The Hardball Times -- Jeff Sackmann http://www.hardballtimes.com/main Baseball. Insight. Daily. en studes@hardballtimes.com Copyright 2012 2012-05-26T10:48:15+00:00 Another look at replacement level http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/another-look-at-replacement-level/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/another-look-at-replacement-level/#When:05:03:15
To get us all on the same page, let's spend a moment talking about what "replacement level" means—or at least is intended to mean.

"Replacement level" refers to the amount of production you'd expect from a freely-available replacement—the type of guy you could call up from Triple-A, or grab on waivers, or convince another GM to give you in exchange for a player to be named later. We're not talking about prospects; we mean minor leaguers (or maybe major league 24th and 25th men) who are interchangeable enough that their organization doesn't value them much.

If we're thinking about the team level, "replacement" is 25 of those guys, all making the major league minimum. Depending on how you define replacement, that team is going to win something in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 games.

Calculating WAR


For today, I'm interested in replacement level for position players. There are three elements of WAR that are relevant to what I want to discuss: offensive value, defensive value, and the positional adjustment.

In setting replacement level, most analysts determine a level of offensive production. This makes sense, partly because it's much easier than trying to measure every aspect of the player's contribution, and partly because it is equally applicable to players at every position.

So, a big part of a player's value is how he performs offensively relative to replacement level. Rightfully so. This is independent of his position.

Defense is treated differently. Instead of comparing a player's defense to some notion of replacement-level defense, we usually compare it to average. This is because a replacement-level player is not replacement-level in all things. While there are some clunky fielders that fit the profile of a replacement-level player, a more useful image might be someone like Colin Curtis or Will Rhymes—a middling offensive player who has at least some defensive skills.

So our hypothetical replacement-level player provides offense at a defined, minimal level and is an average defender. (We can extend the reasoning for defense to other things, like baserunning.)

But, of course, a player who is +40 runs at the plate and +3 runs in the field is a lot more valuable at some positions than others. That's why WAR has a positional adjustment. Such a player is worth more at catcher or shortstop than he is in left field.

The positional adjustment


This is where things get a little tricky. Positional adjustments are important to any WAR calculation and the precise numbers are reasonably well established. But they are better at comparing players among positions than they are at contributing to our understanding of replacement level.

The reasoning behind commonly used positional adjustments (e.g. +7.5 runs for a shortstop, +2.5 runs for a center fielder, etc.) is that some positions are easier to play than others. That's certainly true, and we can quantify the difference by looking at players who move between positions. If the average guy who plays both center field and left field is 10 runs better (per 150 games) in left than in center, it tells us that left field is 10 runs easier to play than center.

If we want to compare the value of Colby Rasmus to the value of Matt Holliday, this is fantastic tool. But positional adjustments, as we use them, ends up oversimplifying replacement level.

Prospects around the diamond


Positional adjustments themselves aren't the problem—the issue is that we can't let that be our only way of managing the differences in positions. The adjustments do a good job of representing the difficulty of playing each position, but it doesn't consider the challenges of filling each position.

Consider the options of a GM who has a sudden need for a player but doesn't want to spend much to fill it. First, he'll consider his own double-A and triple-A squads. If there's a reasonably good option there, he'll take it. If not, he'll scour the minor leagues look for a "freely" available replacement.

That's the case regardless of position. Let's focus on a couple of different scenarios. If a GM needs a shortstop, he probably only has two or three legitimate contenders within the organization: the starter at triple-A, and maybe the triple-A backup or the double-A starter. If none of those are good options, he looks outside the organization, and gets a player someone is willing to part with.

If a GM needs a left fielder, he might logically start his search with his triple-A leftfielder, but he has far more choices. He might choose a center fielder or right fielder from the minors. He might even choose an infielder—just about every infielder, except for some first basemen and a few weak-armed second basemen, can play left field. He is also more likely to be able to draw on the backups already on the roster. Then he can fill the backup's spot with any minor leaguer he chooses.

