corresponding page at Brooks Baseball with the PITCHf/x info in all its glory. A tip of the cap also goes to MLB.tv with its DVR capabilities on archived games.
Craig writes about the Royals at Royals Authority. The Royals Authority 2009 Annual, featuring detailed player profiles and a complete look at the minor leagues is now on sale. He welcomes all questions and comments via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
This annotated week in baseball history: June 21-June 27, 1957
by Richard BarbieriJune 26, 2009
On June 24, 1957, Doug Jones was born. Jones would make his major league debut in 1982 and last through the 2000 season. During that time he not only would have a good career, but also mark a sea change in pitching roles.
Time for a confession: It was never exactly clear to me who Doug Jones was. Part of this is that he was at the end of his career by the time I started following baseball. Jones spent 16 years in the majors—debuting in 1982; this will be relevant later—but spent only six during the period I was really aware of baseball.
Moreover, while Jones was a sometime great reliever (more on this anon) he pitched largely for non-competitive, small-market teams. He also placed in the top 10 in saves eight times, but never led the league.
Compounding matters, right as I became aware of baseball, Doug Johns debuted in Oakland, the team with which Jones would finish his career, which only served to confuse me more.
Even writing this now, I can only sort of picture Jones. I’m think he was a change-up guy, but I’m pretty sure—and a Google image search confirms—that my mental image of Doug Jones is actually Paul Assenmacher.
Sorry, Doug.
In any event, I really ought to know more about Jones, because he was a pretty good pitcher for a pretty long time. He threw more than 1,100 innings, which is a lot for a guy with four career starts. He also did it with a 129 career ERA+, better than Goose Gossage.
While Jones was a strong pitcher on career numbers, he had an odd knack for mixing miserable seasons in with his best ones. After a miserable cup of coffee in 1982, Jones came up for good in 1986.
His first five seasons, Jones averaged 24 saves, including a career high 43 in 1990, with a 160 ERA+. He made the All-Star team every year 1988-1990.
He then put up a 5.54 ERA stinkbomb in 1991. At age 34 and a free agent, Jones was not taken back by the Indians, instead signing with Houston, where he promptly posted a 1.85 ERA.
The next year, he once again was bad, if not quite to 1991 levels, and Houston dealt him to the Phillies for Mitch Williams.
Jones would continue his pattern of alternating good years with ones of varying degrees of mediocrity; his 1997 season (231 ERA+, 80 innings at age 40) was probably his best. Throughout his career Jones relied on a change-up, or rather a slow change-up, and a slower one, and a slowest one. And then an even slower slowest.
He retired after his age 43 season, despite still being a relatively effective reliever, but perhaps he was content to be the oldest player in the league for only one season.
More than his own personal accomplishments, Doug Jones was a man for his time. The story of the “closer” and how Tony LaRussa and Dennis Eckersley created the modern sense of that role is an old one. But maybe no pitcher betters illustrates this than Jones.
Up to—but not including—Jones’ debut 1982 season, the career leader in saves was Rollie Fingers, with 272. Fingers, Sparky Lyle and Hoyt Wilhelm were the only pitchers with more than 200 saves, and just 34 pitchers had 100 or more. That season, Fingers would be the first pitcher to reach 300 saves.
Through the 1981 season, the single-season record for saves was held by John Hiller, who had 38 in 1973. Incredibly, by modern standards, that was one of only seven seasons of more than 35 saves in the entire history of baseball.
By the time Jones retired in 2000, the saves leader board was radically different. Thirteen players had now accumulated 300 or more saves, and two had more than 400. Now, of course, Trevor Hoffman has more than 500 and, barring injury, Mariano Rivera should join him by the All-Star break.
Single season totals also zoomed. After never having happened in the whole history of baseball prior to Jones’ career, the period saw 56 seasons of 40 or more saves, including 23 of 45 or more, and five of 50 or more. Since becoming a full-time closer, Francisco Rodriguez has four straight years of 40 or more saves, an unfathomable number just 30 years ago.
Even more than the raw numbers, Jones’ career covered a remarkable switch in the way a team’s best reliever was used. Prior to 1982, the fewest innings a pitcher had thrown in a 30-save season was 84.2, by Wayne Granger. Of the 22 seasons with 30 or more saves, only five—less than a quarter—were under 100 innings, and the median total was more than 115.
