Fantasy Price Guides - Yu Darvish Missing!
by Greg TamerFebruary 10, 2012
Greg Tamer is the Manager of THT Forecasts. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
Recapping a swap-filled winter
by Jeff MooreFebruary 10, 2012
What an offseason we had, prospect-wise. Every time we got done breaking down a prospect in a new organization, there was more work to do. As I was going back through the transactions, even I forgot just how many big-name prospects had changed placed this winter, and I do this for a living.
So let’s take a look back.
Before the playoffs had even started, the White Sox made their first trade of their busy offseason, sending manager Ozzie Guillen to the Marlins for two lesser-known prospects who don’t have the highest ceilings, but are major league ready. Jhan Marinez made a few appearances out of the Marlins bullpen in 2010, and Ozzie Martinez spent a few weeks in the majors last season and could make the White Sox as a back-up utility infielder.
A couple of months later, the White Sox struck again, sending closer Sergio Santos to Toronto for another pitcher, Nestor Molina, who immediately became the top prospect in a weak farm system. Some are higher than others on Molina, who could be a mid-rotation starter or a back-of-the-bullpen pitcher, depending on his development.
The A’s and Diamondbacks hooked up in the biggest trade of the offseason to that point, the A’s sending All-Star starter Trevor Cahill to Arizona for top prospect Jarrod Parker and outfielder Collin Cowgill. Parker would have competed for a rotation spot in Arizona this spring, but should have a much better chance of making the A’s rotation.
The A’s weren’t done for the winter, but before they could make another move, the Reds and Padres stole the spotlight for a few days. The Padres rebuilt a large part of their 2012 season and their long-term future by acquiring first baseman Yonder Alonso, catching prospect Yasmani Grandal, and pitchers Edinson Volquez and Brad Boxberger for Mat Latos. While Latos was a big price to pay for the Padres, Alonso immediately takes over as their first baseman for the foreseeable future, while Grandal should be along by next season and Boxberger could be a nice bullpen addition as early as this year.
Not wanting to stay out of the news for long, the A’s made another move that involved even more prospects than the Reds-Padres trade. The A’s sent left-handed pitcher Gio Gonzalez to our nation’s capital in exchange for most of their farm system. The A’s got high-end prospects A.J. Cole, a right-handed pitcher, and catcher Derek Norris, as well as Brad Peacock, who emerged as a legitimate pitching prospect in 2011 and Tim Milone, whose ceiling is the lowest of the four, but could help out this season.
Overshadowed by the A’s-Nationals trade because it happened on the same day was a deal the Cubs and Reds put together, exchanging left-handed relievers Travis Wood and Sean Marshall, but with the Reds also sending outfield prospect Dave Sappelt and second base prospect Ronald Torreyes. Sappelt will compete for an outfield spot this spring in Chicago while Torreyes will continue to work his way through the low minors.
At this point, it had been a few weeks since White Sox GM Kenny Williams had made a move, so naturally, that’s exactly what he did. Williams sent outfielder Carlos Quentin to the Padres for two minor leaguers, the main one of which was Simon Castro, whose prospect status has fallen off after struggling in 2011.
Within the first week of the new year, the Padres had struck for a third time this offseason. This time, they hooked up with the Cubs, sending now-blocked first base prospect Anthony Rizzo to Chicago for pitcher Andrew Cashner and young outfield prospect Kyung-Min Na. It was the trade that was expected the minute the Padres traded for Yonder Alonso earlier in the winter, but perhaps not the return Padres fans were expecting.
But despite all these moves, the biggest was yet to come. Just a week later, the Yankees sent catching prospect Jesus Montero and pitching prospect Hector Noesi to the Seattle Mariners for pitcher Michael Pineda, thus ending the saga of a prospect more discussed in trades than any in recent memory. Montero had been rumored to be heading to about half the teams in the league over the past year or two, but the Mariners finally got the Yankees to pull the trigger.
Jeff Moore is the creator of MLBProspectWatch.com, your one-stop site for all the information you need about minor league prospects. He can be reached via e-mail at mlbprospectwatch AT gmail DOT com.
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The Hardball Times
A baseball card mystery: Ontiveros and Schmidt
by Bruce MarkusenFebruary 10, 2012
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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The Hardball Times
A dynasty ranking follow-up
by Josh ShepardsonFebruary 10, 2012
Feel free to reach me at my e-mail, JoshShep50 AT Yahoo DOT com with any questions, feedback, or any other general inquiries.
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The Hardball Times
Forecasting Prince
by Myron LoganFebruary 09, 2012
The Detroit Tigers shocked the baseball world by signing Prince Fielder to a nine-year, $214 million contract earlier this offseason. The public opinion on the deal seems to be that: 1) it makes the Tigers really good in the short-term; 2) nine years and $214 million is a lot of money over a long period of time; and 3) that's a particularly large sum of cash to guarantee to a man of Prince Fielder's size and stature.
We've discussed the Fielder signing in detail here at The Hardball Times, but this time around I wanted to specifically focus on item number three listed above; Fielder's size and how it may impact his performance over the length of the deal. I should first note that the Internet is a big place, and naturally this topic has already been explored by Ryan Campbell and Jeff Zimmerman at FanGraphs. Further, I know there have been numerous size/aging studies over the years published at various locations. That said, I still believe it's worth it to continue down this path and see if we can uncover anything new with regards to how productive Fielder will be in his mid-30s.
With that in mind, and with help from my colleagues at THT, I set out to find a group of players similar to Prince Fielder. The specific traits desired in a Prince Fielder comp:
{exp:list_maker}The player must have been productive through his age-27 season.
The player must have been really big, preferably not only in weight but also in Body Mass Index.
The player should have played on the left side of the defensive spectrum, getting most of his value from batting/home runs.
The player must have turned 27 by 2002, giving at least nine years of performance post age-27. {/exp:list_maker}
I figured that, with help from Baseball Reference's Play Index, the task would be easy enough. I was wrong. Great players of Prince's size, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-foot-11 and 275 pounds, simply don't exist. According to Baseball Reference, only 31 non-pitchers have weighed in at 250+ pounds. Out of that 31, only five posted a career WAR over 15, one of which is Prince Fielder. The other four are Jim Thome, Frank Howard, Adam Dunn, and Carlos Lee. Dunn and Lee are viable comps, but have not logged nine years since age-27. Frank Howard checks in at 6'7'', 255 pounds*, an altogether different body type from Fielder. Thome made the cut.
*Now is probably as good a time as any to mention my concerns with size data, specifically weight. The data I'm using is from Baseball Reference and I'm simply not sure how reliable it is. Further, a player's weight obviously fluctuates throughout his career, and I don't know when these weights were recorded. Some players, like an Andres Galarraga, looked entirely different early in their career as compared to late.
With concerns in mind about a lack of potential comparable players, I attempted to widen the thresholds for inclusion, lowering the weight and performance standards. The subsequent list is larger and includes a number of potential options. Still, putting together a final list of comps isn't easy. For instance, number one on the list in terms of Body Mass Index (32.5), is Miguel Tejada. At age-27 Tejada was playing 162 games at shortstop for the Oakland A's, deriving much of his value out of his ability to (adequately) defend at short. Not exactly Prince Fielder-like. Other guys high on the list are players like Scott Rolen, Hack Wilson, and Bobby Abreu. While these players have similarities to our subject, they gained too much value out of defense/base running to compare directly to Fielder.
I settled on eight players of which to examine, balancing the above-listed traits to best identify good candidates. The players:
On average, the eight players stand at 74.4 inches tall and weigh 231 pounds. They averaged 22.3 WAR through age-27, similar to Prince's 19.6. Over the next nine seasons they averaged 24.7 WAR, highlighted by Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez who aged very gracefully into their mid-30s. I'm using Rally's WAR, located on Baseball Reference in this article. Let's look at a couple of other graphs:
If you can't make too much of that, I don't blame you. Here's the average aging curve of all eight players:
You can see here that the group peaks, perhaps as we'd expect, at age-27. However, they remain productive over their next five seasons, averaging yearly WAR totals of 4, 3.9, 4.3, 3.5, and 3.5. The next four years are more of a struggle. While some players remain productive, a number of guys put up near-replacement level performance or begin to drop out of baseball altogether. Let us just assume, for kicks, that Prince Fielder ages exactly as his comps over the next nine seasons. How much would he be worth?
I came up with $142 million over the next nine seasons, accounting for a five percent increase in dollars per WAR each year. It's a far cry from the $214 million the Tigers paid for Fielder's services, but is it realistic? Our own THT Forecasts, which only project performance six years into the future (how dare they), actually project Fielder to be worth 18.5 WAR over the next six seasons. That's nearly three fewer WAR than the above-listed projection for Prince over six seasons.
Tangotiger looked at 10 first basemen with at least 10 WAR from age-25 through 27 and got a more favorable value projection of nine years, $183 million.
There are likely very few long-term valuations out there that will forecast Fielder to be worth $214 million over the next nine years. There's a reason most of the baseball world was in shock following Fielder's signing in Detroit. That level of years and dollars simply wasn't anticipated. For example, on average, FanGraphs readers expected Prince to sign a 6.5-year, $136 million deal.
Anyway, I don't want to give the impression that the long-term forecast derived here will be (or should be expected to be) accurate over the next nine seasons. Anybody who thinks they can accurately predict player performance over a nine year span should probably be selling their projections on an infomercial for $19.99. While I believe the eight players share similarities with Fielder and can perhaps shed some light on how he'll perform in the future, this method is riddled with any number of potential pitfalls, some of which I've already mentioned. Hopefully, though, you get an idea of how similar players have performed from age-28 through age-36.
For Tigers fans holding their collective breath, there is some reason to be optimistic regarding the signing. First, you get to watch an exciting power hitter play out his near-prime years in Detroit. Second, with Miguel Cabrera and Fielder hitting back-to-back, Detroit will have one of the best one-two punches in all of baseball. Finally, the Tigers are a good team right now and Fielder should put up very productive numbers in the short-term. In a winnable American League Central, the addition of Fielder to the Detroit lineup has a chance to win them a couple of divisions, if not American League pennants. You can make an argument that the Tigers are in prime position to overpay for a superstar caliber player and they made sure to do just that.
Still, there's no reason to sugur-coat the deal from the Tigers perspective. Fielder, a great player, simply isn't great enough to get paid nearly $24 million a year for nine years and earn it, whether he ages like his estimable group of large comparables or like an average player. Even if you consider Fielder to be a five WAR player right now and shave his WAR by a mere .3 WAR per year, he'd still fall $10 million short of his contract. Of course, if he was able to do that you would probably consider the signing a mild success. It would outperform all of his comps performance after age-27, except for Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez, and Johnny Mize, all of whom were better than Fielder up to age-27. Considering that Fielder has only posted two seasons above four WAR through his age-27 season, the idea that he'll do it four times over the next nine years is stretching it.
In the 1982 Bill James Baseball Abstract, James discusses the breadth of a player's skill-set and how it may effect aging. Joe Morgan, he mentioned, experienced a particular late-peak and graceful aging period thanks in part to his ability to do a lot of things well. He was a solid contact hitter, possessed good power, was an excellent base runner, and a solid defender at second base. Morgan's peak years were from 28 through 32, where he posted nine WAR or better five straight seasons.
Fielder's skill-set, on the other hand, is more narrow. He's great at hitting for power, drawing walks, and staying on the field. His contact ability appears to be improving. However, he provides no speed, little base running ability, and no positive defensive ability. If Fielder's central skills decline, mostly his propensity to hit home runs, he'll be left with little baseball value. Still, we don't know what is going to happen to Fielder's specific skills. He could remain a productive power source, while hitting between .270 and .300 for the foreseeable future, retaining much of his current value while declining, if only slightly, in his speed and defense. After all, how much further can Fielder's speed and fielding ability decline.
Overall, we're left in a familiar situation when trying to project a player's performance years into the future. We simply don't know what's going to happen and whether Fielder stays productive through age-36 or suddenly falls off a cliff in three or four years is largely a mystery to us. The Tigers will hope for the former, obviously, but perhaps more importantly Dave Dombrowski and company will try to assemble a World Series winner in the short-term. It'll be a lot easier to deal with Fielder's potential albatross contract with flags already flying.
Myron Logan covers the San Diego Padres at Friar Forecast. Feel free to contact him via email.
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The Hardball Times
The Homestead exemption act of 1992
by Frank JacksonFebruary 09, 2012
In 1992 the Baltimore Orioles opened Camden Yards to rave reviews. The success of that facility has affected the design of every new major league park, in varying degrees, over the last two decades. 1992 also brought another significant event that had long-lasting effects on major league ballparks, but that event affected spring training complexes.
For decades, spring training was all but synonymous with Florida, and in 1992 that was still largely true. Of the 26 teams in major league baseball 18 trained in Florida. The eight exceptions were in Arizona: the Brewers in Chandler; the Cubs in Mesa; the A’s in Phoenix; the Giants in Scottsdale; the Mariners and Angels in Tempe; the Indians in Tucson; and the Padres in Yuma. Basically, Arizona had all but one of the West Coast teams (the Dodgers were still clinging to their ancestral spring home in Vero Beach, Florida) plus three Midwest teams. Except for the Indians, all the teams in the Eastern Time Zone were in Florida.
At this point in time, the good people of Homestead, Florida were eager to enter the spring training sweepstakes. Homestead, at the southernmost tip of the Florida mainland, was then a town of about 25,000 and largely agricultural, aside from the local Air Force base. Despite the fact that metropolitan Miami was just a few miles to the north, Homestead was largely isolated. The Everglades lay to the west, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Florida Keys to the south.
Of course, a town in search of a team must pay to play. Well, Homestead was willing to pay, so they found a team. The Cleveland Indians had trained at Hi Corbett Field in Tucson, Arizona since 1947, back in the Bill Veeck era, but they decided to shift spring operations to Homestead. After cutting a deal with the Indians, Homestead spent $22 million to construct a complex for the Tribe, who were to take occupancy in the spring of 1993. The complex included all the amenities expected of a spring training complex in the early 1990s. The design included a full complement of practice fields, dormitories, and a distinctive tropical pink facade wrapping around the 6,500-seat stadium.
Unfortunately, Mother Nature had designs of her own. Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm, devastated Homestead on August 24, 1992. Even though it was the first major storm of the season, the damage to the Indians’ complex was too extensive to be repaired by spring training, 1993. The Indians had an escape clause in their contract with Homestead, but what to do?
The team was truly in an any-port-in-a-storm situation. Returning to Tucson was out of the question, as the Colorado Rockies had secured the Indians’ former home for their inaugural spring training. Sitting out spring training was not an option, so the Indians went in search of a one-year deal. Obviously, they were not in a good bargaining position. The only deal they could find was in Winter Haven, Florida, where the Red Sox had just vacated Chain of Lakes Park in favor of City of Palms Park in Fort Myers. Unfortunately, the Indians could not get a one-year deal. The best they could obtain was a ten-year lease. So Homestead got stiffed, not just for 1993 spring training but forever after.
While the other teams that trained in Florida had dodged the bullet, you can bet they all took note of what happened in Homestead. I don’t imagine MLB executives would score high on empathy tests, but I’ll bet they were all thinking, “Geez, that coulda been us!” Subsequent hurricanes, especially Charley, Ivan, and Jeanne in 2004, swept over Florida. Some complexes sustained damage from those storms but all were repaired in time for spring training 2005.
Nevertheless, MLB executives came to realize that having a spring training complex in harm’s way wasn’t mandatory. Arizona was looking better and better. What was the worst that could happen in Arizona? A sandstorm? Sure, you might need a lot of water to keep the fields green, but the intense heat was only a problem in the summer. Arizona had no hurricanes (alas, no theme parks, space shuttle launches, beaches, or deep sea fishing either), but they did have palm trees and pleasant weather in March. And it was already a second front in the spring training wars so it had been broken in, so to speak.
Eastern seaboard major league teams had long spring training traditions in Florida, so the Sunshine State could probably put them in the “safe” column. Teams in the Midwest, however, were in play. Since the Indians took refuge in Winter Haven in 1993 (they have since returned to Arizona), the only other teams to take up spring residence in Florida are the Marlins and (Devil) Rays, who obviously have a vested interest in the state. Meanwhile, the Rangers, Royals, White Sox, Dodgers, and Reds have joined the Indians in Arizona. The only teams from the Central Time Zone in Florida are the Twins in Fort Myers, the Astros in Kissimmee, and the Cardinals in Jupiter.
I haven’t heard of any of these teams making noises about pulling up stakes, but next year the Astros may look around, see that all their new rivals in the American League West are in Arizona, and wonder why they are in Florida. So when the lease runs out on their complex in Kissimmee, they may take a more critical look at Osceola County Stadium—the smallest in all spring training. They may want to rectify that, among other shortcomings—real or perceived—but not by paying for it themselves. So despite proximity to Disney World, which would seem to be a competitive advantage for families attending spring training, the Astros might start quietly making inquiries about Arizona.
Similarly, the Cardinals and Twins may get itchy feet when their leases are about to expire. Realizing that Arizona is no father away than Florida, they too might start to lean towards the Grand Canyon State. The Cardinals might ponder the revenue they could garner from spring match-ups with the arch-rival Cubs in Arizona. The Twins might notice that all the other teams in their division are in Arizona, except for the Tigers—something of a special case, as they have been ensconced in Lakeland, Florida, since 1934 (aside from the World War II austerity years).
Of course, even in Arizona, the musical chairs routine among MLB teams and cities is still popular. Spring training complexes have a way of becoming obsolete even faster than big league ballparks. Since their inaugural season in 1998, the Diamondbacks, had spent spring training in Tucson at a brand new complex they shared with the White Sox. The joint was jumping throughout late February and March, and the Diamondbacks’ AAA team, the Sidewinders, provided a regular season tenant for the facility.
Now there is no more spring ball in Tucson and the Diamondbacks’ AAA team has moved to Reno. The Padres are temporarily housing their AAA affiliate in Tucson till they can find a permanent home, but as soon as they leave, the facility’s future will be clouded. Now we’re not talking about some dilapidated, outdated, musty old monstrosity but a facility that’s only 14 years old. This spring, the complex is forsaking baseball in favor of soccer, as Tucson is playing host to several MLS teams in training.
And there are plenty of other examples, both in Florida and Arizona. The Rangers moved from Pompano Beach to a brand new complex in Port Charlotte, Florida in 1986. At the time, all was hunky-dory but around the turn of the millennium, the Rangers had second thoughts, and by 2003, they were in Surprise, Arizona.
This year the Red Sox, at home in Fort Myers since 1993, are moving into a new complex in the same city. Since the Sox games are always sell-outs and New England tourists flood the area every spring, Fort Myers was more accommodating than they might have been for the crosstown Twins.
Something seems to happen during the 10-15 year span of a spring training complex. The team starts to grumble about the inadequacy of their current digs and rumors about a possible move start floating around. Spring training host cities are victimized by rising expectations. Teams look at the facilities that have opened in the years since their facility opened and get amenity envy. So they start making noises that they just might have to seek—almost literally—greener pastures. Maybe they’re not really interested in moving but just applying some pressure to the host city to loosen the purse strings.
As a general rule, there’s some municipality out there somewhere that’s willing to build a new complex to order. Had the Homestead complex not been hit by Hurricane Andrew, it’s likely that the Indians would have vacated by now anyway. Given the experiences of jilted towns in Florida and Arizona, it’s hard to believe that any municipality is still willing to spend the bucks to bring baseball to town for a mere six weeks per year.
Of course, MLB execs have played the same game for years in order to get extensive renovations or new ballparks in their regular season homes. The argument usually went something like, hey, if you can’t give us what we need, there’s another city out there who would love to provide a home for our team.
This strategy still works in Arizona and Florida at the spring training level, but it seems to have gone out of style in MLB cities. Today one doesn’t hear much talk of franchise moves. None of the top 30 metropolitan areas without major league baseball (Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, Orlando, and Las Vegas) is making any noises—at least not loud noises—about obtaining a major league baseball franchise. And if it comes down to voters’ approval, you can pretty much forget about it in today’s economy. The Oakland A’s have been angling for a new ballpark in the Bay Area for a long time, and one can only wonder what will happen if their lease runs out in Oakland and they have nowhere to go.
Meanwhile, back home in Homestead (great name for a country and western song, eh?), what do you do with a damaged spring training complex? It’s no good to anyone damaged, so might as well fix it up, right? Right! So Homestead spent $8 million on repairs in 1992-1993, thinking that another team would come calling.
They were wrong.
Oh, the complex did play host to occasional events. For a while, they were home to the U.S. Olympic baseball team and hosted some college baseball games and various youth league tournaments. The Florida Marlins even played some exhibition games there. And there were other flirtations with soccer, fireworks displays, the movie industry, even pro cricket (I know...who knew there was professional cricket in the USA?), but no heavy-duty tenants. Given the upkeep of such a sizeable complex, it was a white elephant of enormous girth, and Homestead is not among the more affluent South Florida cities. Boca Raton, it ain’t!
Actually, the stadium at Homestead would have made an excellent minor league park. Again, Homestead’s location proved to be a drawback. As part of the Marlins’ marketing area, any affiliated minor league team would have to be part of the Marlins’ network. The Marlins played their first regular season game less than eight months after Hurricane Andrew did its business, but their minor league operations were already in place.
Triple-A ball has not worked in Florida and, aside from Jacksonville, neither has AA ball. The Florida State League (high-A ball) would have been a good fit for the Marlins, but they had already linked up with the Brevard County Manatees. Their Space Coast Stadium was scheduled to open in Viera (near Melbourne) in 1994, and the Marlins would also use the facility for spring training (after spending their inaugural spring training at the Astros’ old facility in Cocoa). While Homestead was in Miami’s backyard, it might as well have been in Alaska, for all the good it did them.
As the years passed, Homestead’s chances of landing a team grew dimmer and dimmer. At one time spring training was popular in South Florida. Over the years Miami, Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, and West Palm Beach had hosted spring training. But one by one, teams in those towns migrated elsewhere. Teams evacuated the lower reaches of the Atlantic side of the peninsula in favor of the Gulf Coast side of the peninsula, central Florida, and the central Atlantic coast. Circumstances had rendered Homestead more and more isolated for potential exhibition games, which would have involved longer and longer bus rides. Today the closest teams are in Fort Myers and Jupiter, both more than 100 miles away. Time spent on the bus is time wasted, precious time that could be spent on workouts, instructions, or practice.
So Homestead might have been doomed in the long run, even if Hurricane Andrew had chosen a different route. In the short run, at least they would have garnered some revenue from Indians games to help pay for the complex. Nevertheless, despite two decades of disappointment, the Homestead Sports Complex is in surprisingly good shape, thanks to the sale of the complex to the La Ley Sports group, who have renamed it—surprise!—the La Ley Sports Complex. The complex now hosts an assortment of amateur tournaments, not just for baseball teams but for other sports. I suspect the 6,500-seat capacity is rarely taxed, and for traditionalists the ping of aluminum on horsehide will never replace the thwack of wood on same, but better amateur ball than no ball at all.
The isolation of Homestead may not be a problem for youth tournaments, but it definitely worked against spring training exhibition games. In Arizona, they heard the same message loud and clear. With no more than three teams in Tucson, numerous bus rides up I-10 to the Phoenix area were needed to diversity the exhibition schedule. Now the teams are all clustered in metropolitan Phoenix, rendering “away” games no farther away than the distance many commuters in the Valley of the Sun drive every day, and leaving more time for productive pursuits.
For the time being, parity has been achieved in spring training: 15 major league teams train in Arizona and 15 in Florida. But rumors crop up every year about one or more franchises moving, so one state may gain an advantage over the other in the years to come. If so, I would bet on Arizona getting the upper hand. Weather is a major factor – and not just lack of hurricanes. Arizona is dryer than Florida and rain is less likely to wash out workouts or exhibition games.
On the other hand, how many training camps can metropolitan Phoenix absorb? Will it get to the point that every self-respecting Phoenix suburb must have its own spring training complex, just as surely as it must have a Walmart and a Chuck-E-Cheese? Significantly, all the complexes in Arizona that have opened since Peoria (Mariners/Padres) in 1994 have been built to accommodate two teams, thus bringing in twice as many spring game dates and fans, and, theoretically at least, twice as much revenue.
In Florida, the first dual spring training site was in Jupiter in 1998, when the Cardinals and Expos opened their camps. Today it remains the only one of its kind in Florida (the Marlins subbed for the Expos in 2003). The old business model of a single team operating at a single facility may be obsolete, though exceptions might be made for teams with huge followings, such as the Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Phillies.
It will be interesting to see how long parity lasts. It may be just a transitional phase till Arizona gets the upper hand. It is difficult to envision Florida regaining dominance. The annual threat of hurricanes is definitely a wet blanket. Hurricanes don’t pass through during the spring training season, but as Hurricane Andrew showed, that doesn’t mean that spring training will remain unaffected. I’m sure the folks in Fort Myers thought long and hard about that before they went ahead with the new home for the Red Sox.
When Hurricane Andrew did a number on Homestead, Florida, the youngest players training in Arizona this spring weren’t even born. Had that event not happened, a lot of them might be working out today in Florida. But I’d be surprised if any of them had ever heard of either Hurricane Andrew or the Homestead Exemption it wrought.
Frank Jackson has published previous baseball articles in National Pastime and Elysian Fields Quarterly. He was weaned on baseball at Connie Mack Stadium.
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The Hardball Times
Fun with numbers
by Nick FlederFebruary 09, 2012
Nick Fleder has been a die-hard Yankee fan since birth and has played fantasy baseball obsessively since around the age of ten. He can be reached for all inquiries or comments at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). You can ask him any baseball or fantasy baseball related questions on Twitter: @fishfle
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The Hardball Times
Making the leap up
by Derek AmbrosinoFebruary 08, 2012
Derek Ambrosino aspires to one day, like Dan Quisenberry, find a delivery in his flaw, you can send him questions, comments, or suggestions at digglahhh AT yahoo DOT com.
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The Hardball Times
Against replay in baseball
by David WadeFebruary 08, 2012
Major League Baseball has language in its new collective bargaining agreement that calls for the expansion of the use of video replay in adjudicating certain calls on the field. We know at least two possible scenarios for replay include fair and foul balls as well as helping umpires determine whether or not a ball was caught in the air.
A great many people are already welcoming this addition to baseball's rules. But, for all the pleas to "just get the call right," something just doesn't feel right about increasing video replay in baseball.
The prevailing thought is that embracing video replay will ultimately eliminate costly umpiring errors, famous errors like those made by Jim Joyce and Don Denkinger, two men who are household names to baseball fans for blown calls.
Prevailing thought says expanded use of instant replay would make egregious errors like those a thing of the past. Some fans are in favor of eventually expanding replay to include anything from force outs to—as some have even called for—balls and strikes.
Embrace it, and replay could bring us into a new and wonderful age in baseball where there is no doubt the contest is settled fairly and accurately, on the field of play, with precise calls. Real baseball fans would be fools to oppose such an obvious benefit to the game they love.
Yet, something still seems off.
Some of those who favor replay believe all of those who oppose replay are either luddites or simpletons, fools who are falling for one of several logical fallacies. The list of fallacious arguments against replay is filled with terms you may remember from your Introductory Logic course.
One trap opponents of instant replay could fall in is what's known as an "appeal to authority." This would catch anyone who quotes players or managers who have spoken out against replay and uses those quotes as evidence against expanding it. That's a bad argument, according to the textbooks.
At the same time, this thought process prohibits those in favor of replay from using quotes from Buck Showalter, who feels expanded use of replay would be so successful it would only make us wonder why we didn't switch to it years ago. This article quotes Showalter's prediction for a Utopian world of baseball under video surveillance. This is the poor argument Bud Selig used a couple of years ago.
Umpire Jim Joyce admittedly blew a call that cost Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Gallaraga a perfect game back in June of 2010. Everyone remembers it, and everyone remembers that Commissioner Selig not only declined to reverse the call, but also used the controversial game to point out that he was against the expansion of replay.
The Commissioner said he had talked to luminaries in Major League Baseball, and from what they told him, "Most baseball people are really against instant replay." Appealing to general managers and owners doesn't make Selig wrong, but it's an argument that sets itself up for criticism.
Another logical fallacy waiting to entrap opponents of instant replay is the dreaded "appeal to tradition." This one makes those against replay look like crotchety old-timers who don't want the game to change.
People can be against change because they feel it is bad for the game, but they need to be careful. They can be ridiculed by those who would note that we'd still have segregation in baseball had some traditionalists had their way. To be sure, it's not right to oppose something because it means a change, even if changing something is wrong or undesirable. A 200-year history without replay does not mean replay is invalid.
Others against replay already have argued that the very first foray into implementing such technology, like what has already been used for home run boundaries, would open a "Pandora's Box." They fear replay is already leading us down a slippery slope that could end up with every call reviewed by laser sensors spanning the entirety of the field, perhaps even culminating in R2D2 calling balls and strikes.
Yes, that doomsday scenario of a "slippery slope" is yet another logical fallacy. This one involves a terrible outcome stemming from some new rule or law, for instance.
Bad consequences are possible after change, but it's hard for that arguer to get his case heard when he makes leaps all the way to his dreadful scenario while skipping over several more likely points in between that could surface before we ever get to such a horrible state. The illogical argument as it pertains to replay in baseball goes something like this:
"If we expand replay, where will it stop? Eventually, every play at first will be replayed, and the game, which often takes too long already, will take even longer. This will drive people from the game. Revenue for Major League Baseball will fall. Young children will no longer have dreams of playing professional baseball. Little League enrollment will fall off dramatically. Eventually, no children will even play baseball, and the sport will be wiped off the face of the earth."
Well, that obviously ends in hyperbole. There's no way replay could spell the end of baseball. But even though that's true and "getting the call right" doesn't seem to carry any negative consequences, something still seems bad about it.
Given that the case against replay is fraught with the potential for so many perilously poor arguments, where in the world can I turn to express what is becoming a growing abhorrence for replay in any sport, let alone baseball?
Maybe this is where I should have a little faith. Maybe baseball won't follow the path of the National Football League, where replay has become its own game within a game and where dozens of high-definition looks don't always provide a definite answer, anyway.
Not to mention the fact that replay has the side effect of sucking the joy out of nearly every big play, since nearly every big play could potentially be overturned and has to endure the deepest of analysis before we know if a play even will stand. Furthermore, replay causes a break in the action and makes the game longer than necessary, something that's already a concern in baseball.
In the NFL, there is football strategy—Xs and Os, as they like to say. But there's also the strategy of dealing with replay. A coach has to decide when to throw the challenge flag, and when that flag is thrown, we are no longer watching a football game.
Now we are watching officials examine a play with incredible scrutiny, scrutiny that sometimes leads to announcers disagreeing with each other on what the call should be. In fact, several broadcasts now bring in an official to serve as the "replay expert" in the booth, and even the expert has predicted a different conclusion from what was eventually called on the field. Is that "getting the call right?"
Consider this quote about replay in football:
"When instant replay began, everybody thought we were going to get a piece of film that's absolutely going to nail it down," said Barry Mano, president of the National Association of Sports Officials. "Guess what? You can look at a clip and I can look at a clip and we can see two different things."
Maybe that wouldn't happen in baseball. Maybe MLB will implement something that doesn't put an arbitrary number on how many challenges a manager could use. Maybe they will only choose certain plays to review and have an umpire watching in the booth, taking the onus off the managers. Maybe we won't have to examine every single double-play ball to make sure the middle infielder doesn't use the "neighborhood play" at second. Maybe.
However, even the best implementation of replay can't keep some calls from still carrying a certain degree of uncertainty. And, if that's the case, how do we ever get to a point where we know, absolutely, that the right call is made?
Maybe the majority of players, coaches, and fans still will embrace replay. Maybe calls will increase for expansion until we see Pitch-f/x systems in place to call balls and strikes. Bill James has even argued that we should put sensors on the bases and boundaries so calls can be made electronically and negate even the need for video evidence. Maybe that's the only way to guarantee we absolutely get the call right.
Hopefully that type of change would make the game better and not just impose too much technology on a ball and stick game. But for that type of dramatic change to take place, baseball will have to take a look at its defined rules.
As it stands, baseball is played "under jurisdiction of one or more umpires." For those umpires to yield their jurisdiction to electronic sensors would seem to deviate from one of the main commandments of the game. Of course, in many ways the game would still be under the jurisdiction of umpires, even if they relied on video replay to help on a call. In fact, the umpires' jurisdiction might reach unanticipated levels should video evidence rule a caught ball as trapped.
Video replay may be able to rectify an out into a safe call, but something would have to be done for any potential baserunners, and an umpire, who already had the right to place runners as he sees fit on calls such as fan interference, may also have to place baserunners on an overturned diving attempt at a catch on a fly ball to the gap with runners on.
But again, such calls might be worth it if gross errors are eliminated. Arguing against this may just be a silly attempt to hold on to something that's not attainable anymore. Not when the technology is there to settle disputes as easily and finally as what is seen in professional tennis, which, other than a rogue call or two, is widely accepted by its players and fans.
So, in the end, maybe all there is to offer against instant replay is a gut feeling, a feeling without concrete evidence that the game doesn't need replay to take it into the coming years any more than it needed steroids to save it in the 1990s.
It's just a game, yet it has somehow always been more than a game. As cold, calculating, and valuable as all the statistical analysis in the world may be, it doesn't mean the players aren't playing a game. Baseball didn't need a rash of homers to keep its true base watching, and it won't need replay to validate it.
Isn't all we really need from umpires is impartiality and a strong desire to get their calls right? They already use technology to grade their performance. Maybe that's as far as it really needs to go in a game that so often is a metaphor for life. And in life, you go with the calls you're given, whether right or wrong. You deal with the bad breaks, and they can even define you.
David welcomes comments below. You can reach him via email at david DOT wade AT insightbb DOT com.
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The Hardball Times
BOB: Oakland dealt setback in pursuit to keep Athletics
by Brian BorawskiFebruary 08, 2012
Oakland falls out of race to keep Athletics
The city of Oakland was dealt a blow in their attempt to keep the Oakland Athletics by courting them with a new stadium. With the Athletics still looking at San Jose, Oakland has tried to keep itself in the mix with a waterfront ballpark that's now dead in the water. The reason is that the state of California is pulling back it's redevelopment money, and the Oakland Redevelopment Agency is going to be dissolved. That's where the money would have come from for a new ballpark.It looks like the city now is going to refocus on building in and around the current Oakland Coliseum with a new ballpark being offered up to the Athletics. At this point, Oakland has to court MLB because it seems like the fate of the Athletics is in the league's hands.
The city is going to take the first step by doing an environmental impact review, but the money to pay for that is also tied up, as well. With MLB still sitting on a decision as to how it will manage an Athletics relocation, it looks like there's still some time for the city of Oakland to get its ducks in a row.
Dodgers' bidder may buy stake in the Mets
Investor Steven Cohen, who has been listed as one of the suitors in the Los Angeles Dodgers sale, is close to buying a minority interest in the New York Mets. With the Mets desperate for cash, it's looking like they're keeping with their decision to bring in ten different $20 million investors, and they're tapping Cohen for one of those ownership shares.The buy-in by Cohen does not preclude Cohen from pursuing the Dodgers, but in the event he becomes an owner in Los Angeles, he'll have to sell his stake in the Mets.
So if Cohen is one of the front runners to buy the Dodgers, that makes this little more than a loan. Cohen has come under some scrutiny because a couple of his former employees are facing insider trading violations, but MLB cleared him in their investigation, and no charges have been leveled at Cohen personally.
This also gives Cohen some leverage, because if he doesn't land the Dodgers and the Mets ever go up for sale, he could be the favorite for a quick sale because he's already been cleared by the league and has a stake in the team.
Wilpon and Katz look to expert witness to minimize damage money
In other Mets news, the owners of the team have their trial coming up with regard to their involvement in the Bernie Madoff scandal. Their lone expert witness is John Maine, who has said that investors like Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz would have had no reason to suspect Madoff and that they shouldn't have to pay back any more than what they gained by pulling some of their money out earlier before the stuff hit the fan.With that, Maine has come under some scrutiny. He was accused in one case of basically acting as a shill for his client and that he hadn't even read any case law on the topic at hand. The judge in that instance also indicated that the written report wasn't provided by Maine but was actually prepared by his client's lawyer.