The point is this. If a GM needs a player at a difficult position, he's stuck with a very few choices within his organization, and probably no good ones outside his own franchise. If he needs a player at an easy position, he can choose nearly any position player in his own organization, and he can choose his favorite freely available player from the rest of baseball.

Back to positional adjustments


What positional adjustments don't advertise is that they don't always work in both directions. It's a safe bet that most shortstops can play second, or third, or center field, and on average, their defensive numbers increase accordingly. But many outfielders can't play second, third, or shortstop. Few non-catchers can play catcher.

I'm not claiming a breakthrough with this explanation—we all know that there are more potential left fielders than there are catchers, more first basemen than shortstops. Positional adjustments are based on players who were chosen to play multiple positions, so even if we were willing to stick Mark Teixeira at shortstop, he probably would be worse than the adjustment would predict. And he's a righty—the situation is clearly worse for lefthanders.

The adjustments might not hold up if we started indiscriminately sending shortstops to left field and center fielders to first base, too. But it seems like a safe bet that the tough-position guys would do better switching to easy positions (relative to positional adjustments) than vice versa.

What, then, is replacement level?


My point is simple: Replacement level differs by position, and positional adjustments don't explain the whole difference.

Our conceptual notion of a replacement player is probably about right for shortstops and catchers. If you need one and you don't care to promote your guy at triple-A, you're probably stuck finding someone like Eric Bruntlett or Chad Moeller.

But if you need a left fielder, you're more likely to find your answer in your own system. You're also more likely to be choosing a prospect who you wouldn't make freely available to another club—that is, someone who is better than the conceptual definition of replacement.

That's why so many prospects end up starting their major league careers out of position. Miguel Cabrera spent years in the outfield before returning to third base; Melky Cabrera and Jacoby Ellsbury both played more left than center upon their initial callups, and Chris Coghlan won last year's Rookie of the Year Award as a second baseman playing left field. Hell, Jackie Robinson spent 1947 as a first baseman.

In real life, we've always known that replacement level is contextual. What's I'm suggesting is that, as we get farther to the easy side of the defensive spectrum, it gets more and more contextual.

But regardless of the numerical replacement levels that result, it is clear to me that in most cases, a team's replacement level is lower than we think at difficult positions and higher than we think at easy ones.

It follows, then, that we may be overvaluing players at the easy positions and undervaluing those at the hard ones. That may be part of the reason that "strength up the middle" appears to translate into more wins. The linked study was based on Win Shares, so it may not apply to other WAR-type stats. But I suspect the underlying problem is what I've described, and it affects other versions of WAR as well.

In my mind, the notion of replacement level just got a whole lot more complicated.

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There are plenty of fascinating historical topics having to do with the Federal challenge and its ultimate resolution, but what interests me most is what a sudden shock of massive expansion did to the talent level in the "major" leagues.

In 1913, there were 16 major league teams. In 1914, there were 24. As population grows and coaching improves, the talent pool increases as well, but it doesn't increase by 50 percent in one season!

So how much did the overall talent level suffer? There's plenty of evidence that the Federal League was never quite on par with the AL and NL, but how much worse was it? And how much did the established leagues lose when the Federals raided their rosters?

Predicting the future of the past


There are a lot of ways to estimate the relative talent level in a league. In comparing a wide range of league-seasons, some analysts like to use population levels, which is an interesting way to consider the impact of integration on major league baseball of the 1950s and 1960s.

To handle more specific problems, analysts tend to look at the year-to-year statistics of players who switched leagues, or even in-season totals of players who were traded from one league to another. For instance, if Lance Berkman OPS's .750 for the Yankees after posting an .808 mark for the Astros, that would be one data point supporting the theory that the AL is tougher than the NL.

Virtually any method in either of these categories lacks either specificity (in the case of population measures) or a sufficient sample (in the case of many league-switching studies). That isn't a knock on analysts who attempt such studies; it's the nature of the beast.

I'd like to try another approach: using retrospective projections. Using an algorithm to predict performance, we can "forecast" how any player would perform in 1914, 1941, or 1961. A system like Marcel (which I'm using for the present exercise) allows us to use three years of data, plus a regression component, to estimate each player's true talent level going into any given season.