Over the course of Jones’ career, not only did the raw number of 30 save seasons skyrocket to nearly 200, but the fundamental breakdown of them was different. The fewest innings was 38.1 by Lee Smith, a total barely a third of Granger’s previous low. Just 17 of the 199 seasons—less than 10 percent—were over 100 innings. The median dropped to less than 75 innings.
During the period Jones was in the league, the entire notion of being a closer was changed, but in many ways he did not. As late as 1999, Jones threw more than 100 innings in relief, and he was one of a small handful of players to throw two seasons of more than 100 innings in relief during the 1990s.
Master of the slow change, and possessor of a terrific mustache, Jones managed a 16-year career despite pitching just 20 innings before age 30. Though he never led the league in a meaningful statistic, he was an effective reliever more often than not, sometimes a great one.
More than that, Jones managed to pitch through an era in which his very role evolved from one sort of work to another. Jones' greatest accomplishment is managing not only to survive in many roles, but thrive as well.
Questions, comments and thinly veiled threats can be mailed to Richard on the back of a twenty dollar bill or e-mailed to him at RichardBarbieri@yahoo.com
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Cooperstown Confidential: Defending the Hall of Fame Classic
by Bruce MarkusenJune 26, 2009
The newly invented Hall of Fame Classic may not mean much to the bulk of the country, but it carries substantial weight for the Cooperstown economy and the culture of baseball. Simply put, Otsego County (of which Cooperstown is a major part) needs this old-timers game as a viable financial replacement for the dearly departed Hall of Fame Game. The Hall of Fame also needs a signature event to herald the start of its busy tourist season and create an historical bridge to its upcoming class of inductees.
I watched Sunday’s first Hall of Fame Classic from start to finish at Doubleday Field and came away duly impressed. From an artistic perspective, the Classic proved to be a solid success on three different levels:
—It was refreshing to see ballplayers who actually wanted to be in Cooperstown, in contrast to the general nastiness of recent major league contingents who had been forced to come to town for the Hall of Fame Game. There were no scowls, as we saw from Cubs manager Lou Piniella in 2008, and no complaints from prima donnas like Brady Anderson and Eric Davis, who whined like babies and couldn’t leave Cooperstown fast enough in past years. Instead, we saw retired players like Jim Kaat and Brooks Robinson, two class acts, willingly sign autographs while engaging in friendly small talk with fans at Doubleday Field.
—In terms of the quality of on-field play, I was mildly surprised by the abilities of the old-timers, who ranged in age from the 40-year-old Jeff Kent to the 90-year-old-but-going-on-65 Bob Feller. Fielders made few errors and only one man (Robinson) stumbled, incurring a twisted ankle in a fall near home plate. The graying Bill Lee looked remarkably spry, even in unaccustomed roles as a hitter and right fielder, in addition to his more traditional pursuit as a left-handed reliever. (Lee picked up two hits, made a fine running catch, and hurled a scoreless inning of relief.) Former Padre, Ranger and Tiger Johnny Grubb continued to display a smooth stroke from the left side at the age of 60, collecting three hits in four at-bats. Ex-Yankees Kevin Maas and Mike Pagliarulo showed some of their holdover power from their playing days, with Maas hitting a towering home run to right field (watch out on Susquehanna Avenue!) and Pags delivering a game-winning double down the right field line.
—The game provided us with just enough oddball moments, always a necessity for the old-timers format. During pre-game introductions, former Tigers left-hander Jon Warden provided some of his usual light-hearted goofiness by bringing a squirt gun onto the field and dousing some of his more famous teammates. The game then began with Feller, the third oldest of the living Hall of Famers, trying to throw strikes to a far more youthful Paul Molitor. (Molitor ended up singling, though it was nothing more than a bloop to short center field.)
Then there was a young boy from Schenectady, 11-year-old Zach D’Errico, who was allowed to play shortstop in the first inning and seized the opportunity by starting a 6-4-3 inning-ending double play. And then there was Lee Smith, who actually looked lighter than in his playing days and picked up the win in relief, all while wearing the unfamiliar uniform of the San Francisco Giants. Although Smith played for eight teams in his career—the Cubs, Red Sox, Cardinals, Yankees, Orioles, Angels, Reds and Expos—he never pitched a game for San Francisco. I have no idea why he wore the Giants uniform, but the strange fashion decision added a degree of delightful quirkiness to the proceedings.
