Boy of Summer

Yoenis Cepedes: Why the A's Just Threw Away $36M

2012-02-15T13:24:00.000-05:00

The normally frugal Oakland A's this week signed outfielder Yoenis Cespedes, the latest Cuban defector, who is expected to be...well, nobody knows exactly what to expect from him. Oakland paid $36 million for him for four years, but it's likely that the small market club doled out a good deal more than any of his other suitors were offering, if only because they actually signed him and the others did not.

Additionally, you would imagine that to entice such a prospective talent to come to a team as abysmal as the A's, you would have to offer significantly more than the competition. Consider also that the Marlins, his most oft-mentioned suitor before the actual signing, play in a state that has no state income tax, and that California's is 10.3% for people making over a million per year. With both factors in play, you would indeed have to assume a formidable gap between the respective teams' offers. His agent, Adam Katz, would surely have advised him of these considerations, even if he was unfamiliar with them, having just gotten off the boat, so to speak.

But those issues ultimately pale in comparison to the question of how good Cepedes really is. Projections range all over, and while he apparently has great tools (and a bold and unconventional marketing department) it's literally anybody's guess what he's going t be capable of on a major league field, 1000-lb squat presses notwithstanding.

The history of Cuban prospects, particularly those who have broken in as free agents after defecting, is frankly abysmal. Since 1960, when Cuba became communist and the United States essentially severed economic ties with it, there have been 45 Cuban born players in MLB.

When you weed out the pitchers, you're left with 20 players, and most of them came through the draft after having gone to high school in Miami or something like that. Of those 20, 13 have played 100 or more games in the majors,though several are young enough to yet have a significant career in the majors.

Only seven Cuban born players have produced more than one WAR for their careers, according to baseball-reference.com, though several others had careers of considerable length, even with out a substantially positive career WAR total. Even that isn't worthless, we must realize, as those players had to have good seasons sprinkled in with the bad ones in order to achieve a net result of about zero.

Normally, if you wanted an analysis of what Cepedes would do, you would perhaps take an average of what has been accomplished by all players like him, while controlling for as many factors as you can (age, handedness, defensive position, body type, etc.). The trouble is that we have so few players to use for such an analysis that it would be moot. So instead I'll look at each player more or less individually, and we'll see if there's anything to be learned.

First of all, let's look at the players who were born in Cuba but drafted in the US, typically because they were children when their parents defected from Cuba.

Jose Canseco - Drafted out of high school in the 15th round in 1982, won 1986 AL RoY, 1988 AL MVP, the first "40 HR - 40 SB" player in history, "better living through chemistry" and all that rot. Clearly talented, but we'll never know what he's have been if he wasn't Juiced.

Rafael Palmeiro - Drafted out of college in the 1st round in 1985, one of a handful of players with 3000 hits and 500 homers, will never get into the Hall of Fame because of a failed drug test and the ensuing scandal that ended his career.

*For the record, Jose and Raffy own about half of all the at-bats and hits and almost 3/4 of all major league homers by Cuban players born in the last half century.

Ozzie Canseco - Jose's twin brother, drafted as a pitcher a year later than Jose, by the Yankees in the 2nd round. After a few unremarkable years pitching in the minors, the Yanks tried to turn him into a hitter on the assumption that he couldn't be that much worse than his MVP brother. But he was.

Orestes Destrade - Though the slugging firstbaseman was signed originally as an undrafted free agent, it wasn't for a lack of effort. The Angels tried to draft him in 1980 but he didn't sign, and the Yanks got him a year later. He had some power but little else and never made a mark in the majors in the 80's, then went to Japan for a few years before signing with the expansion Marlins in 1993. He went back to Japan after the 1994 season for a year and has been doing broadcasting ever since.

Eli Marrero - Third round draft pick by the Cards in 1993, Marrero played parts of 10 seasons with seven different teams in the majors, rarely getting into more than half of his team's games. You can do worse than to have a career as a major league reserve/platoon catcher, but clearly he was no star.

Alex Sanchez - This 5th round 1996 draft pick is the type of player who should have "Run, Don't Walk" tattooed on his person somewhere. Sanchez spent parts of five seasons in the majors with four different teams. He had speed, but no patience or power and did not particularly steal bases well (122 steals, but 58 times caught) or play good defense. He was notably the first major league player ever suspended under the new MLB drug testing program.

Nelson Santovenia - Another first round draft pick, 19th overall in 1982, this catcher played parts of seven seasons with three different teams, and his best season involved hitting .236 with 8 homers.

Yunel Escobar - Currently with his second MLB team, the starting short stop for the Blue Jays, this 2nd round draft pick has decent patience and bat control, hits for modest average and power and plays good defense. He'll never be a star, but is worth a couple of wins per year over a replacement level player.

To date, only four free agent Cuban defectors have had significant careers: Rey Ordonez, Yuniesky Betancourt, Alexei Ramirez and Kendrys Morales. Ordonez, of course was thought to be the second coming of Ozzie Smith, and while he had considerable talents as a defensive shortstop - he won three Gold Gloves and probably deserved at least two of them - he had neither the modest offensive skills nor the longevity of the Wizard, and was out of the majors at age 33, his ninth season in the bigs.

Several others have defected in the last decade or so, and most of them are still around somewhere. These players are of particular interest because they were free agents and therefore able to negotiate deals on the open market, unlike drafted players or those won in a lottery, like Ordonez.

Brayan Pena - A true backup catcher, Pena is now 30 years old and unlikely to make an impact on the major leagues, but with parts of seven major league seasons under his belt, including the last three as the Royals backup backstop. He was signed for an undisclosed amount by the Braves in 2000 and got a few cups of coffee with them before going to KC. Again, no star, but good enough to stick on most major league benches.

Juan Diaz - Signed for an undisclosed amount by the Dodgers in 1996, Diaz hit with some pop in the minors but got only a 2002 cup of coffee with Boston in MLB and has basically been out of the system since 2006. He's now thrilling the crowds in places like Joliet and Winnipeg in the Northern League, never having really made it to the show.

Michel Hernandez - Signed by the Yankees as a free agent in 1998, he's your basic catch and throw guy behind the plate, which is to say he'll never hit enough to get a job in the majors, especially given that he's now 33. He's gotten a handful of at bats with the Yanks and later the Rays, but will probably never see a major league field again unless he buys a ticket.

Barbaro Canizares - Free agent signed by the Braves in 2006, he's hit for decent averages with patience and doubles power in the high minors, but was allowed to go to the Mexican Leagues last year because the Braves had an even better prospect, Freddie Freeman, who hit even more and is only 21. Canizares hit .396 in Mexico in 2011, which is notorious for inflating offense but hey, three-ninety six?!??!! Give the guy a shot, right? Anyway, he's 32, so probably not.

Now we're getting into the handful of known commodities, at least in terms of their actual contracts.

Juan Miranda - Miranda defected in 2004, at the age of 21, and signed with the Yankees for about $2 million over four years in 2006. He's hit for modest numbers in the minors (.282/.373/.477 over four seasons in AAA) and has gotten a few at-bats in the majors, but isn't likely to be an impact player. When he was signed, a Yankee official said, "Miranda is projected to hit over 20 home runs and hit .280. He doesn't swing at bad pitches." Presumably the official meant that he would be able to do that in the majors, not at AAA, but we haven't seen it yet, and at almost 29 years old, time is running out. Presumably if the Yankees thought he was likely to do that, they'd have offered him more than a shade over the major league minimum salary for those four seasons.

Dayan Viciedo - Defected in 2008 at age 19 and was signed by the White Sox for four years and $10 million. His numbers were all with the Cuban junior circuit, but they were impressive enough to merit that contract, and he has not disappointed so far. He's improved in each year in the minors and spent parts of the last two seasons with the ChiSox as an occasional RF, DH or firstbaseman. He's projected as the starting RF for the Pale Hose in 2012, now that Carlos Quentin is gone, but he's a DH waiting to happen, if Adam Dunn doesn't bounce back from his miserable 2011 campaign.

Jose Iglesias - Signed to a four year, $8.2 million contract by the Red Sox in 2009, he was regarded as their best prospect before the 2011 season, but then hit just .235 with one homer for Pawtucket last year. He's only 22 and his defense is his calling card, but if he can't hit a little, he'll never get to play it.