Irving Picard, the trustee in the Madoff scandal, also has attacked Maine, saying that his report lacked any principle or methodology and that Maine is too far removed from a full-time financial post.
Birmingham ballpark is named
The Birmingham Barons will have a new ballpark in 2013, and they recently sold the the naming rights to Regions Financial Corporation. When the ballpark opens, it will be called Regions Field.. Regions has been a sponsor of the Barons since 2007, and the new ballpark is set to be ready in downtown Birmingham for Opening Day in April, 2013.Brian Borawski is a member of SABR's Business of Baseball Committee and writes about the Detroit Tigers at his own website, TigerBlog. He welcomes comments, questions and suggestions via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
The virtual 1958-68 Giants, Reds, and Cardinals (Part 10: 1966-67)
by Steve TrederFebruary 08, 2012
Our long and winding road has completed nine-elevenths of its imaginary journey:
1957-58
1958-59
1959-60
1960-61
1961-62
1962-63
1963-64
1964-65
1965-66
In the 1966 season, we witnessed a stunning reversal of the long-holding dynamic as our Cardinals, the perennial also-rans, suddenly burst out with a 105-victory performance—only to finish second to our Giants, who rose to the challenge to the tune of 106 wins. Who will come out on top in The Summer of Love?
Giants: Actual Reds: Actual Cardinals: Actual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 80 74 3 727 698 76 78 4 695 623 72 82 5T 619 704
1959 83 71 3 705 613 74 80 5T 764 738 71 83 7 641 725
1960 79 75 5 671 631 67 87 6 640 692 86 68 3 639 616
1961 85 69 3 773 655 93 61 1 710 653 80 74 5 703 668
1962 103 62 1 878 690 98 64 3 802 685 84 78 6 774 664
1963 88 74 3 725 641 86 76 5 648 594 93 69 2 747 628
1964 90 72 4 656 587 92 70 2T 660 566 93 69 1 715 652
1965 95 67 2 682 593 89 73 4 825 704 80 81 7 707 674
1966 93 68 2 675 626 76 84 7 692 702 83 79 6 571 577
Giants: Virtual Reds: Virtual Cardinals: Virtual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 83 71 2T 747 692 73 81 5 683 637 77 77 4 640 677
1959 87 67 1T 737 615 87 67 1T 802 662 84 70 4 725 685
1960 93 61 1 709 561 76 78 6 705 666 86 68 4 661 632
1961 88 66 2 787 648 106 48 1 813 629 72 82 6 689 724
1962 103 59 1 800 632 101 61 2T 779 663 84 78 6 809 703
1963 97 65 3 726 578 100 62 1 704 540 80 82 6 664 668
1964 100 62 2 726 576 101 61 1 689 533 87 75 4 662 657
1965 99 63 1 697 587 98 64 2 843 646 85 76 5 692 622
1966 106 55 1 739 581 87 73 5 769 677 105 57 2 667 514The 1966-67 offseason: Actual deals we will make
Nov. 28, 1966: The Cincinnati Reds drafted pitcher Ted Abernathy from the Atlanta Braves in the 1966 Rule 5 draft.
The Rule 5 draft is a highly unreliable source of competent, dependable major league pitching talent. Yet the Reds in the mid-1960s got themselves on a roll of plucking such a useful needle out of the haystack over and over again. In 1961, they took Moe Drabowsky, in ‘62 Al Worthington, and in ’65, it was Don Nottebart.
And this time they’re helping themselves to the best one yet. The submarining right-hander Abernathy intermittently struggled with controlling his wickedly breaking hard sinker, and thus had been inconsistent, and 1966 was one of his down years. But that was on the heels of a brilliant performance in 1965 when he’d set major league records for appearances and saves.
Thus, the wisdom of Atlanta GM Paul Richards in leaving the 33-year-old Abernathy off his 40-man roster on Rule 5 draft day is dubious, and the decision by Cincinnati owner-GM Bill DeWitt (in one of his very final acts before selling the club) to take a flyer on the veteran isn’t. Our Reds will go along with DeWitt’s reasoning.
The 1966-67 season: Actual deals we will not make
Oct. 15, 1966: The Cincinnati Reds sold infielder Gus Gil to the Cleveland Indians.
Gil doesn’t project as anything more than a utility man, and like the actual Reds, our version doesn’t have room for him in the majors. But he’s been putting up .350-plus OBPs in Triple-A, and thus might yield more in the market than just this cash payment. If we have to settle for selling Gil, we will, but we’ll hang on to him for now and see what shakes out during trading season.
Dec. 8, 1966: The St. Louis Cardinals traded third baseman Charley Smith to the New York Yankees for outfielder Roger Maris.
Like the actual Cardinals, we’re intrigued to see what the mighty-yet-fallen Maris might have left in his tank, especially far removed from the sour atmosphere pervading the mighty-yet-fallen Yankees. After all, he’s still just 32 and once presented a marvelous breadth of skill.
But we don’t have Smith, and we certainly aren’t willing to part with Mike Shannon, the third baseman we do have. So we’ll have to pass on the single-season home run king.
Dec. 13, 1966: The San Francisco Giants traded outfielder Cap Peterson and pitcher Bob Priddy to the Washington Senators for pitcher Mike McCormick.
This was a splendid deal by the actual Giants. Alas, our version has already traded Peterson to Washington, so we won’t be able to re-acquire the lefty McCormick, who’s impressively worked his way back from career-threatening arm trouble.
Dec. 14, 1966: The San Francisco Giants traded outfielder Len Gabrielson to the California Angels for first baseman-outfielder Norm Siebern.
Nor do we have Gabrielson, so we won’t be able to pick up the veteran Siebern.
The 1966-67 offseason: Deals we will invoke
Oct. 12, 1966: The Cincinnati Reds traded pitcher Juan Pizarro and cash to the Pittsburgh Pirates for pitcher Wilbur Wood.
Actually, it was the White Sox trading the former star Pizarro to Pittsburgh for the young southpaw Wood.
Though he wasn’t yet 25, the Pirates were the second organization giving up on Wood, despite the fact that his minor league stats were terrific, and he’d acquitted himself decently in the limited opportunities he’d gotten in the majors. The issue, no doubt, was that Wood just didn’t throw hard, and thus wasn’t wowing anyone.
But Wood’s control of his assortment of junk is extraordinary, so our Reds, like the White Sox, are more confident in his future than that of the struggling Pizarro. And we understand the soft-tossing kid has been experimenting with a knuckleball.
Dec., 1966: The San Francisco Giants traded outfielder Jesus Alou and pitchers Dick LeMay and Bob Garibaldi to the Atlanta Braves for pitcher Dick Kelley.
Based on his superb minor league performance (as well as his family pedigree), the 24-year-old Alou had seemed to be a star in the making, but he hasn’t been able to get it going in the majors. We’ve run out of patience with him, and also with the former Bonus Baby Garibaldi, who’s been spinning his wheels, as well, mostly in Triple-A.
The left-hander Kelley is a couple of years older than Alou and Garibaldi and has no star potential, but he appears poised for a nice run as a spot starter/long reliever. It’s plausible the Braves would take this swap, particularly given that in this scenario they don’t have Alou’s big brother in their outfield.
Dec., 1966: The St. Louis Cardinals traded first baseman-outfielder Lee Thomas to the Chicago Cubs for infielder-outfielder Jim Stewart and cash.
Our Cardinals are fed up with the maddeningly inconsistent bat of Thomas. Stewart is just a utility guy, but one with particular speed and versatility.
Dec., 1966: The St. Louis Cardinals traded second baseman Julian Javier to the New York Mets for shortstop Eddie Bressoud, outfielder Danny Napoleon, and pitcher Jerry Hinsley.
And our Cardinals are also quite concerned about the deteriorating offensive output from Javier. We still like his glove, but as he enters his 30s, we fear his value will dwindle, and so we’ll get what we can for The Phantom now. The veteran Bressoud can contribute in a utility role, and Napoleon and Hinsley are decent prospects.
(During this offseason, the Mets actually traded Bressoud and Napoleon to the Cardinals for Jerry Buchek. Unlike the actual Cards, we see the talented but erratic young Buchek as a better second baseman than Javier going forward. Oops: Javier will suddenly deliver the best hitting of his life in 1967-69.)
Dec. 14, 1966: The St. Louis Cardinals traded outfielder Walt Williams and pitcher Don Dennis to the Chicago White Sox for infielder Wayne Causey.
Actually, on this date, the Cardinals traded Williams and Dennis to the White Sox for veteran catcher John Romano. Our Cardinals see the middle infielder Causey as being far more useful than Romano, especially given that we’ve just traded Javier.
Causey is about to turn 30 and slumped a bit with the bat in 1966. But in the past he’s delivered outstanding on-base ability and the capacity to competently handle either shortstop or second base. It’s plausible that the White Sox would agree to expend him instead of the power-hitting Romano in order to get this pair of young players they like, in particular the 22-year-old No-Neck, who’d hit .330 with 54 doubles in Triple-A in 1966.
Dec. 15, 1966: The Cincinnati Reds traded third baseman-first baseman Deron Johnson, pitchers Jim O’Toole and Ted Davidson, and infielder Gus Gil to the Chicago White Sox for third baseman-outfielder Pete Ward, catcher John Romano, outfielder Floyd Robinson, and pitcher Jack Lamabe.
This builds upon the actual trade made on this date, which was simply O’Toole for Robinson, one faded former star for another. This expanded version helps the White Sox get younger, which was the theme in their acquisitions of Wood and Williams, while upgrading their power bat at third base.
For our Reds, the logic is basically that Ward bats left-handed, and thus is a better fit for us as a third-base partner with our emerging young right-handed-batting Tony Perez. We’re taking a risk that the bad back that plagued Ward in 1966 won’t heal, but we think he probably can do well enough in a limited role, and we also see the veterans Romano and Robinson nicely filling spots on our bench.
Jan., 1967: The Cincinnati Reds sold catcher Dave Ricketts to the Kansas City Athletics.
With Romano on board, we no longer have room for this guy.
April, 1967: The San Francisco Giants sold infielder Andre Rodgers to the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Rodgers has had a nice career for us but is finally getting squeezed off the roster.
The 1967 season: Actual deals we will make
May 31, 1967: The Cincinnati Reds purchased pitcher Bob Lee from the Los Angeles Dodgers.
This huge Horse isn’t throwing nearly as hard as he did just a few years ago, but he’s still just 29, and we’ll give him a chance in our bullpen.
Sep. 18, 1967: The Cincinnati Reds traded infielder Len Boehmer to the New York Yankees for pitcher Bill Henry.
A transaction of the merest consequence, no doubt. But it makes sense for us to convert infield surplus into a left-handed prospect, albeit a middling one. (Oh, this is this 1960s left-handed pitcher named Bill Henry, not the other 1960s left-handed pitcher named Bill Henry.)
The 1967 season: Actual deals we will not make
May 14, 1967: The St. Louis Cardinals sold outfielder Ted Savage to the Chicago Cubs.
Our Cards will keep this multi-talented spare part.
May 31, 1967: The San Francisco Giants purchased outfielder-first baseman Ty Cline from the Atlanta Braves.
Our Giants don’t have room for this journeyman.
June 22, 1967: The San Francisco Giants purchased shortstop Dick Groat from the Philadelphia Phillies.
Nor for this declining veteran.
July 16, 1967: The St. Louis Cardinals traded a player to be named later to the New York Mets for pitcher Jack Lamabe. (On Oct. 13, 1967, the Cardinals sent pitcher Al Jackson to the New York Mets, completing the deal.)
Our Cardinals have no interest in Lamabe.
The 1967 season: Deals we will invoke
May, 1967: The Cincinnati Reds sold outfielder Floyd Robinson to the Philadelphia Phillies.
May, 1967: The St. Louis Cardinals traded pitcher Hal Woodeshick to the Philadelphia Phillies for pitcher John Morris and cash.
May, 1967: The St. Louis Cardinals sold infielder-outfielder Jim Stewart to the Chicago White Sox.
May, 1967: The St. Louis Cardinals sold shortstop Eddie Bressoud to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
May 14, 1967: The St. Louis Cardinals sold outfielder Jim Beauchamp to the Atlanta Braves.
None of these guys will survive this year’s mid-May roster trim.
May 30, 1967: The Cincinnati Reds purchased infielder Jake Wood from the Detroit Tigers.
Actually, the Reds made this purchase a month later, but we’ll pick Wood up now to fill in for an injured Tommy Harper.
May 31, 1967: The Cincinnati Reds sold pitcher Jack Lamabe to the New York Mets.
And our Reds will let this veteran go to make room for Lee.
1967 season results
Giants
Following our monster 106-win season, changes to the roster are minimal. Kelley joins the pitching staff, along with rookie right-hander Rich Robertson. And we’ll give spots on our bench to the former Bonus kids Bob Schroder in the infield and Ken Henderson in the outfield, both of whom did well in Triple-A in 1966.
1967 San Francisco Giants Won 84 Lost 78 Finished 4th
Pos Player Age G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+
1B W. McCovey* 29 135 456 73 126 17 4 31 91 71 110 .276 .377 .535 .912 159
2B-SS B. Schroder* 22 128 322 35 75 9 1 0 17 29 33 .233 .293 .267 .560 62
SS H. Lanier 24 121 263 19 56 8 2 0 21 8 31 .213 .232 .259 .491 41
3B-OF J. Hart 25 158 578 98 167 26 7 29 99 77 100 .289 .373 .509 .882 151
RF-CF J. Cardenal 23 108 381 44 93 14 6 6 27 14 60 .244 .270 .360 .629 79
CF W. Mays 36 141 486 83 128 22 2 22 70 51 92 .263 .333 .453 .785 123
LF-1B O. Cepeda 29 151 563 86 182 35 0 27 105 62 75 .323 .398 .529 .927 164
C T. Haller* 30 141 455 54 114 23 5 14 49 62 61 .251 .341 .415 .756 116
OF F. Valentine# 32 121 357 45 87 14 2 9 31 41 64 .244 .333 .370 .702 101
SS-2B D. Schofield# 32 110 255 25 58 11 1 3 15 33 44 .227 .310 .314 .623 80
2B T. Fuentes 23 111 261 19 57 10 1 4 21 22 45 .218 .271 .310 .581 66
3B-1B K. Boyer 36 85 231 21 58 9 2 5 23 23 30 .251 .315 .372 .687 97
OF K. Henderson# 21 89 215 20 44 8 1 4 16 27 51 .205 .294 .307 .601 73
C D. Dietz 25 28 60 5 13 1 0 2 10 12 23 .217 .351 .333 .685 98
C T. Talton* 28 46 59 7 15 4 1 0 5 7 12 .254 .324 .356 .679 95
C B. Barton 25 22 37 2 8 1 0 0 3 1 6 .216 .237 .243 .480 38
Others 113 17 25 3 1 2 12 11 20 .221 .299 .319 .618 78
Pitchers 447 24 63 11 1 0 12 8 191 .140 .144 .170 .314 -10
Total 5539 677 1369 226 37 158 627 559 1048 .247 .315 .387 .702 101
* Bats left
# Bats both
Pitcher Age G GS CG W L SV IP H R ER HR BB SO ERA ERA+
G. Perry 28 39 37 18 16 16 1 293 231 98 85 20 84 230 2.61 128
J. Marichal 29 26 26 18 15 9 0 202 195 79 62 20 42 166 2.76 121
R. Robertson 22 41 29 3 7 9 0 192 207 107 97 8 111 158 4.55 73
D. Ellsworth* 27 32 21 3 7 6 0 125 147 70 59 7 36 45 4.25 79
B. Bolin 28 37 15 0 7 7 0 120 120 71 65 16 50 69 4.88 69
D. Estelle* 25 13 13 1 4 4 0 64 64 34 26 6 38 44 3.66 91
B. O'Dell* 34 18 7 1 4 3 0 58 55 38 37 7 26 22 5.74 58
D. McMahon 37 63 0 0 7 1 5 109 74 30 27 9 38 80 2.23 150
F. Linzy 26 57 0 0 8 6 14 96 67 21 16 4 34 38 1.50 223
S. Miller 39 42 0 0 4 8 8 81 69 28 25 5 34 59 2.78 120
D. Kelley* 27 42 12 1 3 9 2 113 107 54 49 7 48 85 3.90 86
Others 2 0 2 0 0 21 19 9 6 1 11 11 2.57 130
Total 162 45 84 78 30 1474 1355 639 554 110 552 1007 3.38 99
* Throws leftSome things turn out just fine. Orlando Cepeda’s knee trouble is fully in the past as he delivers a peak-level performance. Jim Ray Hart is better than ever, Gaylord Perry proves that his 1966 breakout was for real, and Don McMahon and Frank Linzy are superb heading up the bullpen.
But our list of emerging problems is long. Willie Mays suddenly looks every bit his 36 years of age. Juan Marichal misses nearly a third of the year with a leg injury. Bob Bolin and Dick Ellsworth both slump badly, and the rookie Robertson, consequently pressed into heavier service than planned, struggles.
Sophomore second baseman Tito Fuentes flops, Schroder hits poorly when given the opportunity to replace him, and our middle infield overall is an offensive disaster. In the outfield, Jose Cardenal slumps and at first base, Willie McCovey begins to be bothered by a sore knee.
It’s an aggravating year as, despite our real strengths, we’re unable to put together any sustained hot streaks. We stumble in just six games above .500, our least-impressive performance in our decade in San Francisco.
Reds
Attempting to bounce back from our disappointing 1966, we’ve largely revamped the bench via the big trade with the White Sox and also with the promotion of rookie first baseman-outfielder Lee May. Our pitching staff includes multiple new faces as well, with Abernathy joining the bullpen. Additionally, Wood and Lamabe—as well as journeymen Dick Stigman and Rollie Sheldon—all compete for starts.
Perhaps our most significant alteration is a position shift. We’ll allow impressive youngsters Tommy Helms and Cesar Tovar to battle it out for the second base job and move Pete Rose to left field, easing incumbent left fielder Tony Gonzalez into a part-time role. This will improve us defensively as well as insulate our terrific young star Rose from the injury risks inherent in the middle infield.
1967 Cincinnati Reds Won 94 Lost 68 Finished 1st
Pos Player Age G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+
1B B. White* 33 110 308 35 81 7 2 9 36 51 60 .263 .367 .386 .753 106
2B-OF C. Tovar 26 109 325 52 88 17 4 3 24 21 25 .271 .320 .375 .696 90
SS L. Cardenas 28 108 379 33 97 14 3 2 23 34 77 .256 .318 .325 .643 76
3B T. Perez 25 140 480 68 139 22 6 21 90 26 82 .290 .326 .492 .818 121
RF F. Robinson 31 129 479 91 155 25 8 28 103 67 80 .324 .410 .585 .994 169
CF V. Pinson* 28 150 585 89 169 25 12 16 65 23 77 .289 .317 .455 .772 109
LF-2B P. Rose# 26 148 585 97 176 32 8 12 80 56 66 .301 .363 .444 .808 120
C J. Azcue 27 95 325 43 86 14 7 12 44 23 36 .265 .315 .462 .776 110
2B-SS T. Helms 26 123 373 33 101 20 3 2 29 17 32 .271 .297 .357 .654 78
1B-OF L. May 24 102 297 40 80 21 2 9 44 14 49 .269 .315 .444 .759 105
OF T. Gonzalez* 30 99 254 45 89 12 5 5 33 23 29 .350 .405 .496 .901 145
3B-1B P. Ward* 29 97 234 30 59 9 2 11 37 29 52 .252 .347 .449 .796 116
C J. Edwards* 29 72 188 11 39 5 0 2 18 14 25 .207 .256 .266 .522 43
OF T. Harper 26 52 122 22 27 6 1 2 7 14 17 .221 .297 .336 .633 73
C J. Romano 32 24 58 1 8 1 0 0 2 12 14 .138 .286 .155 .441 24
IF L. Boehmer 26 24 43 5 8 1 0 1 3 3 5 .186 .234 .279 .513 40
2B J. Wood 30 16 17 1 2 0 0 0 1 1 3 .118 .167 .118 .284 -21
OF B. Perry 32 14 16 1 3 1 0 0 2 0 3 .188 .188 .250 .438 19
Others 52 6 7 2 0 1 3 6 11 .135 .220 .231 .451 24
Pitchers 439 22 60 11 2 2 28 19 164 .136 .162 .184 .346 -6
Total 5559 725 1474 245 65 138 672 453 907 .265 .321 .407 .728 98
* Bats left
# Bats both
Pitcher Age G GS CG W L SV IP H R ER HR BB SO ERA ERA+
C. Osteen* 27 35 35 12 18 12 0 259 288 122 112 22 49 136 3.89 98
J. Maloney 27 30 29 6 16 10 0 196 181 76 71 8 72 153 3.26 117
S. Ellis 26 32 27 8 9 10 0 176 197 86 75 18 67 80 3.84 99
M. Queen 25 21 15 4 10 4 0 130 103 46 40 11 35 103 2.77 137
B. McCool* 22 31 11 0 4 6 2 97 92 45 37 8 56 83 3.43 111
D. Stigman* 31 21 15 2 6 9 0 93 101 52 47 13 45 67 4.55 84
G. Nolan 19 11 11 3 6 2 0 76 64 24 22 6 21 69 2.61 146
R. Sheldon 30 10 5 1 3 2 0 48 62 25 22 4 17 31 4.13 92
T. Abernathy 34 70 0 0 7 3 28 106 63 19 15 1 41 88 1.27 298
W. Wood* 25 54 11 0 8 2 4 116 131 55 46 4 30 53 3.57 106
D. Nottebart 31 47 0 0 1 3 5 79 75 25 17 4 19 48 1.94 196
B. Lee 29 27 1 0 4 3 2 51 51 26 25 0 25 33 4.41 86
J. Lamabe 30 11 1 0 1 1 0 22 22 10 9 1 6 14 3.68 103
Others 1 0 1 1 1 17 11 10 10 2 15 13 5.29 72
Total 162 36 94 68 42 1466 1441 621 548 102 498 971 3.36 113
* Throws leftWe may have protected Rose from an injury, but this year our team is nonetheless riddled with injuries. Harper, first baseman Bill White, shortstop Leo Cardenas, and, most ominously, superstar right fielder Frank Robinson all miss significant time with various hurts.
This makes frantic lineup-juggling a necessity and, moreover, the back end of our starting rotation is a jumble, as well. There are ample reasons for this team to swoon.
But we don’t swoon. Instead, we demonstrate the value of tremendous depth. Ward and May prove quite useful off the bench, and Gonzalez hits a ton in spot duty. Neither Romano nor our other veteran catcher, Johnny Edwards, hits at all, so Joe Azcue calmly takes over and performs wonderfully.
Perez busts out as a star, and Vada Pinson persists as one.
Our pitching problems are overcome via two mid-season promotions from Triple-A: first, converted outfielder Mel Queen and then teenage sensation Gary Nolan, both of whom perform like veteran stars down the stretch. And all season long, our bullpen is staunchly anchored by Abernathy, who is dominant, astoundingly good.
This Cincinnati ballclub courts disaster but deftly sidesteps it and finds itself at the head of the parade when the season ends, back in the winner’s circle after a two-season absence. We’ve featured better Reds teams, but perhaps never one with more organizational resilience.
Cardinals
Thrilled though we were with our 105-victory breakthrough last year, we’re not blind to the fact that we achieved it despite some offensive weaknesses. And we’ve made several bold moves to address them.
Moving from shortstop to second base will be Buchek, who hasn’t yet developed as we thought he might but is still young and could benefit from a bit less defensive stress. Taking over as the primary shortstop is the veteran Causey.
Art Shamsky will open the season as our primary first baseman, but if speedy rookie Bobby Tolan proves ready for a regular job in the outfield, then we might slide the veteran Felipe Alou in to first base instead.
1967 St. Louis Cardinals Won 90 Lost 71 Finished 3rd
Pos Player Age G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+
1B-RF F. Alou 32 140 574 68 161 28 4 11 68 32 49 .280 .324 .401 .725 108
2B J. Buchek 25 124 411 44 98 11 3 13 46 27 100 .238 .285 .375 .660 89
SS-2B W. Causey* 30 124 350 34 83 13 5 1 37 36 40 .237 .302 .311 .614 77
3B M. Shannon 27 130 482 48 118 18 3 12 69 37 89 .245 .301 .369 .670 92
RF-CF B. Tolan* 21 110 319 42 83 9 3 7 34 22 50 .260 .311 .373 .684 96
CF C. Flood 29 134 514 61 172 24 1 5 45 37 46 .335 .375 .414 .790 128
LF L. Brock* 28 159 666 99 199 31 12 20 66 23 105 .299 .326 .471 .797 127
C T. McCarver* 25 138 471 61 139 26 3 14 62 54 32 .295 .367 .452 .819 135
SS D. Maxvill 28 122 286 20 64 8 2 1 22 28 41 .224 .292 .276 .569 65
1B-C D. Pavletich 28 74 231 25 52 14 3 5 34 22 39 .225 .301 .377 .678 94
IF P. Gagliano 25 73 217 18 48 7 0 2 19 19 26 .221 .280 .281 .561 62
1B A. Shamsky* 25 88 182 9 35 4 1 3 18 18 41 .192 .271 .275 .546 58
OF T. Savage 30 88 155 24 33 7 1 3 20 26 38 .213 .332 .329 .661 91
3B E. Spiezio 25 55 105 8 22 2 0 3 9 7 18 .210 .265 .314 .580 67
C B. Uecker 32 36 78 6 12 2 0 1 7 9 25 .154 .236 .218 .454 32
Others 36 5 5 0 1 0 1 4 9 .139 .225 .194 .419 22
Pitchers 430 34 64 5 0 0 15 24 163 .149 .185 .160 .346 1
Total 5507 606 1388 209 42 101 572 425 911 .252 .306 .360 .666 91
* Bats left
Pitcher Age G GS CG W L SV IP H R ER HR BB SO ERA ERA+
L. Jackson 36 40 37 11 13 15 0 262 240 97 87 16 56 142 2.99 110
S. Carlton* 22 30 28 11 13 10 1 193 173 71 64 10 62 168 2.98 110
B. Gibson 31 24 24 10 12 8 0 175 151 62 58 10 40 147 2.98 110
L. Jaster* 23 34 23 2 9 8 3 152 141 57 51 12 44 87 3.02 109
D. Hughes 29 25 18 8 10 5 2 148 109 48 44 15 32 107 2.68 123
J. Hoerner* 30 57 0 0 4 4 15 66 52 25 19 5 20 50 2.59 127
N. Briles 23 49 14 4 13 6 6 155 139 45 42 8 40 94 2.44 134
E. Fisher 30 46 0 0 4 2 3 90 89 42 39 7 25 50 3.90 84
L. McDaniel 31 41 3 0 2 6 5 73 69 32 29 4 25 48 3.58 92
A. Jackson* 31 38 11 1 8 4 1 107 117 61 47 7 29 43 3.95 83
J. Gelnar 24 10 1 0 0 1 0 19 30 17 17 4 11 5 8.05 41
Others 2 0 2 2 2 28 20 12 10 0 15 17 3.21 102
Total 161 47 90 71 38 1468 1330 569 507 98 399 958 3.11 106
* Throws leftOur middle infield shuffle isn’t a resounding success, but it does deliver marginally more offense at those positions. And while Shamsky lays an egg, the young Tolan stands up well enough that, with Alou at first, we’ve got every position at least reasonably productive, supporting star turns by Lou Brock in left field, Curt Flood in center, and Tim McCarver behind the plate.
And though our pitching can’t sustain the dazzling pace it kept in 1966, it's very good. A broken leg suffered by ace Bob Gibson is a significant challenge, but the depth of this staff is up to it. Nelson Briles strides forward, as does retread Dick Hughes, but perhaps most impressive is the showing of 22-year-old left-hander Steve Carlton, back from a year in the minors following his Bonus Baby debut of 1965.
We’re a genuinely good team; the ’66 beauty proves to be no fluke. But we aren’t as good as the Reds, who outpace us by three-and-a-half games, nor quite as good as an upstart Chicago Cubs team that comes in just a shade ahead of us in second. Finishing in third place again is frustrating, no doubt, but we are a serious contender. We know it won’t take much more to get to the top.
Next time
In our eleventh and final season, will the Giants rebound? Will the Reds defend their title? Will the Cardinals break their two-decade pennant drought?
Giants: Actual Reds: Actual Cardinals: Actual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 80 74 3 727 698 76 78 4 695 623 72 82 5T 619 704
1959 83 71 3 705 613 74 80 5T 764 738 71 83 7 641 725
1960 79 75 5 671 631 67 87 6 640 692 86 68 3 639 616
1961 85 69 3 773 655 93 61 1 710 653 80 74 5 703 668
1962 103 62 1 878 690 98 64 3 802 685 84 78 6 774 664
1963 88 74 3 725 641 86 76 5 648 594 93 69 2 747 628
1964 90 72 4 656 587 92 70 2T 660 566 93 69 1 715 652
1965 95 67 2 682 593 89 73 4 825 704 80 81 7 707 674
1966 93 68 2 675 626 76 84 7 692 702 83 79 6 571 577
1967 91 71 2 652 551 87 75 4 604 563 101 60 1 695 557
Giants: Virtual Reds: Virtual Cardinals: Virtual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 83 71 2T 747 692 73 81 5 683 637 77 77 4 640 677
1959 87 67 1T 737 615 87 67 1T 802 662 84 70 4 725 685
1960 93 61 1 709 561 76 78 6 705 666 86 68 4 661 632
1961 88 66 2 787 648 106 48 1 813 629 72 82 6 689 724
1962 103 59 1 800 632 101 61 2T 779 663 84 78 6 809 703
1963 97 65 3 726 578 100 62 1 704 540 80 82 6 664 668
1964 100 62 2 726 576 101 61 1 689 533 87 75 4 662 657
1965 99 63 1 697 587 98 64 2 843 646 85 76 5 692 622
1966 106 55 1 739 581 87 73 5 769 677 105 57 2 667 514
1967 84 78 4 677 639 94 68 1 725 561 90 71 3 606 569
Steve Treder can often be found spending way too much time talking baseball at Baseball Primer. He welcomes your questions and comments via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
20,000 days since Herb Score’s injury
by Chris JaffeFebruary 08, 2012
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 order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
A baseball card mystery: Bill Sudakis and the strange light
by Bruce MarkusenFebruary 07, 2012
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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The Hardball Times
20,000 days since Hank Aaron’s worst game
by Chris JaffeFebruary 07, 2012
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 order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
Did you know we had a mock draft?
by Brad JohnsonFebruary 07, 2012
Follow Brad on Twitter @baseballAteam. Email him at pitchin432 AT Yahoo.com
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The Hardball Times
State of the system - Arizona Diamondbacks
by Jeff MooreFebruary 07, 2012
First of a series on major league farm systems
For the second time in three years, the Diamondbacks had multiple first round picks in 2011. Back in 2009, they had five of the first 45 picks, including back-to-back first rounders (picks 16 and 17) and three supplemental picks. Two years later, they became the first team to ever have two of the first seven picks, and paired them up with yet another supplemental pick.
As a result, they have restocked a depleted farm system. The Diamondbacks system is anything but depleted now, with its strength residing in the stable of young arms they have on the horizon.
Despite their offseason trade of Jarred Parker, who had been their top prospect for the past few years, the system is still loaded with pitchers, and the two taken at the top of last year’s draft should be the best of the bunch. Trevor Bauer was taken third overall out of UCLA, and could easily become the first player from that draft to appear in the majors. His methodologies on the mound and in preparation mirror that of Tim Lincecum, as do his mechanics and body type. If the Diamondbacks get half the return on Bauer that the Giants got on Lincecum, they will be thrilled.
Taken just four picks later was Oklahoma fireballer Archie Bradey, a 6-foot-4, 225-pound behemoth of a teenager who had to choose between professional baseball and a scholarship to both pitch and play quarterback at the University of Oklahoma. Bradley signed late and threw just two innings last season, but he is expected to move quickly within the Diamondbacks system, and we shouldn’t be surprised to see him start in full-season ball this year, much as the Pirates Jameson Taillon did last year.
The selection of two pitchers in the top 10 was not only unprecedented, but marked a direct contrast to the organization’s philosophy the last time it had multiple first-round picks.
In 2009, the Diamondbacks took position players with four of the first 41 picks in the draft. That’s not to say the philosophy was wrong. It was simply a reflection of the needs of the farm system at that time, and it appears that they did well with their selections.
Taken with back-to-back picks in that first round were third basemanBobby Borchering, who has since moved to left, and center fielder, A.J. Pollock. Borchering initially split time at third base with the player taken 19 picks after him, Matt Davidson.
Some at the time questioned why the Diamondbacks would select two high school third basemen at the top of the same draft, knowing not only that one would eventually have to change positions, but that neither one would be able to fully develop defensively as they climbed the organizational latter together. Those critics were right to a certain extent, as neither Davidson or Borchering has been able to play third base full time. But Davidson, clearly the better defender of the two, should get the chance to play full-time at the hot corner now that Borchering has shifted to the outfield, and he’ll need it as he is an adequate defender at best at the position.
The good news is both of them can hit, which is why organizations rarely worry about positional logjams in the early minors. Upon being drafted, Borchering was compared to Chipper Jones, although those comparisons were likely due to the obvious similarities of being a switch-hitting third baseman from Florida. Borchering doesn’t have anywhere near the plate discipline of Jones, and swings and misses have been a problem throughout his minor league career, but the power is there and should become even more prevalent once he learns to control the strike zone even better.
While Borchering is more of a power hitter, Davidson is a better all-around hitter and has nice power himself. His 60 extra-base hits last season were a solid number even when factoring in the friendly hitting environments throughout the California League.
Drafted in between the two third baseman, but certainly not forgotten, was Pollock, taken out of Notre Dame. After missing the entire 2010 season with an elbow injury, Pollock rebounded with a nice season in Double-A, posting a .307/.357/.444 line in a league where the average OPS was .739. Pollock is a refined player who has no overwhelming tools, but is no worse than average at any aspect of the game. The Diamondbacks don’t have any room in their outfield right now, so they can afford to give Pollock an entire season in Triple-A in 2012.
The Diamondbacks system is strong not just because of draft success, however. The organization has been active the past few years, willing to trade prospects for veterans, but also willing to restock the farm system by trading veterans. The D-backs got two more potential starters in Tyler Skaggs and Patrick Corbin when they sent ace Dan Haren to the Angels in July of 2010.
Skaggs has developed into a potential middle-of-the-rotation starter, who spent half of the 2011 season in Double-A and would probably see some time in the majors late in the 2012 season on a team that wasn’t as deep at the major league level as the Diamondbacks. Corbin already spent the entire 2011 season in Double-A and should advance one more level next season. While he doesn’t have the same ceiling as Skaggs, he profiles as a back-of-the-rotation starter and could help this year if they need spot starts.
Others to watch
Chris Owings—the 41st overall pick in the 2009 draft was finally healthy for an entire season in 2011, but the performance wasn’t great. His .246 batting average was a disappointment, but the bigger red flag was taking just 15 walks to 130 strikeouts. That kind of plate discipline won’t cut it at any level, and it’s even scarier given that it came in a hitter’s paradise of the California League. Owings still has the tools, but will need to put it together this season in which me may repeat High-A.
Anthony Meo and Andrew Chafin—Chafin, a lefty, and Meo, a righty, were the 43rd and 63rd picks in the 2011 draft, respectively. Both were drafted out of college, but neither pitched much last year after signing. Both are talented and need to be watched as they make their full-season debuts.
Wagner Mateo—He hasn’t done much of anything yet, but this former international bonus baby still has tools and should finally see full-season ball this year. He’s still got a long way to go, but he’s worth keeping an eye on.
Jeff Moore is the creator of MLBProspectWatch.com, your one-stop site for all the information you need about minor league prospects. He can be reached via e-mail at mlbprospectwatch AT gmail DOT com.