That's a mouthful, so let's look at an example. One of the more prominent players to jump to the Federal League was Hal Chase, a man always ready to jump at a few dollars. In 1911, '12, and '13, Chase posted OPS numbers of .762, .671, .660 in about 570 plate appearances per season.

If Marcel had existed back in the winter of 1913-14, it would've predicted that the soon-to-be 31-year-old Chase would post a .681 OPS—near the middle of his past three years' performances, with a bit of a downward nudge for being on the wrong side of 30.

As it turned out, Chase spent about half of the 1914 season with Buffalo of the Federal League. In Buffalo, his OPS was much better than expected: .870. In the other half of the season, with the American League White Sox, his performance was .708, much closer to the projected estimate. If the only information we had at our disposal was the experience of Hal Chase, we'd conclude that the Federal League was very, very hitter-friendly, either due to tiny parks or lower-quality pitching.

League switchers


Of course, we have data on far more Federals than just Hal Chase. After we take out pitchers and players who had never appeared in the majors before joining the FL, we're left with about 70 guys. The vast majority of them performed better than projections.

Once we weight each hitter's experience by playing time both before and after the switch, the average gain (measured by wOBA, a great overall measure for offensive value) works out to about 8 percent. That's huge. Representative of the league-wide trend was Mickey Doolan. His projection was .235/.286/.302, but his performance in the FL was .245/.311/.323. Not very good in either league, but considerably better with the upstarts.

Still, we're left without the entire picture. We can estimate a batter moving from the AL/NL to the FL would generate about 8 percent more offense. But why? We might hypothesize that weaker pitching is the answer, but what if all the Federal League parks were tiny? If the entire league moved from, say, Miller Park to Coors Field, offense would certainly go up, but it wouldn't say anything about the level of competition.

Fortuantely, we have data on pitchers, too. To keep things simple, I'm not going to worry about separating pitching and defense; I'll stick with Run Average to group the two together.

Once again, we have a decent sample to work with: about 40 pitchers with AL/NL projections who played in the FL. Again weighting for playing time, their RA's improved by about 7 percent. In other words, pitchers who left for the Federal League generally posted better numbers in their new home, suggesting that the level of play was markedly lower in the renegade organization.

(Remember, the 7 percent difference encompasses pitching and defense. If we assume that defensive prowess was relatively low in the Federal League, it may be that the pitchers themselves improved by more than 7 percent.)

League stickers


What about the situation back on the home front? The AL and NL lost some stars, but not a huge percentage of them. It seems implausible that the established leagues suffered so much as to make them equal with the Federals, but at the same time, could they have really maintained their level of play against the Federal raids?

The answer is a bit surprising. Using the same techniques as I described above, AL and NL hitters performed 4 percent worse than projected. AL pitchers beat projections by 2 percent, while NL pitchers outperformed forecasts by 3 percent.

Let's take a closer look at what these changes are telling us. If hitters performed worse than projected, that would seem to suggest that the level of competition—at least the average quality of pitching—has gone up. The fact that pitchers beat their projections hints at a change in environment, but the changes were about equal for each league, and no clubs switched parks between the 1913 and 1914 seasons.

If the environment is not the cause, perhaps Federal raids were lopsided and the established leagues were able to keep most of their quality pitchers while losing some better hitters. Or clubs were better at scouting and acquiring quality minor league hurlers than picking up hitters from the farm, making life tougher on veteran hitters than on veteran pitchers.

Whatever the reason, the unexpected conclusion is that, despite a quasi-expansion, the established leagues may have been slightly more competitive in 1914 than in 1913.

In fact, the average level of play across 24 teams was not much worse than the level of play across 16 teams the previous season. Taking all three leagues together, batters hit about 1.5 percent worse than expected, while pitching and defense was about 3.5 percent better than expected. That's a net decline in the talent level, but only a tiny one—small enough to give us a different view on the effect of any increase in league size.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jeff Sackmann 2010-08-05T05:04:15+00:00 The most surprising .300 hitters http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-most-surprising-.300-hitters/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-most-surprising-.300-hitters/#When:05:03:15 Yadier Molina.