Leonys Martin - Signed a 5-year, $15.5 million contract with the Rangers before last season, and hit a combined .295/.362/.421 at three minor league levels last year. That's buttressed largely by the .348 he hit in 29 games at Frisco in the AA Texas League, where .300 batting averages practically fall out of the sky like manna. (Someone named Wes Timmons hit .365 there last year, while non-prospects such as Drew Locke, Jordan Parraz and Paul McAnulty have hit .330 or better there in the last several years.) Viciedo has potential ot be a useful major leaguer for a few years, like Ordonez wasLike Iglesias, Matrin will need to hit in the majors if he wants to stick around. He'll be 24 in March, so he's got time to make good on that contract, but clearly still needs to prove himself at AAA (where he hit .263 with no homers in almost 200 plate appearances).

So there you have them: all of the position players born in Cuba in the last five decades who ever saw any MLB service time. The list is not encouraging. The numbers are better for the drafted players, because of course the teams signing them have better information on them before doing so and hence we would expect more of them to pan out, or they wouldn't have been drafted.

But the free agents are almost all busts, or marginal major leaguers at best. Viciedo has the potential to be a useful major league for a few years, maybe even have a few really good seasons in the middle of a 10-year career, but the rest look like organizational soldiers or guys with one skill (power, defense) but no others, and hence not MLB material.

It's worth noting that Cuban pitchers have fared better than this, with the likes of Livan Hernandez, Orlando Hernandez, Danys Baez, Jose Contreras, Rolando Arrojo, and now Aroldis Chapman. Even Ariel Prieto had 3.0 WAR for his disappointing career and Vladimir Nunez pitched for almost a decade in the majors, albeit rarely all that well.

The reason for this, I think, is obvious: You can tell right away whether a pitching prospect can throw hard and straight, which is most of what pitching entails. Determining whether a prospect will be able to hit such pitches - not to mention curves and sliders and change ups and the like - is a much more complex and drawn out task.

And as for Cepedes, well, don't be surprised if he takes a little while to get acclimated and even longer to become the star people seem to think he'll be.

Or if he never does.

Yankees Search for Lefty DH

2012-02-07T12:10:00.000-05:00

Rumors this morning indicate, not surprisingly, that the Yankees are looking to add a lefty bat to their roster and that the candidates for said position include Former Yankees Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui, as well as Raul Ibanez.

Ick.

OK, so Damon's not terrible. He hit .261/.326/.418 last year, including 29 doubles and 19 steals. Though not the youngest of the trio, he clearly has the youngest legs. Ibanez has not stolen more than four bases in a season since 2005 and Matsui has only 13 steals in his nine-year MLB career. Which means that Damon stands the best chance of being a useful bat next year, especially given the struggles of the other two in 2011.

Matsui hit a paltry .251/.321/.375 last year with only a dozen homers, though it's worth noting that some of that was the result of the Oakland Mausoleum. Baseball-Reference.com's park factor adjustment tool suggests that he'd have hit .271/.343/.403 in Yankee Stadium, making his 2011 numbers slightly more palatable, of not actually any more valuable. According to B-R, he was worth exactly ZERO Wins Above Replacement (WAR) last year and while mediocrity isn't useless on a baseball field, it's hardly something for a team competing for a championship to aspire to. Besides that, he's 37 years old now and hasn't played a full, healthy season since 2005.

Ibanez was signed by the Phillies as a free agent before the 2009 season for three years and $30 million, which resulted in significant amounts of laughing and mockery of the Phillies front office by almost anyone with a computer and an internet connection. But then something funny happened: Ibanez was awesome.

Well, he was awesome for two months, anyway. Despite having a career slash line of .286/.346/.472, Ibanez started his age-37 season hitting .312/.371/.656 with 22 homers in 62 games. Then he sustained a groin injury and when he came back he was a shell of his former self, sputtering to a .232 average with only 12 homers after the All-Star break. In fact, his overall performance in almost 400 games since mid-2009 has been .255/.321/.435 with 21 homers per 162 games, well-below his career averages and not likely to improve significantly as he approaches his fourth decade on Earth.

While not as injury-riddled as Matsui has been, Ibanez was frequently benched last year due to ineffectiveness and so only played about 140 games. The Yankees wouldn't need him to start every day, since he can't hit lefties at all anymore (.211/.232/.353 against them in 2011), but even his line against right-handers last year (.256/.307/.440) was uninspiring. Overall, expecting a full, productive year out of Ibanez seems foolish.

And any thoughts of him spelling Nick Swisher or Brett Gardner at the outfield corners once in a while are misguided at best. Ibanez was a terrible defensive left fielder last year, 1.2 wins below a replacement level player, according to B-R, and this at perhaps the easiest defensive position on the field. That's what Justin Maxwell and Chris Dickerson are for. Even Andruw Jones (+0.4 defensive WAR in limited playing time) is a better option than Ibanez would be.

The trouble with Damon, apparently, is that he wants five million dollars, and the Yankees aren't comfortable with that. Hard to blame them, given that Damon himself is already 38 years old and has no defensive value at all, having not played more than a couple of dozen games in the field since 2009. And of course, if those legs of his give out, he'll be the next thing to worthless.

The irony in all of this is that if the Yankees weren't The Yankees, they would have their pick of younger, cheaper options to fill this void. The Indians, for example, recently picked up the 2011 MVP of the International League, Russ Canzler, for "cash considerations" which is to say, almost nothing. No players, just money, and not very much of it, we presume. Maybe a million. Pocket change to a major league GM, even one from Tampa.

Canzler hit .314 with 18 homers and a .401 OBP for Durham last year, and will make the MLB minimum. He'll be 26 just after Opening Day, so he should be entering his prime as a hitter, and while it's possible that he's a "Quadruple-A" player, who can mash in the high minors but will get swallowed up by major league pitching, it's also possible that he'll be the next Erubiel Durazo or Brian Daubach, a minor league journeyman who just needed enough of a chance at the major league level to prove he could contribute.

The high minors are full of guys like Canzler. Aaron Bates, for example, was signed by the Twins to a minor league contract last year as roster filler, and promptly hit .316/.408/.439 for Rochester. He doesn't have a lot of power, but if he can produce like that in the majors he's an asset, even as a first baseman.

Cleveland's own AAA team featured OF Jerad Head, who hit .284 with 24 homers last season. Journeyman Dallas McPherson hit .283 with 20 homers for Charlotte in 2011. Jeremy Hermida hit .319 with 17 homers for Louisville last year, is 28 years old, is patient, a left handed hitter, and will come cheaply. John Bowker hit .306 with 15 homers for Indianapolis and also hits from the left side. Even the Yankees themselves have such a player: Jorge Vazquez, an almost 30-year old corner infielder who hit 32 homers for Scranton Wilkes-Barre last year, albeit with only 30 walks and 166 whiffs.

None of these guys is on their major league affiliates' depth charts, according to ESPN, and presumably any of them can be had for a song. One of them may give as much value or more to a major league team than the likes of Matsui and Ibanez, at this point in their careers, though they'll be no favorites of the sports betting types. The Yankees, however, rarely go in for the economically sound option, preferring instead the low-risk, known quantity types for such roles.

They can afford to spend a little more cash on a known entity like Damon or Ibanez and then, if they flop, just write them off and trade for someone else in July. Especially when considering that whomever they bring in for this role will only need to play one position for two-thirds of the season (against righties) and won't be expected to be a long term solution to this problem, it would seem that the Yanks have little reason to break from their usual patterns.

But it sure would be nice to see some Cinderella story make a dent in the Bronx this year.

Wakefield, Rivera Milestones Very Different; Notes on AJ Burnett's "Improvement"

2011-09-14T12:07:00.004-04:00

Some interesting milestones were reached last night in games across the AL East, at least.

Though it came in a crushing loss to the woeful Orioles, Tampa Bay's Johnny Damon became just the 9th player in MLB history with 200+ homers and 400 or more steals. Four of the nine (Roberto Alomar, Paul Molitor, Rickey Henderson and Joe Morgan) are already in the Hall of Fame and by rights, Craig Biggio will be someday soon. Barry Bonds and his dad, Bobby Bonds, are both on that list, as is Marquis Grissom.
The Ageless Wonder (as in "I Wonder why he's still pitching in the majors"), Tim Wakefield finally won his 200th career game. A somewhat less exclusive club than Damon's, Wake is the one hundred and eleventieth pitcher since 1871 to reach that milestone, and he has the highest career ERA in that club, though with adjustments for ballparks and time frame, he's only 16th worst.
And Mariano Rivera, a truly ageless wonder, notched his 600th career Save, being only the second man to do that. Trevor Hoffman was the first, and he's no longer adding to his 601 career Saves, so Rivera will likely lead the pack before the year is out.