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The Hardball Times
Rockies building a troubling rotation
by Troy PattersonFebruary 07, 2012
Humidor or not, everyone knows that the best strategy in Colorado is to keep the ball on the ground as much as possible. That's why the Rockies have gotten quite a few questions after an offseason adding Guillermo Moscoso and Jeremy Guthrie. Quite an interesting approach for a team that finished 21 games out last season with an offense based around two players in Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez.
 |
| Moscoso in a much friendlier place. (Icon/SMI) |
In Oakland, Moscoso was able to mask his fly ball rate playing in the spacious Coliseum, which ranks bottom five in home runs against. His HR/FB rate currently stands at 6 percent, but is sure to increase in Colorado. Even a slight uptick in home runs will damage his value and his addition to the Rockies.
On top of the home runs, Moscoso has benefited from a bit of luck in BABIP. His current rate of .234 is unsustainable for any pitcher even with an elite defense. Once his BABIP and HR/FB regress to the mean, you are potentially looking at a below average to replacement level pitcher. His K/BB of 1.91 is pedestrian and his only skill so far has been to pitch in a spacious home park with a bit of luck on balls hit in play.
Adding Moscoso might have been worth the sho,t as he has been able to post solid seasons in the minors (though he's had some rough seasons as well). The problem came when the Rockies decided to add Orioles starter Jeremy Guthrie on Monday. He is not as prone to the fly ball as Moscoso, but has a nearly perfect one to one ratio of ground balls to fly balls.
While not able to hide from the home run in Baltimore, Guthrie has been another one of those who has been able to maintain some level of control over his BABIP. His current rate of .273 is slightly below league average and helps him beat his FIP and xFIP. His career ERA of 4.19 beats his FIP of 4.68 by nearly half a run. Baltimore might not be a pitchers' park, but looking at most home run factors, Coors Field is still a much tougher place to keep the ball in the yard. With a career HR/FB of 10.2 percent it's tough to see that exploding upward, but we can be fairly certain it won't go lower.
Guthrie will see some boost from the switch to a weak NL West from his days in the AL East and he'll enjoy a few road games in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. Moscoso won't get much out of the switch except some boost from the weaker lineups of the NL.
The switch from Jason Hammel to Guthrie is probably a neutral to slight upgrade in terms of wins in 2012. The move for Moscoso, on the other hand, could be a big problem for the Rockies. His small sample size of data so far tells us he is absolutely not a pitcher who is likely to succeed in Coors Field. That move could be a big regret for the Rockies front office in 2012.
Check out more work from Troy at the Boston Red Sox blog Fire Brand of the AL. You can contact him with questions or recommendations email me or @TroyPatterson
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The Hardball Times
Money and wins
by Dave StudemanFebruary 07, 2012
Okay, we all know that teams with bigger payrolls tend to win more games. We know it so well, in fact, that many people consider it the scourge of baseball, the evil lurking in our fanatical hearts, the dark side of the force out. Call it the Alpha Team theory of major league ball. If you're a fan of an Alpha Team, life is good. If you're a Pirates fan, well, you'll always have Willie Stargell and Rennie Stennett.
I'm not out to debunk the Alpha Team theory; far from it. I would just like to give it some historical perspective. This is possible thanks to some terrific data collection by THT co-founder Matthew Namee. Matthew recently compiled the payrolls of all major league teams from 1976 through 2011, the Free Agent Years. Matthew has been using the data to analyze the effectiveness of general managers, which is a really cool idea. Consider this article a background piece to his more detailed analyses.
Plus, there were just 24 teams in 1976; now there are 30. More teams. More payroll. A boatload of money is now paid to major league ballplayers. It wasn't always thus.
If you were around at the time, you remember 1976. The month before the New Year, December, 1975, was the month that Peter Seitz changed the economics of baseball by declaring Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally free agents. This ruling basically undermined the reserve clause. Chaos ensued. The owners postponed spring training in 1976, though Bowie Kuhn finally forced them to open their gates. The Twins traded Bert Blyleven. Charlie Finley sold his best talent, though Kuhn overruled that, too. 24 players refused to sign contracts during the 1976 season and were declared free agents at the end of the year. Reggie Jackson, Joe Rudi, and Bobby Grich were among the players who subsequently signed multi-year deals for over a million dollars each. Mike Schmidt didn't go the free agent route, but the Phillies signed him to the richest contract (at the time) in baseball history ($3.4 million for four years) just to cover themselves.
And on and on. Bottom line: the average team payroll leaped nearly 90 percent from 1976 to 1977.
The graph on the right shows how much each team spent and won in 1977. It's pretty easy to draw a line through the data points, isn't it?
The Phillies, with their veteran lineup featuring Schmidt, Greg Luzinski and Steve Carlton, won 101 games but lost the NL Championship series to the Dodgers. The Yankees, who had been wandering the desert without a world championship for over a decade, took it all with Jackson, Don Gullett and Catfish Hunter leading the payroll. It seemed as though money truly was becoming destiny.
Okay, enough with the ancient history. Let's step back, take in the big picture and ask: how have payroll and wins correlated since the free agency explosion? Has the relationship between the two stayed as strong? The answer is, "it's complicated."
Below is a graph of the year-by-year correlation (R, not R-squared) between the payroll and wins. A high R means that wins closely followed payroll; a low R means that results on the field were more random than payroll would imply. Take a note of the ups and downs during these years.
As you can see, there have been two periods in which money and performance were closely tied: the last half of the 1970s and the last half of the 1990s. The last half of the 1980s, however, was a period of relative equal measure, when both rich and "poor" teams had relatively even chances of winning. Some historical review is in order (the following are my thoughts. Be sure to leave your own observations below).
In the first few years of free agency—the latter half of the 1970s—teams did take advantage of new opportunities by signing top talent to big bucks. It's no coincidence that this period coincided with the Steinbrenner Yankees' return to glory and the introduction of two bottom-dwelling, low-pay expansion teams (the Mariners and Blue Jays). These developments exacerbated the differences between the have's and have-not's.
Beginning around 1980, however, the picture changed as young, lower-paid talent began to make an impact on the pennant races. Players such as Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken in Baltimore, Rickey Henderson in Oakland and George Brett in Kansas City changed their team's fortunes before changing their payrolls. The Mets developed a gaggle of phenomenal, "cheap" young talent. This influx of top young talent helped change the picture in the early part of the decade. At the same time, bad contracts started appearing. The Angels became the first team known for its bloated, underperforming contracts.
Something else happened in the 1980s: collusion. In 1985, 1986 and 1987, free agents such as Andre Dawson, Tim Raines, Jack Morris and many others found no market for their services. It turns out that commissioner Peter Ueberroth had convinced major league owners that they should work together to refuse expensive, long-term contracts. The owners reportedly established standards of no more than three years for position players and two years for pitchers. As a result, average payroll actually declined in 1987.
The impact on the the economics of winning was stark, and the correlation between wins and payroll reached two of their lowest points in 1986 and 1987 (0.17 and 0.15, respectively). Money was losing its power and competitive balance seemed possible. Trouble was, this was illegal. In three different cases, arbitrators ruled that the owners had colluded and eventually ordered them to pay damages.
In 1993, the Rockies and Marlins joined the National League and the era of relative economic equality ended in the major leagues. After the labor strife of 1994 and 1995, high-spending teams started winning strong once again. By 1998, the correlation between salary and wins was 0.77, the highest correlation in the history of our little bit of data. The Yankees and Braves were at the top of the charts, the Expos and Marlins at the bottom, and the Alpha Team worriers seemed to have reason to worry once again.
In fact, a 2000 "blue ribbon panel" (where did that term come from, anyway?) recommended that Major League Baseball institute a system of revenue sharing, essentially taxing the rich teams and giving to the poor ones. Then, in 2001 and 2002, Moneyball was played in Oakland and Billy Beane's A's mounted two of the three best win/salary performances of all the teams and years in our database. (Said differently, the A's won many more games than their payrolls would have predicted, based on the overall major league patterns.)
Certainly we can argue whether teams really did learn how to better spend their payroll dollars. What's less arguable is that the commissioner did indeed start to share revenue between teams according to payroll, and a formal revenue-sharing scheme was codified in the 2006 Collective Bargaining Agreement.
Has this worked? Go back up to the graph and take a look. For the past decade, the average correlation between wins and salary has settled into a "natural" space between 0.3 and 0.5. There are still big payrolls, to be sure, and those teams are more likely to win games. But we haven't seen the extreme correlations between payroll and wins that we witnessed in the past.
For a little more insight, here's one last graph. It's called a "box-whisker" graph because it shows boxes and, um, whiskers around the median payroll each year. In this case, I've calculated the 2011 equivalent of each team's salary and plotted each year on the graph. The boxes above and below the median represent the first two quartiles; that is, half the teams fall within those two boxes. The whiskers show the outside 25th percentile, but I've put an arbitrary limit on those outer quartiles so you can spot the outliers. Those are the triangles that fall outside the whiskers.
See all those outlier triangles starting around 2000 and lasting all decade? Those are the Yankees. Even in the years in which the Yanks don't technically break out as outliers, they stretch the lines to their fullest height. On a inflation-adjusted basis, the Yankees of the 2000's have nine of the top ten spending teams of all time. The only team to break up that run is the Yankees of 1999. So, it's all Yankees.
Check out the other trends. See how narrow the quartiles were in the collusion years? Notice that, indeed, teams became more spread out in the late 1990s. When the Yankees fall into outlier territory in the 2000s, the quartiles look about as wide as previous years. If you graph the Yankees as outliers, the spread between teams in the 2000's is roughly the same as it was in the 1970's and late 1990's, perhaps a bit larger.
So here's the point: Wins and salaries are closely tied, but the relationship between the two has changed over time. There is no doubt that some of the change has been random, or the simple result of individual team successes and failures, but some of it also seems to be related to structural changes in the game. The current state of the game? Despite the outrageous spending ways of the Yankees, it's settled into a pattern that is more competitive than any previous time period, other than the years of collusion.
One other point: We're measuring payroll against regular-season wins here, so the extra randomness added by expanding the playoffs to include wildcard teams isn't accounted for. This is another factor that has given "poor" teams a reason for hope.
So, hey Pittsburgh fans, maybe there is some hope. Hang in there.
References and Resources
You can find payroll information at Baseball Chronology.
It's a little dated, but this is a nice history of baseball economics.
This is a research article on the impact of revenue sharing in the 2000's.
Dave was called a "national treasure" by Rob Neyer. Seriously. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
Super at the right time
by Joe DistelheimFebruary 06, 2012
Joe Distelheim is chief copy editor for The Hardball Times website. He welcomes comments and suggestions via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
Let there be news - Volume 7
by Brad JohnsonFebruary 06, 2012
Let There Be News is a recap of the most interesting stories and transactions from the previous week.
THT and BrooksBaseball team up for game changing database
I swear, nobody put me up to this. And if you've taken the time to check out some of the player cards, you probably understand why I am including this among the top news in baseball from the past week. The tool is simply incredible.
Let's demo what you can do with these cards. Check out Roy Halladay (link in previous sentence).
The first table is trajectory and movement. There, we can quickly glean how frequently Halladay has thrown each of his pitches, how they move and spin, and the average velocity of each pitch type.
Moving along, the pitch outcomes table contains a ton of excellent information. For instance, we learn that Halladay's curveball is some kind of filthy. It generates whiffs nearly 20 percent of the time, and batters rarely manage to put it in play—just 15.43 percent of the time.
The sabermetric outcomes table is my personal favorite. Continuing with the curveball theme, we can easily see that when batters swing at a Halladay curveball, they whiff over 40 percent of the time. That's some kind of unhittable. And if you think that's impressive, check out Craig Kimbrel's curveball.
All of the data are customizable, including the charts that come in every shape, size, and flavor for the discerning sabermetrician. Expect a lot of excellent analysis to be generated using these player cards this season.
Josh Hamilton experiences relapse with alcohol
Hamilton's unfortunate dance with addiction hit another low note this past week. Those who do not struggle with addiction—including myself—will never be able to truly empathize with Hamilton. An unscientific poll of my friends, colleagues, and associates indicated that the common baseball fan does not grasp the seriousness of the situation. One frequent comment went something along the lines of, "How can somebody have the perfect job and screw it up?"
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Hamilton's disease. The quality of his employment does not directly affect his cravings. It could very well be the case that his general success with sobriety is in part fueled by his love for baseball.
There are on-field ramifications to this latest relapse. The Rangers and Hamilton had been working on a multi-year extension, but talks have been tabled. This means that Hamilton will probably become a free agent next offseason—unless they hammer together a deal very quickly.
The Nationals sign Edwin Jackson
The Nationals continued adding to a suddenly deep rotation by signing Jackson to a one-year, $11 million deal with incentives. Jackson was unable to find the kind of multi-year deal he desired, so he will join the NL East to audition for his next contract.
The move to the National League and spacious Nationals Park should help Jackson's numbers. The reason he had trouble landing the deal he wanted was due to concerns over his consistency. That isn't likely to go away over one season, but he could perform well enough to earn a substantial four- or five-year deal in his next spin through free agency.
From the Nationals' perspective, the move deepens an already deep rotation. Jackson will serve as the team's fourth starter for much of the season and will bump John Lannan or Chien-Ming Wang from the rotation.
The important element is that, if the Nationals stick with their plan to keep Stephen Strasburg on a strict innings limit, Jackson would serve as their third pitcher in the playoffs. Of course, the Nationals could figure out some other means to make sure Strasburg is available for the playoffs.
The twist with this signing—and there's always a twist—is that Jackson's results have closely mirrored Lannan's over the past three seasons. There are certain caveats—Jackson should shave some ERA by moving to the National League—but on a pure results level, the Nationals might not prevent too many more runs with this move. Of course, that supposes Washington selects Wang as its fifth starter.
The Cubs sign Gerardo Concepcion
Concepcion was the last Cuban prospect to hit the public consciousness this offseason, and now he's the first to sign. The Cubs inked the 18-year-old to a $7 million deal with an additional $1 million in incentives.
Kevin Goldstein discussed the signing in the latest BPro podcast. Goldstein noted that there isn't much projection in Concepcion due to a sub-90s fastball and a fourth- or fifth-starter ceiling. He would rank Concepcion outside the top 101 prospects and sixth in the Cubs system (which is notably weak).
The deal could affect the market for Jorge Soler, who was already eyeing at least $15 million. With such a mediocre prospect garnering $7 million in this heady, "last call" international market, Soler could end up with an unprecedented deal. For those who haven't followed the various Cubans floating around this offseason, Soler is a five-tool prospect who draws comps to Hanley Ramirez. He has a truly elite ceiling, unlike Concepcion.
Quick Hits
The Phillies signed Chad Qualls to a one-year, $1.15 million deal. Eric Seidman of Fangraphs felt the move was unnecessary, although it does seem to be a cost-effective depth signing. The move will temporarily block one of the many relief prospects in the Phillies system.
The Astros signed Livan Hernandez to a minor-league contract. Earlier in the offseason, Hernandez said the only team he would consider relieving for was the Nationals, so he may decline any non-starting role with the Astros. Houston appears to have a set rotation with Wandy Rodriguez, Bud Norris, Brett Myers, Jordan Lyles, and J.A. Happ, but Rodriguez and Myers are both trade bait. The Astros could option Happ or Lyles to make room for Hernandez until a trade clears up more space.
Just a few days after acquiring Russ Canzler from the Rays for $100,000, the Indians signed another former Ray, Casey Kotchman. He'll earn $3 million plus incentives and could see the majority of time at first base. He has a spotty history of success, although that's been mostly due to fluctuating BABIPs. Unsurprisingly, his career year was accompanied by a career-best .335 BABIP. It would seem the club is done experimenting with Matt LaPorta at first base since Kotchman and Carlos Santana should absorb most of the innings at that position.
The Fukoka SoftBank Swallows signed Brad Penny to a contract that is said to be the largest ever awarded to a first-year, American pitcher. Ken Rosenthal has the contract details in a tweet.
Follow Brad on Twitter @baseballAteam. Email him at pitchin432 AT Yahoo.com
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10 things I didn’t know about one-hitters
by Chris JaffeFebruary 06, 2012
My last column here at THT was on the men least likely to break up a full-length (nine innings pitched or more) no-hitter by getting their team’s sole hit of the day. In all, I looked up nearly 1,000 games from 1919 onward to produce that list.
It was fun, but in the process I learned a whole bunch of other things about no-hitters. Rather than just sitting on them, I thought I’d share some of the most interesting items I came across about one-hitters. Ripping off the format Boss-man Studes pioneered for THT, allow me to present “10 things I didn’t know about one-hitters.”
1. Players who did it multiple times
In all, I have on hand 968 different one-hitters that lasted at least nine innings. Exactly 801 different players accounted for those hits.
663 guys did it only once in their careers. 114 did it twice. 21 did it three times. Only one guy, Don Blasingame, did it four times. And two guys—Cesar Tovar and Eddie Milner—did it five times.
Many players provided the game’s only hit for two different teams, but only two players have ever done it for three squads. Rico Brogna did it with the Mets, Phillies, and Red Sox. Jerry Hairston, Jr. did it with the Orioles, Cubs, and Reds.
(On a side note, Hairston is part of the one of the two father-son combos ever to score his team’s only hit, as Jerry Hairston, Sr. did it once in his career. So did Bob and Bret Boone). Ken Griffey, Jr. never did it, though his dad is one of the only men to do it three times. Speaking of family relations, two pairs of brothers have done it: Felipe and Matty Alou, and Vince and Joe DiMaggio).
Jerry Hairston, Jr.: well-traveled player with the knack for the well-timed hit.
Some of the guys who did it multiple times are among the greatest players of all time. Hall of Famers Enos Slaughter, Tony Gwynn, and Rickey Henderson each did it three times. Barry Bonds, Jimmie Foxx, Stan Musial, and Robin Yount are among the guys who did it twice.
Still, some of these guys are pretty obscure. The guy with the fewest career hits to break up a no-hitter multiple times is Neil Walker, with 296 hits. Well, that hardly counts because he’s still an active player for Pittsburgh who promises to bop plenty more hits.
Aside from Walker, here are the fewest career hits by any of the 138 guys with the only hit in multiple one-hitters.
Name H Duffy Dyer 441 Skeeter Webb 498 Ronny Cedeno 522 Jamie Quirk 544 Goody Rosen 557 Mike Aldrete 565 Nelson Liriano 576 Gene Baker 590 Juan Castro 601 Sam Bohne 605Like Walker, Ronny Cedeno’s career isn’t over. Rather interestingly, they’re teammates on Pittsburgh. In fact, they are the team’s middle infielders, with Cedeno manning shortstop and Walker serving at second base.
Cedeno and Walker: 818 combined hits, yet four no-hitterss broken up
2. Eddie Milner and Cesar Tovar
Let’s look at the two men to do it five times each. First, here are the games they did it in:
Player Team Dat. Cesar Tovar MIN 4/30/1967 Cesar Tovar MIN 5/15/1969 Cesar Tovar MIN 8/10/1969 Cesar Tovar MIN 8/13/1970 Cesar Tovar TEX 5/31/1975 Eddie Milner CIN 4/28/1982 Eddie Milner CIN 6/11/1982 Eddie Milner CIN 8/24/1983 Eddie Milner CIN 6/14/1984 Eddie Milner CIN 8/2/1986The incredible one here is Milner. He provided the only hit in five different games despite only 607 career hits. If you ignore still-active players Walker and Cedeno, Milner has the 10th-fewest career hits among anyone with multiple one-hitter hits to his credit. The nine guys ahead of him all did it twice, yet Milner did it five times.
(If you’re curious, among guys who got the only hit in a one-hitter three times, the man with the fewest career hits is Dan Pasqua with 638 hits. As long as I’m mentioning Pasqua, he and Milner are the only ones to do it three consecutive seasons, 1991-93 for Pasqua).
There is no reason at all for Milner to be atop this list. He’s a career .253 hitter who appeared in 804 games. He played in the early 1980s, which was not a historically bad period for batting average. Yeah, he normally batted near the top of the order, which would help him a little, but that doesn’t explain why he did it five times. The ten men who are most like him according to Similarity Scores combined for one hit in one of these games. (Jim Delsing, Milner’s second-most similar player, did it once).
Two games are especially notable in Milner’s case. In the 1983 game, his hit came with two outs in the ninth, depriving a Cubs pitcher of a would-be no-hitter at the most heartbreaking of moments. At the other extreme, his June 11, 1982, hit came leading off the first against LA’s Jerry Reuss. After that, Reuss retired 27 consecutive batters, so it would’ve been a perfect game if not for Milner’s opening swing.
Tovar makes more sense than Milner atop the list. He had one 200-hit season and narrowly missed it another time in his 1,488-game career. Like Milner, one of Tovar’s games came leading off the first (against Washington’s Dick Bosman in 1970). Unlike Milner, Tovar twice saved his hit for the ninth inning. Both came in 1969, each against the Orioles (Dave McNally and Mike Cuellar, respectively).
3. Two in one year
Both Milner and Tovar did it twice in one year. They are among a select group of 23 players to do that since 1919. Here’s the full list of such players, and the year they did it.
Player Year Jimmie Foxx 1934 Bob Johnson 1937 Goody Rosen 1938 Ralph Kiner 1951 Stan Musial 1959 Don Blasingame 1963 Ed Bailey 1964 Jim Hickman 1965 Woodie Held 1965 Glenn Beckert 1968 Jim Northrup 1968 Cesar Tovar 1969 Ollie Brown 1971 George Scott 1975 RickeyHenderson 1979 John Mayberry 1980 Eddie Milner 1982 Tony Gwynn 1988 Nelson Liriano 1989 Jay Bell 1990 Rafael Palmeiro 1993 Brad Hawpe 2008 Michael Young 2009
No one ever did it three times in one campaign, but Jim Northup did it three times in 353 days from 1968-69. Jim Hickman wins the award for worst batting average, with a lowly .236 mark in 1965.
4. Smallest and biggest gaps
Of the 23 guys who did it in one year, a few did it in one week. The record-holder is Stan Musial. After doing it on April 18, 1959, he did it again just three days—and two games—later. Those were the only times he did it in his 20-plus year career.
That narrowly beats Nelson Liriano and Rickey Henderson, each of whom broke up no-hitters five days apart. Actually, Henderson is a strange one. After doing it twice in his rookie year, he waited a decade before doing it again for his third and final time. That ten-year gap is one of the longest ever.
But it’s not the longest. That title belongs to Ben Oglivie. As a young ’un with the Red Sox, he did it on Aug. 23, 1972, with an eighth-inning line-drive single against Kansas City. Almost 13 years later, on Aug. 2, 1985, an aging Oglivie bopped a fifth-inning homer for Milwaukee for what turned out to be their only hit against Frank Tanana and the Tigers.
5. Leading off the game
I can’t say exactly how many of the sole hits in one-hitters led off the game. Box scores aren’t available until 1950 (and not for all games until the early 1970s), but from 1950 onward, I found 27. The most recent example came from Emilio Bonifacio of the Marlins last year on June 28.
Among the more notable ones, Pittsburgh’s Pete Castiglione led off a game with a triple against Sal Maglie on May 4, 1951, but that was it for the Pirates. Two players had leadoff homers in a one-hitter: Paul Molitor on July 14, 1991, and Bobby Adams on May 13, 1954.
The Adams homer came off Hall of Famer Robin Roberts. Three fellow Hall of Famers also allowed leadoff hits to spoil what was otherwise a no-hitter: Don Drysdale (May 25, 1965), Steve Carlton (April 25, 1972), and Nolan Ryan (June 3, 1989). The Drysdale game was the first one-hitter to have a leadoff hit in a decade.
6. Pinch hitters
There have been (at least) 21 pinch hitters who got the sole hit for their teams. The most recent example was the White Sox’s Juan Pierre, who got a line-drive single to start the bottom of the ninth against Ted Lilly of the Cubs on June 13, 2010.
Here’s a list of when they happened, including the inning the pinch hit occurred.
Guy Team Date Inning Pitcher Bobby Veach WSH 9/19/1925 ??? Ted Lyons Lew Riggs BRO 5/12/1942 6th Junior Thompson Bobby Avila CLE 5/11/1951 8th Joe Dobson George Crowe MLN 5/21/1955 9th Warren Hacker Chuck Harmon CIN 7/23/1955 9th Jim Hearn Ed Fitz Gerald WSH 6/27/1958 9th Billy Pierce Stan Musial STL 4/18/1959 7th Jack Sanford Julio Becquer WSH 7/4/1959 9th Bob Turley Walt Moryn CHC 4/16/1960 8th Sam Jones Cleon Jones NYM 9/11/1965 5th Tony Cloninger Charlie Moore MIL 9/2/1977 8th Paul Splittorff Terry Puhl HOU 4/16/1983 8th Charlie Lea Jerry Hairston CHW 4/15/1983 9th Milt Wilcox Jim Traber BAL 9/30/1988 9th Dave Stieb Ken Phelps OAK 4/20/1990 9th Brian Holman Bill Bean SDP 9/29/1993 9th Tim Pugh Dave Hansen CHC 4/10/1997 9th Alex Fernandez Bobby Higginson DET 9/27/1998 9th Ray Halladay Carl Everett BOS 9/2/2001 9th Mike Mussina Mike Sweeney KCR 8/31/2007 9th Scott Baker Juan Pierre CHW 6/13/2010 9th Ted Lilly
Ken Phelps had the most dramatic one, a pinch-hit home run with the pitch just one out from a perfect game. The Veach game was a 17-0 loss where the victorious White Sox rapped out 24 hits.
Juan Pierre: the man who ruined things for Ted Lilly in the Chicago Crosstown Classic.
7. Hall of Famers vs. Hall of Famers
Here’s another angle to take: How often has a one-hitter had a Hall of Famer get a hit off another Hall of Famer? To date, it’s happened 13 times.
Date Hitter Pitcher 5/23/1924 Harry Hooper Walter Johnson 5/26/1929 CharlieGehringr Red Faber 8/5/1934 Jimmie Foxx Lefty Gomez 5/21/1939 Bobby Doerr Bob Feller 6/27/1939 Earl Averill Bob Feller 9/26/1941 Rick Ferrell Bob Feller 7/31/1946 Bobby Doerr Bob Feller 9/8/1949 Lou Boudreau Hal Newhouser 5/12/1953 Early Wynn Whitey Ford 8/1/1953 Richie Ashburn Warren Spahn 9/5/1969 Tony Perez Phil Niekro 7/9/1972 CarlYastrzemski Nolan Ryan 7/13/1979 Reggie Jackson Nolan RyanFeller is the king of this category, and the Doerr-Feller combination is the only one I can find that happened more than once. In more recent times, the most impressive combination is Jeff Bagwell getting the only hit against Greg Maddux on May 28, 1995. Both could make Cooperstown. If Tim Hudson keeps pitching well, there might be another addition, as Frank Thomas got the sole hit off him on Aug. 28, 2000.
The Lou Boudreau hit off Hal Newhouser in 1949 belongs to an even more select group: player-managers who broke up no-hitters. Only that Boudreau game and a Jimmie Dykes hit on Aug. 3, 1934, are in that club.
8. By franchise
What franchise has been one-hit the most since 1919? It’s the Phillies with 61. That’s not too surprising as they’re the club with the most overall losses. The next-fewest by any pre-expansion franchise is the Indians with 31. That’s fewer than the Rangers (36) or Mets (33), who both have been around for only about 50 years. Heck, the Padres have been one-hit 27 times, and they’ve only existed since 1969.
Flipping it around, the Dodgers have thrown the most one-hitters of at least nine innings in length: 63. That narrowly beats out the Cubs, who have 60.
The Mets lead expansion franchises with 31. That must be a point of pride and frustration for the franchise. Pride because it’s so many—even more than the Pirates (29) who have been around forever. Frustration because, rather (in)famously, the Mets have yet to throw an actual, honest-to-goodness, officially sanctioned no-hitter.
Here’s a weird bit: The Rockies have been one-hit 18 times but have thrown only one full one-hitter. Four times they’ve been one-hit at Coors Field.
9. By date
There’s been a one-hitter on every single day from April 5 to Oct. 5—every day except one, that is. From 1919 onward, there are no one-hitters on Aug. 7. If anyone is curious, Vic Willis threw a no-hitter on that date back in 1899.
April 26 has by far the most one-hitters with 16. Second place in June 26 with a dozen. Bob Turley threw two one-hitters on April 26, the first in 1955 and the second in 1958. April 26, 2002, had two just on that day. There are about 40 times two teams threw one-hitters on the exact same day.
The all-time day is Aug. 29, 2000, when three teams threw one-hitters. All three were distinctive in their own way.
In one game, a John Flaherty single ruined what otherwise would have been a 13-strikeout Pedro Martinez no-hitter. If that game had a great pitcher, the second game saw a great hitter get the hit. Barry Bonds laced a first-inning single against Kris Benson in a Giants-Pirates contest. Finally, Milwaukee got two runs on one hit when James Mouton hit a two-run shot off LA’s Chan Ho Park (who fanned 14 batters in eight innings).
10. Long Yankee and Cub streaks without being no-hit
On June 11, 2003, the Houston Astros no-hit the Yankees, an impressive performance for several reasons, but for our purposes it was notable because it ended a then-record stretch of 45 years without the Yankees being no-hit. They went from a Hoyt Wilhelm no-hitter in September 20, 1958, until the 2003 interleague game without it happening.
How often had they just avoided being no-hit in between? Well, looking it up, in that era of no times no-hit, the Yankees were one-hit 23 times. In many of those games, the hits came early, including four times in the first inning. However, three times the Yankees waited until the ninth to finally get their hit.
On July 2, 1970, Horace Clarke got a single with one away in the ninth. Nearly a decade later, on July 13, 1969, Reggie Jackson also singled with one out in the ninth to get the only Yankee hit of the game.
But the real prize came back on April 14, 1967. In this game, the Yankees came one out from a no-hitter while facing a pitcher making his big-league debut. Boston’s Billy Rohr would win only three games in his career, but he sure had a memorable start, coming just an Elston Howard single away from a debut no-hitter.
Oh, but there's one great moment that must be mentioned. One of the times the Yankees were one-hit came in their last home game in 1968 when Mickey Mantle got their sole hit. That was Mantle's last game in Yankee Stadium. The hit itself wasn't dramatic—it was a first inning single—but it's still pretty cool that he got the team's only hit in his last home game.
That said, the Yankee mark of 45 years without getting no-hit has since been topped by the Cubs, who haven’t been no-hit since Sandy Koufax’s perfect game on Sept. 9, 1965. That’s 46 years and change without one. In that period they’ve been one-hit 21 times.
Twice they waited until the ninth to get their only hit. One is a fairly famous game. Tom Seaver took a perfect game into the ninth inning against the Cubs on July 9, 1969, only to see Jim Qualls make sports trivia history by getting a one-out single (one of only 31 career hits for him).
The second game was the closest the Cubs came to being no-hit in the post-Koufax world, though. Against the Marlins on April 10, 1997, they also got their only hit with one out in the ninth, but on this occasion it was an infield grounder back to the pitcher by pinch-hitter Dave Hansen. A ninth-inning infield single is an odd way to avoid the no-hitter. It must’ve rattled Florida, as they followed it up with back-to-back errors but held on to win, 1-0.
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 order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.
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This week in (fantasy) baseball: 1/30-2/5
by Karl de VriesFebruary 06, 2012
Karl de Vries is a New Jersey-based writer and journalist who prefers following fantasy baseball to watching his hapless Mets embarrass themselves on TV every night. He can be reached at karl[dot]rotodiamond[at]gmail.com or followed on Twitter at @Karl_de_Vries.
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Would the Nationals consider holding back Strasburg?
by Brad JohnsonFebruary 06, 2012
Follow Brad on Twitter @baseballAteam. Email him at pitchin432 AT Yahoo.com
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Yes, we actually classified every pitch
by Dan BrooksFebruary 03, 2012
Dan Brooks is a Neuroscientist at Brown University. He operates BrooksBaseball.net and eats Fried Chicken during every Red Sox game, especially in September. Come follow him @brooksbaseball.
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Card Corner: 1972 Topps—Bob Veale
by Bruce MarkusenFebruary 03, 2012
Baseball cards of the early 1970s are known for many attributes, not the least of which is the appearance of the dreaded windbreaker, or the warm-up jacket. During spring training, players of that era often wore windbreakers, in particular to deal with the early days of camp, when the weather tended to be cooler and windier. Some players would wear the windbreaker under their jerseys, an unusual look that became quite a trendsetting fashion in the early '70s. That little trick might have also been a way to sweat off a few extra pounds that had gathered on a player’s physique during the winter months.
Intimidating in his look and pose, Veale is putting his left arm to good use in this photograph, as he finishes off the kind of simulated throwing motion that became a trademark of Topps cards. We know that Veale wasn’t throwing an actual ball on that overcast day in Bradenton, Fla. With steely eyes squinting behind those outsized tinted glasses and his mouth clenched shut, Veale is doing his serious best to imitate the act of pitching, but his tensed fist is a dead giveaway that his pitching motion is staged and not genuine.
The card also has a bit of a surreal quality, thanks to the large steel cage in the background. Is that a batting cage or a storm shelter? If it is indeed a batting cage, it is a behemoth, one that looks like it might be better suited for a fight between two combatants from a Road Warrior sequel.
At the time this memorable card was created, Veale had won 114 games in a career that began in 1962. He had pitched only for the Pirates and almost exclusively as a starting pitcher. In his early years, his blazing fastball had drawn comparisons to that of Dodgers ace Sandy Koufax, who was generally acknowledged as the hardest thrower of the 1960s. Any comparison that puts a pitcher in the same neighborhood as Koufax indicates just how terrifying Veale must have been at his peak.
The statistics support the image of the 6-foot-6 Veale as a monster on the mound. In 1964, he struck out 250 batters, leading the league, including the great Koufax. The following year, he pumped up his total to 276. In 1969, he would post his final 200-strikeout season. Though radar gun readings were not commonly used in the 1960s, it’s a safe bet that Veale, at his peak, threw his regulation fastball upwards of 95 miles per hour.
Veale’s level of intimidation was enhanced by his wildness. Four times in his career, he led the National League in walks. Three of those times, he topped the 100-mark. He was “Wild Thing” long before the movie came out.
When reporters ask hitters from the 1960s to name the left-handed pitchers they most feared facing, Veale's name usually comes up, along with Koufax and Sudden Sam McDowell. Some hitters, like Lou Brock and Willie McCovey, have claimed that Veale sometimes took off his glasses while pitching, as a way of furthering the notion that he didn’t know where the ball was going.
By 1971, a bad back and the onset of age had taken several miles per hour away from Veale’s repertoire and now mandated a move to the bullpen. The transition brought with it a series of questions. Would Veale’s lapses in control discourage manager Danny Murtaugh from using him in critical late-inning situations? Would Veale’s arm be able to hold up to pitching three to four times a week, instead of the one to two starts a rotation pitcher would make? And what effect would Veale’s lack of conditioning have on his effectiveness. Veale had reported to spring training at 242 pounds, the heaviest weight of his career. The increase prompted the bluntest of headlines in the Pittsburgh Press: “Pirate Fat Man Battles Weight.”
An even larger question shadowed Veale in the spring of 1971. Would he start the season in a Pirates uniform? The large left hander’s name repeatedly popped up in spring training trade rumors. One round of speculation had the Tigers inquiring about Veale, perhaps in a deal involving slick-fielding shortstop Eddie Brinkman (the subject of an earlier “Card Corner” in this space). With veteran shortstop Gene Alley hurt and young Jackie Hernandez considered a borderline major leaguer at best, the slick-fielding Brinkman seemed like a perfect fit for the Pirates. Nonetheless, Pirates general manager Joe Brown denied that any discussions with Detroit took place.
As it turned out, Veale remained in Pittsburgh for the entire season, pitching primarily in long and mop-up relief. He recovered from a bad first impression by losing a dozen pounds during the spring, dropping to a more svelte 230 pounds. Perhaps wearing the warm-up jacket aided the cause. Looking leaner as February faded into March, Veale pitched well in frequent relief appearances during the exhibition season. By the end of spring training, Veale survived his own weight problems, the spring training trade rumors, and a simmering contract dispute with Joe Brown to make the Pirates’ Opening Day roster.