From a financial perspective, the news was not as delightful. The Classic did not draw the sellout of 10,000 fans that we’ve become accustomed to seeing for the annual Hall of Fame Game. Hall officials announced the crowd at 7,069, an attendance figure that will lead the naysayers to wag their fingers and call the Classic a financial dud. Well, not so fast. The lack of a sellout occurred for three overriding but changeable reasons: the negative blowback from losing the Hall of Fame Game, the local conflict created because Cooperstown Central School staged its graduation on the same day of the Classic, and the generally poor state of the upstate New York economy.
All three of these problems could be addressed by the time the Classic returns in June of 2010. First off, once fans accept the fact that the defunct Hall of Fame Game will not return—and it’s not coming back, folks—I think they’ll more fully embrace the concept of an annual old-timers game featuring recognizable names from the recent past. Second, the local high school has already announced that next year’s graduation will not take place on the same day as the Classic, which will always be scheduled for Father’s Day. And third, the economy figures to be better next year, if only because it cannot get much worse.
Economic problems aside, Classic organizers need to address at least two other concerns. During the game, some of the retired players moved from the dugouts to an autograph tent, where they provided free signatures to those in attendance. Unfortunately, some unruly adult fans pushed out some younger fans as they grappled for position near the tent that had been set up by the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association. Two fans told me that some of the adults acted unconscionably in clamoring for autographs and then rudely yelling at some of the old-timers who had to leave the tent to return to the game. I hope the alumni association can address the situation by creating a better flow of traffic around the autograph tent. If there is simply too much demand for autographs, perhaps only children should be allowed to visit the tent. Knowing the record of the alumni association—a quality organization if there ever was one—the problem will be remedied by 2010.
Then there is the issue of the rosters for the game. Of the 26 players invited to participate, only 11 had experience as position players. That limited number forced organizers to play former major league pitchers like Bill Lee, Mike Timlin, and Anthony Telford in the outfield and use other pitchers as designated hitters. Lee, Timlin and Telford are good athletes who responded well to the challenge, but most baseball fans want to see pitchers pitch and not play out of position. The alumni association should consider expanding the rosters to a total of 30 players and bringing in more ex-players who have experience as outfielders, third basemen and shortstops. That would make the game better and more credible with fans and media, especially those nitpickers looking to criticize the concept of an old-timers game at any turn.
As alumni association CEO Dan Foster assured me during the pre-game ceremonies, the Hall of Fame Classic isn’t going anywhere; it’s here to stay in Cooperstown. The alumni are committed to the game, seemingly as committed as Hall officials. With the right changes, this game could become nearly as popular as its predecessor. That should be the goal—and it’s a realistic one at that.
References and Resources
http://www.baseballhalloffame.org
http://www.baseball-reference.com
Bruce Markusen is the author of seven books on baseball, including the award-winning A Baseball Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s, the recipient of the Seymour Medal from the Society for American Baseball Research. He has also written The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, Tales From The Mets Dugout, and The Orlando Cepeda Story.
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Snell demoted
by Paul SingmanJune 25, 2009
Have any questions, comments, compliments, concerns, criticisms, or suggestions? Tell me about them here.
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Curt’s Pitch for ALS
by David GasskoJune 25, 2009
David Gassko is a former consultant to a major league team, and a writer for Heater Magazine. He welcomes comments via e-mail.
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Geovany Soto is a viper
by Craig CalcaterraJune 25, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Are you not entertained?
by Craig CalcaterraJune 25, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Psycho Pspeaks Pstupidly
by Craig CalcaterraJune 25, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Gallo’s Humor
by Craig CalcaterraJune 25, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Marlon Byrd gets his supplements from Victor Conte
by Craig CalcaterraJune 25, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Todd Snider is basically awesome
by Craig CalcaterraJune 25, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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And That Happened
by Craig CalcaterraJune 25, 2009
Craig writes the Shysterball blog for the Hardball Times.