I'll be the first to grant you that Saves are mostly a junk stat, a self fulfilling prophecy, overrated at best and at worst truly misleading. But holy cow, 600 of anything in baseball is kind of a lot, don't you think?

Even so, we don't need that stat to say how good Mariano Rivera has been in his career. There are 126 pitchers who have amassed at least 100 career Saves, and Rivera has the lowest ERA (2.22) of any of them.

His 2.22 career ERA is the best among active pitchers, and has been for four years running. (This isn't terribly unusual for a relief pitcher, as they tend to have lower ERAs in general, and if they stick around long enough, eventually amass 1000 or more innings. Lee Smith, John Franco, Kent Tekulve and Hoyt Wilhelm have all held this honor for multiple years.)

He also has the best winning percentage among pitchers with at least 300 career Saves, which is certainly a testament to the fact that he;s always pitched for good teams, but is also a sign that he manages to hold on more often than he chokes. You know, in case the 600 Saves weren't enough for you in that vein.

His 205 adjusted ERA is the best of all time for pitchers with at least 1000 innings under their belts, and that's one category in which he's not likely to be caught any time soon. No starting pitcher will ever do it, as they simply throw too many innings to ever be that good at relative run prevention for a whole career. For reference, Pedro Martinez is the next man on the all-time career list, and he had a career mark of 154.

Zach Grienke had a 205 in 2009, when he won the Cy Young award. Roger Clemens won seven of those - two more than anyone else in the history of MLB - and his mark is 143. Among active pitchers, Tim Lincecum, Roy Halladay and Johan Santana each have two Cy Young Awards, but are all around the 140 mark, and are unlikely to somehow significantly improve as they age.

The only remote possibility of anyone passing him is Jonathan Papelbon, who has a 201 ERA+ in 422 career innings. But he'll need to actually improve, to be as good as he was from 2006-09, and that for another whole decade, to knock Mo off that hill.

If you'd like to compare him to other elite relief pitchers, we can do that. Dennis Eckersley won a Cy Young Award and an MVP in 1992, pitching 80 innings and striking out 93, with a 1.91 ERA and 51 Saves. That performance was worth 3.0 WAR, according to baseball-reference.com. Mariano Rivera has had 12 years that were about that good or better. That's basically his whole career since 1996, excepting 2002, when he was hurt for part of the year, and 2007, when we was merely very good.

Or, to put it another way, if you add up the Cy Young year performances of every reliever to ever win the award, (Rollie Fingers, Bruce Sutter, Gagne, Eck, Mark Davis, Willie Hernandez, Sparky Lyle, Steve Bedrosian and Mike Marshall) you get a 67-39 record, 334 Saves and a 2.03 ERA (201 ERA+) in 1009 innings. Rivera, for his career, has a better adjusted ERA than that conglomerate, a better WHIP, better walk rate, better K rate, and therefore a better K/W. He also has an additional 198 innings with 14 walks, 216 strikeouts and a 3.18 ERA, or essentially two and a half more seasons worth of Cy-worthy relief efforts.

If you prefer modern metrics, Rivera's WPA of 56 is the best of anyone with at least 100 career Saves, far ahead of John Smoltz and Dennis Eckersley, both around 40. His WAR of 55.9 is behind only those two, though they both had a lot of starts to help in that department. Roy Halladay is only slightly ahead at 59 WAR, which should give you an idea of how valuable Rivera has been to the Yankees.

No active relief pitcher is even close to him, as Frankie Rodriguez has only about 22 WAR in his career. Among pitchers with fewer than 100 career starts, Rivera's 55.9 WAR are far and away the most, almost 50% more than Hoyt Wilhelm and Goose Gossage, both at about 40.

Anyway, congratulations to Mo the Yankees, one of the greatest of all time.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

On a separate note, and of more immediate importance, AJ Burnett seemingly pitched quite well last night, allowing two runs in six innings, with mercifully only two walks and 11 strikeouts. But before we go crazy saying that he's "turned a corner" or "found himself" or "doesn't suck", let's look at the facts:

The mariners are the worst hitting team in the American League. They have averaged a paltry 3.41 runs per game this year. So, in Burnett's six innings, they would have been expected to score 2.27 runs.
They actually scored two runs, so Burnett saved about one quarter of one run better than an average AL pitcher.
Actually, it's worse than that. Because SafeCo Field is so tough on hitters, they've averaged only 3.23 runs/game at home. So Burnett saved 0.16 runs. Whoopee.

How bad are the Mariners' hitters? Well, not as bad as last year, when they averaged just 3.17 runs per game, the lowest mark by any MLB club since before the institution of the Designated Hitter rule. In fact, they're the first American League team since 1971-72 to average fewer than 3.5 runs per game for two consecutive years as well. At that time, however, about a third of the league averaged 3.5 runs per game or less, so clearly these Mariners are much worse, relative to their context.

There have been teams this bad for a year, on occasion, during the last three decades, but they always find a way to improve the next year. The Mariners are the first team not to make a significant improvement after such a terrible year, improving just three tenths of a run since 2011. Maybe 2012 will be their year to go from "atrocious" to just "bad".

But, in any case, let's not get too excited about Burnett's apparent improvement until he faces real major league hitters, OK?

Yankees Don't Need King Felix

2011-07-26T16:49:00.001-04:00

The New York Yankees have the second best record in the American League, currently 60-40, a season high 20 games above the .500 level. They have the best run differential in MLB, +135, and they have the best ERA+ (adjusted for ballpark factors and such) in the Junior Circuit as well, 19% better than the league average, trailing only the Phillies, who have a 123 mark in the slightly less challenging National League.

So why does ESPN's Yankees feature writer Andrew Marchand think they need pitching help? I'll let him tell you in his own words:

"[Felix] Hernandez, just 25, is the type of guy the Yankees dream about. They need a starter to team with CC Sabathia to get them through October.

Freddy Garcia and Bartolo Colon have pitched well enough to get the Yankees to October, but can they keep it up for three more months?

Colon might be able to miss bats in the late fall, but Garcia's mid-to-high 80s stuff usually doesn't translate then."

Really? He states that last part as though it's a foregone conclusion, a well-known fact, like that water is wet, snow is cold and that The Pentaverate meets tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado known as, "The Meadows."

But even shadier than the assertion that The Colonel puts an addictive chemical in his chicken is the notion that soft-tossers can't win in October. A brief scan of the career postseason Wins leaders reveals several names known more for their control and smarts than for their blazing speed: Andy Pettitte (19 Wins), Tom Glavine (14), Greg Maddux (11), David Wells (10) and Orlando Hernandez (9) comprise about half of the top ten or 11 postseason winners, and none of them had a fastball that averaged more than 90 mph for most of their careers.

Granted, Wells, Pettitte and El Duque could all get into the low 90's sometimes, but they all lived around 88 mph or so most of the time and got batters out with offspeed stuff, wits and experience. You could argue - and you'd be right, of course, smart-guy - that these "Wins" were largely attributable to the fact that these guys all pitched mostly for the Yankees and Braves of the last decade and a half, very good teams that would be expected to produce pitchers who win, even if they didn't pitch all that well.

But that's not the case here. Pettitte's ERA in the postseason was 3.83. Wells had a career postseason ERA of 3.17, and El Duque's was 2.55, all three better than their overall career ERA's. Glavine and Maddux were 3.30 and 3.27, respectively, though they both had losing postseason records because Braves hitters are contractually not obligated to hit in October. True story.

And besides those guys, the annals of baseball are practically filled with the names of starting pitchers who got outs in the postseason without necessarily lighting up the radar gun. Derek Lowe. Barry Zito. Clem Labine. Jimmy Key.

And while Garcia doesn't have as much experience in the October limelight as Pettitte or Glavine, he's not exactly some starry-eyed kid just up from the farm, either. He just turned 35 years old last month, and has more than 2,000 career innings in the major leagues. More to the point, Garcia has done just fine in the postseason, with a 6-2 record and a 3.11 ERA that's nearly a full run below his career mark in the regular season. Granted, his three postseasons occurred in 2000, 2001 and 2005, when (according to FanGraphs.com) Garcia was still throwing fastballs in the low 90's, but even that was not an overpowering arsenal by any stretch of the imagination.