By maintaining a spot on the Pirates’ roster throughout the season, Veale earned the first and only world championship ring of his career. After winning the National League East, Veale’s Pirates upended the hard-hitting Giants in the Championship Series before stunning the favored Orioles in a classic seven-game World Series.
The 1971 season also provided Veale with an opportunity to take part in an unusual episode of baseball history. On Sept. 1, the Pirates became the first team in major league history to field an all-black lineup. Veale pitched out of the bullpen that day, one of three Pirates relievers to take his turn in place of an ineffective Dock Ellis.
Veale did not pitch particularly well for the ‘71 Pirates. In fact, it was the worst season of his career. He struggled through some brutal relief outings, which ballooned his ERA to nearly the 7.00 mark. After the season, several Pittsburgh writers predicted that Veale would draw his unconditional release.
To the surprise of many, the Pirates retained Veale and his 6.99 ERA on their 40-man roster. His spot secured, Topps printed a 1972 card for Veale. The card, numbered at 729, did not come out until later in the season. In fact, by the time the card hit candy and dime stores, Veale was no longer a Pirate. In his first five appearances in 1972, Veale had pitched brutally, giving up seven walks and 10 hits in nine innings. The Pirates responded by placing him on waivers. When no other major league team claimed him, Veale agreed to report to the Bucs’ Triple-A affiliate at Charleston.
Veale remained an International League pitcher until Sept. 2. Opting not to bring Veale up for the stretch run as they made their way to another division title, the Pirates instead sold him to the Red Sox, who were contending for a title of their own in the American League East.
Veale found AL batters to his liking. He pitched extremely well in six games for Boston, hurling eight scoreless innings of relief, while picking up two wins and two saves. Unfortunately, Veale’s pitching wasn’t enough to help the Red Sox overtake the Tigers in the pennant race, but his impressive showing convinced the front office to bring him back for the 1973 season.
Appearing in a Boston uniform (and with a windbreaker underneath the jersey) on his 1973 Topps card, Veale pitched so well for the Red Sox that he became their second-best reliever, behind only Bobby Bolin, who was having a career year. But suddenly, Veale’s performance fell off in 1974, Dogged by injuries, he pitched only 13 innings in 18 appearances, saw his ERA balloon above five and a half, and watched his 13-year major league career wind down to its finish.
Veale was not done with baseball, however. He wanted to coach, even though very few black men held managing or coaching positions at the time. Yes, Frank Robinson had just become the Indians’ skipper, making him the first African-American manager in big league history, but outside of Cleveland, very few blacks held any coaching jobs. Veale had to sit out the 1975 season, but the following year, he signed on with the Braves, who made him one of their minor league pitching instructors.
In 1983, he landed in Utica, N.Y., the hometown of his former Pirates teammate Dave Cash. The Utica Blue Sox, an independent minor league team owned by writer Roger Kahn, hired Veale as pitching coach. Kahn’s ownership of the team was something of a sham, a publicity stunt designed to generate a plot for his next book. But the Sox became a success under Kahn. Stocked with minor league veterans, the Blue Sox ended up winning the New York-Penn League championship that summer.
I started working in Utica in 1987, missing Veale by four years. Veale is long since retired from coaching, but baseball diehards in Utica still remember him. Quotable and outgoing, Veale seemed to be well-liked by everybody, not an easy feat in a Blue Sox organization that had its share of disharmony and dysfunction. On a team where the entire front office and coaching staff seemed to be at odds with one another, Veale remained calm and above the fray. In other words, he acted very differently from the image portrayed on his baseball card. He looked a bit frightening in his pose for Topps, but Bob Veale is not so monstrous after all.
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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Supplementing the dynasty rankings (Part 2)
by Jeffrey GrossFebruary 03, 2012
Jeffrey Gross is a 24-year old law student (and die-hard Cubs fan) who currently resides in Madison, WI. In addition to writing for The Hardball Times, he currently writes baseball analysis for the Game Of Inches blog under the pseudonym David "MVP" Eckstein and has previously worked for The Daily Illini and Northern Star newspapers as a film critic and sportswriter (respectively). You can reach him by email at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or by comment at http://www.gameofinches.blogspot.com
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10,000 days: 500th homer for Mr. October
by Chris JaffeFebruary 03, 2012
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 order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.
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Edwin Jackson finally signs
by Matt FilippiFebruary 02, 2012
Matt Filippi is the creator of Yankees Talk Blog; you can email him at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and you can follow him at @Matt_Filippi.
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THT Forecasts - 2012 fantasy price guides
by Greg TamerFebruary 02, 2012
Greg Tamer is the Manager of THT Forecasts. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions via e-mail.
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The all-month team: February
by Richard BarbieriFebruary 02, 2012
As I have mentioned in the past with these columns, it occurred to me that while constructing variously goofy all-Something teams is fun, they are essentially one-shots. Creating teams based on the best players born in each month, on the other hand, produces squads that can be compared to see which is best. With that in mind, each month through November I will be constructing a team from the players born in that month, and come December, attempting to determine who—or when—comes out on top.
Before we begin this month’s list—which I am curious to see, given February’s status as the shortest month—a quick review of the ground rules: each player’s date of birth is as listed on his Baseball-Reference.com page and the player must have played at least 50 percent of his games at a position to qualify for the spot. And—most importantly of all—I reserve the right to realize I made a terrible mistake and change the team up to next December when we compare.
Having gotten that out of the way, let’s begin:
Catcher: Elston Howard
Generally speaking, I use Baseball-Reference’s WAR to pick each of these positions, though I am not necessarily wedded to it. In this case, for example, Elston Howard is technically second in WAR by a February catcher to Smoky Burgess. Burgess was a fine player—he would be a fine choice behind the plate—but never reached Howard’s heights in peak value. Moreover, Burgess spent much of his career as a pinch hitter, never catching more than 113 games in a season.
Also of note: By the end of his career, this spot might belong to Brian McCann. The Braves’ catcher seems unlikely to ever match Howard’s peak, but having started as a regular at 22, could accumulate enough value to overwhelm that advantage.
First Base: Eddie Murray
Conversely, there was no question for picking Eddie Murray at the first base spot. In addition to his substantial lead in WAR over second-place Wally Pipp, Murray is undoubtedly an all-time great. Playing primarily for the Orioles, the switch-hitter finished his career with more than 500 home runs and placed fifth or higher in the MVP voting every year from 1981 through to 1985.
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| His time in NY was not the best, but no one can question Roberto Alomar's greatness (Icon/SMI) |
Second Base: Roberto Alomar
Every month seems to have a position where there is a wealth of good choices. For February, that position is second base. In addition to Alomar—about whom more in a moment—the Groundhogs (what else would a February team be called?) could turn to Hall of Famer Joe Gordon or Hall of Famer Red Schoendienst.
Despite those names, Alomar is an easy choice. The switch-hitting second generation player was a 12-time All-Star, 10-time Gold Glove winner at second (no one has more) and four-time Silver Slugger award winner.
Third Base: Ron Santo
Finally elected—a year too late to see it, shamefully—to the Hall of Fame this past December, Ron Santo is one of the 10 best third basemen who ever lived. Santo’s skills, including leading the National League in walks four times and finishing in the top five eight times, were severely underappreciated in their time but will be on Team February.
Shortstop: Honus Wagner
There have been some tremendous shortstops in baseball history: Hall of Famers like Cal Ripken, Arky Vaughn and recent electee Barry Larkin. They go along, of course, with recent and still active greats like Alan Trammell (a February birth himself) and Derek Jeter. But Honus Wagner stands alone as the greatest. The Flying Dutchman—an outstanding nickname, incidentally—remained a dominant offensive force while playing short through age 38 and his performance in the years before that was simply outstanding. If, as the saying goes, great teams are built up the middle, February is in good shape with their double-play combination.
Left Field: Monte Irvin
Monte Irvin did not debut in the Major Leagues until age 30 and because of this played fewer than 775 games. This holds his career numbers down considerably; he has fewer than 750 hits, 500 RBI and 100 home runs. He earns the spot on the all-February team, ahead of players with better career numbers like Chick Hafey and Rondell White because Irvin’s debut at age 30 came in 1949, nearly as soon as he could if not for baseball’s segregation policy.
Irvin—who made five Negro League All-Star teams and hit a reported .358 over his Negro League career—was clearly ready for the Majors long before ’49, and any reasonable person would have to award him credit for that time.
Center Field: Cesar Cedeno
On the subject of players, like Santo, who are underappreciated, we come to Cesar Cedeno. Cedeno was the victim of his home park, one which made his actual performance appear far less than it was. At age 21, for example, in 1972, Cedeno put up a total line of .320/.385/.537 in Houston’s Astrodome. He finished sixth in the MVP voting. The third place finisher was Pittsburgh’s Willie Stargell, who hit .293/.373/.558 at Three Rivers Stadium.
In raw terms, Cedeno’s OPS was nine points lower. If one adjusts for their home parks, however, and puts Stargell into the Astrodome his line drops to .291/.371/.551, identical OPS to Cedeno with a batting average nearly 30 points less.
Right Field: Hank Aaron
What is there to say about Aaron that you don’t already know? Outside of Barry Bonds, no one has ever hit more home runs. (And inside of Barry Bonds, as Groucho Marx almost said, it is too dark to hit home runs.) If not for Babe Ruth, Hammerin’ Hank could lay claim to being the best right fielder of all-time. For this team though, he and Wagner form a tremendous one-two punch, the best seen on any month team thus far.
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| Just Verlander, climbing the list of February greats (Icon/SMI) |
Starting Pitchers: Pete Alexander, Wilbur Cooper, Wes Ferrell, Herb Pennock, Justin Verlander
Yikes, that is some drop from staff ace down to the rest of the staff. Of course, when one is discussing a pitcher as great as Alexander—who is arguably a top five starter of all-time—there will be inevitably be a slump in quality. None of which is speak ill of Wilbur Cooper and his cohorts. For his part, Cooper won 216 games pitching primarily for the Pirates in the teens and early ‘20s. Wes Ferrell could not match that total for victories; he won 193 over his career, but made up substantial value with his bat: he was a lifetime .280 hitter and was a greater than two WAR player with the bat alone in 1935.
Herb Pennock is actually second all-time in February wins, behind Alexander. Most of Pennock’s 241 wins came after age 30. Already 29, and owner of a 77-72 lifetime record, the Knight of Kennett Square was traded to the Yankees in 1923 and proceeded to go 164-90 for the rest of his career.
Verlander is a bit of an unusual choice. Though several February pitchers had better careers, a peak does count for something and Verlander’s last three years (averaging 238 IP with a 140 ERA+) are pretty impressive. Moreover, Verlander is still on the “right” side of 30, and while pitchers are always dangerous to predict, it seems a strong bet that by the time his career is over, this spot will be his without question.
Relief Pitcher: Dan Quisenberry
These days, I suspect Quisenberry is remembered as much for his wit (I found a delivery in my flaw…Natural grass is a wonderful thing for little bugs and sinkerball pitchers, etc.) and his tragic early death at age 45, as he is for his pitching. That’s too bad. At his absolute best, “Quiz” was a masterful reliever in what might be roughly called the Mariano Rivera Model of Relief Pitching: force the other guys to beat you. That is, no walks, no home runs, make them string together a bunch of hits to beat you. That earned him his place on the February team.
(The other way to do it is what might be called the Billy Wagner Model of Relief Pitching: giving up the occasion—or more than occasional—walk or home run, but covering your sins with a huge number of strikeouts.)
Manager: Pat Moran
February, if we’re being honest, is a little shallow in the managerial department. Nonetheless, one could do far worse than Pat Moran. Moran’s greatest gift was apparently his leadership in his first season. First taking over the Phillies in 1915, who finished 74-80 the year before, Moran led them to a 90-62 record and the National League pennant. The Phillies would finish second the next two years, before Moran lost his job after a 55-68 year in 1918.
Taking over the Cincinnati Reds the next season, Moran again led a turnaround, taking the Reds, who finished 68-60 the year prior, to a 96-44 record and a trip to the World Series. The Reds’ victory in that World Series, is, of course, somewhat tainted by the “Black Sox” scandal, but Moran nonetheless led his team to victory.
For his career, Moran finished with 748 wins and a .561 winning percentage—the latter number higher than that of names like Bobby Cox, Miller Huggins and Sparky Anderson.
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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The Hardball Times
We will, we will (mock) you
by Nick FlederFebruary 02, 2012
Nick Fleder has been a die-hard Yankee fan since birth and has played fantasy baseball obsessively since around the age of ten. He can be reached for all inquiries or comments at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). You can ask him any baseball or fantasy baseball related questions on Twitter: @fishfle
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The Hardball Times
How are wins, attendance and payroll all related?
by Dan LependorfFebruary 02, 2012
"...there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's fifty feet of crap. And then there's us." — Moneyball (2011)
The release of Moneyball helped bring baseball economics into the mainstream. Obviously, given the subject matter, a lot of the attention has been centered on the plight of the small-market team, and how small-market general managers need to be smarter to survive. A common refrain I hear is that small-market teams are often pulled into a death spiral where payroll, attendance, and the quality of the team drag each other down, sinking the team into the gutter with no easy way out. And it intuitively makes sense. But is it really that simple? How strong are the links between those three variables?
Thankfully, testing the strength of the links is fairly easy. I created a data set comprised of all MLB teams between 2000-2011, consisting of team payroll at the beginning of the season (via USA Today), total attendance per game figures (via Baseball-Reference), and winning percentage. Sure, it seems intuitive that all three of the possible pair combinations between payroll, attendance, and wins would have noticeable correlations. More money should buy more wins, wins should go hand-in-hand with more people in seats, and attendance should mean more revenue dollars for the front office to play with. But instead of relying on conjecture, why not actually test it?
Before I continue, I need to touch on a very important point. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Two variables may be correlated, but the existence of a correlation does not mean that one of the variables caused the other. The percentage of US households with a television over the last 50 years correlates with the price of a gallon of milk, as both have increased over time, but the correlation certainly doesn't mean that the price of milk caused more US families to purchase TVs. Correlation can certainly point in the direction of causation, but proving causation is a rather tricky proposition that requires research in a controlled environment. So think of this as a loose suggestion, rather than anything that's set in stone.
Now, onto business. What conclusions can we draw?
By far, the biggest correlation is between payroll and attendance.
| Variable Pair | R2 |
|---|---|
| Payroll/Wins | 0.16 |
| Attendance/Wins | 0.27 |
| Payroll/Attendance | 0.54 |
The R2 between payroll and attendance is 0.54, which is a fancy, statistical way of saying that 54 percent of the variation in payroll can be attributed to changes in attendance. The R2 figures for payroll/wins and attendance/wins are far lower, indicating a lesser degree of correlation. It makes sense that the two other pairs should be related, but the links between those pairs don't seem to be quite as strong as payroll/attendance.
But is it possible to shed a little more light on the correlation? Sure, A and B share a correlation, but does A influence B more than B influences A? It's easy enough to test by looking at correlations between a set of variables and another set of variables from the previous year.
Again, before delving into this, I have to give a similar warning as above. Another common logical fallacy is to assume that if an event happened after a previous event, the first caused the second. After writing this article, I made myself a sandwich, but typing about baseball didn't cause me to get hungry. An event that follows another can certainly be the caused by the first event, but it's not necessarily true. So again, nothing here is set in stone as an emphatic "this is how it is" conclusion.
Attendance follows wins, not the other way around.
| Variable Pair | R2 |
|---|---|
| Attendance/Wins | 0.27 |
| Attendance/Last Year's Wins | 0.30 |
| Wins/Last Year's Attendance | 0.13 |
If we compare attendance with the previous year's wins, the R2 jumps up a little from the same-year correlation. But when reversed, when wins are compared to last year's attendance, the R2 falls to 0.13. This seems to suggest that a fanbase shows up in larger numbers if the team is doing well, but the reverse effect of a team doing well because of a large fan base (more revenue from ticket sales) doesn't generally exist.
Payrolls expand after a team does well more often than the reverse.
| Variable Pair | R2 |
|---|---|
| Payroll/Wins | 0.16 |
| Payroll/Last Year's Wins | 0.25 |
| Wins/Last Year's Payroll | 0.12 |
Again, we see an R2 change as these variables are moved around in time. This indicates that teams generally expand payroll to push a talented team over the edge, instead of using payroll to give a bad team a talent spike. Nothing surprising here, but it's nice to have it in black and white numbers.
Payroll and attendance are far "stickier" than wins.
| Variable Pair | R2 |
|---|---|
| Payroll/Last Year's Payroll | 0.83 |
| Attendance/Last Year's Attendance | 0.80 |
| Wins/Last Year's Wins | 0.31 |
For this set, I ran a correlation analysis between each variable and it's value in the previous year. (To borrow a term from economics, a variable is called "sticky" when it isn't very susceptible to change over time.) The year-to-year correlations between payroll and attendance are extremely high, whereas wins are much more volatile.
So what does it all mean, as far as small-market teams? Having a healthy fan base and a strong payroll is extremely important for the health of a franchise. Wins are volatile, but payroll and attendance will stick around for a while. Of course, the problem is that wins lead to payroll and attendance, so there seems to be truth in the death spiral idea after all. It's also interesting to note that the correlation between payroll and wins isn't nearly as strong as one might expect. An R2 of only 0.16 is absolutely tiny, indicating a relationship that is far from ironclad. (That's your cue to gloat or sulk, Rays and Cubs fans.)
References and Resources
- USA Today MLB Salary Database
- Baseball-Reference Attendance Database
- My data set, with payroll, attendance, and win percentage figures from 2000-2011.
Dan can be contacted here (email) or here (twitter). He welcomes all comments, even offers for cheap male enhancement pills and winnings from lotteries he didn't realize he had entered.
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The Hardball Times
2012 Fantasy Price Guides
by Greg TamerFebruary 02, 2012
Greg Tamer is the Manager of THT Forecasts. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
2012 Players Comments
by Greg TamerFebruary 02, 2012
Greg Tamer is the Manager of THT Forecasts. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
Are you mocking me?
by Derek AmbrosinoFebruary 01, 2012
Derek Ambrosino aspires to one day, like Dan Quisenberry, find a delivery in his flaw, you can send him questions, comments, or suggestions at digglahhh AT yahoo DOT com.
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The Hardball Times
Why Oliver Loves Yu
by Brian CartwrightFebruary 01, 2012
WAR ERA WHIP W L IP H HR BB SO HR/9 BB/9 SO/9 6.2 2.57 0.97 16 4 185 138 8 41 198 0.4 2.0 9.6
It looks like Yu broke Oliver. That's Yu Darvish; Oliver is the engine of The Hardball Times Forecasts. It's not the first time it's happened, but when a player so dominates his non-major league competition that that his derived major league true talent exceeds generally accepted norms, it offers an opportunity to examine the system and make some changes for the better.
Darvish's performance against batters in Nippon Professional Baseball, the world's second best professional league, is indeed mind-boggling: consistently low hits, home runs and walks, with more than a strikeout an inning.
Patrick Newman of npbtracker shows pitch type, velocity and usage rate for pitchers in that league. This past year, Darvish's fastball sat at 94 to 95 mph, with a slider in the low 80s, and a high 80s change-up. He also mixes in a low 90s cut fastball, forkball, shuuto and slow curve.
Newman also pointed me to Pro Yakyu Nuru Data Okijyo from which I was able to get Darvish's ground ball rates.
Year Age ERA W L IP H HR BB SO GB% 2007 20 1.82 15 5 208 123 9 49 210 59.9 2008 21 1.88 16 4 201 136 11 44 208 57.8 2009 22 1.73 15 5 182 118 9 45 167 59.2 2010 23 1.78 12 8 202 158 5 47 222 57.4 2011 24 1.44 18 6 232 156 5 36 276 60.0
Still the question remains, how accurately can that performance be projected into a major league equivalent? The standard process is to find as many players as possible who have played in both leagues, comparing their performance, as a group, in both situations.
If, for example, starting pitchers might translate differently from relievers, players can be divided into different groups that better fit their role and profile, but at the risk of having the comparisons based on smaller, and thus less reliable, sample sizes.
Oliver's Japanese translations are based on the performances of 260 pitchers who have performed on both sides of the Pacific from 1998 to 2011. Of these, 185 have been North American players who have gone to Japan, with 75 Japanese pitchers coming here, but only 28 of those 75 appearing in the major leagues. Since 1998, only five pitchers who were starters in Japan were given starting roles in the majors.
Oliver is rule based. Given a supply of play by play and seasonal data, I write code that describes how different parts of the data relate to one another. If I believe Darvish's translations are too strong, adjusting the code will also affect every other Japanese pitcher. Changes must be made in a way that balances the performances of all in the group. There did appear to be differences in whether the pitcher started his career in North America or Japan, and whether he was a starter or a reliever. After adjustments were made, Darvish's projection hardly budged.
With a projected 2.57 ERA, give or take a few tenths, Oliver is putting Darvish ahead of every current major league starting pitcher. The Texas Rangers were willing to commit $111 million dollars over the next six years to procure his services, but can he realistically be expected to out-perform this projected list of 2012's top 15 starting pitchers?
ERA Name 2.75 Clayton Kershaw 2.79 Stephen Strasburg 2.88 Justin Verlander 2.97 Roy Halladay 3.05 Cliff Lee 3.05 Josh Johnson 3.15 Matt Cain 3.16 Jered Weaver 3.17 Felix Hernandez 3.25 Ian Kennedy 3.25 Mat Latos 3.25 Adam Wainwright 3.26 Cole Hamels 3.28 Tim Lincecum 3.33 Michael Pineda
Let's look at how Oliver's past projections for Japanese starting pitchers compare to their actual performances. I will note that the major league performance is a weighted mean of the player's first three seasons in the majors, with the first season weighted at 1.0, the second 0.7 and the third 0.5. This is the reverse ordering of how past seasons are used to generate the projections. No minor league data are included. Also, the projected ERA is based on the expected wOBA allowed, while the major league ERA is the actual, and not park adjusted.
Kei Igawa Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 1788 3.89 0.297 0.046 0.072 0.218 MLB 1st 3 years 330 6.54 0.317 0.064 0.109 0.161
Igawa was signed by the Yankees in 2007 and was expected to provide an above-average numbers of strikeouts, although accompanied by a few extra home runs. Maybe the pressure of working for George Steinbrenner was too much; Igawa allowed far too many walks and long balls and lasted only 12 starts that year and one the next before returning to Japan.
Kaz Ishii Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 1547 3.96 0.284 0.048 0.119 0.246 MLB 1st 3 years 1525 4.25 0.279 0.042 0.144 0.191
Ishii signed with the Dodgers in 2002, spending three years in their rotation. After one more with the Mets, he also returned to Japan. Wild in Japan, he walked even more here and also underperformed his projected strikeout rate, although the ERA projection was fairly close.
Kenshin Kawakami Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 1381 3.50 0.284 0.044 0.046 0.205 MLB 1st 3 years 943 4.22 0.295 0.032 0.071 0.157
Kawakami joined the Braves in 2009 and had a respectable 3.86 ERA, but suffered through a 1-10, 5.15 year in 2010, then spent the entire 2011 season in the minors. He walked more and struck out fewer than projected (I'm beginning to notice a pattern).
Hiroki Kuroda Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 1685 3.54 0.278 0.037 0.048 0.167 MLB 1st 3 Years 1520 3.65 0.283 0.025 0.045 0.170
Kuroda delivered four quality season from 2008 to 2011 for the Dodgers, almost exactly matching his projection, and just signed a 1 year, $10 million deal with the Yankees.
Daisuke Matsuzaka Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 1630 2.77 0.273 0.030 0.061 0.245 MLB 1st 3 years 1517 4.01 0.295 0.039 0.105 0.221
The Japanese import everyone loves to hate, Matsuzaka did have two solid seasons, in 2007 and 2008, for the Red Sox, but injuries have kept him sidelined and/or ineffective for the past three years. Showing fine control his last two years in Japan, he's issued an above-average numbers of walks in the majors.
Hideki Irabu Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 1658 3.19 0.281 0.028 0.100 0.258 MLB 1st 3 years 1125 4.94 0.283 0.058 0.085 0.187 Hideo Nomo Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 1707 4.40 0.291 0.040 0.157 0.243 MLB 1st 3 years 1884 3.16 0.269 0.035 0.094 0.275 Colby Lewis Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 1479 3.26 0.302 0.034 0.039 0.230 MLB 1st 3 years 1431 4.03 0.273 0.046 0.072 0.220
I looked at three more pitchers - Hideo Nomo and Hideki Irabu from the 1990s, and Colby Lewis, who after never experiencing any success in the majors spent 2008 and 2009 in Japan before returning the past two years with the Rangers.
Irabu issued fewer walks but also fewer strikeouts than expected, and couldn't avoid the long ball. Nomo was very wild in Japan but pitched much better than expected in the major leagues. Lewis' strikeout rates were as expected, but his walks jumped up.
Hisanori Takahashi Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 1355 4.27 0.292 0.047 0.066 0.175 MLB 1st 3 Years 713 3.60 0.294 0.037 0.068 0.215 Ken Takahashi Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 940 5.28 0.293 0.052 0.088 0.133 MLB 1st 3 Years 116 2.96 0.280 0.026 0.113 0.200 Koji Uehara Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 872 3.65 0.290 0.050 0.037 0.201 MLB 1st 3 years 522 3.34 0.282 0.043 0.036 0.248 Keiichi Yabu Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 1030 4.30 0.284 0.041 0.076 0.149 MLB 1st 3 years 262 4.50 0.330 0.033 0.089 0.170
These last four were all primarily starting pitchers in Japan, but did most or all of their major league pitching out of the bullpen. All showed better-than-expected strikeout rates, with Uehara almost doubling his rate after the Orioles removed him from the rotation.
It is known that on average pitchers perform better out of the bullpen. Tango calls it his rule of 15: Home runs and walks down 15 percent, strikeouts up 15 percent. I believe I can improve the Japanese translation factors by adjusting the stats as starters and relievers to the same baseline before compiling sets of matched pairs. Where I have play-by-play data from Gameday I am able to tabulate how each pitcher has performed as a starter and as a reliever, which then needs to be regressed to the standard splits. However, the available seasonal level stats from Japan do not offer this breakdown. The number of innings pitched as a starter and reliever can be estimated, but the Japanese leagues have not published games started for the past three seasons.
The records for the eight starting pitchers above suggest that the translation factors currently being used by Oliver are too generous: As a group, the observed major league performances of the eight compared to their projections were 0.99 for base hits (BABIP), 1.11 for home runs, 1.24 for walks and 0.91 for strikeouts. But, how much more should we trust the record of eight starting pitchers in the majors compared to the 75 Japanese pitchers who have pitched in the minors and majors over the past 13 seasons? How much different should we expect them to be from the 185 pitchers who have left here for Japan?
Yu Darvish Size ERA BH% HR% BB% SO% Projection 1799 2.57 0.280 0.019 0.058 0.272 Adjusted 0.278 0.021 0.071 0.248
The first line is Darvish's current Oliver projection, while the second shows the rate stats adjusted for those eight starters (still very good).
These are Darvish's top comparables using his current projection—a higher ERA than 2.57, but the top five still puts him right at the top with Kershaw and Strasburg, while a larger sample of comps still rates high enough to rank him fifth of sixth in the major leagues.
Rank Name Season ERA BH% HR% BB% SO%
1 Martinez, Pedro 2004 2.55 0.288 0.020 0.056 0.285
2 Verlander, Justin 2012 2.87 0.281 0.033 0.064 0.263
3 Johnson, Randy 2005 2.96 0.290 0.034 0.054 0.272
4 Santana, Johan 2007 2.78 0.274 0.039 0.056 0.269
5 Kershaw, Clayton 2012 2.75 0.284 0.024 0.078 0.274
6 Prior, Mark 2003 3.19 0.302 0.032 0.073 0.278
7 Schmidt, Jason 2004 2.97 0.283 0.028 0.074 0.247
8 Peavy, Jake 2008 3.47 0.304 0.034 0.063 0.254
9 Greinke, Zack 2010 3.20 0.307 0.029 0.058 0.253
10 Lincecum, Tim 2012 3.27 0.300 0.030 0.084 0.268
11 Schilling, Curt 2005 3.02 0.292 0.039 0.042 0.248
12 Matsuzaka, Daisuke 2008 3.29 0.283 0.038 0.072 0.243
13 Hamels, Cole 2008 3.52 0.290 0.043 0.070 0.246
14 Bedard, Erik 2008 3.39 0.303 0.031 0.079 0.250
Top 5 2.78 0.283 0.030 0.062 0.273
Top 10 3.00 0.291 0.030 0.066 0.266
All 3.09 0.292 0.033 0.066 0.261
Now using the adjusted projection. The composite ERA of the top five comps again puts Darvish fifth or sixth, while the larger list drops him closer to 15th.
Rank Name Season ERA BH% HR% BB% SO%
1 Schmidt, Jason 2004 2.97 0.283 0.028 0.074 0.247
2 Martinez, Pedro 2006 3.01 0.281 0.032 0.059 0.243
3 Matsuzaka, Daisuke 2008 3.29 0.283 0.038 0.072 0.243
4 Verlander, Justin 2012 2.87 0.281 0.033 0.064 0.263
5 Latos, Mat 2012 3.25 0.290 0.032 0.069 0.234
6 Hanson, Tommy 2012 3.43 0.285 0.036 0.072 0.233
7 Peavy, Jake 2010 3.40 0.298 0.034 0.076 0.243
8 Lester, Jon 2011 3.34 0.298 0.029 0.083 0.241
9 Hamels, Cole 2008 3.52 0.290 0.043 0.070 0.246
10 Kennedy, Ian 2012 3.24 0.277 0.036 0.071 0.226
11 Jimenez, Ubaldo 2012 3.49 0.295 0.024 0.091 0.240
12 Scherzer, Max 2011 3.59 0.296 0.038 0.084 0.249
13 Kershaw, Clayton 2012 2.75 0.284 0.024 0.078 0.274
14 Bedard, Erik 2009 3.57 0.296 0.036 0.083 0.237
15 Beckett, Josh 2005 3.50 0.303 0.031 0.077 0.238
16 Santana, Johan 2009 3.37 0.286 0.043 0.059 0.235
Top 5 3.08 0.284 0.032 0.068 0.246
Top 10 3.23 0.287 0.034 0.071 0.242
All 3.29 0.289 0.033 0.074 0.243
For the final set of comparable projections, I used a defense independent approach, using only groundball, walk and strikeout rate. Assuming that major league baseball has a slightly lower rate of ground balls than the Nippon league, I found Darvish's top comps using a ground ball rate of 0.55, a walk rate of 0.071, and a strikeout rate of 0.248. There's no difference between the different sized groups, each with a composite ERA out of major league baseball's top 15, but much of the ERA difference between this and the previous sets of comps is in the home run rate, almost 50 percent higher here than in Oliver's projection.
Rank Name Season ERA GB% BH% HR% BB% SO%
1 Liriano, Francisco 2007 3.58 0.53 0.304 0.037 0.087 0.254
2 Hernandez, Felix 2011 3.16 0.54 0.287 0.026 0.071 0.219
3 Burnett, A.J. 2008 3.81 0.55 0.295 0.037 0.082 0.217
4 Jimenez, Ubaldo 2011 3.18 0.52 0.284 0.020 0.097 0.240
5 Lester, Jon 2011 3.34 0.51 0.298 0.029 0.083 0.241
6 Wainwright, Adam 2011 3.12 0.51 0.295 0.028 0.061 0.226
7 Garcia, Jaime 2012 3.64 0.54 0.310 0.027 0.069 0.201
8 Carpenter, Chris 2006 3.27 0.54 0.292 0.031 0.052 0.205
9 Zambrano, Carlos 2006 3.23 0.51 0.276 0.023 0.088 0.215
10 Chacin, Jhoulys 2012 3.61 0.52 0.271 0.033 0.105 0.213
11 Halladay, Roy 2012 2.96 0.52 0.305 0.024 0.034 0.216
12 Wilson, C.J. 2012 3.47 0.51 0.290 0.024 0.089 0.212
Top 5 3.41 0.53 0.294 0.030 0.084 0.234
Top 10 3.39 0.53 0.291 0.029 0.079 0.223
All 3.36 0.53 0.292 0.028 0.076 0.221
Yu Darvish is clearly a very talented pitcher, enough that the Texas Rangers were willing to put $51 million down and $60 million over the next six years to have him in their starting rotation. Just how well his future major league performances can be projected is a work of art, with different available methods where even small changes in estimated base hits allowed can vary the ERA estimate by a few tenths. Oliver has had a good record so far, such as with Stephen Strasburg and Ian Kennedy. However, players have some amount of natural variance each year as well as changes in their true talent.
Examining several sets of comparable pitchers shows an expected ERA for Darvish anywhere from 2.78 to 3.40, which is from excellent down to merely very good, but no recent major league pitchers have the combination of Darvish's expected home runs, walks and strikeouts. Looking at those comparables and Darvish’s pitch metrics give me a personal opinion: I would compare him to Felix Hernandez with more strikeouts or Ubaldo Jimenez with fewer walks.
Meanwhile, as these customized estimates all gave a higher ERA projection than Oliver, I’ll retreat to my office, where first things on the drawing board are incorporating ground ball rates to give regression means for base hit and home run rates, and separately consider pitching as a starter and reliever.
Brian got his start in amateur baseball way back in the 1970's as the statistician for his local college summer league in Johnstown, Pa, which also hosts the annual All-American Amateur Baseball Association. A longtime APBA and Strat-o-Matic player, he still tends to look at everything as a simulation. He has also written for StatSpeak and Fangraphs, was runnerup in the Baseball Prospectus Idol competition, and has consulted for a major league team. You can contact him at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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The Hardball Times
Reflections after a long offseason
by Chris LundFebruary 01, 2012
"What a team. What a ride. The Cardinals are world champs in 2011."
And that was that. Eight months of projections, pontification and paying attention for a criminal number of hours boiled down to the St. Louis Cardinals and that damn squirrel taking a world championship.
For most of us, the chase ended well before then. We bid farewell to those who share our cheers and jeers in our favorite section of the diamond, those who haul beer around for the thirstiest of fans, those who bring the game into our homes with their play-by-play and compelling (or otherwise) insights. Our little baseball families dispersed for another long, lonely winter spent staring at coutndowns that remind of us the exhausting wait until we're reunited once again.
Sure, there were little glimmers of hope. A round of winter meeting rumors sparked a phone conversation about whether or not you would fill that elusive leadoff spot. A division rival bolsters its rotation in exchange for a bevy of prospects. Sure, you say, they may have the edge on us this year, but just wait until The Kid makes the leap. They won't have a prayer. Those damn Yankees have been so quiet. They just have to be up to something, right?
It's natural, really. We can try to fill the void with football all we want, but it's just not the same. The weather, for one, is no fun at all. You can't settle into a spot in the stands underneath the sun the way you want to. Not to mention there is no majesty in a bowl stadium. Where are the towering walls, waterfalls and patterns cut in to the grass? The peanut vendors? Well, they just have it all wrong.
And don't even try watching on television, unless you're a fan of people simultaneously yelling at each other and laughing. It only makes you want the summer to return that much more.
Now we've reached that part of the year where the resolutions begin. This will be the year where you get out to the park more. You're planning the weekend road trips to the Wrigley Fields and Fenway Parks of the world. A picture next to the Babe Ruth monument would make a nice little mantlepiece. Maybe you'll head out west and occupy a kayak in the middle of McCovey Cove. Perhaps it'll be that trip to Cooperstown you've always wanted to take.
At the very least you know you could do just about whatever you want with any two teams and be just fine. It may not have the familiar feel of your home park with your seats and your friends and your colors, but it doesn't take away from how badly you would love to check it off your list.
It's simply a matter of counting down the days. The lure of the Grapefruit League and the Cactus League is slowly building. Sure, those of us not lucky enough to make it down in person won't be as enamored as those who are, but it will be refreshing to see a pitcher's windup on television or hear the crack of the bat on the radio after so much waiting.
I know I'm looking forward to that walk up to the box office on Opening Day, standing amongst all of those people I've stood with for so many years now and waiting to get into the ballpark. I'll go in with my premeditated refusal to give in to the money pit that is criminally overpriced beer and popcorn, but I'll likely crack under the pressure of being asked whether or not I would like some.