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Jenrry Mejia and Other New Prospect Breakdowns
by Matt HagenJune 25, 2009
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Roster Doctor - 6/25/09
by Paul SingmanJune 25, 2009
Have any questions, comments, compliments, concerns, criticisms, or suggestions? Tell me about them here.
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The wrong side of 120
by Jeff SackmannJune 25, 2009
Much has been made of Austin Wood's 169-pitch relief outing for the Texas Longhorns in the regional tournament last month. To many, it was merely the last in a long line of excessive pitch counts in the college ranks. Now that Wood has been drafted by the Tigers, we'll find out how his arm holds up in the longer term.
But Wood, of course, wasn't the only college pitcher taken in the draft with a questionable workload behind him. Even Stephen Strasburg logged a couple of outings over 120 pitches this season. In an era when 20- and 21-year old professionals virtually never cross the 100-pitch mark, it is striking just how often college pitchers go considerably farther.
Quantifying workloads
To get an idea of which highly-touted pitchers might have been pushed hard before turning pro, I looked at pitch counts for 2009 starts for all college pitchers taken in the first five rounds. The following table shows the 10 highest Pitcher Abuse Points (PAP3) totals among those 40 pitchers.
Some of the pitch counts had to be estimated; the number of appearances for which pitch counts were estimated in given in the "Est" column. The next five columns show the number of outings with 100-109 pitches, 110-119 pitches, and so on:
Name School Apps Est 100+ 110+ 120+ 130+ 140+ PAP3 Austin Wood Texas 39 4 0 0 0 0 1 328509 Jerry Sullivan Oral Roberts 14 5 1 4 1 3 2 319961 Eric Arnett Indiana 14 1 0 2 2 2 2 296316 A.J. Morris Kansas State 15 0 2 3 3 1 2 255109 Josh Spence Arizona State 18 9 0 2 4 2 1 236418 Mike Minor Vanderbilt 17 3 2 4 5 2 0 166824 Tyler Blandford Oklahoma State 13 9 2 3 2 0 1 134314 Mike Leake Arizona State 19 11 4 2 3 1 0 113618 Matt Way Washington State 16 4 6 3 2 0 1 106382 Rex Brothers Lipscomb 14 3 2 3 3 2 0 101367
Good news and bad news
By the accepted standards of college baseball, only the Austin Wood outing is particularly eye-catching. A glance at Boyd Nation's PAP reports for past college seasons (here's 2007) shows that totals in the 200,000 range aren't unusual, even for top prospects. The Braves might wish Mike Minor had been subject to a quicker hook, but only the top few names on this list are serious causes for concern.
What's a bit more distressing is how thoroughly the first round is represented on this list. Strasburg, Kyle Gibson, and Alex White all rank within the next four (though I had to estimate the majority of Strasburg's pitch counts). I don't doubt that most of these guys wanted the ball, and I'm sure their coaches generally have good intentions, but when Eric Arnett throws 145 pitches in a non-conference game in March, you have to wonder why.
As a first-round pick near the top of this list, Arnett is of particular interest. All of the 100-plus pitch outings are reported (not estimated) pitch counts. In one seven-start stretch from March 28 to May 8, he threw 119 or more pitches six times. I've published more details of Arnett's full season workload elsewhere.
Fortunately for these pitchers, if long outings have negative results, we haven't seen anything yet. By just about any statistical measure, Arnett and Jerry Sullivan threw just as well in May as in March. Minor's numbers suffered (a May ERA pushing 5.00, along with a SLG allowed over .500), but that may be more attributable to a series of tough matchups, including a particularly bad outing against South Carolina. I hope we don't have reason to recall this column in these pitchers' first pro seasons.
A gold star
Usually, discussions of college pitch counts (or Pitcher Abuse Points in any context) focus on the negative. But it isn't all bad.
The one first-round starting pitcher without a PAP3 total approaching 100,000 is Kennesaw State's Chad Jenkins. It appears that it's no accident; classmate Kyle Heckathorn, drafted in the supplemental first round, also came in near the bottom of the list. Some of the credit is due to Jenkins himself. He threw five complete games but never exceeded 123 pitches. Heckathorn only managed one complete game, but finished it with only 98 pitches.