Besides, Garcia's prowess as a pitcher has always been linked directly to the movement on his pitches, not necessarily their speed. In his younger days, he tended to walk more batters than he does now, a supposed result of trying too hard to steer pitches into the catcher's mitt rather than allow their natural movement to make them tough to hit. His walk rates dropped considerably when he went to the White Sox, and whether that was due to a superior pitching coach, change of scenery, or simple maturity, the change has mostly stuck.
Regardless of past experiences, this Freddy Garcia certainly seems to know how to retire hitters. Granted, he's had a rough time with the Red Sox this year, but then, who hasn't? His record of 0-2 with an ERA of s10.13 against them is terrible, bet then the 0-1, 5.40 record Hernandez has posted is not exactly something you'd want engraved on your Hall of Fame plaque either. Against other possible playoff contenders, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Detroit and Texas, he's 4-1 with a 1.93 ERA in 33 innings of work this season. Hard to complain about that, and certainly hard to justify saying that he can't somehow get the same batters out in October that he owned in May, June and July.

Overall, his 3.23 ERA is 14th among the 49 qualified AL pitchers, comfortably within the top 30%, and his 128 adjusted ERA is 12th in the American League. For the record, King Felix, whom Andrew Marchand is convinced would be a huge upgrade over Garcia, is currently 22nd on that list. Garcia has given the Yankees a Quality Start in 72% of his outings compared to just 64% for Hernandez, despite all the help he theoretically gets from Safeco Field.

Perhaps Marchand somehow perceives that Garcia is something less than he is because of his lackluster Win-Loss record. Though he's generally gotten excellent run support, Garcia has taken two "Tough Losses" this season, i.e. losses in Quality Starts, which is why his record is 9-7 instead of 11-5, as perhaps it rightly should be. A record of 11-5 might reassure everyone that Garcia is part of the solution, not part of the problem in the Yankees' starting rotation - which has allowed the 4th fewest runs per game in the AL this year, by the way. At the very least, it might stop people from writing articles like the one Marchand penned for ESPN.

On the other hand, Marchand specifically mentions the issue of run support when he brings another darling of the trade fodder discussions into the fray:

"If the Yankees were to deal for the Dodgers' Hiroki Kuroda, he might be a postseason upgrade. Kuroda has a National League-worst 12 losses, but that is due to 2.85 runs of support per game, the lowest average in the league. His ERA is barely over 3.00."

So, clearly, he understands that Wins and Losses are not entirely indicative of a pitcher's quality. (It's perhaps worth noting that Kuroda, despite his solid career ERA of 3.53, is singularly ineffective in games against the Junior Circuit, going just 3-8 with a 4.33 ERA in InterLeague games. Maybe he wouldn't be such an upgrade. Unless they could hide him in the bullpen through the first two rounds of the playoffs, anyway.)

Marchand seems to know that Hernandez isn't going anywhere anyway, as he repeatedly refers to how young (25) and how good (really, really) Hernandez is, and that this is exactly the type of pitcher that a franchise would want to use as the foundation of a half decade or so of playoff runs. Also, that the Yankees would have to give up the farm to get him, that he's signed at reasonable salaries through 2014 and...what was it?...something else...

Oh yeah: The Yankees don't need him.

Posada's Resurgence, Royals' Rotation, and the Tribe's Return to Earth

2011-06-30T12:55:00.000-04:00

We're about halfway through the 2011 baseball season, which seems like a good time to recap some of the more interesting developments in the major leagues this year. There is, of course, no shortage of such stories to consider, but a few of them that caught my eye are...

Jorge Posada:

Yankees' DH Jorge Posada, after infamously taking himself out of the lineup (he was hitting .165/.272/.349 at the time), has gone on an absolute tear, as I suggested he might. Since that day off and the media circus that followed it, Posada has hit .330/.398/.516. More important, perhaps, is that his BABiP skyrocketed from .164 to .375.

He had hit half a dozen homers in the first three weeks of the season, and perhaps fell in love a bit with his longball stroke, to the detriment of the rest of his approach. He had no doubles to that point in the season and managed only two of them - and no homers - in the next three weeks before Bench-gate. In any case, he's got eight doubles in the 103 plate appearances since then, plus three homers, so clearly he seems to be hitting with authority again.

Of course, Posada has only hit like this for a full season once in his life, and that was in 2007, at which time he was a spry young hatchling (catchling?) of 35, not a creaky, 39-year old DH. That required him to hit about 60 points above his career BABiP for the whole year, which just isn't likely to happen again, but Posada should be able to finish this streaky season with somewhat respectable numbers.

The Royals' ...umm..."Pitching" Rotation

The Kansas City Royals announced recently that they would be going to a 6-man starting pitching rotation, at least until the All-Star Break. Royals Authority makes a decent point in that such an arrangement should theoretically reduce the number of innings on the fragile, young arm of Danny Duffy, the one starting pitching on this team who has the potential a few years from now to be something more than "older".

At first glance, this seemed to me rather like making up for the fact that your only cars are a rusty old Ford Pinto and an AMC Pacer by also buying a Trabant. Sure, that car's a piece of crap, too, but at least dispersing the load between three cars (or, you know, six) reduces the chances of your bursting into flames when someone rear-ends your Pinto, right? The distinction, of course, is that someday Duffy might develop into a Camaro, or at least a Camry, while Kyle Davies is likely to always be a Chevette.

Still, this seems like a problem with a more conventional solution to me: Put Davies in the bullpen. He's been terrible in just about any situation this season - you don't amass a 7.46 ERA by being good once in a while - but for his career he's slightly better in the first couple of innings than he is during the later ones. Make him a long reliever. Let him focus on his low 90's fastball and curve and use his change up and slider/cutter only sparingly, and maybe he'll surprise you by being useful.

Lots of sub-mediocre starters have proven to be effective relievers, a list too long to bother naming. Kyle Davies is 27 years old and has a career adjusted ERA 23% worse than the leagues in which he's pitched. He's only pitched enough to qualify for the ERA title once and only once finished a season with an ERA that wasn't awful, i.e. with 10% below average. What exactly do they have to lose?

Pushing this guy out there every six days may save a couple of starts on Duffy's arm, but it also means that the bullpen and/or the bench are that much more shorthanded. Given that most of the rest of the rotation is pretty terrible too, they're going to need bullpen arms more than they need a 6th starter. Lets' not forget that the birth of the 5-man rotation was mostly because the Dodgers of the early 1970's actually had five good starters (Claude Osteen, Bill Singer, Don Sutton, Al Downing and Tommy John), not because they couldn't decide which of the five lousy ones was lousy enough to earn a demotion. The 2011 Royals have no such conundrum: Davies ought to go grab some pine.

Whither the Tribe?

Hey! Remember those heady days of Early May when the Cleveland Indians looked like they were young, hungry upstarts with surprising talent, running away with the AL Central Division title? They were 20-8, had a 4.5 game lead on their closest competition - the Royals, heady days indeed - and everyone was talking about how this might be their year to surprise everyone.

Granted, they're still in 1st place two months later, but now tied with the Tigers, they've gone just 22-29 since that hot start, with their offense as the main culprit. Having scored about 5.4 runs per game in the first month or so of the season, they've averaged just 3.7 runs per contest since then. They've got some decent pitching talent (Masterson, Carrasco, maybe Tomlin), but until they get Shin Soo Choo back or they get the kinds of performances they anticipated from the likes of Grady Sizemore or Carlos Santana, the Tribe can expect little more than to be overtaken by the Tigers.

Yankees' Jorge Posada Poised for Improvement

2011-05-19T22:51:00.001-04:00

The benching heard round the world on Saturday - Jorge Posada's choice to remove himself from the lineup rather than bat 9th - may have been just what he needs to get his terrible season turned around. The Yankees decided in the offseason that Posada's 39 year old knees and popgun arm were not going to serve them well as a catcher for a team making a run at a 28th world championship.

So they moved him to DH, except that he hasn't been doing much H'ing this year at all. He was hitting only .165/.272/.349 before Yankees manager Joe Girardi tried dropping him to the bottom of the order against Boston on Saturday night. Posada apologized for his part in the spat and everybody made nice and what-not, but the real question is whether it's reasonable to expect Posada to markedly improve over the rest of the season.

Part of the answer to that question relates to the $11.1 million Posada will earn this year and what his legacy will be as a player and a Yankee. But really, money is not a huge problem for the Yankees and we all know that the guy who caught two perfect games and served as the primary backstop for four of the five championship teams since the 1990's is going to have his number 20 retired when he hangs up his spikes, even if he hits a buck fifty this year. Nobody really gets on Carlton Fisk's case for hitting only .220 in a smattering of action over his last two seasons, right?