From there I will no doubt be enamored with this season's carefully selected theme song and exhilarating video, and for a moment I'll think, "This feels like the year." Then the teams will take the field, and I'll be thrust back into the throngs of reason. Scoring games, pitch counts, and bullpen matchups once again become my daily thought process, and all will be right once again.
Until that day, my countdown reads: 18 days until pitchers and catchers report. The longest 18 days of the year.
References and Resources
Thanks to Joe Buck for the call that ended 2011 and started this story.
It should be noted that the Oakland Athletics and Seattle Mariners will report in 11 days, not 18.
Chris is a writer-at-large and encourages you to talk baseball.
For further baseball discussion, you can follow him on twitter under @thechrislund or send him an e-mail at chris (dot) lund89 AT gmail (dot) com
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The Hardball Times
The virtual 1958-68 Giants, Reds, and Cardinals (Part 9: 1965-66)
by Steve TrederFebruary 01, 2012
We've completed eight seasons of triangulated time travel:
1957-58
1958-59
1959-60
1960-61
1961-62
1962-63
1963-64
1964-65
The pinnacle of the National League standings has been the site of a sustained heavyweight slugfest between our Giants and Reds, with each so far bagging three-and-a-half pennants and coming very close nearly every time the other wins it. But for our Cardinals, it's been eight long years of not-good-enough. Could this be the year this persistent dynamic is finally altered?
Giants: Actual Reds: Actual Cardinals: Actual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 80 74 3 727 698 76 78 4 695 623 72 82 5T 619 704
1959 83 71 3 705 613 74 80 5T 764 738 71 83 7 641 725
1960 79 75 5 671 631 67 87 6 640 692 86 68 3 639 616
1961 85 69 3 773 655 93 61 1 710 653 80 74 5 703 668
1962 103 62 1 878 690 98 64 3 802 685 84 78 6 774 664
1963 88 74 3 725 641 86 76 5 648 594 93 69 2 747 628
1964 90 72 4 656 587 92 70 2T 660 566 93 69 1 715 652
1965 95 67 2 682 593 89 73 4 825 704 80 81 7 707 674
Giants: Virtual Reds: Virtual Cardinals: Virtual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 83 71 2T 747 692 73 81 5 683 637 77 77 4 640 677
1959 87 67 1T 737 615 87 67 1T 802 662 84 70 4 725 685
1960 93 61 1 709 561 76 78 6 705 666 86 68 4 661 632
1961 88 66 2 787 648 106 48 1 813 629 72 82 6 689 724
1962 103 59 1 800 632 101 61 2T 779 663 84 78 6 809 703
1963 97 65 3 726 578 100 62 1 704 540 80 82 6 664 668
1964 100 62 2 726 576 101 61 1 689 533 87 75 4 662 657
1965 99 63 1 697 587 98 64 2 843 646 85 76 5 692 622The 1965-66 offseason: Actual deals we will make
Nov. 29, 1965: The Cincinnati Reds drafted pitcher Don Nottebart from the Houston Astros in the 1965 Rule 5 draft.
Nov. 29, 1965: The St. Louis Cardinals drafted pitcher Joe Hoerner from the Houston Astros in the 1965 Rule 5 draft.
We haven’t generally been listing the Rule 5 picks in this series, because they’re usually quite unimpactful.
But both of these guys are better talents than one usually finds available in Rule 5 drafts, and both our Reds and our Cardinals will snap them up as eagerly as their real-life counterparts. (The fact that both Nottebart and Hoerner were left off the Houston 40-man roster that fall may suggest some disarray in the Astros’ front office as GM Paul Richards and owner Roy Hofheinz quarreled, leading to the Wizard of Waxahachie’s you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit departure in December.)
Nov. 29, 1965: The San Francisco Giants drafted second baseman Don Mason from the Washington Senators in the 1965 Rule 5 draft.
And then there’s this selection. It isn’t odd on its face, as Mason is an intriguing prospect, a 20-year-old left-handed-batting second baseman who’s hit .285 with 18 homers in Class A in 1965.
But the Giants have already devoted a "bonus baby" investment to Bob Schroder, a left-handed-batting second baseman, and been forced to commit a major-league roster spot to an unproductive Schroder in 1965. Keeping Mason will require doing the same for this left-handed-batting second baseman in 1966, and while left-handed-batting second basemen are pretty cool, just how far in this direction is it prudent for a team to go?
Our Giants will draft Mason; at this point in the process there’s no downside. But in spring training, we’ll make him prove to us that he can pull his weight on the full-season roster or we’ll relinquish him.
The 1965-66 offseason: Actual deals we will not make
Oct. 20, 1965: The St. Louis Cardinals traded third baseman Ken Boyer to the New York Mets for pitcher Al Jackson and third baseman Charley Smith.
Oct. 27, 1965: The St. Louis Cardinals traded first baseman Bill White, shortstop Dick Groat, and catcher Bob Uecker to the Philadelphia Phillies for outfielder Alex Johnson, catcher Pat Corrales, and pitcher Art Mahaffey.
Our Cardinals don’t have Boyer, White, or Groat, so they can’t pull off this dramatic infield demolition engineered by St. Louis GM Bob Howsam.
Dec. 9, 1965: The Cincinnati Reds traded outfielder Frank Robinson to the Baltimore Orioles for pitchers Milt Pappas and Jack Baldschun and outfielder Dick Simpson.
Well, one might put it this way:
The Big One; a deal so notorious that more than 40 years later it remains high on everyone’s short list of All-time Bad Trades.While our version of the Reds has some pitching concerns, we’re nowhere close to being tempted to doing something like this.
We’ve discussed before how clever a maneuver it was on the part of the Orioles. From the Reds’ point of view, the deal was prompted by Cincinnati Owner/GM Bill DeWitt’s concern that Robinson, his franchise player for a decade, was “an old 30” (along with a not-so-subtle undertone of discomfort with Robinson’s strong personality—read whatever racial implications into this you deem appropriate), as well as the opportunity to shore up the pitching staff following a season in which the Reds led the world in runs scored but finished fourth.
In such a circumstance, leveraging hitting surplus into pitching help was a fine strategy. But DeWitt, shall we say, whiffed on the execution: He guessed wrong in the estimation that decline was imminent for Robinson (strike one), he guessed wrong that the value garnered in this exchange was somewhere close to equivalent (strike two), and in any case he guessed wrong that Robinson’s contribution to the Reds—in terms of tangible play as well as intangible leadership—was indeed a surplus and not an essential (grab some pine).
The 1965-66 offseason: Deals we will invoke
Nov., 1965: The Cincinnati Reds purchased catcher Dave Ricketts from the St. Louis Cardinals.
With Ed Bailey appearing as though he's nearing the end, this switch-hitting backup catcher is more valuable to our Reds than to our Cardinals.
Dec. 1, 1965: The St. Louis Cardinals traded outfielder Matty Alou to the Pittsburgh Pirates for pitcher Joe Gibbon.
Actually, on this date the Pirates made this one with the Giants. Since it’s our Cards who have Alou, they’ll accept Pittsburgh’s offer of the lefty Gibbon, whose peripherals in 1965 were incomparably superior to his 4.51 ERA. (Even an eight-year-old scrutinizing Gibbon’s 1965 Strat-o-Matic card could figure that out.)
Dec. 2, 1965: The San Francisco Giants traded pitcher Bill Hands, outfielder Ollie Brown, and catcher Randy Hundley to the Chicago Cubs for pitcher Dick Ellsworth.
Actually, the Giants traded Hands and Hundley to the Cubs for pitcher Lindy McDaniel and outfielder Don Landrum. But in our scenario, the Cubs don’t have McDaniel (our Cards do, and they aren’t parting with him), and we’re not sure if the Cubs have Landrum, but it doesn’t matter because our Giants don’t want him.
But as in reality, in our scenario the Cubs at this point would be struggling (even moreso than in reality), quite ready to deal marketable assets in return for high-potential young talent. This offer our Giants present is that for sure, and it’s hefty enough to plausibly command the durable, still-young southpaw Ellsworth, who’d been just so-so in 1964 and ’65 after busting out with a tremendous year in ’63.
Much as our Giants like Hands, Brown, and Hundley, our roster is so deep that the only one we have a spot for is Hands. And the resulting upgrade from Hands to Ellsworth in our starting rotation is worth this considerable price.
Dec., 1965: The San Francisco Giants traded outfielder-infielder Cap Peterson to the Washington Senators for outfielder Fred Valentine.
Valentine is a toolsy switch-hitting journeyman, but at the age of almost-31 is the type of player the still-struggling Senators would surrender for the right offer. Our Giants haven’t been able to find major league room for Peterson, but he’s a line-drive hitter with defensive versatility, and he’s just 23.
April, 1966: The San Francisco Giants returned infielder Don Mason (earlier draft pick) to the Washington Senators.
Yeah, we’re just not ready for that commitment. It isn’t you, Don, it’s us.
April, 1966: The Cincinnati Reds traded pitcher Joe Nuxhall to the Atlanta Braves for pitcher Hank Fischer.
We're big fans of Nuxhall, who’s given us back-to-back-to-back fine years as a long reliever-spot starter in his Cincinnati career renaissance. But for 1966, he’s shaking out as our sixth left-handed pitcher, and on a staff of 10, that’s really not advisable. So we’ll exchange him for the right-hander Fischer, who isn’t as good, but is a decade younger.
April, 1966: The St. Louis Cardinals sold pitcher Bill Henry to the Philadelphia Phillies.
April, 1966: The Cincinnati Reds sold infielder Chico Ruiz to the Minnesota Twins.
End-of-spring training roster culling.
The 1966 season: Actual deals we will make
Aug. 15, 1966: The Cincinnati Reds traded pitcher Hank Fischer to the Boston Red Sox for players to be named later and cash. (On Dec. 15, 1966, the Red Sox sent pitchers Dick Stigman and Rollie Sheldon to the Reds, completing the deal.)
Fischer does poorly in Cincinnati, and like the actual Reds, we’ll scrap him in August. The price the Red Sox are willing to pay is generous; both Stigman and Sheldon have fallen on hard times, but each is young enough to have an Act III yet to play.
The 1966 season: Actual deals we will not make
May 8, 1966: The San Francisco Giants traded first baseman-outfielder Orlando Cepeda to the St. Louis Cardinals for pitcher Ray Sadecki.
Mmm-hmm. As we put it in Blockbusters:
Branch Rickey's famous trading maxim was, "It's better to trade a player a year too soon than a year too late." That's sound wisdom, and a variant on it might be, "It's better to trade a player when his market value is high than when his market value is low." Buy low/sell high, in other words. Well, the Giants spectacularly botched this one in that regard.Our Giants won’t go there.
Cepeda had been a superstar, of course, but he was coming off a season lost to major knee surgery, and it wasn't yet clear just how fully he'd regain his form, so the Giants went ahead and dealt him while that doubt was holding his market value way down. Therefore, all they could get for him was Sadecki, who at just 25 was already in his seventh big-league season but had yet to establish himself as even so much as a consistent, dependable league-average starter.
May 11, 1966: The San Francisco Giants sold infielder Dick Schofield to the New York Yankees.
Like the actual Giants, we’ve been frustrated by Schofield’s offensive woes. But not frustrated enough to just cut him loose; we still see him contributing in a utility role.
May 20, 1966: The Cincinnati Reds sold pitcher Gerry Arrigo to the New York Mets.
Our Reds don’t have Arrigo. (And our Reds do still have Cesar Tovar.)
June 15, 1966: The Cincinnati Reds traded pitcher Joey Jay to the Atlanta Braves for pitcher Hank Fischer.
This is how the Reds actually acquired Fischer.
Aug. 16, 1966: The Cincinnati Reds purchased pitcher Gerry Arrigo from the New York Mets.
Interestingly, Cesar Tovar was not being sold and re-sold every three months in 1966.
The 1966 season: Deals we will invoke
May, 1966: The St. Louis Cardinals sold pitcher Joe Gibbon to the Washington Senators.
We still like Gibbon, but our Cards have not one but two emerging southpaws this year that will squeeze him off our staff at mid-May cut-down time.
1966 season results
Giants
We won the pennant in 1965, but that was despite three nagging problems. We have plans to address all three.
Problem No. 1 was the absence of Cepeda, and the strain that put on run production. He’s back for 1966 (though just how completely, we’ll have to find out) and ready to reclaim left field. We could move Jim Ray Hart, who handled left in Cepeda’s stead, back to right field, but that would deprive young Jose Cardenal of playing time, and he’s a multi-faceted talent we want to try to develop.
So instead, we’ll make Hart our primary third baseman (in the minors, he played mostly third, and—how about this—shortstop), easing 35-year-old Ken Boyer into a part-time role.
The second issue was the starting rotation behind Juan Marichal. We’re beefing that up with the addition of Ellsworth, and we think the enigmatic Gaylord Perry is capable of better than he delivered in 1965.
And problem No. 3 was twin offensive sinkholes in the middle infield. We’re dealing with that by sliding young Hal Lanier from second base over to shortstop, where he’ll share the position with Schofield, and we anticipate pinch-hitting liberally at this spot in the order.
At second base, we’ll introduce 22-year-old rookie Tito Fuentes, who, though he’s just a little guy, is coming off a monster Triple-A season in which he slugged .543 while playing his home games in a pitchers’ park, in a league that slugged .386.
1966 San Francisco Giants Won 106 Lost 55 Finished 1st
Pos Player Age G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+
1B W. McCovey* 28 150 502 85 148 26 6 36 96 76 100 .295 .391 .586 .977 163
2B T. Fuentes 22 133 487 57 127 19 3 8 36 8 51 .261 .272 .361 .633 72
SS H. Lanier 23 134 344 28 79 11 2 2 28 12 37 .230 .251 .291 .541 48
3B-OF J. Hart 24 156 578 88 165 23 4 33 93 48 75 .285 .341 .510 .852 129
RF-CF J. Cardenal 22 128 374 54 108 11 3 11 32 21 45 .289 .328 .422 .750 104
CF W. Mays 35 152 552 99 159 29 4 37 103 70 81 .288 .367 .556 .923 149
LF-1B O. Cepeda 28 137 456 62 136 24 0 21 74 36 70 .298 .360 .489 .849 130
C T. Haller* 29 137 455 72 109 18 2 26 65 51 72 .240 .320 .459 .780 111
3B-1B K. Boyer 35 91 273 34 77 15 1 8 34 19 33 .282 .324 .432 .757 105
SS D. Schofield# 31 80 194 26 42 3 0 0 8 24 24 .216 .303 .232 .535 49
OF-1B W. Bond* 28 81 181 20 41 5 1 6 25 14 25 .227 .290 .365 .655 78
OF F. Valentine# 31 73 169 31 47 10 3 5 20 14 22 .278 .339 .462 .800 117
IF A. Rodgers 31 54 137 16 32 6 0 2 13 18 27 .234 .314 .321 .636 75
OF J. Alou 24 66 148 16 38 3 0 0 8 3 10 .257 .271 .277 .548 51
C B. Barton 24 43 91 1 16 2 1 0 3 5 5 .176 .216 .220 .436 20
C T. Talton* 27 37 53 8 18 3 1 3 6 1 5 .340 .364 .604 .967 159
IF R. Peña 26 21 40 3 8 1 0 0 3 3 7 .200 .256 .225 .481 33
C J. Orsino 28 14 23 1 4 1 0 0 0 0 7 .174 .174 .217 .391 6
Others 75 4 17 0 1 1 3 2 10 .227 .241 .293 .534 45
Pitchers 432 34 80 10 3 3 36 17 142 .184 .208 .240 .448 22
Total 5564 739 1451 220 35 202 686 442 848 .261 .316 .422 .737 100
* Bats left
# Bats both
Pitcher Age G GS CG W L SV IP H R ER HR BB SO ERA ERA+
J. Marichal 28 37 36 25 26 5 0 307 228 88 76 32 36 222 2.23 167
G. Perry 27 36 35 13 22 7 0 256 242 92 85 15 40 201 2.99 125
B. Bolin 27 36 34 10 13 9 1 224 174 85 72 25 70 143 2.89 129
D. Ellsworth* 26 31 29 7 8 9 0 179 204 92 72 17 33 104 3.62 103
D. LeMay* 27 17 15 2 2 2 0 66 84 43 36 12 28 27 4.91 76
B. Garibaldi 24 11 6 1 3 2 0 44 55 26 22 3 17 23 4.50 83
D. McMahon 36 61 0 0 10 5 7 90 76 34 27 8 39 62 2.70 138
B. O'Dell* 33 59 0 0 5 3 3 102 104 35 30 5 38 62 2.65 141
S. Miller 38 51 0 0 9 4 15 92 71 30 26 5 20 66 2.54 147
F. Linzy 25 42 2 0 6 7 4 86 92 34 28 4 29 49 2.93 127
Others 4 0 2 2 0 31 34 22 19 3 19 20 5.52 68
Total 161 58 106 55 30 1477 1364 581 493 129 369 979 3.00 124
* Throws leftCepeda doesn't display peak form, but he’s very good. Hart proves able to handle third base (as had Cepeda several years ago), and Boyer is productive coming off the bench. Cardenal hits well, as does catcher Tom Haller. Willie Mays finally begins to show signs of slowing down, but he remains extremely good, and Willie McCovey is as productive as ever.Fuentes struggles with strike zone judgment but hits adequately. Our lineup overall is once again fearsome, leading the major leagues in home run production, blasting over 200 bombs for the fifth time in six years.
Ellsworth isn’t great, but he’s solid, and he fits in nicely as a southpaw fourth starter behind right-handers Bob Bolin (who’s excellent), Perry (who does bust out as a star), and Marichal (who’s utterly brilliant). Sophomore sinkerballer Frank Linzy, who worked as a starter as a midseason call-up in 1965, moves to the bullpen to replace Masanori Murakami (who’s returned to Japan) and completes a rock-solid, four-deep relief corps.
It’s an outstanding team without significant weakness. With an assist from Pythagoras, who allows us to outperform our projection by seven full games, we cruise to a glittering 106-55 record, tying the all-time franchise record for wins set way back in 1904.
In most seasons, that would be more than enough for a runaway pennant, but not this year. We do capture the flag, our fourth outright (plus one first-place tie) in nine seasons since coming West. But it turns out to be a magnificent squeaker of a race, and we're grateful for every last bit of that good Pythagorean fortune as we sweat it out.
Reds
We’ve made minimal changes to the roster that finished second by an eyelash in 1965. Ricketts is taking over as third-string catcher, and sophomore Tommy Helms beats out Chico Ruiz for one of the backup infielder spots. Nottebart and rookie Ted Davidson will join the bullpen.
1966 Cincinnati Reds Won 87 Lost 73 Finished 5th
Pos Player Age G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+
1B B. White* 32 144 471 81 140 19 5 21 85 59 82 .297 .372 .493 .865 129
2B P. Rose# 25 156 654 107 205 38 5 16 70 37 61 .313 .347 .460 .807 114
SS L. Cardenas 27 144 454 52 116 20 3 16 65 36 70 .256 .307 .419 .725 92
3B-1B D. Johnson 27 128 404 66 104 20 2 19 65 31 70 .257 .309 .458 .766 102
RF F. Robinson 30 155 576 124 189 36 3 47 123 75 92 .328 .410 .646 1.056 177
CF V. Pinson* 27 156 618 77 178 35 6 16 76 33 83 .288 .323 .442 .765 102
LF T. Gonzalez* 29 132 384 58 114 21 4 7 40 25 61 .297 .342 .427 .769 105
C J. Edwards* 28 98 282 24 54 8 0 6 39 31 42 .191 .266 .284 .550 47
OF T. Harper 25 99 277 45 75 11 3 3 16 27 44 .271 .337 .365 .701 88
C J. Azcue 26 93 272 24 81 10 1 8 44 15 21 .298 .332 .430 .762 102
3B T. Perez 24 99 257 25 68 10 4 4 41 14 44 .265 .302 .381 .683 82
IF T. Helms 25 69 181 24 50 7 0 3 16 7 11 .276 .302 .365 .667 78
UT C. Tovar 25 67 116 14 30 5 2 1 10 8 14 .259 .302 .362 .664 77
C D. Ricketts# 30 46 75 7 20 2 1 0 5 3 3 .267 .288 .320 .608 62
LF J. Lynch* 35 64 56 5 12 2 0 1 6 4 11 .214 .267 .304 .570 52
Others 34 5 9 2 0 1 4 2 7 .265 .306 .412 .717 90
Pitchers 417 31 67 10 2 1 18 19 131 .161 .188 .203 .391 5
Total 5528 769 1512 256 41 170 723 426 847 .274 .323 .427 .750 99
* Bats left
# Bats both
Pitcher Age G GS CG W L SV IP H R ER HR BB SO ERA ERA+
C. Osteen* 26 39 38 9 18 12 0 252 260 101 97 11 70 141 3.46 114
J. Maloney 26 32 32 10 17 7 0 225 174 75 70 18 90 216 2.80 141
S. Ellis 25 37 32 6 12 14 0 199 201 120 115 31 71 140 5.20 76
J. O'Toole* 29 25 24 2 5 6 0 142 139 65 56 16 49 96 3.55 111
J. Jay 30 27 12 1 6 4 1 103 118 60 58 11 44 65 5.07 78
H. Fischer 26 29 12 0 2 8 0 86 108 52 49 5 30 47 5.13 77
D. Nottebart 30 59 1 0 5 4 12 111 97 45 38 11 43 69 3.08 128
B. McCool* 21 57 0 0 8 7 19 105 76 32 29 5 41 104 2.49 159
T. Davidson* 26 54 0 0 5 4 4 85 82 41 37 11 23 54 3.92 101
J. Pizarro* 29 34 9 1 8 4 3 89 109 54 49 13 33 43 4.96 80
D. Zanni 34 15 0 0 1 1 0 25 20 9 8 2 11 20 2.88 137
D. Osteen 23 13 0 0 0 2 1 15 26 21 20 3 9 17 12.00 33
Others 0 0 0 0 0 1 3 2 2 0 1 0 18.00 22
Total 160 29 87 73 40 1438 1413 677 628 137 515 1012 3.93 100
* Throws leftRobinson emphatically vindicates our decision to keep him by delivering perhaps his greatest year, leading the majors in home runs, runs scored, RBIs, slugging, and OPS. Our hitting encounters just one problem, an inexplicably terrible year from catcher Johnny Edwards, and while we aren’t the juggernaut we were in ’65, our offense is very good, scoring the most runs in the major leagues.On the mound, we get strong years from top starters Claude Osteen and Jim Maloney and ace reliever Billy McCool. But we also get a host of problems. Neither Fischer nor Jay are effective. Our sore-armed lefties of 1965, Jim O'Toole and Juan Pizarro, both avoid the DL this time, but neither is an ace like before, as O’Toole is so-so and Pizarro pretty bad.
But the worst problem is that young Sammy Ellis, a relief sensation as a rookie in 1964 and a 20-game winner as a sophomore in ’65, becomes extremely hittable this time around, his ERA ballooning well over 5.00.
The result is a Cincinnati team dropping to fifth place after finishing first or second for five straight years. It isn’t our Reds who challenge the Giants for the pennant this time.
Cardinals
Despite finishing in fifth in 1965, we liked what we were seeing at most positions and have made only a few alterations for ’66. Rookie left-hander Larry Jaster will compete for a spot in the starting rotation, and the Rule 5 pick Hoerner will claim a role in our bullpen.
There will be a big change in venue, as in 1966 St. Louis unveils brand-new, circular, state-of-the-art Busch Memorial Stadium.
1966 St. Louis Cardinals Won 105 Lost 57 Finished 2nd
Pos Player Age G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+
1B L. Thomas* 30 114 275 26 62 5 1 6 29 24 30 .225 .294 .316 .610 70
2B J. Javier 29 140 414 35 95 12 5 6 35 23 57 .229 .267 .326 .593 64
SS-2B J. Buchek 24 123 358 32 85 13 5 6 36 29 90 .237 .289 .352 .641 78
3B M. Shannon 26 137 459 61 132 20 6 16 77 37 106 .288 .337 .462 .799 120
RF-1B F. Alou 31 154 633 94 211 31 7 24 92 23 48 .333 .365 .518 .883 143
CF C. Flood 28 152 563 77 150 19 5 9 61 23 45 .266 .295 .366 .661 83
LF L. Brock* 27 156 643 103 183 24 12 15 51 31 134 .285 .320 .429 .749 106
C T. McCarver* 24 146 516 64 143 18 13 11 64 34 36 .277 .321 .426 .748 106
1B-OF A. Shamsky* 24 96 257 37 63 8 1 16 42 35 52 .245 .330 .471 .801 120
SS D. Maxvill 27 112 263 17 64 9 2 0 18 25 41 .243 .307 .293 .600 68
1B-C D. Pavletich 27 83 235 28 70 14 2 8 36 18 39 .298 .348 .477 .824 127
3B-2B P. Gagliano 24 90 213 23 54 8 2 2 19 24 29 .254 .326 .338 .664 85
OF T. Savage 29 70 123 21 28 8 2 3 20 16 27 .228 .312 .398 .710 96
C B. Uecker 31 39 52 4 9 1 0 2 7 4 10 .173 .224 .308 .532 46
IF J. Williams 22 19 30 2 7 1 0 0 2 2 7 .233 .281 .267 .548 54
Others 94 9 20 6 1 1 8 7 13 .213 .272 .330 .602 67
Pitchers 410 34 68 14 1 4 26 15 154 .166 .182 .234 .416 15
Total 5538 667 1444 211 65 129 623 370 918 .261 .305 .392 .698 93
* Bats left
Pitcher Age G GS CG W L SV IP H R ER HR BB SO ERA ERA+
B. Gibson 30 35 35 20 24 9 0 280 210 90 76 20 78 225 2.44 148
L. Jackson 35 38 35 10 16 11 0 230 230 91 84 22 58 103 3.29 110
A. Jackson* 30 36 30 9 16 10 0 210 197 72 57 16 41 82 2.44 148
L. Jaster* 22 23 21 6 12 4 0 145 117 54 52 16 42 87 3.23 112
N. Briles 22 28 17 0 5 8 2 104 110 46 40 11 40 69 3.46 105
J. Gelnar 23 27 17 1 6 4 0 99 111 46 44 13 31 49 4.00 91
E. Fisher 29 60 0 0 5 5 15 86 77 30 26 4 24 47 2.72 133
H. Woodeshick* 33 59 0 0 3 0 4 70 57 17 15 5 23 30 1.93 188
L. McDaniel 30 58 0 0 9 3 5 98 80 33 27 3 29 76 2.48 146
J. Hoerner* 29 57 0 0 6 0 13 76 57 16 13 5 21 63 1.54 235
Others 7 3 3 3 2 59 48 19 16 2 19 40 2.44 148
Total 162 49 105 57 41 1457 1294 514 450 117 406 871 2.78 130
* Throws leftIt isn’t a season in which everything goes according to plan. First baseman Lee Thomas slumps so badly that he loses his starting role. Second baseman Julian Javier hits quite poorly, as well, though his slick glove allows him to retain his first-string job, more or less. And The Phantom's fellow defensive whiz, center fielder Curt Flood, wields a third slump-ridden bat.But the parade of good news is long and boisterous. Right fielder Felipe Alou delivers his best year, leading the league in hits and finishing second in batting average. Third baseman Mike Shannon breaks through as a productive regular. Art Shamsky comes off the bench with outstanding power to grab the first-base job from Thomas. With solid years from left fielder Lou Brock and catcher Tim McCarver, and robust lefty-mashing work from platoon hitter Don Pavletich, we mount a league-average offense despite our slumps.
And this competent offense is paired with a pitching staff of rare and exquisite excellence. Ace Bob Gibson has never been more terrific. Southpaw Al Jackson, a humdrum innings-eater in seasons past, comes up with a marvelous performance of his own, combining with Gibson and veteran right-hander Larry Jackson to form an outstanding top three. Jaster and sophomore Nelson Briles provide reliable spot starting.
Hoerner is tremendous. He joins fellow lefty Hal Woodeshick and right-handers Lindy McDaniel and Eddie Fisher to form a four-man relief unit that is an impervious and dazzling gem.
No major league ball club since 1954 has presented an ERA+ better than ours. Led by this phenomenal staff (and helped a little bit by a three-win Pythag cushion), our 105 victories are the second-most in St. Louis history. We finish, heartbreakingly, in second, but there is no question that our long struggle to produce a contender is over. These Cardinals are, at last, absolutely for real.
Next time
In a suddenly new reality, we find ourselves asking if it's the Reds who might be able to get within hailing distance of the front-runners in 1967.
Giants: Actual Reds: Actual Cardinals: Actual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 80 74 3 727 698 76 78 4 695 623 72 82 5T 619 704
1959 83 71 3 705 613 74 80 5T 764 738 71 83 7 641 725
1960 79 75 5 671 631 67 87 6 640 692 86 68 3 639 616
1961 85 69 3 773 655 93 61 1 710 653 80 74 5 703 668
1962 103 62 1 878 690 98 64 3 802 685 84 78 6 774 664
1963 88 74 3 725 641 86 76 5 648 594 93 69 2 747 628
1964 90 72 4 656 587 92 70 2T 660 566 93 69 1 715 652
1965 95 67 2 682 593 89 73 4 825 704 80 81 7 707 674
1966 93 68 2 675 626 76 84 7 692 702 83 79 6 571 577
Giants: Virtual Reds: Virtual Cardinals: Virtual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 83 71 2T 747 692 73 81 5 683 637 77 77 4 640 677
1959 87 67 1T 737 615 87 67 1T 802 662 84 70 4 725 685
1960 93 61 1 709 561 76 78 6 705 666 86 68 4 661 632
1961 88 66 2 787 648 106 48 1 813 629 72 82 6 689 724
1962 103 59 1 800 632 101 61 2T 779 663 84 78 6 809 703
1963 97 65 3 726 578 100 62 1 704 540 80 82 6 664 668
1964 100 62 2 726 576 101 61 1 689 533 87 75 4 662 657
1965 99 63 1 697 587 98 64 2 843 646 85 76 5 692 622
1966 106 55 1 739 581 87 73 5 769 677 105 57 2 667 514
References and Resources
In case you're wondering what a league might look like that has its top two teams combining for 211 wins, and its fifth-place team capturing 87...
I certainly haven't "spreadsheeted" any of the other teams the way I have our three protagonists, but through this exercise, I have kept an off-the-top-of-the-head estimate of how each year's NL standings would turn out, given the probable moves everyone else would be making in this scenario. And here's how the 1966 National League standings might have been:
Team W L Pos SAN FRANCISCO 106 55 1 ST. LOUIS 105 57 2 Pittsburgh 90 72 3 Los Angeles 89 73 4 CINCINNATI 87 73 5 Philadelphia 71 91 6T Houston 71 91 6T Atlanta 70 92 8 New York 62 99 9 Chicago 57 105 10Quite a peculiar outcome, no doubt: a league not only with extreme totals at both ends, but also with no team close to .500, just five clear winners and five clear losers.
Steve Treder can often be found spending way too much time talking baseball at Baseball Primer. He welcomes your questions and comments via e-mail.
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Dissecting a mystery pitch
by Alan NathanJanuary 31, 2012
Alan Nathan is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Illinois who spends his time these days working on the physics of baseball.
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A baseball card mystery: Ken Holtzman’s 1974 Topps card
by Bruce MarkusenJanuary 31, 2012
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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The new golden age of catching
by Troy PattersonJanuary 31, 2012
Since 1976, the total fWAR accumulated by all catchers has been higher than that totaled in 2011 only once. That was in 1977, when catchers in both leagues totaled 86.1 fWAR. Last season in nearly an extra 500 games, catchers had an fWAR of 84.3. Considering that 2011 includes FanGraphs base running skill, but pre-2002 years do not, the comparison is even more impressive for the seasons after 2002, since in no year have catchers had a base running value higher than -45.8.
During the span from 2004 to 2009, only Ivan Rodriguez was among that group in fWAR and he was the only one largely included for defensive value. That group was always the best of the best, with Mauer being the far and away best. Then, in the span of two seasons, we saw an influx of talent both at the plate and behind the plate.
In 2010 the majors saw seven players top 3 fWAR at catcher including Buster Posey in his first full season. There were also a few random blips in the cases of Miguel Olivo and Carlos Ruiz, who were not young players and had little history of being that level of catcher. Olivo benefited from a solid season defensively to reach this level. This seemed like a nice season from the backstops, but what happened next was a boon of catchers.
Last season 11 players totaled more than 3 fWAR; not one was by benefit of an above-average defensive value. This new group included Mike Napoli (pictured) in a breakout season, Alex Avila, Matt Wieters, Yadier Molina, Carlos Santana, Nick Hundley, Chris Iannetta and Wilson Ramos. Surprisingly Mauer and Martinez missed this group, making this influx of new talent even more impressive.
That list also misses Posey after his gruesome leg injury and 2012 will welcome Jesus Montero to the majors. Although playing in Seattle might hurt his overall numbers offensively, his Oliver projections give him enough to enter this group in 2012 with a projected WAR of 3.2. A few players might come down to earth or play less time behind the plate, but 2012 looks to continue the elite play at backstop.
Explaining the new catchers
This sudden boom of catching talent seems to coincide with many teams and analysts trying to put a value to catching defense and most finding the value is quite a bit less than had been thought. Sure, there are some butchers with the glove, but the highest lost value in most seasons is 10 runs or one win. So a player like Napoli is going to cost you a few runs behind the plate, but spending a majority of his time there still makes him a better team asset than at first base or DH.
So teams are willing to slide even poor defenders behind the plate to see their offense carry a poor glove. Dave Cameron did a look at this value when reviewing where to put Montero. Even his theoretical worst catcher makes sense behind the plate over the DH spot. That's not to say someone like David Ortiz should have been playing catcher all these years, but perhaps the Red Sox should not view Ryan Lavarnway as a future DH just to keep Jarrod Saltalamacchia behind the plate.
Lavarnway is an excellent example of the new catcher. He played outfield in high school and his early college career until 2007 when he moved to catcher. His defense has grown in the two college years and three minor league seasons since, but he still is labeled most often as future DH. If his glove and arm do just enough not to embarrass or draw negative attention to himself, then he is exactly the type of catcher the majors have seen emerge recently.
So the new catching group is allowed to make some defensive gaffes because the offense at that position is so valuable. This seems to come with a fan and manager limit, though. If a player like Martinez just can't throw anyone out, then the manager and fans just can't agree with any numbers. The same is true when you look at Napoli—his label as defensive liability has pushed him to limited catching duty.
As many have said, there are plenty of ways we could be discounting the defensive value or cost. Regardless, the consensus is that one to one-and-a-half wins is the limit for any catcher to gain or lose for his team. If you can find someone who is passable behind the plate, it's a lot simpler to find another bat to fill your DH spot than the other way around.
Next season
According to Oliver forecasts, seven catchers are headed for WAR totals over three. That includes Montero at the position and another season of Napoli at catcher for at least most of his games. There doesn't seen to be a benefit to moving catchers away from the position and teams have started to take advantage of that. The 2011 season was arguably the best by catchers in 35 seasons and with last year's catchers expected to stay behind the plate in 2012, there is no reason we shouldn't see another great year from catchers.
Check out more work from Troy at the Boston Red Sox blog Fire Brand of the AL. You can contact him with questions or recommendations email me or @TroyPatterson
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10,000 days since Carlton becomes Phillies win leader
by Chris JaffeJanuary 31, 2012
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 order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.
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The Verdict: Hardball Times mock draft analysis
by Michael SteinJanuary 31, 2012
The Court wants to hear your comments on whether you concur or dissent with the verdict by sending an email to michael.stein @ fantasyjudgment.com, or find us on Facebook and Twitter @FantasyJudgment.
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Let there be news - Volume 6
by Brad JohnsonJanuary 30, 2012
Let There Be News is a recap of the most interesting stories and transactions from the previous week.
In case it wasn’t clear, the lead-in was a joke. There is no team named the Mysteries, although I imagine they would be based in Montreal were they to exist. The Montreal Mysteries are now expected to focus their attention on Cuban imports Yoenis Cespedes, Gerardo Concepcion and Jorge Soler.