If this is a result of a firm policy on the part of the Owls coaching staff, that's great news, especially since KSU is maturing into a quality program. Perhaps it is possible, even in NCAA Division I, to impress scouts, win games, and save arms, all at the same time.
References and Resources
Boyd Nation has been doing great work with pitch-count analysis on the college ranks for a long time. You can find much of his commentary in the column archive on his site. If you want to play around with estimated pitch counts, Boyd's published formulas are here. For what it's worth, I use my own play-by-play-based estimator, which I've found to be slightly more accurate.
Jeff Sackmann is the creator of MinorLeagueSplits.com. With Kent Bonham, he founded CollegeSplits.com, which provides data on amateur baseball to about half of the 30 Major League teams.
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Neglect and reversion
by Brandon IsleibJune 25, 2009
Among my non-baseball pursuits is my frequent playing of Magic: The Gathering, the original collectible card game. For those unfamiliar with the concept, you buy packs with 15 cards, much like you would baseball cards, except that the cards correspond to fantasy creatures and sorceries and such and you build a deck out of them and try to beat someone else who's done the same thing. The game's been around for 16 years and has over 10,000 unique cards, so there are a lot of options. There's a Pro Tour and players who make a living playing on it, and it was even featured on ESPN2 in earlier days. (I can't wait for ESPN to come up with about 50 more channels to make competitions out of random things. "And the Which Wall Will Dry Fastest Competition is on ESPN39 today...")
Over the last two weeks, the head Magic people announced that with the next set there would be some rules changes, most of them minor terminology changes but one biggie: how creatures fight each other. The change is largely a reversion to how things were pre-1999 (they've only done major changes twice in 16 years, in '99 and now), but it has players saying the game is dumbing down and how they'll quit and all this hubbub over what is largely a restoration to original rules on the point.
All this got me thinking about the similarities with the designated hitter rule and rules changes in general. Purists howl, but the American League hasn't suffered from it one bit. Like in Magic, most minor rules changes have been beneficial. The rule that makes all stadiums built or modified after 1958 have fence distance minimums has standardized the game in more important ways than its spot in the rulebook suggests, literally leveling the playing field and making sabermetrics a lot easier in the process. I don't know if there were pro-Polo Grounds purists running around back then, but baseball is assuredly better without home fields that are ridiculous places to play the game. As for the DH, for my part, I enjoy having the variety between leagues (especially after Bud Selig quietly consolidated all power under his office by abolishing league presidents) and oldster hitters getting to ply their craft against hapless young'uns. But as much as it pains me to say it, now may be the time to remove the rule, if ever it should be removed.
Bob Costas, in his book Fair Ball, makes reference to an MLB proposal to the union in 1997 that would have increased rosters to 26 and removed the DH. (The whole book is on Google Books, believe it or not.) Costas assumes that the union couldn't see past the salaries that DHs command to find a spot for more players. It's plausible that the union believed it, too, though if it did it was mistaken for reasons I'll look at in a little bit. But the concept of a 26-man roster is intriguing. Bullpens have bloated since the book has written, and I suspect every team would love to have an extra roster spot to compensate for that by getting another position player on the bench. And it seems fairly clear that eliminating a high-profile, potentially high-salaried office like the DH would require some sort of tradeoff for the union's sake. The pinch-running fan in me wants to see a 26th spot regardless. But what are the tradeoffs for eliminating the DH? At this point in time, relatively few, and it's for this reason I think that it's soon or never for the DH/26th man plan. Well, maybe soon or never is overdramatic, but the reasons that would recommend eliminating the DH are as clear now as they ever will or can be.
Is it even a position?