Of course, some .300 hitters are different from others. For every Yadi, there's a Todd Helton or Joe Mauer, who disappoints when his batting average doesn't start with a three. For today, I'm interested in the Yadis of the past, the guys with proven track records of mediocre batting averages who nonetheless join the .300 club.

Finding the surprises


How do we identify which .300 hitters qualify as surprises? We could compare each .300 season to the player's previous campaign, but that might just as easily reveal a unusually bad earlier season. We need to take a broader view.

That's where Marcel projections come in. Usually we use projections to predict the future—after all, that's pretty much the meaning of the word. But in order to predict the future, any forecasting system is, at least in part, making an estimate of the present. In other words, when forecasters projected Yadi's 2008 season, they were looking at the past and making a conclusion as to his true ability level.

It is fascinating—maybe even valuable— to have an estimate of a player's true talent level given the information available at a certain time in the past. To find projections of a player's performance for recent years, you're just a Google search away. But what if you wanted to estimate, say, Ted Williams' true talent level given the data available before the 1943 season, which he missed due to the war?

For this project (and others to come), I ran the Marcel algorithm through baseball history back to 1901. If you'd rather find some cool stuff yourself rather than read about what I find, I've made the full spreadsheets available. Have fun.

Marcel takes a player's performance over the past three years, combines it with a dose of league average, and spits out an estimate of how he will perform the next year. Thus, for every .300 season (or any other single-season milestone you care to consider), you can compare the actual results to Marcel's preseason estimate.

When discrepancies arise, the speculation can begin. In the jarring differences we'll see in a moment, did the player just get lucky for a season? Did he "put things together?" Is Marcel less skillful when forecasting certain types of players? Whatever the answer, it surely isn't the same in every case.

From zero (or .225) to .300


1. Richie Scheinblum - 1972. In March and April of '72, Scheinblum must have impressed somebody. In early May, the Royals traded away Al Oliver, and they handed Scheinblum the right field job. You have to wonder why.

The previous year, he hit .143 in 57 plate appearances. Two years before that, he got 222 plate appearnces for the Indians, in which he hit .186. Sure, a disproportionate number of those were pinch-hitting appearances, in which it's harder to have success. Given under 300 plate appearances, Marcel doesn't have a lot to go on, but even when heavily regressing him up to league average, the result is a .222 average and a wOBA of only .278. Yikes.

Sure enough, given the opportunity, Richie hit an even .300. He even walked 11 percent of the time for good measure. And it wasn't a total fluke—as a part-timer, he did even better in 1973, hitting .307. But in '74, he posted a .183/.242/.200 line and never got another shot.

2. Bill McKechnie - 1914. From 1911 to 1913, future Hall of Fame manager McKechnie was a part-timer, but Marcel saw enough in his roughly 600 plate appearances to mark him down for a .225 average in 1914. What Marcel didn't know is that he would move from the AL and NL to the upstart Federal League.

The 1914-15 Federal League is a subject worth an article in its own right (look for that in August). For today's purposes, it's enough to know that by poaching as many major leaguers as it could, it put out a pretty decent level of baseball but ended up diluting the talent pool in all three leagues as a result.

This precursor of the expansion era isn't enough to explain McKechnie's jump from .227, .247, and .129 up to .304, but it does help. Unlike Scheinblum's, McKechnie's magic didn't last. He managed only a .251 average in the 1915 Federal League and never hit above .260 again. Surely his two World Series rings as manager made him feel better.

3. Jim Hickman - 1970. Now this is what you call a career year. In 13 major league seasons, he hit above .275 only once. His OBP topped .370 once. He slugged better than .465 only once. But all of those personal bests came in tandem. For the '70 Cubs, Hickman hit .315/.419/.582, leaving it to posterity to figure out where those 613 plate appearances came from.