No, the real problem is the one they had last winter. The Yankees want to win, and just as they knew they couldn't do that with a catcher who was not a threat to ever catch a base stealer, neither can they do so with a DH who gets a hit only about once every three games. Posada pinch hit a drew a walk the next night in a loss, then went 2-for-3 in a big win against Tampa Bay on Tuesday, and is currently 1-for-3 with a double and two walks against Baltimore as I write this, but that's not the reason I think he might be poised for a turnaround.

Curiously, for a guy who's been such a good hitter for such a long time, Posada's awful start in 2011 is not wholly unprecedented. Twice before - oddly enough, six years ago, and six years before that - Posada found himself mired in a terrible slump after the first month or so of the season, got benched for a game but came through as a pinch hitter, and then reverted to his usual form for the rest of the year. Take a look:

Timespan       PA    BA   OBP   SLG  HR  RBI  BB 
thru 5/14/99   87  .176  .299  .311   3   10  12
rest of 1999  349  .260  .350  .421   9   47  41
       
thru 4/29/05   87  .244  .322  .333   1   10   9
rest of 2005  458  .265  .356  .449  18   61  56
       
thru 5/13/11  125  .165  .272  .349   6   15  15
rest of 2011   ?     ?     ?     ?    ?    ?   ?

I am not so naive as to think that this constitutes clear evidence that happy days are here again for Posada and the Yankees, but I am inclined to wonder whether maybe Posada just needed a chance to clear his head, get outside of himself a little or something, and be reminded that he can still play this game. A man who thinks of himself as a champion and finds his batting average starting with a "1" in the middle of May has got to have a lot of stress, you know?

How Are the Yankees Doing It??

2011-05-05T15:57:00.003-04:00

As I write this, the Yankees are beating the Tigers in Detroit, 2-1 in the 5th inning. A.J. Burnett has continued to pitch well this year, and this game is something of a microcosm of his season. He's somehow managed to surrender a run without giving up a hit, or - and this is the real surprise in Burnett's case - a walk. (EDIT: There goes the no-no: Single to right by Ramon Santiago to start the 6th.) If they manage to win this game they'll rise to 18-11, tops in the AL East and 2nd only to the upstart Cleveland Indians in the American League overall.

But how are they doing it? How is this team, without Andy Pettitte, with three terrible outings from Phil Hughes and now possibly two months without their #3 starter at all, with four of its starting nine hitters flirting with the Mendoza line for most of the season, still managing to win?

Well, the short and obvious answer is that everyone else is overcompensating. Pettitte and Hughes may be non-factors, but Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia, picked up on the cheap in the off-season as insurance policies, have delivered handsomely, combining for a modest 3-3 record but for a 2.95 ERA in 58 total innings, which means that they've essentially provided the team with an opportunity to win almost every time they've taken the ball. Nobody expected that either of these guys could be this good, much less both of them.

Additionally, Burnett has been quite good, posting a 4-1 record and a 3.93 ERA. That's largely due to lowering both his walk and hit rates by about one from what they were last year, without losing any strikeouts or increasing his homers allowed. This may not be wholly sustainable, since FanGraphs says that Burnett's getting a lot more swings at pitches outside the strike zone than he ever has in the past, but the real Burnett isn't necessarily far below this one. (EDIT: On the other hand, Burnett gave up a run in the 6th and currently has the bases loaded with nobody out in the 7th, so maybe I wrote too soon...)

The hitters have been the really bizarre part of the Yankees' success this far in 2011. Though Derek Jeter is hitting only .250 with no power and no steals, Nick Swisher is hitting .223 with only one homer, and the speedy, plucky Brett Gardner is hitting just .213 with four times caught stealing in eight attempts, somehow the Yankees are still near the league leaders in runs scored. This is because they lead the league in homers by a healthy margin over the Texas Rangers, 46-38. Jorge Posada's bat has been feast or famine all year, with an average of just .161, but also six home runs.

Mark Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez and Curtis Granderson are all hitting about .250 to .260, but all have slugging percentages above .500, and Robinson Cano leads the team in the Triple Crown stats, despite having only three walks in 27 games. New catcher Russell Martin, after hitting a combined .249/.350/.330 and smacking only 12 homers in his last two years (240 games) with the Dodgers, has already hit six of them in just 25 games with the Yankees. Even the bench (Eric Chavez, Andruw Jones, and Eduardo Nunez, mostly) has combined to hit a respectable .276/.343/.395, getting a few key hits here and there to spark a rally or win a game.

The bullpen has been another key to the success, amassing an MLB-leading 12 Saves to go with a 3.26 ERA, which is only about the middle of the AL pack. Fortunately the starters have lasted long enough that they're also only about the middle of the pack in innings pitched, which hopefully means the relievers won't get burnt out by the end of the year.

But the real question is whether or not the Yankees can sustain this, and I'm not sure they can. I know Burnett is capable of pitching this well (EDIT: Maybe not: he allowed three more runs in the 7th - one earned - before finally escaping the inning.) and that CC Sabathia is every bit capable of finishing the season with something like his current 2.68 ERA. I can see Garcia and Colon being useful, if not quite this good for most of the year, and I can see rookie starter Ivan Nova racking up 10-12 wins and an ERA of about 4.50, but I'm not sure I can see all of them happening at the same time.

Similarly, while I don't think the Yankees will finish the year with four starters hitting .250 or worse, neither do I think they will finish the season with five starters slugging .500 or better. While the Yankees are first in homers, they're 4th from the bottom in doubles, which means perhaps that some of those homers are due to stay in the park and that therefore some of those runs will have to wait for another hit if they expect to score.

With Derek Jeter ineffective (and now perhaps injured) and without any real help from Gardner or Swisher, the Yankees are going to have a hard time remaining competitive, much less keeping its hold on the AL East. And if Jorge Posada doesn't start going from a designated misser to a real DH (he now hitting .154 after an 0-for-4 day) there's no way that the rest of the lineup can compensate.

We see these bizarre splits early in the year all the time, and it's really not that unusual for someone like Colon to bounce back or for Posada to just fall apart, but for all of the odd happenings on the Yankees to keep pace all year would be unprecedented. The Yankees may continue to win, but their MLB playoff odds will drop significantly without some help from the other half of the lineup.

Book Review: ScoreCasting

2011-03-14T18:56:00.001-04:00

ScoreCasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won
by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. John Wertheim

This is one of those books.

It's the kind of book you needed to read. You just didn't know it. It's not just a baseball book, but there's no shortage of baseball in it. It's not just a numbers book, but it's got plenty of numbers. It's not just a psychology book, though it addresses several ways in which human psychology plays into sports (and life) decisions. In short, it's a fascinating summary of how money, psychology and statistics - and the misinterpretation of them - can drive the sports you enjoy far more than you might have suspected.

Granted, some of this stuff is not exactly groundbreaking. The chapter on why the Steelers are so good while the Pirates are so bad is an appropriately brief four pages. Anyone with even a rudimentary comprehension of how television plays into the business ends of the NFL and Major League Baseball, and how differently these two sports benefit from that medium, could have written this chapter nearly as well, and almost as succinctly.

For that matter, even the more interesting stuff isn't groundbreaking in the strictest sense of the word, but that's a good thing. The authors frequently refer to studies and papers and books that have been out for years, sometimes decades, to help bolster their contentions. Their reliance on the work of others - not exactly standing on the shoulders of giants, as Newton once said in an uncharacteristically humble moment, but at least using peer-reviewed research - helps to lend credence to their claims in a way that doing their own work never could. You can still wonder whether they draw the appropriate conclusions from their study of the facts, but you really can't criticize the facts themselves when the study the use has been out since 1982, or whatever.

Among the more interesting topics addressed in the book are:

That the desire to avert a loss - rather than to gain a victory - has a much greater effect on the decisions that athletes and their coaches make than you would imagine. It seems to characterize almost every sporting feat you've ever seen, and you never even knew it!
That the decision of one NFL team, 20 years ago, to think outside the box changed the face of the NFL draft, forcing the other 29 teams eventually to follow. And that the smart teams now are taking advantage of that change in the present day, to the dismay of those teams who had only just figured out the last change, it seems.
That the MLB drug testing system is inherently racist. (OK, not really, but it sure looks that way!)
That selfishness in team sports can be a virtue.
That the best thing you can do when one of your teammates on the basketball court "gets hot" and makes four or five shots in a row...is to give the ball to someone else for a while.
And most shockingly: Umpires are human. No seriously, it turns out that the "home field advantage" in baseball and almost every other high-level sport is due almost entirely to the fact that the umps (or refs, or judges or whatever) don't want to get lynched. And they probably don't even know it!