This week’s feedback request: How often do you use links from LTBN? This week’s issue is fairly light on links (outside of the Fielder section). Does that negatively affect the quality of the column?
On to real stuff…
The Detroit Tigers hook Prince Fielder
Oh, to imagine how many words could I write about Fielder and the Tigers right now.
The contract, a nine-year, $214 million behemoth, will pay Fielder $23 million in 2012 and 2013 and then $24 million for the remaining seasons. Rather than rehash all the fallout from the signing, let’s take this in a different direction, shall we?
A timeline of the deal.
Too many DHs?
On defense and brick gloves.
Jay Jaffe has more about those brick gloves.
Joe Sheehan thinks the Cabrera-to-third base plan is a mistake.
The consensus is that Prince was overpaid. Is that true?
When owners attack. Or more specifically, when owners take a personal interest in fielding a high-quality product. Yeah, that’s a less interesting title, let’s stick with “when owners attack.”
R.J. Anderson does a great job covering the many aspects of this signing. Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall.
The Blue Jays sign Brandon Morrow to a three-year deal
The three-year, $21 million deal covers Morrow’s final two arbitration seasons plus a free-agent season. The club holds a $10 million option on a fourth season with a $1 million buyout.
The contract is a calculated risk on the part of the Jays. Morrow shows frequent flashes of ability, akin to the best pitchers in baseball, yet his actual results have been below average. Three years from now, we might be talking about Morrow as an elite pitcher or as a slightly better version of Ricky Nolasco. Only time will tell in that regard.
Morrow consistently fans over 10 batters per nine innings, and his walk rate has trended in a rapidly positive direction. That’s the good news.
The bad news has to do with his ability to strand baserunners, specifically that he’s been below average in that category the last few years. Chris Cwik offers some theories over at Fangraphs.
So, will Morrow continue to improve his control? Will he get a handle on baserunners? The answers to these questions probably will determine whether the Blue Jays just signed a great contract or a mediocre one.
The Giants sign Tim Lincecum to a two-year deal
The two-year, $40.5 million contract buys out Lincecum’s final two seasons of arbitration eligibility.
Players and teams exchanged arbitration figures last week. The Giants submitted a $17 million figure while team Lincecum countered with $21.5 million. Rather than face arbitration, the two parties agreed to a contract that calls for $18 million in 2012 and $22 million in 2013 with a $500k signing bonus.
The deal is seemingly an admission by Lincecum and his representation that their figure might not have been entirely reasonable. Perhaps they expected a lower bid from the Giants?
The deal has a bit of a head-scratcher quality from the Giants' perspective. Going year-to-year with Lincecum would have cost the club “only” an additional $2.5 million.*
*estimated $19.25 million mid-point for 2012 + roughly $23.75 mil in 2013
Given the available information—including continuously declining velocity from Lincecum, an atypical body type for a pitcher, and mechanics that still cause some scouts to bite their nails—it seems like a roughly $2.5 million savings is on the light side when over $20 million is at stake.
Then again, the Giants will undoubtedly insure their ace, so they’ll be just fine monetarily so long as Lincecum is productive or on the disabled list. And the added cost certainty may make it easier to deal Lincecum if the Giants discover that their ship is sinking at the trade deadline.
The Blue Jays sign Francisco Cordero
And with that, the last closer is finally signed. Cordero agreed to a one-year, $4.5 million contract to head north of the border.
Of course, the interesting part of this deal is that Cordero will not serve as the Blue Jays closer. That honor goes to Sergio Santos, who has emerged as one of the game’s better relievers in recent seasons. Santos was acquired earlier this offseason from the White Sox in exchange for Nestor Molina.
It’s possible, perhaps likely, that Cordero overplayed his hand this offseason. His peripherals have declined rapidly, but he still has the record of proven success that some front offices appreciate.
If he'd had more modest salary demands earlier in the offseason, he probably could have found a more advantageous situation, be that an actual closer's role or simply more money over more years. Instead, he found himself without leverage, choosing between teams with lukewarm interest.
It’s impossible to blame Cordero or his representation for that. Pitchers with a lesser reputation than Cordero have signed for more in recent seasons—Brandon Lyon comes to mind—and Jonathan Papelbon found a massive contract with the Phillies that sent a false signal to free-agent closers.
Quick Hits
Only a few players have generated more speculation this offseason than Yoenis Cespedes. He’s finally a free agent, and negotiations could move quickly with spring training only a few weeks away.
The Phillies signed Juan Pierre to a minor-league deal. He will compete with John Mayberry Jr. and Laynce Nix for playing time in left field. His primary role may be as a pinch runner for when Jim Thome or Ty Wigginton reach base late in games.
The Phillies have one roster spot unaccounted for while Ryan Howard is sidelined with an Achilles injury, but his return will result in a roster crunch. I have more to say about the move and how it affects Domonic Brown over on THT Live.
The Red Sox signed outfielder Cody Ross to a one-year deal and figure to use him in the light half of a platoon with Ryan Sweeney. If Carl Crawford’s struggles from 2011 continue into 2012, Ross may find some time in left field as well.
Last Monday, the Yankees and Mariners officially completed their blockbuster trade from two weeks ago. For those living under a rock, the Yankees will receive Michael Pineda and pitching prospect Jose Campos from the Mariners in return for Jesus Montero and Hector Noesi.
Whilst the internet melted from the stunning Fielder signing, the Orioles quietly signed utility infielder Wilson Betemit. He has emerged as a useful platoon option and will earn $3.25 million over the next two seasons.
The Nationals inked Brad Lidge to a one-year, $1 million deal. The Nationals’ spacious home park seems ideally suited to the injury-prone slider specialist.
The Athletics designated utility infielder Adrian Cardenas for assignment. The A’s originally received Cardenas as part of the Joe Blanton trade. The other major piece in that trade, Josh Outman, was already dealt this offseason.
The Rays signed utility infielder Jeff Keppinger to a one-year, $1.525 million deal. Keppinger’s flexibility should prove useful to a club that is famous for its ability to get the most out of its players. Russ Canzler was designated for assignment in a related move.
The Giants signed Ryan Theriot to a one-year, $1.25 million contract with incentives that could take the deal up to $2 million. Theriot will join a crowded mix of undistinguished shortstops in San Francisco.
Closing thoughts
LTBN may take a one-week hiatus in observance of the national holiday next Sunday. More likely, an abbreviated version will appear.
Follow Brad on Twitter @baseballAteam. Email him at pitchin432 AT Yahoo.com
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Juan Pierre, Domonic Brown, and plans
by Brad JohnsonJanuary 30, 2012
Follow Brad on Twitter @baseballAteam. Email him at pitchin432 AT Yahoo.com
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Dave Duncan, the 1982 Mariners and lost glory
by Paul Francis SullivanJanuary 30, 2012
Pitching coach extraordinaire Dave Duncan has stepped down from his position with the St. Louis Cardinals. Chances are he has coached his last game, leaving as a world champion. But he’s been more than a great pitching coach. He has left in his wake a multitude of pitchers who turned their careers around, tapped into their potential, and had their best seasons under his tutelage.
In his time as a coach for the White Sox, A’s and Cardinals, four different pitchers won Cy Young Awards. (LaMarr Hoyt, Bob Welch, Dennis Eckersley and Chris Carpenter.) He turned a journeyman into one of the best postseason aces of all time (Dave Stewart.) He made a Hall of Famer out of one washed-up starter-turned-reliever (Eckersley) and a top setup man out of another (Rick Honeycutt.) And he transformed a reliever into a 20-win, Cy Young-contending starter (Adam Wainwright).
Pitchers like Storm Davis, Jeff Weaver, Jeff Suppan, Matt Morris and Joel Pineiro all became millionaires many times over after reviving their careers under Duncan’s watch. Twenty times one of his pitchers received Cy Young consideration. He has a remarkable resume of success with three different playoff-bound franchises (and world championships in both leagues.)
And to think, the team that could have benefitted from this wisdom was the Seattle Mariners.
The potential turning point of 1982
Managers Darrell Johnson and Maury Wills couldn’t turn the team into a .500 club, let alone a contender. But when manager Rene Lachemann brought Duncan onto his coaching staff, things began to turn around.
The Mariners were contending at the All-Star break and had a winning record going into August before tailing off. But their 76-86 record was by far their best season to date.
The main reason for the turnaround was the pitching. With Duncan in charge of the staff, Seattle led the league in strikeouts and finished second in saves and shutouts.
Seattle’s 1982 season was best remembered for an ancient Mariner. Gaylord Perry earned his 300th win (and cemented his Hall of Fame resume) in the Kingdome that year. But it was their young pitchers that gave the team hope.
Twenty-seven-year-old Floyd Bannister was starting to fulfill his talent. Jim Beattie already had World Series experience and success but was also only 27 and pitched to a good 3.34 ERA. Twenty-five-year-old Bill Caudill was the bullpen ace, winning 12 and saving 26 with a 2.35 ERA.
Left-handers Bryan Clark and Ed Vande Berg were both excellent that year out of the pen. And a trio of youngsters, Edwin Nunez, Mike Moore and Gene Nelson, all struggled but showed promise. Moore, at age 22, was the elder statesman of the three. Jerry Don Gleaton and Larry Andersen, both of whom would pitch for many years to come, were also on the staff.
The staff that could have been
What if Duncan were allowed to mold this group? Picture the same coach who transformed so many careers using his wisdom and turning around the franchise.
Moore would spend years being agonizingly inconsistent in Seattle before becoming an ace after joining the A’s (and Duncan’s supervision.) Nunez never quite put it together in his career, shuttling between the rotation and the bullpen before bouncing around as a mop-up man for the next 12 seasons. Perhaps Duncan could have been his anchor.
Meanwhile, the Mariners farm system included future ace Mark Langston and the talented, but inconsistent, Matt Young.
Imagine the Mariners pitching in the mid 1980s with Duncan on the coaching staff. As history actually unfolded, neither Moore nor Langston could synchronize their solid seasons. One was always off when the other was on. Could Duncan have made them the devastating 1-2 punch in the AL West?
Along with Bannister and Young in the rotation and Caudill, Gleaton, Nunez and Andersen in the bullpen, the team could have had the best pitching staff in the division. Nelson would become an effective pitcher under Duncan in Oakland. Why not in Seattle?
Remove Duncan’s influence from the 1983 White Sox and the 1988-1992 A’s, and the AL West would have been a very winnable division.
No team other than the LaRussa/Duncan White Sox had even a winning record in the West in 1983. The 84-win Royals were the lone winning AL West team in 1984, and 91 wins were enough for the Royals to win in 1985. The Twins won the AL West (and eventually the World Series) with just 85 wins. And then the LaRussa/Duncan juggernaut went to Oakland.
Sure, this change in history would have meant that Ken Griffey, Jr. would have been drafted by another team, but the foundation of a good offense was there as well.
Big leaguers Dave Henderson, Julio Cruz and Todd Cruz were all on the 1982 squad. Future major leaguers like Spike Owen, Phil Bradley, Harold Reynolds, Alvin Davis and Jim Presley were already in the Mariners system. And Danny Tartabull was acquired between the 1982 and 1983 seasons.
None of those players were superstars, but they could have given Seattle a good infield and a powerful outfield to compliment their deep pitching.
A great pitching staff could have finished in first one of those years. The franchise that had 15 of 16 losing years to begin their existence could have found the postseason around the same time as their partner in expansion, the Toronto Blue Jays, did in the mid 1980s.
The ugly truth
Alas, that didn’t happen. Mariners owner George Argyros was notoriously cheap and wouldn’t give Duncan more than a one-year contract. Duncan went to the White Sox in 1983 in time for their first postseason berth since 1959. The Mariners regressed to a 100-loss team and even Dick Williams couldn’t turn the squad around.
As Duncan collaborated with LaRussa on 14 playoff teams, six pennant winners and three world champions, the city of Seattle remains the only current big-league city never to have hosted a World Series.
(The Nationals/Expos franchise has never won a pennant, either. But the city of Washington was host to the 1924, 1925 and 1933 World Series, and Montreal is no longer a big-league city.)
Could the Mariners have won in the mediocre West of the 1980s? Nobody will know for sure. But it is safe to guess that a pitching coach who could win a World Series starting Jeff Weaver, Jeff Suppan and Anthony Reyes could have done a good job Mike Moore and Mark Langston in their primes.
Alas, more reasons to cry in Seattle’s coffee.
References and Resources
SB Nation, Lookout Landing, Baseball Reference
Visit http://sullybaseball.blogspot.com/
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This week in (fantasy) baseball
by Karl de VriesJanuary 30, 2012
Karl de Vries is a New Jersey-based writer and journalist who prefers following fantasy baseball to watching his hapless Mets embarrass themselves on TV every night. He can be reached at karl[dot]rotodiamond[at]gmail.com or followed on Twitter at @Karl_de_Vries.
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What was I thinking?
by Ben PritchettJanuary 30, 2012
Ben Pritchett can be reached for questions, comments, gripes, or considerations at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or you could follow his whims on twitter @pritchettclan.
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THT mock draft 2012
by Ben PritchettJanuary 28, 2012
Ben Pritchett can be reached for questions, comments, gripes, or considerations at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or you could follow his whims on twitter @pritchettclan.
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Price’s backdoor cutter
by Lucas ApostolerisJanuary 27, 2012
You can read more of Lucas's work at Beyond the Boxscore and Don't Bring In The Lefty. Also, you can contact him at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or on Twitter @DBITLefty.
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Cliff Lee and the four-seam fastball
by Harry PavlidisJanuary 27, 2012
Harry Pavlidis admits he has a baseball problem. He is a member of Complete Game Consulting and has his own blog, Cubs f/x. Feedback, questions and comments are appreciated - Email harrypav@gmail.com and Twitter @harrypav
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Outfield assist of another kind
by Bojan KoprivicaJanuary 27, 2012
After playing, coaching and umpiring more than 500 games all over Europe, Bojan realized that it's actually writing about baseball that can be most easily done while holding a beer in a hand. If you want to discuss either baseball or beer with him, drop him a line.
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In the old days, the game was more exciting
by Max MarchiJanuary 27, 2012
There was no paraphernalia in the old days with which one could protect himself. No mitts; no, not even gloves, and masks, why you would have been laughed off the diamond had you worn one behind the bat.
- Jim O'Rourke, 1913
I don't think the major league baseball players of today can be compared to the old-timers. I think the slider is a nickel curve and I detest hearing the modern sissies moan about how it has ruined batting averages.
- Frankie Frisch, 1962
I think probably after my generation, the game is going to change. My generation is the last of the old school.
- Darren Daulton, 1997
Former players will always tell you that nowadays the game is easier, while back in their day the pay was low, the fields were uneven, and you had to be a very tough guy to get and keep a job in baseball.
Thus, while I never read about anyone saying the line used for the title, it's quite possible that if you ask a bunch of old-timers, you'll discover that they did used to play a more exciting game, and that today's millionaires take part in rather dull contests.
During the last offseason I introduced a method to rank games by their "excitement factor." The relevant articles that lay down the foundation for the algorithm are What makes an exciting game, revisited and More than three decades of exciting games.
However imperfect a measure of something so subjective will always be, the method was shown to do a pretty good job. When teams traded the lead and the outcome was in discussion until the very end, the games were ranked high. Conversely, whenever one team run out for good with the lead very early, the contest was listed at the bottom. As a refresher, you may want to look at the articles dealing with Division Series, League Championship Series and World Series (World Series at its best and Fall Classics countdown).
One reader e-mailed me with an interesting question. Looking at the top postseason games list, he had the impression that the highest ranks were dominated by recent games. Thus he asked whether that was just an artifact due to the increased number of postseason games. Or are we witnessing an increase in spectacular playoff contests?
Retrosheet has play-by-play data for every postseason game in major league history. I applied my algorithm to the games and grouped them by decades.
The chart below shows the average scores by decade.
Unfortunately it's hard (if not impossible) to interpret what a change of 0.10 in the excitement factor means, as the final number is obtained through a series of statistical transformations. The best I can do to help interpret these difference is to outline a couple of games for comparison.
Game One of the 1927 World Series, a 5-4 Yankees victory over the Pirates, scores very close to 0.1 (the typical postseason game of the '20s), while Game Five of the 1967 World Series, won by the Red Sox 3-1 over the Cardinals, is around -0.1, much in line with the average 1960s postseason game.
If you look both at the line score and the win probability chart of those games, you'll have a hard time telling which must have been the more exciting. Going through the 1927 play-by-play, we see the Pirates threatened in the bottom of the eighth, cutting the Yankees' lead to one run and leaving the tying runner 90 feet from home.
On the other hand the 1967 Cardinals never figured out Jim Lonborg: They connected for just three hits and never were in contention despite the close final score (Roger Maris belted a homer to right with two outs in the ninth for the lone Cardinals run).
However, back to the question. Have postseason games gotten more exciting lately? The chart seems to say that the games got worse from the '20s to the '60s, then bounced back to the original standard.
There's a peak in the '90s. If we think about that decade, a lot of great games come to mind:
{exp:list_maker}Joe Carter's game winner in 1993
Sid Bream coming home in 1991
The entire 1991 World Series
The Marlins winning in extra innings in Game Seven in 1997
and many more{/exp:list_maker}
I don't feel we can come out with anything conclusive from this analysis. From the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the 1960s the postseason was just the World Series, with a maximum of seven games played in a given year. Thus just 50-60 games contribute to the average scores until the '60s, compared to 140 in the '70s, 176 in the '80s, 228 in the '90s and 322 in the first decade of the new millennium.
Luckily, we have a lot more games to work with. In fact Retrosheet offers play-by-play data for regular season contests going back to 1948, thus giving us the opportunity to compare thousands of games each year.
The question can be reformulated: Have the games gotten better in the last 60 years?
Look at the chart below, showing the average score by year.
Even without the superposed smooth line, it appears the answer is a resounding no. The games seem to have steadily been getting more boring since the '70s.
Okay, that's quite a bold statement, as the golden year of 1966 scores 0.04 on average while in the dark times of 2001 the average game scored -0.02. I challenge the readers to choose the better game between the May 30, 1966 one featuring the Orioles at Minnesota (Baltimore won 5-1) and the Sept. 9, 2001 contest in which the Blue Jays visited the Tigers (and won 6-3).
Again, if you look closely, the 1966 game is locked for the first half, while the 2001 Jays take an early lead they never relinquish, and this can make for the difference (0.04 versus -0.02) in the excitement factor.
Sure, the difference separating the best and worst years is very thin. However a trend is there: Starting from the 1970s, the line has steadily gone downward. Is it possible to find a cause for this?
Everyone knows that 1969 is the year of a four-team expansion. It's also the year when divisions were born and the mound was lowered. Any of the three, or their combination, could be the culprit. However, if it was a single change in the game (or a combination of events happening together), I would expect the line to have an initial steep decline, then become flat. If it were expansion, for example, we should see a step down in 1969, then other steps when the major leagues expanded again in 1977, 1993 and 1998.
You might remember that the game excitement score is the synthesis of three factors, one for the importance of the final part of games, one for rallies and one for equilibrium.
The next charts depicts the trend for the three factors.
The rally factor seems to be the force driving down the game excitement. It seems that coming back has consistently become more difficult over the years.
Does this make sense? I think so.
I would indicate relief pitching as the explanation for that. Baseball has gradually moved from having the starting pitcher going the full nine innings to the current habit of having multiple relievers come out of the bullpen in a single game and, perhaps, in a single inning.
Coming back has to be harder when there's never a tired arm on the mound, the superstar left-handed batter has to face a southpaw specialist brought in just for him, and setup-closer combinations like Jonny Venters and Craig Kimbrel can make games just seven- inning affairs.
Will the trend continue? Are we doomed to watch fewer and fewer thrilling contests in the future?
If the relievers usage hypothesis is sound, it's hard to imagine an increase of specialization from where we stand right now, unless teams completely abandon the concept of starting rotation and select their pitchers inning by inning.
Thus, we should not get worse than this. Let's hope the evolutions that sooner or later will happen in baseball can make up for what we have lost during the past decades.
References and Resources
The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at http://www.retrosheet.org.
After creating a baseball rendition of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper cover, Max began his baseball writing because he needed an excuse to show the picture. He wrote for an Italian audience for six years before making the jump to The Hardball Times. You can contact him by e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
Supplementing the dynasty rankings (Part 1)
by Jeffrey GrossJanuary 27, 2012
Jeffrey Gross is a 24-year old law student (and die-hard Cubs fan) who currently resides in Madison, WI. In addition to writing for The Hardball Times, he currently writes baseball analysis for the Game Of Inches blog under the pseudonym David "MVP" Eckstein and has previously worked for The Daily Illini and Northern Star newspapers as a film critic and sportswriter (respectively). You can reach him by email at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or by comment at http://www.gameofinches.blogspot.com
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The Hardball Times
30th anniversary: The Ryne Sandberg trade
by Chris JaffeJanuary 27, 2012
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 order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.
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Cooperstown Confidential: thinking about Al Smith
by Bruce MarkusenJanuary 27, 2012
I must confess that when I first heard about the death of Al Smith 10 years ago, I knew little about him or his career. I remembered him mainly as being the pour soul who had a glass of beer dumped on him by a careless fan at the old Comiskey Park. The photo of Smith being doused with beer has become iconic for baseball fans. But there is more, so much more, to the story of a very fine ballplayer.
With a name like Al Smith, it’s easy to become overlooked. He did have a colorful nickname in “Fuzzy,“ pinned on him by a minor league teammate who noticed how quickly his facial hair grew. But his actual name was exceedingly bland. Coco Crisp, minor leaguer Wonderful Monds, and Orval Overall have names that make you curious to learn more about their accomplishments and personalities. With an Al Smith, the motivation to learn more must come from somewhere else. In Smith’s case, he was not only a good player but a man who overcame obstacles, including the color line, position switches, unpopular trades and displeased fans.
Although Smith played through the mid-1960s, his professional career actually began in the Negro Leagues, at a time when segregation was only beginning to break down in baseball. He broke in with the now forgotten Cleveland Buckeyes in 1947, the same year that Jackie Robinson was making history for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Smith and the Buckeyes claimed the 1947 Negro American League championship. One year later, Smith signed a contract with the Indians organization, but it was a minor league assignment with no promise of major league glory. Smith spent nearly six full seasons working his way through Cleveland’s system, improving his OPS almost every season, before finally receiving the big league call in 1953.
A right-handed hitter and thrower, Smith didn’t hit much as a rookie, but immediately impressed the Indians with his defense in left field. By the following year, his offensive game showed enough improvement to earn placement in the starting lineup. Initially, he played infield for the 1954 Indians, before being switched to left field, where he beat out veteran Dale Mitchell.
Impressed with his patient approach to hitting, the Indians installed him as their leadoff man. He responded by reaching base at a clip of .398, scoring 101 runs, and skillfully setting the table for middle-of-the-lineup mashers like Al Rosen, Larry Doby and Vic Wertz. (Yeah, those ‘54 Indians could play a little bit.) Though overshadowed by the bigger names in a deep and talented lineup, Smith played a huge role in the Indians winning 111 games, at the time an American League record.
Smith and the Indians ended up losing the World Series in stunning fashion, dropping four straight games to the upstart New York Giants. It wasn’t really Smith’s fault; he reached base 35 per cent of the time and hit a leadoff home run on the first pitch of Game Two.
As well as Smith played in 1954, he elevated his game the following summer. With a .407 on-base percentage, 22 home runs, and a league-leading 123 runs scored, Smith emerged as the Indians’ best everyday player. His career season earned him a third-place finish in the MVP race, ahead of such immortals as Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle. Only Yogi Berra and Al Kaline, two other Hall of Famers, bettered him in the MVP balloting.
Unfortunately, Smith’s 1955 season would represent his pinnacle. His play fell off appreciably the following two seasons. In 1957, the Indians switched him between the outfield and third base, a move that displeased him, and somewhat understandably so, considering his defensive acumen in the outfield. The Indians told Smith they wanted to make him their fulltime third baseman in 1958. So Smith asked for a trade.
The White Sox accommodated Smith during the offseason. The Indians sent him and Hall of Fame right-hander Early Wynn to the White Sox for Minnie Minoso and Fred Hatfield.
The trade became a public relations disaster for the White Sox. Smith became well-liked by his new teammates, but Minoso was such a popular player with the ChiSox that Chicago fans blamed Smith for being his replacement. Unfairly, Smith became a frequent target of boobirds at Comiskey Park. Given such a negative atmosphere, it’s not surprising that Smith batted only .252 and .237 in his first two seasons in the Windy City.
Bill Veeck, the legendary owner of the Indians, sensed that Smith was being made a scapegoat and tried to soothe the situation. On Aug. 26, 1959, he held “Al Smith Night” at Comiskey Park. Anyone with the last name of Smith (or any name that resembled Smith) would be admitted to the ballpark free and given a button that said, “I’m A Smith and I’m For Al.” It was the pure promotional genius of Veeck at its best, but it initially seemed to backfire. That night, Smith dropped a fly ball that led directly to a 7-6 loss for the White Sox.
After that moment of embarrassment, Smith responded with a late-season charge. He hit six home runs over the final five weeks of the season, including a key blast on Sept. 22. His home run, coming against his former mates in Cleveland, helped the White Sox to a win that clinched the American League pennant. The “Go Go Sox,” so named for their emphasis on singles hitting and speed, advanced to the 1959 World Series to play the Dodgers.
That World Series would provide the singular moment of fame in Smith’s career. In Game Two, he ran back toward the wall on Charlie Neal’s long drive. As Smith stood at the brick wall, forlornly watching Neal’s drive land a few rows deep into the Comiskey Park stands, he was greeted by a face full of beer, dumped on him from the stands.
“It hit the bill of my cap and came down the side of my face,” Smith said later. “It was in my nose and everywhere.” The Chicago Tribune ran a picture spread of the famous dousing. Taken by photographer Ray Gora using a new high tech camera designed to cover NASA rocket launches, the photos presented an eight-part sequence of the incident. The photos were picked up nationwide, making Smith a celebrity of sorts, but for all the wrong reasons.
At first, Smith thought a fan had tossed the beer at him intentionally. But the left field umpire told him that the fan had accidentally knocked the beer over while trying to catch the home run ball. The fan, a motor oil company executive named Melvin Piehl, later explained that he was trying to make the catch so that the ball wouldn’t hit his boss’ wife, who was sitting next to him. At least Smith could take some consolation in knowing that one of the hometown fans meant him no harm.
The White Sox ended up losing that game, and the Series, just as the Indians had in 1954. Perhaps that’s one reason Smith is not better remembered.
By 1960, Smith’s popularity in Chicago seemed to turn a corner, as he became accepted by the Chicago fans who were now placated by the return of Minoso via trade. To make room for him, the Sox asked Smith to move to right field. He not only made the move unflinchingly, but he also batted .315, good enough for second in the league batting race, and earned a spot on his second All-Star team. The following year, he put together his best season in terms of raw power, reaching career highs with 28 home runs and 93 RBI.
Smith followed with a slightly less productive season in 1962, but he would run into a more significant roadblock because of a change in Sox ownership. Veeck, whom Smith loved to the point of calling him “the greatest man… in baseball,” had sold the team. His departure left the Sox’ day-to-day operations in the hands of new general manager Ed Short.
Smith bristled when Short asked him to move back to third base. White Sox management also asked Smith to become an off-season ticket seller. When Smith balked at the proposed wintertime job, the White Sox traded him and Luis Aparicio to the Orioles for Hoyt Wilhelm, Ron Hansen, Pete Ward and Dave Nicholson.
By now 35, Smith started to slip badly. He played a year in Baltimore before making a short return to Cleveland for a half-season and then finishing up his career with the Red Sox. At 36, the talented and versatile Mr. Smith was done.
After his playing career, Smith remained in baseball, just not in the major leagues. He went to work managing the park district baseball program for the city of Chicago, remaining in that position from 1966 to 1981. He also did some part-time work for the White Sox in the field of community relations.
Ten years ago, Smith, by then retired, underwent arterial surgery. Afterward, he suffered cardiac arrest and died at the age of 73.
The headlines of some of his obituaries highlighted the incident with the cup of beer. Yet, there was so much more to this man, who was a Negro Leagues standout, a productive player for two World Series teams, a highly regarded teammate, and a popular citizen in the city of Chicago. Al Smith might have had a plain name, but he had a rather remarkable life.
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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Closer watch
by Paul SingmanJanuary 26, 2012
Paul has been managing fantasy baseball teams for many seasons and writing for THT Fantasy over the past three years. He is currently a student at UPenn welcomes readers' thoughts at his email here or in the comments below.
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The Hardball Times
Jack Morris: the winningest pitcher of the 1980s
by Bobby MuellerJanuary 26, 2012
The only two certainties in life are death and taxes.
—Mark Twain.
At times attributed to Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, and Christopher Bullock, the above quote isn’t exactly correct. One other certainty in life is that a sportswriter supporting Jack Morris for the Hall of Fame will ALWAYS mention two things about Morris: His 10-inning, complete-game, 1-0 shutout of the Braves in game seven of the 1991 World Series and that he won more games than any other pitcher during the 1980s.
This article supporting Jack Morris for the Hall of Fame mentions both, of course, even adding a little something extra: "Morris won more games than any pitcher during the 1980s. Every pitcher that won the most games in a given decade deep into history before that has been inducted into the Hall." It’s the second part of that statement that sent me to Baseball-Reference’s Play Index.
Yes, it’s true, every "Winningest Pitcher of the ____s" before Morris is in the Hall of Fame. But is this important? Does anyone know who the winningest pitcher of the 1970s was? Or the 1960s? Or any decade before Morris? It seems that the only pitcher ever mentioned as the "Winningest Pitcher of the ____s" is Jack Morris. This is often a big part of the writer’s argument that Morris should be in the Hall of Fame.
With the "Winningest Pitcher of the ____s" in mind, I decided to look back at the men who hold this title for the previous nine decades to see how Morris compares.
| Range | Pitcher | Decade Wins | Decade WAR | Decade WAR Rank | Decade ERA+ | Decade ERA+ Rank | Career WAR | Career WAR Rank | Career ERA+ | Career ERA+ Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The 1900s | Christy Mathewson | 236 | 61.1 | 2nd | 142 | 4th | 87.7 | 14th | 137 | 11th |
| The 1910s | Walter Johnson | 265 | 90.8 | 1st | 183 | 1st | 127.7 | 3rd | 147 | 3rd |
| The 1920s | Burleigh Grimes | 190 | 32.4 | 9th | 112 | 18th | 37.2 | 158th | 108 | 170th |
| The 1930s | Lefty Grove | 199 | 69.4 | 1st | 162 | 1st | 98.3 | 7th | 148 | 2nd |
| The 1940s | Hal Newhouser | 170 | 50 | 1st | 138 | 1st | 56.3 | 52nd | 130 | 19th |
| The 1950s | Warren Spahn | 202 | 58.6 | 2nd | 126 | 4th | 93.4 | 11th | 119 | 61st |
| The 1960s | Juan Marichal | 191 | 56.7 | 2nd | 136 | 2nd | 64 | 37th | 123 | 37th |
| The 1970s | Jim Palmer | 186 | 52.5 | 5th | 137 | 2nd | 63.5 | 39th | 126 | 29th |
| The 1980s | Jack Morris | 162 | 27.9 | 12th | 109 | 13th | 39.3 | 141st | 105 | 219th |
Yikes! Two of these guys clearly do not belong with the others—Burleigh Grimes and Jack Morris. Most of the other "Winningest Pitchers of the ____s" are among the best pitchers in the history of baseball (Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove) and are more than worthy Hall of Fame pitchers. Every pitcher except Grimes and Morris not only led the decade in wins, but were also among the top five in WAR and ERA+ for that decade. Grimes and Morris, despite leading their respective decades in wins, do not come close to the others in WAR and ERA+. Let’s take a closer look:
Christy Mathewson—Winningest Pitcher of the 00s—From 1900 to 1909, Mathewson won the most games, had the second-highest WAR, and the fourth-best ERA+ of pitchers with more than 1000 innings pitched. In addition, Mathewson won 373 games over 17 seasons with a career ERA+ of 137, good for 11th all-time among pitchers with a minimum of 2000 innings pitched. He is 14th in career WAR. Mathewson was among the inaugural inductees to the Hall of Fame in 1936, getting 90.7% of the vote and joining Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, and Walter Johnson in that first class. He’s a slam-dunk Hall of Fame pitcher, regardless of his status as the winningest pitcher of the 00s. That he won more games than any other pitcher from 1900 to 1909 is incidental to his Hall of Fame credentials.
Walter Johnson—Winningest Pitcher of the 10s—From 1910 to 1919, Johnson won 265 games and accumulated 90.8 WAR with an ERA+ of 183, leading all pitchers in each category. Johnson is in the running for greatest pitcher of all time. He won 416 games with an ERA+ of 147. He is 3rd in career WAR and career ERA+. Of all the "Winningest Pitchers of the ____s" on this list, he’s the best. Johnson, like Mathewson, was part of the first class of honorees at the Hall of Fame in 1936.
Burleigh Grimes—Winningest Pitcher of the 20s—Ack! Grimes is the most-comparable pitcher on this list to Jack Morris and he clearly does not rank with the other Hall of Fame pitchers listed here. While he did win the most games of any pitcher during the 1920s, Grimes was 9th in WAR for the decade and 18th in ERA+. His rank in career WAR is 158th. His career ERA+ is 170th. In his first year of eligibility for the Hall of Fame (1937), Grimes got 0.5 percent of the vote. He received votes in 10 Hall of Fame elections over the next 18 years and never received more than 6 percent of the vote. In 1956, more than 20 years after he’d been retired, Grimes started to gain some traction in Hall of Fame voting when his total increased from 1.2 to 13 percent. Two years later, he was up to 26.7 percent. In 1960, he peaked at 34.2 percent, then dropped back down to 26.9 percent in 1962. He was not elected by the BBWAA but did get into the Hall of Fame in 1964 thanks to the Veteran’s Committee. By most measures, Grimes is among the worst starting pitchers in the Hall of Fame, and possibly THE worst.
Lefty Grove—Winningest Pitcher of the 30s—Grove, like Walter Johnson, has a case as the greatest pitcher of all time. He won exactly 300 games in his career but that total would have been much higher if his debut in the major leagues hadn’t been delayed. Grove won over 100 games for the independently-operated minor league Baltimore Orioles before owner Jack Dunn finally sold his rights to the Philadelphia Athletics, so Grove didn’t pitch in the major leagues until he was 25 years old. In the 1930s, Grove won the most games, accumulated the most WAR, and had the best ERA+ of any pitcher. For his career, Grove is 7th all time in WAR and 2nd in ERA+. He doesn’t need the title of “Winningest Pitcher of the 30s” to seal his Hall of Fame case.
Hal Newhouser—Winningest Pitcher of the 40s—like Grove, Newhouser led his decade in wins, WAR, and ERA+. Unlike Grove, Newhouser is not among the “inner circle” of Hall of Fame pitchers. Newhouser had fewer wins (207) than many Hall of Fame starting pitchers and he got the bulk of those wins in just seven seasons. From 1944 to 1950, Newhouser won 151 games with an ERA+ of 145. He won 80 games over a three-year stretch from 1944 to 1946, when he won back-to-back MVP awards and finished 2nd the third year. In the five years before and after that stretch, Newhouser never won more than 9 games. For his career, Newhouser ranks 52nd in WAR and 19th in ERA+. In 12 years on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot, Newhouser was generally in the 20 percent range, peaking at 42.8 percent in 1975, the last year he was eligible. His induction to the Hall of Fame came by way of the Veteran’s Committee in 1992. His place in the Hall of Fame is almost entirely due to his excellent stretch of pitching from ’44 to ’50.
Warren Spahn—Winningest Pitcher of the 50s—Spahn doesn’t have the peak of Grove or Newhouser, but he had a longer career than either and finished with 363 wins. During the 1950s, Spahn had 202 wins, was second in WAR and fourth in ERA+. In his career, Spahn was 11th all time in WAR, but just 61st in ERA+, which ranks him just below Bob Lemon and above Bert Blyleven. Spahn was selected to the HOF in his first year of eligibility in 1973 by the BBWAA, with 83.2% of the vote.