There are minor explanations, but not enough to explain the difference between Marcel's forecasted .234 average and Hickman's actual .315. The National League average of .280 was higher in 1970 than any other year of his career. And a BABIP of .337 was far better (luckier?) than any other he posted. Maybe Hickman just liked goats.

4. Ray Powell - 1921. For the first time, we're looking at a guy who was a true regular for the two years before his surprise .300 season. Powell logged a lot of time for some bad Boston Braves teams but posted his best results on a decent one.

In 1919 Powell hit .236/.303/.326 and led the league in strikeouts for good measure. In 1920 he struck out even more often and fell back to a .225/.282/.314 line. (Maybe it was some consolation that George Kelly struck out even more often, keeping Powell out of first place in that department.) Had Marcels been published, there wouldn't have been many Braves fans taking issue with the forecast of a .238 average.

Except for Powell himself. He kept striking out in 1921, leading the league again. He also led the league in triples, homered a dozen times (no mean feat in the early 20s) and hit .306/.369/.462. Maybe he hated Rabbit Maranville; the Braves shipped him out in the offseason, and for the next three years, Powell hit much better than the future Hall of Fame shortstop.

5. Rickey Henderson - 1999. For the Padres, Angels, and A's in 1996-98, Rickey walked a ton. And it's a good thing, because he wasn't getting to first base very often via the base hit. Given those three years of data, Marcel didn't question his value—it projected a .337 wOBA—but there was no reason to expect a renaissance of singles. Marcel forecast a .238 average.

Mets fans know the rest of the story. As part of the Wild Card-winning club, Henderson kept on walking and complimented his famous baserunning and patience with a batting average of .315. As was the case with Hickman, his BABIP explains a lot. 36.3 percent of Rickey's balls in play became base hits, the second-highest rate of his career. It was one of only three times he topped 30 percent after his 30th birthday.

More surprises


There have been close to 3,000 .300 hitters in the last hundred years, and had Marcel been around all that time, about 200 of them would have been projected to hit .260 or worse.

Click here to see the full spreadsheet of all those .300 hitters, together with their Marcel projections as well as their Marcels for the following year, to get an idea of how much the surprise season influenced an estimate of their true talent level.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jeff Sackmann 2010-07-29T05:03:15+00:00 Free Mike Hessman http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/free-mike-hessman/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/free-mike-hessman/#When:08:50:15 Mike Hessman is 32 years old. In the last 15 years, he has played more than 1,600 games in the minor leagues, and 77 in the majors. He's played regularly for the Triple-A affiliate of three different franchises, and he worked his way through the Braves system so long ago that some of the teams he played for don't exist anymore.

If you like traditional stats, you probably don't care much for Hessman. His career batting average in the minors is .232, and he's had a shocking six seasons below .220. Then again, you can't complain about his 329 minor league home runs, which contribute to a very respectable .460 slugging percentage.

Of course, minor league career stats don't mean much. It doesn't make sense to mix in Triple-A numbers with rookie-ball results. As a gauge of Hessman's talent, we care most about his numbers one step away from the bigs, which were compiled between age 24 and 32:
Year  Age  Tm        Aff  PA   BA     OBP    SLG    
2002  24   Richmond  ATL  532  0.262  0.321  0.486  
2003  25   Richmond  ATL  395  0.248  0.296  0.440  
2004  26   Richmond  ATL  304  0.287  0.365  0.562  
2005  27   Toledo    DET  547  0.214  0.313  0.436  
2006  28   Toledo    DET  394  0.165  0.269  0.406  
2007  29   Toledo    DET  498  0.254  0.356  0.540  
2008  30   Toledo    DET  473  0.271  0.374  0.602  
2009  31   Toledo    DET  548  0.217  0.324  0.442  
2010  32   Buffalo   NYM  249  0.287  0.369  0.616
We're looking at a unique player. He profiles like Russell Branyan only, if anything, more extreme. The patience and power is exemplary, but you surely won't be surprised to learn that he strikes out nearly 30 percent of the time.

Gotta be like Mike


A quick glance at those numbers, and I'd understand if you assumed Hessman was a 1B/DH, the sort of guy where "first baseman" should always come with scare quotes. But that's not the case.