The book, in short, is eye-opening, sometimes jaw-dropping but extremely informative, well written, fast paced and fun to read. The two guys who wrote it are friends who grew up together - one an economist, one a sportswriter - and got back together just to write this book, and you can almost hear how much fun they had writing it.

It's got the kind of information in it that would be a lot of fun to bring up in a discussion at a bar or while watching the game in your living room, though it might also be the kind of stuff that gets you beat up, so make sure you have a large friend with you if you bring these issues up in public.

But regardless of how you use the info, make sure you read it. If you're in intelligent sports fan, you need to read it. Now you know.

Sifting Through Some of the Yankee Prospect Hype

2011-03-07T14:09:00.000-05:00

I saw an interview of the Yankees player development director, Mark Newman, by noted baseball prospect expert John Sickels, and was more than a little surprised at some of the spin Newman puts on various players in the organization. Maybe surprised isn't the right word. This is Spring, after all, when everyone is in the best shape of his life and Jeff Francoeur looks like he's turned a corner and the goat-footed balloon man goes whistling far and wee and all of that, so I guess a little unbridled optimism isn't so inappropriate. It's not like I expect the head of the Yankees whole minor league operation to bad mouth his charges either, but I guess I expected a little more realism.

While I agree with Rob Neyer that this is an "absolute-must-read-for-Yankee-fans", I also think that Newman lays it on a little thick at times, and that someone has to sift through some of what he says with the use of a healthy dose of cynicism and maybe - just maybe - a few facts.

I won't cover the whole interview transcript, which is comfortably over 2,000 words long, but I'll hit some of the high points and clue you in on a few things newman didn't tell you. None of this means that I think Sickels did a poor job with the interview. On the contrary, he got a lot of good information out of a very highly-placed source, all on the record, but he couldn't possibly have parried with Newman every time he thrust Melky Mesa or Eduardo Nunez out there, so I will.

SICKELS: [...] What do you see as the strengths of the system. And what are your weaknesses, areas you want to improve?

NEWMAN: [...] I also like our group of center fielders. Slade Heathcott, Mason Williams, and Melky Mesa all have the tools to play center and we think they all have a good chance to hit. Angelo Gums may end up there too. So, I would say pitching, catching, and center field are our strengths.

BoS: Newman starts by talking about all the potential high end rotation arms in the system, which Rob Neyer has already debunked, so I won't rehash that. He then mentions the catching, and there's little argument there, and what arguments there are (about Jesus Montero's defense, for example) get addressed later on. But he throws three names out there for this so-called bumper crop of CF candidates, and I'm not buying it.

Slade Heathcott: A 2009 first round pick, he was supposed to be a power hitter but slugged only two homers in 350+ plate appearances last year at Charleston in the Single-A South Atlantic League. He also struck out in about a third of his at bats, got caught stealing in 40% of his attempts, made 7 errors in 75 games in CF and hit only .258. He was, to be fair, one of the half dozen or so youngest regular position players in the Sally League, and maybe just not crashing and burning at that age is an accomplishment in itself, but really, if that performance doesn't constitute a crash and burn, what does? Newman addresses the strikeouts and the lack of power later in the interview, blaming the jump from high school to A-ball. Maybe this year was more about honing tools than putting up gaudy stats, but in either case, Heathcott has yet to prove himself as a pro, in my mind.

Mason Williams: Also drafted out of high school, also very young, also unimpressive, albeit in only a handful of opportunities (4-for-18 with no extra base hits, steals, runs or RBIs). The jury is clearly still out on him, and I can't see how an 18 year old with 5 career games on his resume allows you to call his position a "strength" for your organization.

Newman says later in the interview that Williams is fast and has a strong arm,that he threw hard as a pitcher in high school, and so he projects as a CF. That's probably as much because he's not going to hit like a corner outfielder as it is because of his speed and his arm. Also, after Googling him for research for this article, I've got "Classical Gas" stuck in my head. Thanks.

Melky Mesa: This is the worst offense in the list. Mesa was signed out of the Dominican Republic, debuted with the Yankees' GCL team in 2006 at the age of 19...but is now 23 and hasn't yet gotten past A-ball. He was among the Florida State League leaders in homers, steals, runs scored and triples, but he hit only .260 with modest patience and whiffed 129 times in 122 games. For his 4-year minor league career, he's hit .236/.307/.431 - think "last year's Jose Guillen, but with speed...and only in Single A". Maybe his improvement to .260/.338/.475 in 2010 means he's making strides, but even so, it seems to me that the strides he's making are more in the direction of "Speedy 5th outfielder" than "Future Star".

SICKELS: What about your weaknesses?

NEWMAN: Corner players with power. We have (Brandon) Laird who is a solid prospect, but we are thin for corner bats otherwise in the system. [...]

BoS: Well, at least he admits that much. But even Laird has more than a few chinks in his armor. He won the Eastern league MVP award last year, hitting .291/23/90 for AA Trenton, but his presence in that semi-illustrious club doesn't guarantee much. For every Jeff Bagwell, Ryan Howard or Vladimir Guerrero, it seems there are two or three Adam Hyzdus or Calvin Pickerings. Heck, the last Yankee farmhand to win Eastern League MVP was Russ Davis in 1992, also a defense-challenged thirdbaseman, whose ceiling turned out to be "useful for a couple of years."

More common on the list are good, but not great players who have a decent career in the majors but never achieve stardom - Kevin Millar, Matt Stairs, Cliff Floyd, Marlon Byrd, etc. Laird was horribly overmatched during his month in AAA last year, with a .246 average, 27 strikeouts and only four walks in 31 games, and I think the organization is going to make him a left fielder, because he seems unable to handle third base. He's sometimes hit better when not playing third base, so maybe that will be what he needs. But if not, we may be looking at a ceiling of Wes Helms or Russ Davis. Ick.

[...]

BoS: After that, there's a back-and-forth about Jesus Montero, whether he can really catch, etc. Everyone agrees that he can hit, but he's big, with clunky mechanics behind the plate and little success in preventing steals. His 23% rate catching base thieves, on the face of it, doesn't seem much worse than the 2010 International League average of 27%, but only one catcher with at least 60 games had a lower CS% and nobody came close to his league leading 15 passed balls. It's possible that he'll figure something out, but guys who are already 6'4", 225 at the age of 20 tend only to get bigger, and there's hardly ever been a regular catcher that big who's remained a regular catcher for long.

Anyway, back to the dialogue:

SICKELS: Austin Romine, your other strong catching prospect behind Montero. Good arm, good defensive reports, but he threw out just 23% of runners last year.

NEWMAN: I don't worry about his glove, Romine can really catch. He turns bullets into marshmallows. His arm is strong and accurate. By the internal defensive metrics we use, Romine rates as a very strong defender, and Montero isn't far behind him.

BoS: We're obviously not privy to those internal metrics, and CS% isn't everything, despite what I wrote about Montero, so I'll buy this one, for now. Romine's OPS has dropped each of the last two years as he's jumped levels, but not precipitously so. Mostly I included this part because I loved that line about turning bullets into marshmallows.

SICKELS: The other top catching prospect is Gary Sanchez. Where does he start the year? How does his glove compare to Montero's at the same stage?

NEWMAN: He should go to Charleston and will probably be there all year. The hardest thing for him will be adjusting to the workload and length of the season. He is way ahead of Montero at the same stage defensively. He's very bright, works hard, needs experience but already calls the game well. He's a very sharp kid. The bat is terrific and he is much more mature and professional about hitting than most players his age. He is way ahead of the curve mentally, outthinking the pitchers.

BoS: Sanchez is another young Dominican free agent, having only turned 18 in December last year, who somehow managed to hit .353 in half a season in the Gulf Coast League. Not wanting to get too excited about half a season's worth of at-bats, ('member when we did that with Jeremy Reed?) you have to admit at least that the bat looks promising. When promoted to Low-A Staten Island, he wasn't nearly as good but at least he didn't flop.

But his defense? Well, if you thought Montero's 15 passed balls in 105 games were bad, wait til you see Sanchez: 16 Passed Balls. In 30 games. Thirty. And he threw out only 19% of base stealers in the GCL. Yeesh. Maybe's he's out-thinking the pitchers a little too much, eh? Maybe he should just try catching what they call for a while?

For the record, we don't have SB/CS data for Montero's 2007 season in the GCL, when he was 17, but he allowed only four passed balls in 23 games. Not great, but better than every other game by a long stretch. We'll see if Sanchez can figure things out well enough to stick there.

SICKELS: David Adams, where does he stand? Is he healthy?