Juan Marichal—Winningest Pitcher of the 60s—Marichal finished second to Bob Gibson in WAR for the decade and second to Sandy Koufax in ERA+. By Hall of Fame standards, Marichal had a relatively short career (16 seasons) and low number of wins (243). The bulk of his career came in 13 years between 1961 and 1973 and he was effectively done as a major league pitcher at the age of 36. Marichal finished his career with 64 WAR, good for 37th all time, and an ERA+ of 123, also 37th all time. It took him three years to be elected to the Hall of Fame by the BBWAA, going from 58.1 percent of the vote to 73.5 percent to 83.7 percent, gaining entry in 1983.
Jim Palmer—Winningest Pitcher of the 70s—Palmer is similar to Marichal. While he did win more games than any other pitcher during the 1970s, he did not lead in WAR or ERA+, finished fifth in WAR and second in ERA+ for the decade. In his career, Palmer had 63.5 WAR, good for 39th place, two spots behind Marichal. He did outdo Marichal in ERA+, finishing at 126 and 29th place all time. Palmer was selected to the Hall of Fame in 1990, his first year on the ballot, getting 92.6% of the vote.
Jack Morris—Winningest Pitcher of the 80s—Now we get to the main man, Jack Morris. All of the pitchers above, except for Burleigh Grimes, not only led their decade in wins, but also finished among the top five in WAR and ERA+ for their decade. These "Winningest Pitchers of the ____s" include three pitchers among the top 15 in career WAR, two others in the top forty, one ranked 52nd in career WAR . . . and Burleigh Grimes, ranked 158th. Back to Morris. During the 1980s, Jack Morris won more games than any other pitcher. He was also 12th in WAR for the decade and 13th in ERA+. The pitchers who had similar value to Morris in the 80s include John Tudor, Bret Saberhagen, Charlie Hough, and Mario Soto. None of those pitchers have sportswriters banging a drum for their Hall of Fame candidacy. In his career, Morris had 39.3 WAR, good for 141st all time, just behind Javier Vazquez and a bit ahead of Al Leiter. His ERA+ is even worse—105, which ranks him 219th, in the company of Tim Wakefield and Ken Holtzman.
When it comes to "Winningest Pitchers of the ____s," Jack Morris is much closer to Burleigh Grimes than any other pitcher on this list. Grimes, as mentioned above, may be the worst starting pitcher in the Hall of Fame. Every pitcher on this list, except Grimes, has a legitimate Hall of Fame case that does not rest on their status of having won more games than any other pitcher during a specified number of years.
If you can’t build a Hall of Fame case for Jack Morris based on traditional metrics, such as wins or ERA (42nd and 326th all time), and you can’t build one on advanced metrics likes career WAR or ERA+ (141st and 219th all time), then you have to build it on one great World Series victory and a mantra, “Winningest Pitcher of the 1980s.” That mantra falls apart upon closer inspection. Jack Morris does not belong in a group that includes Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, or Lefty Grove. He does not belong in a group that includes Warren Spahn, Juan Marichal, and Jim Palmer. He can keep company with Burleigh Grimes, but that does not make him a Hall of Fame pitcher.
Looking Ahead
| Range | Pitcher | Decade Wins | Decade WAR | Decade WAR Rank | Decade ERA+ | Decade ERA+ Rank | Career WAR | Career WAR Rank | Career ERA+ | Career ERA+ Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The 1990s | Greg Maddux | 176 | 61.1 | 2nd | 162 | 1st | 96.8 | 8th | 132 | 17th |
| The 2000s | Andy Pettitte | 148 | 26.8 | 17th | 115 | 15th | 49.9 | 78th | 117 | 71st |
That being said, Morris is on the cusp of entry. He became eligible in 2000 and sat in the 20 percent range for the first five years on the ballot. In year six, he gained 7 percent, up to 33.3 percent. After eight years on the ballot, he was up to 37.1 percent. After 10 years, he was at 44 percent. He made another jump in 2010, held steady in 2011, then made his biggest leap yet in 2012, up to 66.7 percent. He’s close. If he does make it, then the narrative can continue, even if it is misleading.
As quoted above, "Every pitcher that won the most games in a given decade deep into history before that has been inducted into the Hall." Morris has a good chance of continuing this trend. If he does, the next "Winningest Pitcher of the ____s" is a no-brainer Hall of Famer—Greg Maddux. We likely won’t repeatedly hear that Maddux won more games in the 90s than any other pitcher because his accomplishments don’t need that piece of trivia to uphold his candidacy. Maddux won 355 games. He’s eighth all time in WAR and 17th in ERA+. His credentials are beyond reproach.
After Maddux, though, comes another questionable Hall of Fame candidate—Andy Pettitte. Andy Pettitte won more games than any other pitcher from 2000 to 2009, just like Jack Morris and Burleigh Grimes in their respective decades. Also like Morris and Grimes, Pettitte was nowhere near the best pitcher of the decade. In fact, he was 17th in WAR and 15th in ERA+ from 2000 to 2009, marks even worse than Jack Morris in the 80s. For his career, Pettitte is 78th in WAR and 71st in ERA+.
Still, in a few years, when Andy Pettitte hits the ballot and his career accomplishments do not make him a slam-dunk Hall of Fame pitcher, get ready to hear that Andy Pettitte won more games than any other pitcher in the 00s. There will be sportswriters who will use it to support his candidacy, but that piece of trivia shouldn’t make him a Hall of Fame pitcher. It shouldn’t work for Jack Morris either.
References and Resources
WAR (Wins Above Replacement) and ERA+ are from Baseball-Reference. ERA+ or ERA plus adjusts a pitcher's earned run average (ERA) according to the pitcher's ballpark and the ERA of the pitcher's league. Average ERA+ is set to be 100; a score above 100 indicates that the pitcher performed better than average, below 100 indicates worse than average.
For the Decade ERA+ Rankings, I used a minimum of 1000 innings pitched.
For the Career ERA+ Rankings, I used a minimum of 2000 innings pitched.
Bobby Mueller is a long-suffering Pittsburgh Pirates fan (Damn you Francisco Cabrera in 1992!) currently living in the Pacific Northwest. He welcomes comments via e-mail.
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Marshall McDougall’s greatest game
by Frank JacksonJanuary 26, 2012
In my collection of approximately 2,300 autographed baseball cards, a large proportion have been obtained at minor league parks. A visit to most minor league team shops will usually yield a set of cards for the local Mudville Nine, and sometimes a set of the league’s best prospects. Getting said cards autographed at the minor league level is much easier and much less stressful than attempting same at a major league ballpark. And over the years, I have come across a fair number of once obscure minor leaguers who went on to major league and, sometimes, All-Star status. No inductees at Cooperstown yet, but I remain optimistic.
Obscure minor leaguers were on my mind on a warm summer evening in 2003 at the Dr Pepper/7Up Ballpark (now known as simply the Dr Pepper Ballpark), home of the Frisco Rough Riders. It was the inaugural year for the stadium and the franchise, then and now the Texas League (AA) affiliate of the Texas Rangers. I took out my minor league cards and scorecards and started matching names and numbers.
At the time none of the names meant much to me, including the Frisco infielder who signed a Texas League prospect card from the year before when he was a member of the Midland Rockhounds, What I didn’t realize at the time was that this young man (he was 24 at the time) was not just another long shot to achieve baseball immortality. He had already done that.
His name was Marshall McDougall. That name may not be a household world, but it looms large in the NCAA baseball record book.
Now before we review McDougall’s achievement, think of the best day you ever had in your life. Now don’t go all soft and gooey and hearken back to the day your son/daughter was born or the day you got married or any of the usual sentimental claptrap. I mean a day when you ruled, when you ran the table, when you took on all comers and bested them all. Now I’m not talking about buying a winning lottery ticket, hitting four trifectas in a row or walking away from your local church bingo parlor with a fistful of cash.
Sure, a certain amount of luck is involved in any achievement, but I’m thinking about a day when all your efforts finally bear fruit in abundance, when all doubts about your abilities are erased. It would be like acing the SAT test, or getting notified you had been accepted by all the colleges you applied to and they were all offering scholarships. Author Truman Capote relates how he sent out short stories with no results for two years, and then he received three acceptance letters in one mail delivery.
That’s the sort of day I’m talking about. Not just a lucky day, but a day that offers vindication of your talents, an assurance that you are truly on the right track. You aren’t just wasting your time or spinning your wheels. On a really good day, you might even entertain notions that you have godlike powers.
Well, think of just such a day—and it’s not a given that you’ve ever had or ever will have such a day—and I guarantee you your best day was nowhere near as good as the day Marshall McDougall enjoyed on May 9, 1999.
On that day, Marshall McDougall and the Florida State Seminoles found themselves at Shipley Field in College Park, Maryland for a game against an Atlantic Coast Conference rival, the University of Maryland Terrapins. Well, on that day it was no contest. Remember how Indians used to make rattles out of turtle shells? That’s one way to envision what the Seminoles did to the Terrapins that day—and Marshall McDougall was right in the middle of his team’s 26-2 victory—on a day when they took no batting practice!
The Seminioles were ranked #4 in the nation with a 43-10 record, which would culminate in a 57-14 record and their 17th trip to the College World Series (where they were eliminated in the title game by the University of Miami). In addition to McDougall, three other players (John-Ford Griffin, Matt Diaz, and Kevin Cash) would go on to play major league ball. It was a typically successful season for the legendary head coach Mike Martin, then in his 20th season (and still at the helm today) at Florida State. The Terps’ record was more modest. They were 21-26 and just 6-14 in the ACC. Only Duke had a worse record. The Terps would finish the season with a forgettable 23-33-1 record.
For McDougall, it was his first visit to College Park. 1999 was his first season playing big-time college baseball. Born December 19, 1978, in Jacksonville, McDougall graduated from Buchholz High School in Valrico, Florida, where he was named to the all-state second team and was drafted by the Chicago White Sox in 1996. From there, it was on to Santa Fe Community College, where he was second team all-state his first year (and was drafted by the Yankees) and first team all-state in his second year. Santa Fe was located in Gainesville, Florida, the hometown of the University of Florida Gators, the Florida State Seminoles’ arch-rival, so how McDougall ended up in Tallahassee rather than remaining in Gainesville is a bit of a mystery.
In 1999 at Florida State, McDougall was a heavy-set (6'1", 200 lbs.) second baseman in his junior year. He had been enjoying a good season, to put it mildly. At the season’s end a few weeks later his batting average was .419, and he led all Division I teams in hits (126), RBI’s (106), total bases (242) and runs (104). He led the ACC in average, runs, hits, RBIs and homers. He was the ACC player of the year and a consensus first-team All-American.
Obviously, Marshall McDougall had a lot of good games in 1999. But none came close to surpassing his game on May 9th. He started off with a single to left in the top of the first inning. No one could have known at the time, but that was the only “underachieving” at bat he had all day. The rest of his day looked like this:
2nd inning - solo home run (his 18th of the season)
4th inning - three-run home run (#19)
6th inning - two run home run #20)
7th inning - three run home run (#21)
8th inning - grand slam (#22)
9th inning - three-run home run (#23)
Now I don’t know where he stood in the ACC before the day started, but by the end of the day he was the home run leader. And if you’re wondering whose record, he broke, it was Henry Rochelle of Campbell University who hit five homers in a 1985 contest against Radford. With his 16 RBIs in one game, McDougall set another record, surpassing the old mark of 14 set by Jim La Fountain of the University of Louisville in a game against Western Kentucky on March 24, 1987 (La Fountain hit three grand slams that day, so he still has his name in the record books for that achievement). McDougall’s 25 total bases is yet another NCAA record.
A game and a season like McDougall had (for good measure, he was chosen MVP of the College World Series, even though the Seminoles came up a game short) cannot help but attract attention. The Red Sox took him in the 26th round of the draft, but McDougall elected to return to Florida State for his senior year. It would have been tough to improve on his junior year, and indeed he backslid a bit, with a .346 average, 15 homers, and 67 RBIs—a good year by any standard except the benchmark McDougall had set the year before. Even so, the Oakland A’s took him in the 9th round of the draft.
He worked his way up in the A’s system, via Vancouver and Visalia, to AA Midland where Baseball America rated him as the A’s 24th best prospect. The A’s traded him to Cleveland for Ricardo Rincón. He played only seven games for the AA Akron Aeros before being injured. He finished his 2002 season with a couple of rehab games for the Mahoning Valley Scrappers. The Rangers took him in the Rule 5 Minor League Draft on December 16, 2002. He spent most of the 2003 season as a shortstop with Frisco (where I encountered him) but also gained his first AAA experience in Oklahoma City. Learning to play third base, he played with the same franchises in 2004.
In 2005 he started the season at a .341 clip with Oklahoma City and got called up by the Rangers as a utility player. Here he garnered his sole big league experience. He spent roughly half the season on the Rangers’ roster and played five positions but only came to bat 18 times, thanks to the fact that the Rangers had a set infield, one that was young and healthy. Then injuries, primarily to his wrist, caught up to him. He later played in the Dodgers and Padres systems but never made it back to the Show.
Along the way, there were stops in the Mexican League and with independent minor league ball, along with more injuries. In 2010 he played for the Uni-President Lions of Taiwan. His offensive stats were solid—he was even leading the team in home runs—but his defense at third base just wasn’t there and he was released in August. He spent the 2011 season with Reynosa of the Mexican league. Where he will spend the 2012 season, at age 33, is an open question at this point.
Given his status as a career minor-leaguer might lead the nay-sayers to denigrate McDougall’s achievement of May 9, 1999. First of all, the University of Maryland was a weak sister in the ACC, and their pitching staff finished the season with a 6.73 ERA. The pitchers he faced (Jamie Hammond, Ryan Fleetwood, and Aaron McFarling) ended the season with ERAs, respectively, of 5.56, 6.68 and 6.97.
His last home run was hit off Kevin McDonald, a position player who was brought in to do some mop-up work. Also, Shipley Field was something of a bandbox with the left field foul pole just 320 feet away, the right field foul pole five feet farther, and a straightaway center field distance of just 380 feet (McDougall himself characterized his six-HR output as “four good ones and two cheap ones”). And, of course, there’s the aluminum bat, rendering all amateur offensive statistics suspect.
On the other hand, you could turn around all these things, and list them as enabling factors rather than mitigating factors. They created the perfect storm, the conditions under which the right individual could hit six consecutive home runs.
When the subject of records that will never be broken arises, this one just might be at the top of the list. First of all, just to tie the record, a batter would have to come to bat six times in a game. That doesn’t happen often. To break the record, one would have to come to bat seven times. The year McDougall set the record, he only had one other game with seven at bats (on June 18, during a 14-11 victory over Stanford in the College World Series). The chances of a player coming to bat seven times in a game are slim.
On the other hand, the NCAA record for hits in a game goes to the Air Force Academy’s John McBroom (now a retired general), who got two hits more than McDougall when he went 9 for 9 in a May 10, 1967 contest against the Colorado Buffaloes. Still, the chances of a player coming to bat a seventh time after hitting home runs in his six previous appearances is slim to the point of non-existent—but in extra inning games, anything can happen. And if you’re looking at consecutive home runs, not just home runs in one game, then six straight home runs spread over two games is always possible.
By contrast, the major league record of four home runs in a game is threatened, at least theoretically, at the start of every game because most position players will come to bat four times in a game unless they are removed early. I suspect we’ll see someone hit five home runs in a big league game before we see someone hit seven in a collegiate contest.
It’s hard to conceive of the euphoria one would feel while trotting around the bases after hitting one’s sixth home run of the day. If you could induce the same brain chemistry via a pill and gain FDA approval, your company’s stock price would soar even in a down market.
Whatever McDougall felt that day, he soon grew tired of talking about his record. But I have to think that if McDougall had not had that record-breaking day, he would not have stuck it out in professional baseball as long as he has. The gods of baseball seduced him by granting him one day of godlike powers. After hitting six home runs in one game, how could he ever feel he was born to be anything other than a baseball player? Would Hercules have attempted as much if he did not know he was a demigod?
Hercules, of course, never had to perform in front of wiseacre baseball fans. One can just imagine the sort of comments McDougall inspired when he stepped into the batter’s box in the minor leagues. I imagine he heard something along the lines of:
"How many homers did you hit today, Doogie?"
"Set any records lately, kid?"
"No aluminum bats in this league, college boy."
But after more than 12 years, McDougall appears to have accepted if not embraced his past.
"You want to be remembered for a lot more than one game," he said, "but you can’t be too upset. It’s better to be remembered for something good than something bad."
Pete Rose, Joe Jackson, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds would doubtless agree.
References and Resources
Tampa Bay Tribune, May 9, 2009
http://www.seminoles.com
http://www.uterps.com
http://www.baseball-reference.com
Frank Jackson has published previous baseball articles in National Pastime and Elysian Fields Quarterly. He was weaned on baseball at Connie Mack Stadium.
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Players I’ll avoid this year
by Dave ShoveinJanuary 26, 2012
Dave Shovein is a graduate student and aspiring fantasy baseball guru. He welcomes all comments and questions at shove1dm AT yahoo DOT com.
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It’s THT Dispatch
by Dave StudemanJanuary 25, 2012
Dave was called a "national treasure" by Rob Neyer. Seriously. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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THT Forecasts - 2012 Oliver projected-WAR starting lineup
by Greg TamerJanuary 25, 2012
Greg Tamer is the Manager of THT Forecasts. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions via e-mail.
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The anticipated return of Wainwright’s curveball
by Harry PavlidisJanuary 25, 2012
Harry Pavlidis admits he has a baseball problem. He is a member of Complete Game Consulting and has his own blog, Cubs f/x. Feedback, questions and comments are appreciated - Email harrypav@gmail.com and Twitter @harrypav
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Another Fielder for Detroit
by THT StaffJanuary 25, 2012
The other superslugger free agent first baseman, Prince Fielder, is going to Detroit, where he spent his preteen years while his dad, Cecil, played first base for the Tigers. He joins future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols in jumping to the American League.
Fielder's signing, courtesy of Tigers owner Mike Ilitch, who wants a championship, and agent Scott Boros, who wants, dropped jaws around the baseball world and here at The Hardball Times. There are questions:
{exp:list_maker}He's apparently signing for nine years. He'll be 28 years old this year and, as a Mlwaukee Brewer last year, was listed officially at 285 pounds. In nine years, he'll be 37 and presumably no lighter.
The Tigers already have a first baseman named Miguel Cabrera, generally regarded as one of the top handful of hitters in baseball. And they already have a fine hitter in Victor Martinez, out with an injury this year but expected back in 2013 as a first baseman/designated hitter.
And then there's the matter of money: An average of almost $24 million a year—a little less that Pujols, a little more than Mitt Romney. All told, Detroit has agreed to pay Fielder $214 million between now and the end of his contract. Foresight is 2020. {/exp:list_maker}
Here's what some of our writers had to say:
David Wade:
Full disclosure here: I am a lifelong Detroit Tigers fan. I also write about baseball and often criticize bad contracts that hamstring some teams.
So, while I think signing a big first baseman to a nine-year deal for over $200 million is crazy, it gets crazier when you already have a big first baseman in Miguel Cabrera, who is signed for several more years. And it gets even crazier when you have yet another player—a high-priced catcher—who will likely need to play a great deal of designated hitter or first base starting in 2013. And it gets even crazier when you look at the Tigers' need for an upgrade at third base, for instance.
For crying out loud, everyone knew the Yankees were out of the bidding for many of the same reasons we thought Detroit was.
But it seems Detroit's ownership and management just doesn't give a damn. They have an impact bat from the left side, something they've coveted for years. And while Alex Avila and Victor Martinez helped add punch to the lineup last year, the former will have to catch a bunch of games in 2012 and the latter will miss the entire year.
Plus, Prince is a better hitter than both of them.
So, when switching out my baseball writer hat for my Detroit hat, I find myself very excited about this signing. After all, it's not my money. The only negative that the money can have on me as a fan at all is if it keeps ownership from spending on good players in the future.
While what we've seen in the past does not guarantee what we'll see in the future, it's comforting for the Tigers fan in me to remember that the team's owner, Mike Ilitch, carried Magglio Ordonez' god-awful contract for years and his general manager still found a way to bring elite talent to the roster. Whether it was in trades with quick and expensive contract extensions, free agent signings, or spending over slot on the draft, Detroit has kept bringing in talent for the past few years.
It'll be harder to spend over slot on the draft, given changes to baseball's collective bargaining agreement. But, as long as Ilitch keeps spending his money to make my team better, what do I care if the last five years of Fielder's contract are not a good deal?
As surely some others will point out, Fielder will be only 28 next year. For the next few years he'll probably even be worth the money.
Nick Fleder:
Comerica is a more friendly home park for Prince—the walls in right-center and right field are shorter than those at Miller Park—despite clocking in behind Miller Park in home run rate two years running. He sprays his homers around the field a good amount (this is evidence of that: http://www.hittrackeronline.com/detail.php?id=2011_678&type=hitter), and whoever is providing him lineup protection will likely be better than the 2011 version of Casey McGehee (perhaps it'll be Jhonny Peralta). He should see more bean balls as a result.
McGehee's struggles must have contributed to Fielder's career-high 32 intentional bases on balls, higher than his previous range of 17-21. Sure, that's not a huge factor, as he might see a boost of only 10 plate appearances in the statistics, but in actuality, pitchers were probably playing it safe with Fielder more often that not last season. Take the following stats as an example of the conservative pitching and resulting aggression at the dish from Fielder: He swung at 31.1 percent of pitches outside the zone (up nearly 3 percent from his career average) and made contact on nearly 10 percent more pitches outside the strike zone last year. Perhaps the luck involved in this equation is another discussion, but his change in approach is certainly noteworthy.
More on lineup: Per my imprecise calculations, the Milwaukee 1-2-3 of Rickie Weeks, Nyjer Morgan and Ryan Braun—who were featured in that order ahead of Prince in 2011—compiled a .368 on-base percentage and stole 57 bases, providing him ample RBI opportunities. If we assume Ordonez is dropped to fifth in the 2011 Tigers lineup, behind Cabrera and the man of the hour, the 1-2-3 of Austin Jackson, Brennan Boesch and Cabrera posted—would you know it—a .369 on-base-percentage (though they stole 30 fewer bases). It won't be the most noteworthy transition in terms of lineup adjustment, and the park should be friendly. Overall, a short-term recipe for success.
Now he just has to keep that weight in line, and can't get hung over from the $214 million contract-celebration bash. I can't imagine any scenario in which Fielder provides any sort of return on investment in even the same ballpark, and the most convincing argument for why the Tigers gave up this kind of moolah is the Bucket List wish of 82-year-old owner Ilitch to win a World Series. That, and Boras' deft negotiations. I don't even wanna know what's going on there.
Brad Johnson:
When something unexpected happens that seemingly doesn't make any sense, it's a good policy to wait before offering an opinion. Sometimes, time can offer perspective.
In this case, that perspective might be a second move. At first glance, it doesn't appear that the Tigers can hold onto Fielder, Cabrera and Martinez for the 2013 season. On the face of it, it looks like Detroit will try to play Cabrera at third base or left field and/or trade Martinez. I'm going to pull on my predictions hat and choose hidden answer C: I believe the Tigers may shop Cabrera.
Think about it: They had a franchise first baseman already and opted to sign another one. The incumbent has had recurring off-field problems and isn't exactly a poster child for hard, diligent work. Yet he's also massively talented and still potentially valuable to a large market franchise (the Dodgers have been known to invest in troubled stars). Shifting to Fielder allows them to position a role model as the centerpiece of the franchise. And the marketing department must love the father-son connection.
Myron Logan:
Detroit looked like the class of the America League Central even without Martinez, but the addition of Fielder certainly helps to solidify the Tigers as a true World Series contender.
There's obviously a lot of risk in signing a really big, already below-average first basemen through his age-36 season. Okay, it's downright scary. Further, if it seems like a redundant addition. Cabrera shifted over to first base in 2008 and he hasn't logged significant innings at third since 2007. He's passable at first, but a shift back to the hot corner might not go well. Martinez is signed through 2014 and he's more of a first base/DH-type than a catcher at this point. An infield defense of Cabrera, Fielder, Peralta, and Ryan Raburn/Ramon Santiago has the makings of a ground ball's best friend.
The Tigers are at a point on the win-curve where you could argue that paying a premium for Fielder makes some sense. His addition will give them better playoff odds in 2012 (and in the short-term) and naturally improve their probability of advancing in the playoffs. And you know, flags fly forever. With the inherent randomness of postseason baseball, though, it's dangerous to put so much emphasis on October success. If the Tigers don't break through within the next few years, Fielder's contract will quickly turn into an albatross that never paid major dividends.
Derek Ambrosino:
So, it looks like the Detroit Tigers have chosen to assemble a softball team. How this strategy will influence their ability to win games over the next few years remains to be seen, but from a fantasy perspective this could be a boon. If the Tigers have a realistic intent of playing Cabrera at third base, that would have huge fantasy implications. A third-base-eligible Miggy would immediately vie for consideration as the top overall pick in a fantasy draft. Even the possibility of added positional eligibility nudges Cabrera's ADP up a few spots.
Jeff Gross:
The old adage says like father, like son. The Tigers better hope not, because we all know how Cecil Fielder's 30s went, and the Tigers just signed Prince through his age 36 season. With Martinez out for the year, Fielder fills a role for 2012, but what about 2013 and 2014? Apparently Cabrera has agreed to slide to third, which makes him a potential No. 1 overall fantasy player in my book. Adding Fielder also bolsters the runs/RBI production of rest of the Tigers team. Alas, an infield of Fielder, Miggy and Peralta means Tigers pitchers are going to have to learn to avoid contact this season.
Bruce Markusen
The idea of playing Cabrera at third base, given his current weight, is preposterous. It would be akin to the Giants putting Jim Ray Hart at third, or the Mets putting Dave Kingman at third, and expecting one of them to play the position creditably. Unless Cabrera loses about 30 pounds and makes a conscious effort to improve his footwork and throwing, I think he'll be a disaster. The Tigers should either cut their losses and make him a DH, or trade him.
Short term, the signing of Fielder gives the Tigers a frightful lineup, though they're still lacking a good leadoff batter. Long term, this is a move that is clearly unreasonable. With that body, can we really expect Fielder to still be an effective player in four years, when he's 32? And then at 35, 36, what are those seasons going to look like?
One offshoot of the Fielder signing: Johnny Damon won't sign with the Tigers, where he had expressed interest in going, and may be headed back to New York.
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AL West: offseason check-in
by David WadeJanuary 25, 2012
The Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics will open the 2012 major league season with a two-game series at the Tokyo Dome in Japan, March 28-29. If you are thinking that this is not exactly a riveting and interesting matchup chosen by MLB, you are exactly right, given how the two teams look at that moment.
Most baseball fans will react to the remaining 17 meetings between these two teams in the coming season with extreme indifference. However, those first two in March should generate a great deal of excitement in Japan.
For the host country, the two-game series will represent a homecoming for Seattle right fielder—and Japan's most famous and successful baseball export—Ichiro Suzuki. Unfortunately, the matchup has taken a slight hit since another former Nippon Professional Baseball All-Star, Hideki Matsui, doesn't look like he will return to Oakland's roster for the 2012 season.
But even without him, fans in and around Tokyo likely will be more interested in the series than folks in and around Seattle and Oakland. In fact, it might be that only the staunchest supporters of the green and gold would notice if the A's if they never came back at all.
But they will come back. After they play in front of exuberant crowds in late March, they will return to a park the owner doesn't want to play in anymore, and they probably will play in front of sparse crowds. General Manager Billy Beane is, with the exception of a confusing Coco Crisp signing, whittling the Oakland payroll down to a sliver, and the few recognizable names that were due back from last year's roster will be gone in 2012.
Crisp is a 32-year-old outfielder who is below average with the bat, even if he is above average in the field. In an offseason that's featured trades of Gio Gonzalez, Trevor Cahill, Andrew Bailey, and seemingly anyone else who is within five years of free agency and not currently injured, the Crisp move doesn't fit in with what has turned into a complete rebuild in Oakland.
It is a plan that Oakland ownership feels is partly due to much-needed roster reconstruction. It's also partly, and very publicly, a declaration that they believe they cannot compete while playing in their current stadium. Oakland owner Lewis Wolff has repeatedly cited the team's current facilities and location as an albatross that will continue to force low payrolls and, subsequently, poor records for his team.
Wolff feels that a move to the very affluent area of San Jose would boost team revenue and allow him to actually keep his good players and even sign better free agents than Crisp now and then. But the San Francisco organization currently has the rights to the San Jose market. For any move there, Wolff will need his fellow owners' approval.
Wolff hopes a move to a new stadium would prompt several years of sellouts and a vast improvement in revenue. Beane hopes he could convert that revenue into results like those the Cleveland organization enjoyed when they moved into Jacobs (now called Progressive) Field. The Indians rode the gate receipts that came with their new stadium to five consecutive playoff appearances.
Without such a move, and barring another innovative strategy that garners results with even smaller budgets than he's had in the past, Beane's chances for inspiring a Moneyball sequel seem slim.
In addition to the revenue problems, Oakland management also knows that the strength of its divisional rivals means the A's probably would fall short of the playoffs even if they had their pick of locations.
The 2010 and 2011 Division Champion Texas Rangers are coming off of back-to-back World Series appearances. While they lost valuable starter C.J. Wilson to free agency, they reinforced their rotation by adding their own Nippon All-Star, starting pitcher Yu Darvish. Darvish hopes to become the biggest thing in the majors since Ichiro, while Texas hopes he lives up to the huge posting fee it had to pay to get him.
Texas paid big because Darvish dominated his competition in Japan. Last season, he posted a 1.44 ERA and struck out 276 batters in 232 innings. Everyone knows the competition is not the same in Japan. Most also know the league used a new type of baseball that sent offensive numbers plummeting across the board.
But even with the benefit of facing inferior hitters and the use of a dead ball in 2011, his numbers in other seasons were still spectacular and give the Rangers reason to believe he'll be successful in the U.S., particularly when several of his starts will come against the struggling offenses of Oakland and Seattle, which feature inferior hitters of their own.
Texas was rumored to have been an aggressive bidder back in 2006 when the Boston Red Sox eventually won the rights to sign Daisuke Matsuzaka, another Japanese starter with a ton of hype. Despite a solid beginning to his major league career, Matsuzaka has not lived up to his contract.
While their paths to the majors and previous successes are similar, Darvish differs from Matsuzaka in both size and pitch selection and more resembles a prototypical major league pitcher than does his predecessor. Texas is banking on a successful transition for Darvish that, combined with a continuation of the offensive success the Rangers have enjoyed the past few seasons, will go a long way toward making them World Series contenders once again in 2012.
THT Forecasts is bullish on Darvish and has him as a 7.0-WAR player for the next six years, and more specifically a projection of an ERA of 2.40, a 0.97 WHIP, and 223 strikeouts in 208 innings pitched in his debut major league season.
Yes, this is just a projection. Yes, that would put Darvish among the best pitchers in the game, and it's not likely he'll post results nearly that high. But it's interesting in that while the forecast is clouded by his lack of innings in the majors, Darvish's numbers dwarf those predicted by the same system for Wilson. It is possible Darvish will significantly outpitch Wilson in the coming years.
Texas' offense remains intact, and as briefly alluded to earlier, it is formidable. If Darvish pitches anywhere close to what Oliver projects as his major league equivalent forecast, about the only knock on the Rangers' offseason will be that there wasn't enough money to make a run at free agent Prince Fielder. Of course, if reports of Fielder's contract with Detroit are accurate, Darvish's contract wasn't as big an impediment as the demands for Fielder were.
Scott Boras had taken his clients deep into the offseason without a deal before, and once again he was able to get a team to meet his exorbitant demands. Even though Fielder would have been a significant upgrade for one of the very few average spots in Texas' lineup, the cost was ultimately too high. That is a good thing for the other teams in the AL West.
Seattle, another of Texas' divisional cohabitants, was also thought to be a possible fit for Fielder. There is little doubt that the slugger would have made a big difference to the Mariners' punchless lineup because it was a lineup that finished last in several important offensive categories last season—hits and runs, among others.
Seattle has worked to improve its offense for next season by trading starting pitcher Michael Pineda to the New York Yankees for their top prospect, catcher Jesus Montero. Montero's bat is so good, and his catching so suspect, that he may play the designated hitter role in Seattle right away in hopes that he can boost the Mariners' run-scoring totals. He will fit in with other young bats that the Mariners have high hopes for, like Dustin Ackley and Mike Carp.
Then there is the final team in this puzzle, and the team that's made the biggest moves so far. As every baseball fan knows, the Angels signed baseball's best player this offseason and dramatically improved their own moribund offense. While the contract for Albert Pujols is one of the largest in baseball history, and like Fielder's may become a burden in its final years, the immediate payoff is a chance to narrow the gap that has grown between the Angels and the Rangers.
Angels owner Arte Moreno decided to spend big after he hired new general manager Jerry Dipito a few months ago. In addition to Pujols, the Angels were able to improve their already daunting pitching staff (and strike a blow to Texas' own pitching) by signing the aforementioned Wilson.
With those two huge signings—and a trade for catcher Chris Iannetta, who will no doubt improve the production from that position over what they've had the past couple of seasons—the Angels figure to have enough talent to compete with Texas for years to come.
Unfortunately for their other competitors, the big-money additions Texas and Anaheim made have widened what was already a large gulf that separated the Mariners and A's from the top two teams in the division.
We know Oakland will probably not be adding any proven major league talent before the season starts. The Mariners are a candidate to rebound a bit from last season's 67-95 record, but as constructed, the A's may have a hard time reaching even 60 wins, which is a total that Texas and Anaheim may be nearing by the All-Star break.
David welcomes comments below. You can reach him via email at david DOT wade AT insightbb DOT com.
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Ask Oliver
by Derek AmbrosinoJanuary 25, 2012
Derek Ambrosino aspires to one day, like Dan Quisenberry, find a delivery in his flaw, you can send him questions, comments, or suggestions at digglahhh AT yahoo DOT com.
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BOB: Astros ponder new look
by Brian BorawskiJanuary 25, 2012
Selig’s extension finalized
Bud Selig’s two-year extension as commissioner of MLB was finalized this week. There was one holdup because of the nature of the extension. Since the contract extension wasn’t on the original agenda for the owners’ meeting, there needed to be unanimous consent from all 30 owners. One owner, John Moores of the San Diego Padres, initially voted no because his sale of the Padres to Jeff Moorad wasn’t approved.As a compromise, they convened and decided to do the vote conducted by return ballot, and Moores voted yes this time. Selig’s extension will make him commissioner through the end of 2014.
Astros’ owner looking at name and uniform change
Jim Crane, the new owner of the Houston Astros, is looking into changing the team’s name and uniforms. Right now, he’s put it out to his consultants and staff members, but it’s looking like he’s targeting a 2013 date, which is when the Astros will enter the American League.The announcement came at an event where several fan initiatives were unveiled. Other programs include a five-percent rebate on full-season and 27-game ticket packages if you buy by January 31, 2012. The cheap seats will see their price cut from $7 to $5, and kids can sit in those cheap seats for just $1. There’s also a newly discounted club-level ticket that costs $35 (formerly $46) and includes $15 in food vouchers.
Dodgers’ sale roundup
There’s not big news coming out camp McCourt, but a bunch of mundane things are happening that are slowly making the sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers a reality. The Dodgers have filed a bankruptcy plan and McCourt put an April 30, 2012, deadline to sell the team.This date coincides with the date Frank McCourt has to pay his ex-wife, Jamie McCourt, $131 million out of the proceeds from the sale. The Dodgers are looking for the blessing from the bankruptcy court on Feb. 22, 2012, so they can move ahead with the sale.
In the meantime, the opening bids for the team are starting to come in. More than 10 opening bids were received from suitors like Magic Johnson, Mark Cuban and Peter O’Malley. These opening bids aren’t binding, so they appear to be more of a reflection of each person’s level of interest in the team.