Hessman has played almost all of his pro career at the hot corner. And if TotalZone is to be believed, he's been damn good.
Year   Team     Chances  Runs  
2005   Toledo       201     +1  
2006   Toledo       260    +11  
2007   Toledo       307    +26  
2008   Toledo       242     0  
2009   Toledo       293    +13  
2010   Buffalo      122     +4  
TOTAL              1425    +55
As with any defensive metric reporting on 120-game samples, there's plenty of volatility here. Surely he wasn't worth 26 runs above average in 2007. But by the same token, five and a half years of above-average numbers can't be written off.

In fact, pro-rating Hessman's TotalZone numbers for the years that results are available, he averaged about 14 runs above the typical Triple-A third baseman. That doesn't mean he'd be +14 per 150 games in the majors—a realistic translation is probably about +9—but even if we irrationally slash those numbers by half, a well-established +7 indicates a very good defender.

Stereotyped and buried


If you can accept the claim that Hessman is a solid fielder—possibly even an elite one—the picture changes considerably.

If we translate Hessman's stats back to 2005, he comes out with a major-league-equivalent OPS of about .700, and that includes his dreadful 2006 season. A probably more accurate assessment is rendered by various projection systems, some of which put him above .760.

An OPS of .760 is a convenient number, it turns out. Last year, the major league average at third base was .757. (With, admittedly, a higher OBP and a lower SLG than Hessman would bring to the table.) Even if you are pessimistic and think he's closer to a .700-level player, you may be interested to know that nine teams got less than a .700 OPS from third base last year. Those clubs include the Twins, Phillies and Cardinals.

Find this man a home


At the moment, Hessman just back from an injury that kept him out of the lineup for more than a month. Now he's healthy, he's probably stuck manning third for Buffalo until the end of the season. It shouldn't be that way.

If he is to get a chance this season, he'll have to find a new home. As much as I may complain, I'm not about to argue that the Mets should move their third baseman to make room! But this year, like last, there are plenty of teams that could use a power bat with good defense at third base.

Ten major league clubs have gotten a .710 OPS or worse out of third base. Three are contenders and would become more credible ones with Hessman on board.

The White Sox have settled on Omar Vizquel as a stopgap. Vizquel's defense may be great, but that's all he's offering, and as we've seen, Hessman can hack it in the field as well. Even if Mark Teahen returns, he may not be a better option than the Mets minor leaguer.

The Twins need even more help at third base. Enough pixels have been spilled complaining about Ron Gardenhire's commitment to Nick Punto, so I'll just add that despite Punto's quality defense, he's currently slugging .307. If the Twins are willing to give up a player to be named later, they could instantly add at least 100 points to that.

Putting on the worst show in the majors this year at third are the Angels. It would be an exaggeration to say that they must upgrade the position if they want to chase down the Rangers, but it certainly looks like the easiest way to boost their production. Kevin Frandsen has hit well enough to bring the cumulative third base OPS up (yes—up!) to .555, but he's not an acclaimed defender, nor does he have the potential to make a serious difference at the plate.

But even in the era of WAR and wOBA, a man with a .220 batting average is a tough sell. And I understand why scouts aren't raving about him—if 23 percent of your fly balls are of the infield variety and 28 percent of your plate appearances end in a strikeout, it's easy to look really bad on any given day.

Can't we look past all that? Hessman is probably past his prime, and in two or three more years, he won't have the skills to contribute even if a team does give him a chance. Right now, he's an untapped asset. Someone needs to make the call.

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Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jeff Sackmann 2010-07-17T15:51:15+00:00 Advanced pro debuts http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/advanced-pro-debuts/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/advanced-pro-debuts/#When:15:13:15
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Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jeff Sackmann 2010-07-15T18:44:15+00:00 Book review: The Eastern Stars http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/book-review-the-eastern-stars/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/book-review-the-eastern-stars/#When:08:35:15
On July 2 each year, about a month after the amateur draft, the international signing period opens and major league teams stock up on promising teenagers from around the world—mostly Latin America. Then most of us forget about those players until the best of them start cracking prospect lists a few years later.