NEWMAN: He's dealing with a bout of plantar faciitis right now but should be fine. He's a solid hitter when he's healthy. I think his glove is underrated. His range is OK, but he is just amazing at turning the double play. If I had to give him a 20/80 number on turning the double play, I'd give him an 80.

BoS: Adams hits for decent average (admittedly bolstered by a .367 BABiP at Trenton last year) and is patient, but shows only doubles power at best and has no speed. That makes him project as a slap-hitting second baseman with soft hands but limited range, the upside of which is Placido Polanco or Miguel Cairo but the more likely result of which is Jody Reed or Mark Lemke, i.e. decent, but not enough of an offensive threat in the majors to keep pitchers honest, especially given that his ball in play aren't going to find holes so easily in the majors. That thing about "If they had a metric for this, I bet he'd be awesome" is exactly the kind of things that team executives say when a prospect doesn't have a lot of obvious, measurable skills, like "moxy" or "mound presence". Baseball Prospectus rates him as just an average defensive second baseman.

NEWMAN: One infielder that people need to watch closely is Eduardo Nunez.

SICKELS: What do you think about him?

NEWMAN: He's always had the tools. He can run and throw, very legit defender at shortstop, has some surprising pop in his bat, efficient at stealing bases. He is still working on his plate discipline, work in progress. He could start at shortstop for a lot of clubs. He was really great back in rookie ball five years ago, then kind of stalled out when he lost confidence. But he's had his confidence back the last two seasons and has played much better. We really like him.

BoS: Baseball Prospectus' metrics call Nunez' defense below average but their commentary on him indicates that he's actually pretty good. He has hit for decent averages the last two years, but as Newman admits, he doesn't like to walk. And I have no idea what Newman means by "surprising pop in his bat". The dude hit four homers in over 500 trips to the plate in 2010, has never had more than nine in a season, and has a career slugging percentage of .369.

Therefore, any offensive value he provides is going to have to come from the batting average, which is a fickle mistress. He does have good speed and base stealing instincts, with 113 steals and only 39 times caught in his minor league career, including 42 out of 54 the last two seasons, so that will help him eek out a few infield hits that someone like, say, David Adams will never get. And he doesn't strike out too much, so I guess that helps a little, but he seems like he'd be maxed out as a major league regular. BP projects him for .268 with 7 homers and 15 steals in 2011, if he played every day, which he won't. For reference, that's about what Orlando Cabrera did last year.

SICKELS: Is Cito Culver sticking at shortstop?

NEWMAN: Absolutely. Range, hands, arm strength, all above average for shortstop. His feet work well. He has a great sense of timing.

SICKELS: The bat?

NEWMAN: I think he'll be fine. He might not hit for a ton of power, but he should hit for average, hit a few homers. He'll be a legitimate hitter.

BoS: Culver was the Yankees' first round draft pick this past year. He played about half a season for GCL Yankees, but also got a handful of games at Low-A Staten Island. He was only 17 last year, and not impressive statistically (.251/.325/.330), but the jury's still out. He's young enough to develop into something but so far away at this point that it's not really worth debating what that might be. But let's do it anyway, shall we?

For the record, the Yankees have taken five different shortstops with their first round picks - all from high school - since the amateur draft began in 1969. Culver was actually drafted as a pitcher, but we'll include him for comparison. The others were:

Carl "C.J." Henry in 2005, who was turned into an outfielder, went to the Phillies in the Bobby Abreu trade in 2006, hit .222 in parts of four seasons and washed out of pro ball by 2008.
Bronson Sardinha in 2001, who's played short, third and outfield in the minors and is still playing at age 27, albeit not with the Yankees. He got only a cup of coffee in the big leagues in 2007 but hasn't been back because he's hit only .270 with occasional power and not much else in the bushes.
Dennis Sherrill in 1974, who remained a shortstop but turned out not to be a very good one. He hit .292 with 14 homers at AA as a 22 year old, but never hit better than .237 in a season at any level otherwise, got only five total at-bats in the majors, and was out of baseball by age 25.
Rex Hudler in 1978, a career backup infielder who found a niche as a useful bench guy for about a decade and a half in the majors.
Oh...and a someday-first-ballot-Hall-of-Famer named "Derek". You might have seen him around.

The difference between Jeter and those other guys is mostly how high they were drafted. Sherrill was 12th, Henry 17th, Hudler was 18th, Sardinha was 34th and our man Culver was 32nd. Jeter was 6th, and if any of the five teams in front of the Yankees in 1992 thought even for a second that Jeter would eschew the quarterback's job at the University of Michigan to come and play for them, they would have picked him instead.

So the Yankees pretty much lucked out that year in that they had a high draft pick and there was a player who wanted nothing more in life that to be a Yankee from practically the day he was born, and was talented enough to pull it off. Obviously the exception and not the rule. I'll be very surprised if, 20 years form now, we look back on Cito Culver's career and find that it compares favorably to Rex Hudler's.

Now on to the pitchers...

NEWMAN: [Dellin Betances is] Definitely a starter. Three-pitch guy, plus curveball, plus changeup, hit 96-97 in first game. There are some concerns about his durability until he proves otherwise, but we think he'll be fine. He has a great work ethic, I love the physique, his mechanics are consistent. His walk rates have gotten better. With the injury behind him we think he'll be durable now. He will start off in Double-A.

BoS: Betances is listed as 6'8", 245 lbs, which explains why he has struggled with mechanics. That's a lot of body to get coordinated all at once. He's 22 years old and has only three games above Single A ball in his career, so it's a little too early to get excited about him, but the fact that he managed to shave about three walks per nine innings off his previous rates without losing his strikeouts or giving up considerably more hits speaks volumes about his potential. If he continues to pitch like he did last year, he won't be in Trenton for long.

SICKELS: Manny Banuelos opened lots of eyes in the Arizona Fall League. I saw him down there and he's just incredibly smooth.

NEWMAN: Yeah, he is a smaller guy but wow, great stuff. It is hard to fathom how a guy his size, throwing that easy with the ball coming out of his hand the way it does, can throw so hard. He was at 93-95 yesterday. I have no worries about his arm. His delivery and athleticism scream durability. He's going to Double-A with Betances.

BoS: Banuelos has averaged a shade over nine strikeouts and a shade under three walks per nine innings in his three-year minor league career, which, like Betances, includes exactly three games above single-A. But Banuelos won't even turn 20 for about another week, so while it's not like he's expected to help the big league club this year, he could be there as soon as 2012.

SICKELS: Hector Noesi. His key seems to be control. Possible fourth starter?

NEWMAN: Yeah, some of our people see him as a number three, some think he is more of a four/five guy. His key is the fastball/changeup combination, and he has amazing control. He's shown he can spin a breaking ball but needs to tighten it. Nardi Contreras is our pitching coordinator, and he's terrific at helping guys with their breaking balls. He's working with Hector.

BoS: Amazing control is right. He's walked only 1.6 per nine and allowed 0.7 homers per nine in 353 minor league innings, spanning four seasons. His strikeout rates aren't quite as high as those other two, but they're plenty high. He had his first exposure to AAA ball last season - three games, just like the other two, must be a Yankee developmental thing - so clearly he still needs to prove himself, but Baseball prospectus' PECOTA system thinks he could be a league average starter right now - projecting him for a 4.75 ERA in 68 innings. He's 24 already, so his time is now, but with just an average velocity fastball, he can't slip much without kissing his chances at a major league career goodbye.

SICKELS: Andrew Brackman, starter or reliever?

NEWMAN: Starter. His changeup has come miles and miles in the last year. He emphasized working on the changeup this winter and it looks so much better this spring. I know some people were frustrated with him until last year, but he is a unique guy. He was a college basketball player. He is 6-11. And he had the elbow injury. We told people to be patient because any one of those factors by themselves were enough to slow his progress, but he had all three. He had the trifecta of extenuating circumstances.

But once he got healthy, look at the progress. He went from 6.5 walks-per-nine to 1.9 walks-per-nine in A-ball last year. I've never seen a starting pitcher make that kind of leap in such a short amount of time. The stuff has always been there. He's an extraordinary athlete, fields his position, runs springs [sic...I think he meant sprints] in the outfield like he's 6-2. He's going to start the year in Triple-A.

BoS: Brackman is a weird case, as Newman details, but his ability to cut his walk rate by more than half without losing but a sliver off his K-rate is really impressive. He had half a season at AA Trenton - and was actually pretty good there - so it makes sense to send him to Scranton, but expect some (wait for it...) growing pains at AAA. Most of his competition in the International League will have seen it all, having spent at least some time in the majors, so he'll need to develop as a pitcher to succeed there. Look for some ugly numbers for a while as he works out the kinks again.