I assumed there were all these DHs running around that we'd be eliminating. It could be that my Red Sox fandom or irrational love of Harold Baines made me think this. As it turns out, however, DHs are a bit like the two hole in the lineup: there's general consensus as to what it's there for (at least to old-schoolers) and no one player who embodies its traits. I took the AL from 1973-2009 and looked up how many players started at least 100 games at every position in that time period. The results:
C 251 1B 335 2B 340 SS 362 3B 334 LF 236 CF 335 RF 273 DH 178Though it's clear that full-time left fielders are down because of the DH, left field is the lowest non-catcher position for the NL as well. Still, there have been twice as many full-time shortstops as DHs in the AL. One-hundred and seventy-nine is just south of averaging five per year, which is to say that the hitter is rarely designated. Twenty-two of those 178 seasons are from players before they hit their age-30 season, five of them from David Ortiz and Travis Hafner. It seems that regular DHing is up this year, so maybe the practice is trending upward. Nevertheless, the number of AL teams with regular DHs hasn't hit seven since 1998. Last year, there were only three (Ortiz, Hafner, and Jim Thome); the last decade has averaged under four per year, bottoming out with two in 2002 (Ellis Burks and Frank Thomas). Only 10 players have been regular DHs for at least five years:
Harold Baines 11 Edgar Martinez 9 Hal McRae 8 Paul Molitor 8 Chili Davis 8 Don Baylor 7 Frank Thomas 7 Willie Horton 5 Andre Thornton 5 David Ortiz 5Of these, Thomas and Ortiz could have played the field if need be; it was the luxury of their league that allowed them to DH, but by no means did their physical condition necessitate it initially. So in terms of serious DHs, we're looking at approximately eight players whose careers would not have been meaningful without the position. George Brett didn't become a Hall of Famer off his 1991-1993 seasons, and Carl Yastrzemski didn't become a Hall of Famer off his 1982-1983 seasons either. While the position is a nursing home for a few players, the rarity of such use makes the DH more a halfway home from a roster management perspective: it's a way to tinker with your lineup, give some rest here or there, and let a designated fielder play for the slugging oaf. In the sense that it's used this way, I wouldn't call DH a position or a concept as much as it is free rest and defense. When the AL gets to give breathers to its most important pieces without losing their bat, of course the team's going to be superior to an NL counterpart. It's like a final exam where half the class is allowed to get sleep the night before and the other half is forced to stay up.
If teams aren't going to use the position as a position on the whole, then I fail to see how it justifies its existence. If interleague isn't "well, at least Paul Molitor doesn't face us in our home park" but "the AL team just shuffles its lineup a bit and loses a mediocre hitter," then things will stay as unbalanced as they've been over the last few years. Maybe it's too much conjecture for me to go down that road, but I don't see how the NL can gain an advantage unless their AL opponents are just bad teams.
Are they even good hitters?
On the whole, yes; DHs are good hitters, and they're obviously better than the pitchers they're replacing. But take a look at this breakdown, which is the historical percentage of times each batting order slot has been the DHs (figures as of Monday's games):1 4.0 2 4.3 3 15.7 4 28.7 5 20.8 6 14.4 7 8.7 8 2.7 9 0.7AL teams have used the DH 77,981 times, so DHs have batted ninth 522 times. While DHs are clearly good hitters the vast majority of the time, 12.1 percent of the time they're in the bottom three slots. So historically for every four AL games, one of them has a DH who's relatively weak. While that may seem like a low figure, in the context of this discussion it matters quite a bit. What's really being asked is whether the DH is a working concept, and with a waste of 12.1 percent I'm not so sure it is. One-eighth of the time, the manager's question of "can we find a good hitter to replace the pitcher today?" is answered no. The DH was conceived as a way to bring offense and excitement into the league, and while many of the bottom-slot DHs have been decent hitters, they don't justify a whole rule. While the 1982 Brewers were an exciting team, they were not so because Roy Howell (the all-time leader in batting seventh as a DH) got to hit instead of ride the bench. More to the point, Roy Howell did not make them one-ninth more exciting than an NL team, which is what the DH rule on balance ought to achieve.
Is it better than having another roster spot?
I don't think so. The flexibility of an extra roster spot is obvious. Smart teams have been using the Triple-A yo-yo and 15-day disabled list as though they had extra players anyway, so why not face facts, save some bus and air expenses, and expand the roster? ("Go green...expand rosters.") As alluded to earlier, the roster shuffling is more important now with bloated bullpens than it was in 1997 when the idea was initially pitched. Will the new Fehr-less union be amenable to the idea, assuming MLB would try it again?The idea was much easier to reject in 1997, as there were more full-time DHs then. Now it's just Ortiz, though Travis Hafner will join the list soon. Five players versus two is a drop in the union bucket, but as the players involved are all high-profile it's a bit more complicated than that. Still, it wouldn't be difficult to implement an agreement that phases out the DH in, say, five years. Ortiz and Hafner are only a year apart, and neither look particularly Bainesish in their odds of lasting forever; why not agree to the change soon, let teams adjust, and put an end to a strange position?