To acknowledge the influence of "Latin America" on modern baseball is too vague: It obscures more than it explains. A huge percentage of internationally born major leaguers are from the Dominican Republic. And a disproportionate number of them are from the area around San Pedro de Macoris.

San Pedro's all-star team would have a fighting chance against the best of just about any U.S. city. Starting with Rico Carty, the area has produced stars such as George Bell, Tony Fernandez and Pedro Guerrero. In the big leagues now are Macorisanos Robinson Cano, Alfonso Soriano and Jose Valverde, among many others.

Yet to the average baseball fan, the name of the town gets you a blank stare. Surely there's a story here. Why San Pedro and not somewhere else in the Dominican? Why so many middle infielders that San Pedro has earned the moniker "The Cradle of Shortstops?"

The Eastern Stars


Mark Kurlansky has attempted to fill the gap with his recent book, The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris. He traces the history of San Pedro through its multiple spells as part of Spain's Dominican colony, into its years as the home of U.S.-owned sugar mills, up to today's baseball factory.

It is in describing the earlier stages that Kurlansky is sure-handed. The Dominican has always been something of an afterthought in the Caribbean, passed around from one imperial power to another, with a culture that owes much to those of Haiti and Cuba.

When we get to the baseball, the book starts to disappoint. It's clear that Kurlansky isn't compelled by the baseball angle. Or if he is, he has little interest in how Dominicans fit into the broader picture of U.S. baseball. He spends as much time on recipes for San Pedro delicacies as he does trying to answer the question that makes his topic an interesting one.

He is to be commended for spending as much time in San Pedro as he clearly did. The pages of The Eastern Stars are filled with quotes from ex-major and minor leaguers, family members, scouts and buscans, the men who prepare Dominican teenagers for pro academies.

The downside is that these interviews appear to comprise almost all of his research. As any baseball historian can tell you, ex-ballplayers aren't always the most reliable sources when it comes to their own exploits. To take just one example, he accepts Rafael Vasquez at his word that in rookie ball, Vasquez "struck out five batters in a row and was immediately sent up to Class A." Nice story, but what Kurlansky calls a "phenomenally swift" rise really involved 53 innings before the promotion. Any single fact-check sounds like a nitpick, but there are more than enough fudges of the sort to make this a tough read for a baseball fan.

Stories untold


I'll admit that some of my disappointment with The Eastern Stars isn't fair to the author. There's a certain book I'd love to read; it isn't the one he set out to write.

It doesn't take much imagination to realize that the path to the big leagues is very, very different for a Dominican teenager than for his U.S. counterpart. The level of poverty in San Pedro beyond most of our experience, and the focus on baseball-as-salvation is a far cry from neighborhoods where Little League is what kids do between music lessons and homework.

Kurlansky gives us plenty of hints about the difficult transition from the Dominican academies to U.S. farm teams, and he reminds us now and then about the long odds facing any San Pedro kid, even after he signs a contract. But there's an immediacy that's clearly missing.

It's that immediacy that I think is missing from the awareness of most baseball fans. We can marvel at how exciting and bewildering it must be for a teenager from Mississippi to be drafted, signed and sent to Montana for rookie ball. But I, for one, wish I understood better the parallel system by which Dominican players go from promising prospect to a Dominican academy to, well, Montana. The language barrier is a big part of the problem; no intrepid team bloggers interviewed A's mega-prospect Michael Ynoa last year.

The Eastern Stars leaves the reader with a much clearer impression of where these players come from, and the lives led by their parents and grandparents. But it doesn't do much to explain why San Pedro has been responsible for so much baseball greatness, and it leaves the prospects themselves just as opaque as they've always been.


Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jeff Sackmann 2010-07-15T08:35:15+00:00 Does every *seller* get one representative? http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/does-every-seller-get-one-representative/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/does-every-seller-get-one-representative/#When:14:04:15
Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jeff Sackmann 2010-07-10T14:04:15+00:00