Mets’ owners look for March resolution in Madoff case
Mets’ owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz appear to be getting closer to finally resolving their financial woes. When spring training is heating up, they’ll be in court defending themselves against Irving Picard, the trustee in charge of recovering damages that resulted from the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme. Picard is looking for $1 billion from the two owners because he thought the two were complicit in the ponzi scheme.Fortunately for the two owners, the amount the two will have to pay has been capped at $386 million, which is the amount they pulled from the fund. There’s also a chance the amount could be as little as $83.3 million, depending on how the proceeds are split up between return of capital and gains. Of course, all of this uncertainty hasn’t done the team any good as they look to be as bad on the field as they were last year.
Athletics must contend with expiring lease in stadium situation
Another month has passed without the league signing off on an Oakland Athletics move to San Jose. Without a stadium even in the works, it means the Athletics probably will remain in Oakland through 2015. The problem is, their lease is up with the city of Oakland and the county at the end of the 2013, which means the city has quite a bit of power in any lease extension negotiations.For now, things are at a standstill. The Athletics sent a proposed lease extension to the city last year, but it got a mixed response. It’s just one more problem that will have to be contended with, and my guess is it won’t get resolved until the relocation issue is taken care of.
Brian Borawski is a member of SABR's Business of Baseball Committee and writes about the Detroit Tigers at his own website, TigerBlog. He welcomes comments, questions and suggestions via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
40th anniversary: Dave Winfield and the NCAA basket-brawl
by Chris JaffeJanuary 25, 2012
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 order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
Fast goes Astro
by Dave StudemanJanuary 24, 2012
Dave was called a "national treasure" by Rob Neyer. Seriously. Comments about this article can be sent to him through the miracle of e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
The greatest eye in baseball
by Troy PattersonJanuary 24, 2012
As a fan of numbers, I always look for the player who did something better than anyone else. We all know the best power hitters, for instance, but what about something a bit more subjective? When you ask what player had the best eye, you might say Ted Williams' OBP of .482 is a pretty good measure and call it a day, but that wouldn't be much fun, and I also don't think it's the right answer anyway.
On-base percentage is a combination of too many things outside just a good eye at the plate. A great hitter like Williams can use power to add some hits that another hitter might not. So perhaps then walk rate might make the best hitter. That leads us to a similar discovery, though, when we look at the top 15 walk rates of all time.
Name BB% Ted Williams 20.6 Barry Bonds 20.3 Max Bishop 20.0 Babe Ruth 19.4 Ferris Fain 18.4 Eddie Stanky 18.3 Roy Cullenbine 17.8 Gene Tenace 17.8 Jack Crooks 17.6 Eddie Yost 17.6 Mickie Mantle 17.5 Bill Salkeld 17.4 Bill Joyce 17.3 Randy Milligan 17.2 Jack Cust 17.2
So Williams, Barry Bonds, Max Bishop and Babe Ruth seem to be the best all time at taking a walk. Few would complain if we said they had the best eyes in all of baseball, but something doesn't feel right about just using walk rate. When Jack Cust can crack the all-time top 15 in a stat, I have to make sure I'm doing it right.
The next place to look would have to be strikeouts, but K percentage is littered with players at the low end who make good contact and yet can't walk. I decided the best way to go would be BB/K. This list was something completely different and quite surprising.
Name BB/K Joe Sewell 7.39 Monk Cline 6.33 Johnny Bassle 5.4 Cupid Childs 5.26 Tris Speaker 5.20 Eddie Collins 4.23 John McGraw 4.15 Bill Gleason 4.00 Mickey Cochrane 3.95 Tommy Holmes 3.93 Willie Keeler 3.58 Davy Jones 3.56 Dan Brouthers 3.53 Ferris Fain 3.46 Johnny Evers 3.44
At first, the list looks like a bust as nothing matches with our first list, and perhaps we again are seeing a lot of extremely low strikeout guys with okay walk rates. That's not what I set out to find when looking for the greatest eye in baseball history. That's when I noticed one name repeats on both lists. Ferris Fain ranks fifth in baseball history with a walk rate of 18.4 percent, but he also has a walk per strikeout rate of 3.46, making the top 15 on that list. Could Fain be the greatest eye in baseball, or is he just an anomaly that fits the search criteria?
Fain was a first baseman who played only nine seasons, all in the American League, from 1947 to 1955 and had the great nicknames Burrhead and Cocky. He spent time with the Philadelphia Athletics, Chicago White Sox, Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Indians. His debut was delayed due to military service from 1943-1945. His skills were that of the perfect leadoff hitter but odd for a first baseman. In 4,904 plate appearances, Fain carried a line of .290/.424/.396 and led the league in average twice and OBP once. He never struck out more than 7.6 percent in any season and had his best BB/K of 5.12 in 1950.
Fain was a very interesting character and known for a hot temper, which led to several barroom brawls, including a broken hand during a fight after the 1952 season. The temper and the fighting didn't affect him on the field until 1954, when he suffered a broken leg and played only 65 games with his lowest walk rate at 14.2 percent. This, along with the drinking and fighting, seemed to spell his demise. He was still amazing at the plate in 1955 with 114 games and a walk rate of 26.2 percent, but that would be the last season for Fain and what might have been the greatest eye in baseball. At only 34, it's a shame he had only nine years in the majors.
His final fWAR of 31.6 was very good for a player of nine seasons, with a wOBA of .390 and wRC+ of 127. He wasn't a Hall of Fame candidate, but thanks to his amazing eye at the plate, he was an All-Star-level player. Now perhaps we can recognize him as the greatest eye in baseball.
After baseball, things didn't get better for Fain as he was arrested twice for growing marijuana. The first time, he was placed under house arrest, and the second time he received 18 months in prison. In response to questions about his marijuana production, Fain was quoted saying, ''I knew how to grow the stuff. I was as adept at it as I was in playing baseball.'' He died in 2001 at the age of 80, regretting only that his off the field behavior likely kept him from a managerial chance later in life.
Check out more work from Troy at the Boston Red Sox blog Fire Brand of the AL. You can contact him with questions or recommendations email me or @TroyPatterson
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The Hardball Times
A baseball card mystery: Bob Didier and Cleon Jones
by Bruce MarkusenJanuary 24, 2012
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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The Hardball Times
20,000 days since the Phillies integrate
by Chris JaffeJanuary 24, 2012
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 order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.
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The Hardball Times
The virtual 1958-68 Giants, Reds, and Cardinals (Part 8: 1964-65)
by Steve TrederJanuary 24, 2012
Our grand excursion has taken us from the late 1950s fully into the mid-'60s:
1957-58
1958-59
1959-60
1960-61
1961-62
1962-63
1963-64
For the Giants and Reds, it's been a thrill ride of great success, with the only frustration for each franchise being the presence of the other. Meanwhile, frustration has been the constant theme for St. Louis, while in reality the Cards captured a World Championship in 1964.
Giants: Actual Reds: Actual Cardinals: Actual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 80 74 3 727 698 76 78 4 695 623 72 82 5T 619 704
1959 83 71 3 705 613 74 80 5T 764 738 71 83 7 641 725
1960 79 75 5 671 631 67 87 6 640 692 86 68 3 639 616
1961 85 69 3 773 655 93 61 1 710 653 80 74 5 703 668
1962 103 62 1 878 690 98 64 3 802 685 84 78 6 774 664
1963 88 74 3 725 641 86 76 5 648 594 93 69 2 747 628
1964 90 72 4 656 587 92 70 2T 660 566 93 69 1 715 652
Giants: Virtual Reds: Virtual Cardinals: Virtual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 83 71 2T 747 692 73 81 5 683 637 77 77 4 640 677
1959 87 67 1T 737 615 87 67 1T 802 662 84 70 4 725 685
1960 93 61 1 709 561 76 78 6 705 666 86 68 4 661 632
1961 88 66 2 787 648 106 48 1 813 629 72 82 6 689 724
1962 103 59 1 800 632 101 61 2T 779 663 84 78 6 809 703
1963 97 65 3 726 578 100 62 1 704 540 80 82 6 664 668
1964 100 62 2 726 576 101 61 1 689 533 87 75 4 662 657Who'll get some satisfaction this time around?
The 1964-65 offseason: Actual deals we will make
None. How about that?
The 1964-65 offseason: Actual deals we will not make
Nov. 21, 1964: The San Francisco Giants traded outfielder Jose Cardenal to the California Angels for catcher Jack Hiatt.
We’ve examined this peculiar transaction before:
It was a trade that simply didn't make sense from the Giants' standpoint, and it worked out dismally. Cardenal, given a chance to play with the Angels in 1965, immediately became a solid regular, and played in the major leagues though 1980. Hiatt, with little opportunity to play given the crowd of Giants behind the plate, didn't make the majors to stay until 1967, and never became anything more than a utility player. Cardenal would earn 212 Win Shares in his major league career, while Hiatt earned 48.
Dec. 4, 1964: The Cincinnati Reds traded infielder-outfielder Cesar Tovar to the Minnesota Twins for pitcher Gerry Arrigo.
And this similarly inscrutable one as well:
All along, the Reds’ handling of Tovar was, well, puzzling. After signing him at the age of 17 and immediately making him a first-string second baseman in the minors, the Cincinnati organization spent six years failing to promote this blazing-fast Venezuelan to the major leagues ….Suffice to say that both Cardenal and Tovar presented minor league resumés of the sort that very rarely result in a trade before a chance to play in the majors. Moreover, in neither of these deals does the return provide a sensible explanation.
Instead the Reds swapped Tovar for Gerry Arrigo, who was, to be sure, an intriguing young pitcher: a hard-throwing 23-year-old lefty. But he was one with dubious control, and a minor league track record that paled in comparison to Tovar’s.
But, then, consider this fact: Cardenal and Tovar were both black Latins. And Hiatt and Arrigo were both white Americans.
And, then, consider this fact: in the 15-year period from October 1959 through October 1974, the Giants conducted a total of 95 transactions with other major league clubs. In these deals the Giants relinquished 27 African-American or Latin American players. They acquired just three players of color (Ozzie Virgil in 1965, Nate Oliver in 1968, and Dick Simpson in 1969), all of whom were throw-ins in deals in which the primary acquisition was a white player.
Consider that.
The Reds in this period didn’t demonstrate a pattern that stark. But Cincinnati as well made several key trades that were essentially black-for-white exchanges when they surrendered Curt Flood, Tony Gonzalez, Juan Pizarro, and, of course, Frank Robinson, and these deals were not balanced by trades for significant black talent.
Both the Giants and Reds in the 1950s and ‘60s were bold pioneers, leaders, in the scouting and signing of amateur players of color. The core stars developed by both franchises were black, either African-American or Latin American. But neither franchise demonstrated a corresponding eagerness to acquire players of color in the trade market, and both demonstrated a pattern of clumsy undervaluation of (or at least impatience with) young black players, surrendering them abruptly (in exchange for white players) before giving them a chance to develop: that describes not only these Cardenal and Tovar deals, but also Cincinnati’s Flood, Gonzalez, and Pizarro trades, and San Francisco’s handling of Leon Wagner, Andre Rodgers, and George Foster.
Our Giants and Reds are striving to avoid such blunders. Neither Cardenal nor Tovar will be dealt away here.
Dec. 14, 1964: The Cincinnati Reds traded pitcher Bob Purkey to the St. Louis Cardinals for pitcher Roger Craig and outfielder Charlie James.
Our Cardinals don’t have Craig, and in any case our Reds don’t want to deal away Purkey, who was quite effective in 1964.
Dec. 15, 1964: The St. Louis Cardinals purchased outfielder-first baseman Tito Francona from the Cleveland Indians.
We don’t have a spot for this veteran.
Jan., 1965: The San Francisco Giants traded catcher Tim Talton to the Kansas City Athletics for outfielder George Alusik.
He wasn’t much defensively, but Talton was a good hitter for average. It doesn’t make sense to toss away a left-handed-batting catcher in exchange for a right-handed-batting outfielder for which we have no need.
Feb. 1, 1965: The San Francisco Giants traded pitcher Billy O'Dell to the Milwaukee Braves for catcher Ed Bailey.
As we discussed here:
The lefty O’Dell had been a consistently fine pitcher for the Giants since they’d acquired him from Baltimore in 1959. But he encountered his first off-year in 1964, his ERA ballooning to 5.40, and he lost his spot in the starting rotation.We won’t deal O’Dell at this juncture, but will instead give him a full season to show what he can do as a reliever.
However, O’Dell’s peripherals in 1964 didn’t look nearly as bad as that ERA. Moreover, his starter versus reliever splits in ’64 were extreme: In his eight starts, O’Dell had been blown out with 46 hits in 34 innings and an 8.55 ERA, while in relief he was quite effective, allowing just 36 hits in 51 innings, and posting an ERA of 3.33. At the age of 33, it appeared as though O’Dell was entering the phase of his career in which he might no longer be capable of doing well as a starter, but might thrive in the bullpen.
Feb. 11, 1965: The San Francisco Giants traded catcher Del Crandall to the Pittsburgh Pirates for pitcher Bob Priddy and outfielder-first baseman Bob Burda.
Our version of the Giants doesn't include Crandall, and at this point in our scenario the Pirates have neither Priddy nor Burda anyway.
The 1964-65 offseason: Deals we will invoke
Oct., 1964: The Cincinnati Reds released first baseman Wally Moon.
He’s had a fine run in Cincinnati, but we don’t see him generating any meaningful trade value now. So it’s time to free up the roster room.
Dec. 7, 1964: The St. Louis Cardinals traded outfielder Johnny Lewis to the New York Mets for infielder Elio Chacon and cash.
Actually on this date the Cardinals traded Lewis to the Mets along with pitcher Gordie Richardson for Chacon and pitcher Tracy Stallard. We like Stallard, but we see our Ray Sadecki-less staff as having more need for the left-hander Richardson than the right-hander Stallard.
Dec. 9, 1964: The San Francisco Giants traded infielder Jose Pagan to the Pittsburgh Pirates for infielder Roberto Peña.
Peña is a modest prospect we’ll probably just park in triple-A, but we’re ready to say adios to Pagan’s backsliding performance.
Dec. 14, 1964: The St. Louis Cardinals traded first baseman Bill White to the Cincinnati Reds for outfielder-infielder Curt Flood, catcher-first baseman Don Pavletich, and outfielders Art Shamsky and Ted Savage.
Woah, Nelly!
It isn’t as big a bombshell as when our Cardinals traded away Ken Boyer back in 1960, but this is pretty doggone explosive. And the reasoning is essentially the same as it was for our Cards back in 1960: being honest with ourselves, we simply don’t see our current nucleus as plausibly pennant-bound.
We love White, but he’s in his thirties now, and he’s never going to generate more trade value than he is today. And what a bountiful package of trade value this is. The not-yet-27-year-old Flood has been perpetually in search of a position in Cincinnati, but we love the idea of seeing how he’ll do as a full-time center fielder. And Pavletich and Shamsky are serious young bats.
From the perspective of our Reds, it’s leveraging some of our exceptional depth into a single star performer who’s as well-rounded and consistent as they come. White hasn’t yet begun to decline, so we can confidently expect at least a couple of years of first-rate production.
Dec. 15, 1964: The St. Louis Cardinals traded shortstop Dick Schofield to the San Francisco Giants for outfielder Matty Alou, infielder Gil Garrido, and cash.
So, we embrace the rebuilding spirit in St. Louis. Schofield has been a steady performer, but he’s turning 30 and we don’t see him as the regular shortstop of a future Cardinals championship club. We’ll commit to youth at the position and see what develops, and we’ll give the 26-year-old Alou—who’s stagnated in San Francisco after looking like he might be something special—an opportunity in our outfield.
As for our Giants, a short-term horizon properly prevails. We’ve gotten a decent run from Andre Rodgers at shortstop, but his range is beginning to decline. Schofield shores us up defensively, and allows us to slide Rodgers over to second base.
Dec. 15, 1964: The St. Louis Cardinals traded third baseman Jim Davenport to the Pittsburgh Pirates for pitchers Earl Francis and John Gelnar and cash.
And our St. Louisans will complete the infield bust-up by scrapping the 31-year-old Davenport, who’d hit surprisingly well for us in 1961-62 but then quickly faded. Third base is another spot where we’ll go with kids, while giving the talented-but-erratic Francis and the soft-tossing prospect Gelnar a chance to make the staff.
Feb. 11, 1965: The San Francisco Giants sold second baseman Chuck Hiller to the New York Mets.
Hiller’s batting average has dropped a neat 100 points in two years, which isn’t the sort of thing one often sees. We’ve shopped him around and found no trade offers, so we’ll just take some cash from the Mets instead.
March, 1965: The Cincinnati Reds sold outfielder-first baseman Marty Keough to the Milwaukee Braves.
March, 1965: The St. Louis Cardinals sold outfielder Charlie James to the Houston Astros.
March, 1965: The St. Louis Cardinals sold outfielder Bob Burda to the San Francisco Giants.
Late-in-spring-training roster pruning. Our Giants will stash Burda in triple-A as Walt Bond injury insurance.
The 1965 season: Actual deals we will make
None. So there.
The 1965 season: Actual deals we will not make
May 4, 1965: The Cincinnati Reds traded pitcher Bill Henry to the San Francisco Giants for pitcher Jim Duffalo.
Our Reds never had Henry and our Giants no longer have Duffalo.
May 22, 1965: The San Francisco Giants traded shortstop Jose Pagan to the Pittsburgh Pirates for shortstop Dick Schofield.
We already sent Pagan to Pittsburgh and Schofield to San Francisco.
May 29, 1965: The San Francisco Giants traded pitcher Bob Hendley, catcher Ed Bailey, and outfielder Harvey Kuenn to the Chicago Cubs for outfielder Len Gabrielson and catcher Dick Bertell.
Our Giants don’t have any of those guys, and have no interest in Gabrielson or Bertell anyway.
July 19, 1965: The San Francisco Giants signed pitcher Warren Spahn as a free agent.
We love the wonderful Spahnie, even this superannuated version, but don’t have an opening on the staff.
The 1965 season: Deals we will invoke
June 15, 1965: The St. Louis Cardinals traded pitchers Ray Washburn and Mike Cuellar to the Houston Astros for pitchers Hal Woodeshick and Larry Yellen.
Actually on this date St. Louis traded pitcher Ron Taylor to Houston along with Cuellar in exchange for the standout reliever Woodeshick and so-so pitching prospect Chuck Taylor. Our Cardinals don’t have R. Taylor and do have C. Taylor, so we’ll rework the deal. Washburn has shown flashes, but hasn’t developed as we’d hoped, so we’ll take this opportunity to bolster the bullpen.
June 30, 1965: The Cincinnati Reds sold pitcher Bob Purkey to the Chicago Cubs.
Purkey this year is encountering the kind of struggle that doesn’t bode well for a 35-year-old. He’s been a splendid asset since we acquired him so long ago, but the time has come to cut him loose.
July 10, 1965: The San Francisco Giants sold pitcher Jack Sanford to the California Angels.
As it is for our Giants and the 36-year-old Sanford.
1965 season results
Giants
We’re installing Schofield as our primary shortstop, and having Rodgers compete with Hal Lanier for the second base job. And in the bullpen, we’ll have rookie Masanori Murakami replace the retired Billy Pierce—Murakami is the first Japanese-born player in the major leagues (the next won’t come along for another 30 years), and we didn’t plan for him to be here, but he’s just blown away everyone he’s faced.
But our biggest change is forced upon us by an injury. Orlando Cepeda underwent knee surgery over the winter, and arrives at spring training entirely unable to do anything more than limp to the plate to pinch hit. His absence from the lineup will provide an opportunity for the rookie Cardenal and sophomore Jesus Alou to compete for serious playing time in the outfield, and put extra pressure on Willie McCovey to bounce back from his dreadful 1964 performance.
1965 San Francisco Giants Won 99 Lost 63 Finished 1st
Pos Player Age G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+
1B W. McCovey* 27 160 540 93 149 17 4 39 92 88 118 .276 .380 .539 .919 152
2B-SS H. Lanier 22 143 418 28 94 12 7 0 31 17 54 .225 .249 .287 .536 48
SS D. Schofield# 30 125 439 44 92 14 1 2 23 44 61 .210 .281 .260 .541 51
3B K. Boyer 34 144 535 66 137 17 2 12 55 58 71 .256 .324 .363 .687 90
RF-CF J. Cardenal 21 100 282 37 72 13 2 6 23 13 40 .255 .286 .379 .665 83
CF W. Mays 34 157 558 118 177 21 3 52 112 76 71 .317 .397 .645 1.042 184
LF-3B J. Hart 23 160 591 91 177 30 6 23 96 47 75 .299 .348 .487 .836 129
C T. Haller* 28 109 349 35 87 4 3 14 42 41 51 .249 .335 .398 .733 103
IF A. Rodgers 30 125 352 41 91 19 1 8 31 43 66 .259 .333 .386 .720 99
OF-1B W. Bond* 27 98 271 31 72 11 1 8 31 28 33 .266 .338 .402 .740 105
OF J. Alou 23 84 260 30 79 13 1 5 26 6 17 .304 .321 .419 .740 104
C J. Orsino 27 71 147 18 35 7 1 6 18 12 32 .238 .305 .422 .727 99
2B B. Schroder* 20 57 83 14 18 2 0 0 5 9 8 .217 .287 .241 .528 49
OF K. Henderson# 19 63 73 10 14 1 1 0 7 9 19 .192 .277 .233 .510 43
C T. Talton* 26 28 39 4 8 1 0 0 4 5 6 .205 .295 .231 .526 48
LF-1B O. Cepeda 27 33 34 1 6 1 0 1 5 3 9 .176 .225 .294 .519 43
Others 114 12 24 3 0 1 7 7 20 .211 .256 .263 .519 45
Pitchers 428 24 67 3 1 2 29 13 143 .156 .172 .181 .354 -2
Total 5513 697 1399 189 34 179 637 519 894 .254 .315 .398 .713 97
* Bats left
# Bats both
Pitcher Age G GS CG W L SV IP H R ER HR BB SO ERA ERA+
J. Marichal 27 39 37 24 23 12 1 295 224 78 70 27 46 240 2.14 169
G. Perry 26 33 30 7 9 13 0 206 213 113 98 23 74 178 4.28 84
B. Bolin 26 33 29 4 11 7 0 182 167 65 64 24 62 148 3.16 114
D. LeMay* 26 29 18 4 9 6 0 139 135 65 57 12 41 55 3.69 98
F. Linzy 24 15 12 2 6 1 0 70 74 28 23 4 18 28 2.96 122
J. Sanford 36 17 14 0 4 3 0 68 65 33 31 7 19 33 4.10 88
B. Hands 25 13 10 2 5 3 0 65 69 34 26 4 24 44 3.60 100
D. Estelle* 23 16 10 1 2 3 0 56 57 36 28 5 31 35 4.50 80
S. Miller 37 67 0 0 14 6 20 119 92 27 26 5 29 104 1.97 184
B. O'Dell* 32 53 1 0 9 5 11 100 81 32 24 9 26 73 2.16 167
D. McMahon 35 52 0 0 3 2 7 81 79 36 30 8 31 57 3.33 108
M. Murakami* 21 45 1 0 4 1 4 74 57 31 31 9 22 85 3.77 96
Others 1 0 0 1 0 10 13 9 8 1 9 4 7.20 50
Total 163 44 99 63 43 1465 1326 587 516 138 432 1084 3.17 114
* Throws leftIn St. Louis, Schofield had never been a good hitter, but he hadn’t been a bad one, slapping out a .260-ish batting average and drawing frequent walks. But he shows up in San Francisco and resolutely forgets how to hit. We spend all year waiting for him to snap out of it, to no avail. And Lanier doesn’t hit a lick, either.
Cardenal and Alou aren’t terrible, but Cepeda’s bat is definitely missed, even moreso because Boyer, at 34, finally begins to show his age. Fortunately, Jim Ray Hart proves he’s for real, McCovey does rebound, and Willie Mays—astonishingly, at the same age as Boyer—delivers a staggering season, a power-hitting clinic of historic proportion.
Our pitching isn’t quite the same patchwork quilt of sublime and ridiculous as our hitting, but it’s close. The starting staff behind ace Juan Marichal is shaky—the biggest issue being Ernie Broglio imploding due to elbow trouble—but the Dominican Dandy is tremendous, and so is our bullpen, headed up in scintillating fashion by the ageless Stu Miller.
And Pythagoras is kind to us, as we squeak in at four wins above projection. We need every inch of that extension in order to defeat the extremely tough competition.
Reds
The arrival of White at first base bumps Deron Johnson over to third, where he’ll compete with rookie Tony Perez. That bumps incumbent third baseman Tommy Harper to the outfield, where he’ll assume the platoon/utility role Flood had been filling.
The only other alteration is on the pitching staff, where we’re introducing an exceptionally hard-throwing rookie, Billy McCool, and last year’s rookie sensation reliever Sammy Ellis is promoted to the starting ranks.
1965 Cincinnati Reds Won 98 Lost 64 Finished 2nd
Pos Player Age G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+
1B B. White* 31 142 472 80 139 23 3 21 75 55 69 .294 .367 .489 .856 133
2B P. Rose# 24 162 670 119 209 35 11 11 84 69 76 .312 .378 .446 .824 125
SS L. Cardenas 26 156 557 67 160 25 11 11 59 60 100 .287 .353 .431 .784 114
3B-1B D. Johnson 26 125 415 68 120 21 4 23 94 38 62 .289 .344 .525 .869 135
RF F. Robinson 29 156 582 111 172 33 5 33 116 70 100 .296 .386 .540 .925 151
CF V. Pinson* 26 159 669 99 204 34 10 22 97 43 81 .305 .349 .484 .833 126
LF T. Gonzalez* 28 108 370 62 112 19 1 15 49 29 52 .303 .356 .481 .837 127
C J. Edwards* 27 114 371 48 99 22 2 17 53 50 45 .267 .351 .474 .826 124
OF-3B T. Harper 24 80 257 52 68 10 1 8 30 32 48 .265 .343 .405 .748 104
3B T. Perez 23 99 253 38 65 13 4 11 45 19 60 .257 .310 .470 .781 111
C J. Azcue 25 71 175 14 41 4 0 2 18 11 29 .234 .283 .291 .574 58
UT C. Tovar 24 74 157 25 38 8 2 2 14 11 18 .242 .287 .357 .643 75
LF J. Lynch* 34 73 121 11 34 1 0 6 20 7 25 .281 .323 .438 .761 107
C E. Bailey* 34 45 80 8 18 3 0 2 13 16 16 .225 .347 .338 .684 89
IF T. Helms 24 21 42 4 16 2 2 0 6 3 7 .381 .435 .524 .959 162
IF C. Ruiz# 26 29 18 7 2 1 0 0 1 0 5 .111 .111 .167 .278 -25
Others 7 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 .000 .000 .000 .000 -100
Pitchers 449 29 62 7 3 1 19 26 168 .138 .173 .174 .347 -4
Total 5665 843 1559 261 59 185 793 539 963 .275 .338 .440 .778 112
* Bats left
# Bats both
Pitcher Age G GS CG W L SV IP H R ER HR BB SO ERA ERA+
C. Osteen* 25 36 36 9 16 10 0 258 238 98 90 21 68 145 3.14 119
J. Maloney 25 33 33 14 20 9 0 255 189 78 72 13 110 244 2.54 148
S. Ellis 24 40 35 13 20 8 2 238 198 105 98 20 94 167 3.71 101
J. Jay 29 41 20 3 9 8 1 156 148 82 72 20 63 104 4.15 90
J. Pizarro* 28 18 18 2 7 2 0 97 105 51 45 10 33 65 4.18 90
J. O'Toole* 28 12 9 1 1 4 1 46 51 37 34 7 21 32 6.65 56
B. McCool* 20 53 2 0 9 9 20 90 78 43 41 8 40 105 4.10 91
J. Nuxhall* 36 47 2 0 6 3 10 99 92 36 35 10 21 81 3.18 118
J. Tsitouris 29 31 2 0 2 4 2 66 62 39 31 7 33 51 4.23 89
D. Zanni 33 28 1 0 1 2 1 52 41 17 13 5 24 35 2.25 167
H. Haddix* 39 24 0 0 3 1 1 34 33 25 15 5 21 21 3.97 94
B. Purkey 35 15 4 1 3 3 1 41 46 28 25 6 11 14 5.49 68
Others 0 0 1 1 0 26 21 7 6 2 10 19 2.08 181
Total 162 43 98 64 39 1458 1302 646 577 134 549 1083 3.56 105
* Throws leftTremendous staff-wide pitching was the key to our pennants in 1963 and ’64. But this year we encounter some serious challenges on the mound. Purkey and Harvey Haddix both finally run out of gas, and Joey Jay isn't sharp. Worst of all, our two top southpaws, Juan Pizarro and Jim O'Toole, both go down with arm trouble, with O’Toole especially ineffective.
Thus Jim Maloney, Claude Osteen, and Ellis emerge as a new top three, and though they’re excellent, they carry a heavy load. Overall our staff is good but not comparable to past versions.
But our hitting, as though responding to a distress signal, heroically rides to the rescue. Pete Rose ignites into stardom, heading a lineup that rolls out relentlessly ferocious thump, carpet-bombing opponents into submission. Our team OPS+ of 112 is the highest achieved by any team since the Boys of Summer were at their towering peak in 1953.
Alas, to the same four-game degree the Giants are helped by the Pythagorean whims, we’re hurt. Our resulting record of 98-64 noses out the Los Angeles Dodgers, but falls just short of the Giants.*
Cardinals
In our revamped lineup, Flood takes over in center field, moving Felipe Alou and his hopefully-healed knee over to right. Lee Thomas moves in from right field to first base.
Another outfielder, rifle-armed sophomore Mike Shannon, is converted to third base, where he’ll compete with fellow sophomore Phil Gagliano. And at shortstop we’re going with youngsters Jerry Buchek and Dal Maxvill.
1965 St. Louis Cardinals Won 85 Lost 76 Finished 5th
Pos Player Age G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+
1B L. Thomas* 29 143 496 71 139 24 5 23 74 61 36 .280 .358 .488 .845 127
2B J. Javier 28 77 229 20 52 6 4 2 25 8 44 .227 .256 .314 .571 54
SS-2B J. Buchek 23 139 487 45 118 19 7 11 48 37 128 .242 .293 .378 .671 80
3B M. Shannon 25 124 383 40 90 23 4 6 43 39 72 .235 .305 .363 .668 80
RF F. Alou 30 143 555 88 172 30 2 24 78 32 64 .310 .348 .501 .849 127
CF C. Flood 27 150 577 84 179 28 3 10 68 48 47 .310 .365 .421 .786 113
LF L. Brock* 26 155 631 105 182 35 8 16 68 45 116 .288 .340 .445 .785 111
C T. McCarver* 23 113 409 48 113 17 2 11 48 31 26 .276 .327 .408 .735 98
3B-2B P. Gagliano 23 128 399 46 96 15 2 9 46 44 50 .241 .312 .356 .668 81
SS D. Maxvill 26 102 220 17 40 5 3 0 15 21 35 .182 .252 .232 .484 32
C-1B D. Pavletich 26 68 191 23 62 11 1 8 29 24 28 .325 .399 .518 .917 147
OF A. Shamsky* 23 79 178 20 46 7 4 5 19 20 42 .258 .335 .427 .762 105
OF M. Alou* 26 70 108 12 24 4 1 1 6 4 11 .222 .250 .306 .556 50
1B-OF J. Beauchamp 25 46 84 7 17 2 0 1 7 9 18 .202 .284 .262 .546 49
IF E. Chacon 28 36 63 9 15 2 0 1 5 9 8 .238 .324 .317 .642 75
OF T. Savage 28 30 63 7 10 3 0 1 4 6 9 .159 .232 .254 .486 32
C B. Uecker 30 27 58 7 12 3 0 1 4 9 12 .207 .324 .310 .634 73
C D. Ricketts# 29 11 15 1 3 0 0 0 0 0 2 .200 .188 .200 .388 5
Others 48 5 11 2 1 0 8 2 7 .229 .275 .313 .587 59
Pitchers 400 37 62 6 2 7 36 19 155 .155 .182 .233 .415 12
Total 5594 692 1443 242 49 137 631 468 910 .258 .314 .392 .706 90
* Bats left
# Bats both
Pitcher Age G GS CG W L SV IP H R ER HR BB SO ERA ERA+
B. Gibson 29 38 36 20 20 12 1 299 243 110 102 34 103 270 3.07 126
L. Jackson 34 39 39 12 16 17 0 257 276 126 115 28 58 132 4.03 96
A. Jackson* 29 34 31 5 12 12 1 185 205 99 88 15 53 113 4.28 91
J. Gelnar 22 11 9 1 2 3 0 63 67 24 23 5 16 30 3.29 118
R. Washburn 27 11 8 1 4 6 0 57 55 27 24 7 12 30 3.79 102
N. Briles 21 15 6 0 2 3 1 55 58 25 24 4 15 31 3.93 99
G. Richardson* 26 13 7 0 1 3 0 54 57 28 26 6 19 38 4.33 90
D. Hughes 27 13 8 1 1 4 0 53 57 31 26 5 25 31 4.42 88
L. McDaniel 29 71 0 0 6 5 2 129 120 46 39 12 48 93 2.72 143
E. Fisher 28 56 13 1 12 8 12 144 126 55 51 13 34 77 3.19 122
H. Woodeshick* 32 41 0 0 3 1 13 48 37 11 9 1 22 31 1.69 230
B. Henry* 37 38 0 0 3 1 4 42 40 17 16 2 8 37 3.43 113
S. Carlton* 20 15 2 0 0 0 0 25 27 7 7 3 8 21 2.52 154
Others 3 3 3 1 2 51 43 16 15 3 15 26 2.65 147
Total 162 44 85 76 36 1462 1411 622 565 138 436 960 3.48 112
* Throws leftSecond baseman Julian Javier, our only holdover regular infielder, breaks a finger and misses half the season, then struggles with the bat when he returns. This widens the window of opportunity for the younger infielders, but no one does much with the chance.
But by and large things go pretty well. Our bench gets a shot in the arm from Shamsky and (especially) Pavletich. With Lou Brock and Flood at the top of the order, and a rejuvenated Alou and Thomas in the middle, we don’t scare anybody but our offense is nudging toward league-average again.
Our pitching is a work in progress as well, as rookie right-handers Gelnar and Nelson Briles are introduced to the rotation in mid-season. But Bob Gibson is terrific, and the bullpen led by workhorses Lindy McDaniel and Eddie Fisher is outstanding.
At the end of the year, we’re still stuck in middle-of-the-pack traffic. However, our Pythag suggests we’re a little better than that, and so much of our key talent is still young that we think—perhaps we're kidding ourselves?—we may at last be headed on the road toward contention.
Next time
We'll enter the final three years of this long-range experiment. Can the Cardinals' persistence be rewarded? Is anyone going to be able to break the San Francisco-Cincinnati stranglehold on first place?
Giants: Actual Reds: Actual Cardinals: Actual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 80 74 3 727 698 76 78 4 695 623 72 82 5T 619 704
1959 83 71 3 705 613 74 80 5T 764 738 71 83 7 641 725
1960 79 75 5 671 631 67 87 6 640 692 86 68 3 639 616
1961 85 69 3 773 655 93 61 1 710 653 80 74 5 703 668
1962 103 62 1 878 690 98 64 3 802 685 84 78 6 774 664
1963 88 74 3 725 641 86 76 5 648 594 93 69 2 747 628
1964 90 72 4 656 587 92 70 2T 660 566 93 69 1 715 652
1965 95 67 2 682 593 89 73 4 825 704 80 81 7 707 674
Giants: Virtual Reds: Virtual Cardinals: Virtual
Year W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA W L Pos RS RA
1958 83 71 2T 747 692 73 81 5 683 637 77 77 4 640 677
1959 87 67 1T 737 615 87 67 1T 802 662 84 70 4 725 685
1960 93 61 1 709 561 76 78 6 705 666 86 68 4 661 632
1961 88 66 2 787 648 106 48 1 813 629 72 82 6 689 724
1962 103 59 1 800 632 101 61 2T 779 663 84 78 6 809 703
1963 97 65 3 726 578 100 62 1 704 540 80 82 6 664 668
1964 100 62 2 726 576 10