Conclusion
The DH was birthed as a bit of a gimmick, a distraction from the massive talent disparity in the leagues, which disparity many AL owners brought on themselves through years of ineptitude or racism. If anything, it now reinforces the talent disparity in the leagues but the other way round, it's not often used meaningfully, and a decent portion of the time the hitter isn't great anyway. In the long run, these things may not matter much, but it seems clear to me that the rule isn't earning its keep. From that angle I see no reason to have it over a 26th roster spot. There would be hue and cry over the change, but baseball didn't die from instant replay, standardized fields, or even the DH. I think MLB and the union owe it to the health of the game to improve the game, especially when it's easy, and an extra player would be healthier than a DH slot that's amorphous and neglected.References and Resources
The usual. Obviously, the Costas book I read a long time ago was also part of it.
Former Magic Pro Tour player and card developer Randy Buehler had a blog entry in which he compared the Magic rules changes to the DH rule as a parenthetical aside. It got my gears whirring for this article. If you're particularly interested, it's here.
Brandon Isleib is a stat geek in all his endeavours, which makes him naturally inclined to baseball. He can be reached via the electronic mails.
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Poisoning the well
by Colin WyersJune 25, 2009
According to Google, there are roughly 22,300 web pages containing the terms "mother's basement" and "baseball." A classic example of the genre is this slanderous screed:
Sabermetricians. Ugh. It’s like Major League meets Revenge of the Nerds, except the nerds aren’t fun and they think they’re better than you. And Bob Uecker isn’t there to keep things interesting with the occasional witty one-liner.
I can’t say that sabermetrics as a statistical form of analysis isn’t effective, because in many cases it is (on-base percentage, for example). I just really don’t like the guys behind the numbers. Poindexters from Ivy League schools who lack the social skill to relate to other people, but can explain the value of a ground ball by drawing a diagram and involving advanced mathematics (and they say baseball is boring).
This is not of course a lone example; Fire Joe Morgan of course made a career of lampooning that kind of thing.
So why does it matter?
The logical fallacy
It's a clear and simple case of poisoning the well. It's a form of personal (or "ad hominem," if you prefer) argument that attempts to discredit what a person has to say before he actually gets the chance to say it.
In a larger sense, it's an effort to discredit sabermetrics (and thus avoid arguing with its premises) by discrediting the sabermetrician, or sabermetricians in general.
An odd form of slander, isn't it, that attempts to make "advanced mathematics" into an insult, is it not? Heaven forfend that intelligent people seek honest answers to questions!
It's a way to avoid asking questions, or answering them. Whenever someone starts poisoning the well, you should start asking why they can't be bothered to address the contention being argued.
An example
Let's talk about Harold Reyonolds.
Reynolds was one of the key participants in the now-infamous MLB Network roundtable on Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA projection system. His contribution to the discussion, aside from saying "stats are ridiculous" repeatedly and calling sabermetricians "stats mongers," involved introducing the idea of someone with a quality .215 batting average. And I don't think he meant some Adam Dunn-like Three-True-Outcomes deity.
I especially don't think that's what he meant after reading this most recent blog posting of Reynolds':
But what I've been witnessing while I've been a broadcaster is everyone using these stats to try and explain the game of baseball. Not all statistics work. Some do, some don't. And one of the stats that has become real popular is OPS. On-base plus slugging. All of a sudden, it's this stat that defines whether a guy is a good ball player or not. And the fact of the matter is, if you're a power hitter then the situation will dictate what a pitcher does with you—either walk you or pitch you real careful. So more than likely you're going to end up on base and therefore your on-base percentage goes up. This in my mind has become the stat the everyone thinks is the be all and end all. It is not. If you have a ball club that's a great offensive team then that changes everything. But if you have a guy like Adrian Gonzalez, for example, his OPS is going to be high—he's got a lot of home runs and walks a lot ... because you're not going to pitch to him. Power guys like Giambi and Dunn have always had high OPS because no one wants to pitch to them. But it takes two hits to score them from first.
I'm not here to take down Reynolds' argument (others have done so, if that's what you want); nor am I here to concede the aspects of it that are technically correct (like the fact that OPS is not the perfect measure of offense).
I'm here to ask: What's the point in engaging Reynolds in this discussion at all?
Does anyone think that if Reynolds is led by the nose to a handful of correlation coefficients or a linear regression he's going to go, "Oh, well that makes sense?" Is there any reason to think that if someone shows Reynolds a context-dependent stat like WPA or linear weights based on base-out state, the scales will fall from his eyes and he will become a born-again sabermetrician?
Well, it depends. Will any of those newfangled metrics conclude that, say, Ichiro is a better hitter than Adam Dunn?
Reynolds' attitude towards advanced offensive metrics seems to be that they are wrong because they don't agree with what Harold Reynolds thinks.
That's it. The rest is incidental—if you prove those wrong, Reynolds will offer something else, or go back to talking about how "stats are ridiculous." The conclusion comes first, the argument second.
In that case, does it make any sense to argue with Reynolds? Any reason to suspect that Reynolds is going to argue in good faith?
Let's move on to a favorite whipping boy of the online sabermetric movement, Murray Chass. He wrote, a while back:
Things I don’t want to read or hear about anymore:
Statistics mongers promoting VORP and other new-age baseball statistics.
I receive a daily e-mail message from Baseball Prospectus, an electronic publication filled with articles and information about statistics, mostly statistics that only stats mongers can love.
To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense. For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out. I asked some colleagues whose work I respect, and they didn’t know what it meant either.
Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know.
That's a perfect summation of the school of thought I am discussing here: VORP is nonsense, even though (or especially because!) Murray Chass doesn't know what it means.
Now, there are legitimate arguments against VORP as an estimation of player value (I have made some of them myself). Does anyone think that if presented with them, it will create an opening to discuss other, more correct metrics with Chass? Or are you simply providing Chass with enough ammunition to use against VORP without providing him the means of coming up with something better?
The answer
Imagine you're on a baseball team (it could be your local rec league, it could be the New York Yankees; for this example it makes little difference). The other team strikes out three times in a row, and yet they send another batter up to the plate.Nothing convinces them to take the field and allow your team a chance to bat.
Should you pitch to the guy?
Of course not! Only one option is presented to you: to leave the field of play.
It's the same in rhetoric as it is in baseball. Both sides have to play by the same rules, or there's no point in playing along. It's an old aphorism: never wrestle with a pig, because you get dirty and the pig likes it.
Now, aren't there some on the sabermetric side of the aisle who similarly move to the ad hominem to close off debate, and who will argue their position despite the evidence? Of course there are! Is this right? Of course it isn't! But in either case, it is simply appropriate to walk away from the argument until that person is ready to have a fair fight.
The right approach
What should you be doing, then?
The correct approach is to point out poor arguments and bad logic, but to be non-confrontational about it. Remember, you don't want to argue with people who won't argue in good faith. What you do want to do is lay the groundwork for an argument in good faith, regardless of whether or not the other party wants to participate.
Because there is typically a third party, of course, one who is neither persuaded to the cause of the sabermetrician, nor set against him as one who doesn't bother to watch baseball games. It's those people who are pliable, who can be persuaded with evidence.
So persuade them with evidence. Don't let the carnival barkers and the hucksters and the swindlers of the world distract you from this. Don't take the bait.
And remember that the inflexible, the ones dead set on a conventional wisdom that's long since fallen out of date, are a dying people. Let them pass. There are plenty of people out there who aren't so calcified in their views, who cut their teeth on the works of people like James and Palmer and who are receptive to an evidence-based approach to baseball.
And they are the future. If some wish to remain in the past, then by all means let them be buried there.
References and Resources
Anyone who wants to argue on the Internet should absolutely peruse this list of logical fallacies. Another great resource is the Forrest of Rhetoric.
Colin Wyers knows exactly how much of a nerd he is. He is very interested in hearing about any other concerns you may have; you can reach him by e-mail, and he will try his best to respond in a timely fashion. He also blogs at Statistically Speaking.
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