SICKELS: Ivan Nova: favorite for rotation?

NEWMAN: I don't know if he's the favorite. We would like him to be. He's young and has the stuff, pitched at 94-96 the other day. He's another guy working on his secondary stuff to go with the heater. The other issue is command. He has control, he throws strikes, but his command within the zone still needs work.

SICKELS: Like the difference between throwing strikes and throwing quality strikes?

NEWMAN: Yeah. That's what he's working on.

BoS: If this were a courtroom, Sickels would have gotten in trouble for leading the witness. In any case, Nova is only a favorite because the Yankees don't have anyone else with as much upside who also has so much experience at AAA and in the majors. He's basically a straight power pitcher with just a show-me change up, but if your stuff is good enough, that can work. He struggled in his first exposure to AAA in 2009 but then thrived there last year. Expect some difficulties early on in the majors if he breaks camp with the big club, and if he doesn't work them out, expect him to get sent back to work on them while the Yankees try Brackman or Phelps or (God help us...) Sergio Mitre in the #5 spot in the rotation for a couple of weeks.

SICKELS: There are other interesting arms beyond the main group. Adam Warren for example. In other systems he would get more attention.

NEWMAN: True. Adam, compact arm stroke, throws his fastball and changeup at any spot in the zone. He's still refining his spin pitches, which will determine if he's a number three starter or a number five starter. He's heading to Triple-A.

BoS: Baseball Prospectus thinks his ceiling is as a #4 starter, a LAIM, which of course is nothing to sneeze at, but if that's the best he'll ever be, then it's a lot more likely that he'll have a career as a swingman or mop-up reliever. His stuff isn't that great, but h is fastball improved last year and he has enough different offerings to keep batters guessing, which is why he's been able to do pretty well in the minors. In the majors, that's not likely to get him too far.

SICKELS: We talked about David Phelps as a sleeper last year, and he really panned out.

NEWMAN: Yeah, David's secondary pitches have really improved. He's always had a decent changeup and slider, I would rate the slider as almost-plus. But his curveball is much better than it used to be, and he has a solid 90-93 MPH heater. Gives him four pitches. Just a solid blue-collar strike thrower. He'll begin in Triple-A.

BoS: That sounds like a bit of an exaggeration about his fastball. BP calls his stuff just average but says that his command and control are both good, and they give him an outside shot at one of the back end rotation jobs. Guys like this take a while to get going in the majors, and most of them never really do.

SICKELS: Another one who looks really interesting is Graham Stoneburner.

NEWMAN: He's really come around. He threw hard in college at Clemson, and he still works at 94-96 with sink. But his secondary pitches have taken a step forward, he keeps the ball down, throws strikes. He was raw in college but much better now. Heading to Double-A.

BoS: Baseball Prospectus says he's got a good sinker slider combo, but they project him as a reliever unless he can come up with a third pitch. If he really threw "94-96 with sink" and had a plus slider, he wouldn't need a third pitch. Sounds like another tall tale to me.

SICKELS: Some observers really like Brett Marshall as a sleeper.

NEWMAN: He has the arm, and we gave him $800,000, so we've liked him too (laugh). He threw 97-98 before he got hurt. He still throws 93-95 with big-time sink. His fastball looks like a left-hander's slider. He has a good changeup, but is still working on the slider and curve. Great athlete, aggressive personality. Have to watch him this year, yeah.

BoS: Another case of the Newman Boost: An independent scouting website says his fastball is more like 88-91 most of the time - on the low end of that for the 2-seamer, on the high end for the 4-seam - though it can get up to 93 mph at times. Seems like it's generally best to subtract 3-5 mph from whatever Newman says. With that said, Marshall still looks like he could be a useful major leaguer someday. He's got just so-so control (a little over three walks per nine, but low homer rates) and good strikeout rates, but he's still not yet in AA, so it will be a while before we see him on the mound at New Yankee Stadium.

SICKELS: One guy I liked as a sleeper from the 2010 draft is Chase Whitley, 15th round guy out of Troy University. He was a shortstop/pitcher and the two-way guys catch my eye.

NEWMAN: He fits in that category. Low-90s fastball, really good changeup. Breaking stuff needs work but his changeup is just terrific, unusually good for a reliever. Good athlete, too.

SICKELS: Potential middle relief type?

NEWMAN: Yeah.

BoS: Whitley blew everyone away in the NY-Penn League, striking out 44 in 34.1 innings without allowing a homer. That's maybe not so surprising since he had pitched for a Division I NCAA college, albeit a small one. His polish from that experience must have helped a lot when facing a bunch of 19 and 20-year olds who were in their first extended look since being signed out of high school or from some academy in the Dominican Republic. It will be interesting to see if his fastball will be good enough at the higher levels, given that even Mark "Ninety Six" Newman describes it as "low 90's".

SICKELS: Finally, any other guys you want to mention as sleepers?

NEWMAN: We mentioned Melky Mesa and Brandon Laird earlier. Laird is just a solid hitter all-around. Melky has the tools, we just need to see what he does in Double-A.

BoS: Someone needs to help Newman out with the definition of "sleeper". Laird's generally listed among the Yankees' top 15 prospects or so and he won the Eastern League MVP last year, so everyone's heard of him by now. That's not a sleeper. Neither is Mesa really, especially since he's 24 now and has yet to get out of A-Ball.

NEWMAN: A sleeper for you is Anderson Feliz. He's an infielder out of the Dominican, played in the Gulf Coast League last year. He'll probably end up at second base, but he can really hit. Strong guy with power, broad back, plus runner, great swing. He needs to walk more but that's normal at this point. I rate him as similar to Robinson Cano at the same stage of his career.

BoS: There we go. An 18 year old who held his own in the GCL, plays a premium position and projects for power as his body matures and his frame fills out? That sounds like a sleeper. Also for the record, since Newman keeps bringing others up for comparison, Cano wasn't this good at this age, but then most of Cano's minor league lines (.278/.331/.425 over 2100+ plate appearances at six different levels) gave little hint of how good he'd be in the majors, which is to say, probably one of the three best second basemen in the world right now.

So there you have it: A few agreements, a lot of disagreements, but hopefully just a lot of details you might have missed if you only read the interview and took it at face value. Hopefully it was helpful.

Book Review: Willie Mays - The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch

2011-03-02T10:18:00.003-05:00

"Mays would have made a splash no matter when he entered the major leagues, but 1951 served him unusually well. His skills shined brightly on a sluggish team in a plodding league in a big-stage city that was about to lead a communications revolution. He was a game-changing catalyst in a storied rivalry about to embark on a historic pennant race, a radiant contributor to an era forever consecrated as the golden age of baseball."
- James S. Hirsch, from Willie Mays - The Life, the Legend, p. 100

The eponymous subject of James Hirsch's new book is quite possibly the greatest player in baseball history. You can argue for Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron or Mickey Mantle or Ty Cobb or Honus Wagner or even Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez, if you can look past the steroid thing, but there's no question that The Say Hey Kid is right in the thick of that conversation.

It stands to reason, then, that a book about such a player as Mays, especially a landmark work given the unprecedented access the author had to Mays the person, should be pretty darn interesting at the least. And the potential is there for this to be a truly great work, wouldn't you say?

Well, don't hold your breath.

I don't mean to disparage either Mays the man or Hirsch the writer, as this book makes it clear that both men are excellent at their respective professions. But somehow the combination of the two leaves me wanting.

It's not the writing, per se. As you can see from the above quote, Hirsch is a wonderfully eloquent writer when the situation falls for eloquence, and he's no slouch at simply getting his facts across when brevity is the order of the day. He tells the story beautifully, thoroughly and very well.

From Mays' humble beginnings in Alabama, through his school days, his travails in the waning Negro Leagues, to the minor leagues and eventually the majors, then to the Army, then back to the majors and an incredible career and a life of superstardom, Hirsch doesn't miss a beat. Because of the "authorized" nature of the book, we also get an unprecedented look into Mays' personal life, his relationships with family, mentors, teammates, friends and of course women, including both of his wives.

But Mays himself is hardly the only source of material for the book, as is clear by the 25 pages of end notes and five pages of bibliographical references. There were two previous biographies of Mays, as I understand it, but neither could boast the opportunity to have compared notes with the man himself, who has always been reticent to talk to anyone he doesn't know, especially reporters and writers.

But there's the rub, perhaps. Because it's an authorized biography, Hirsch had to get the approval of Mays for whatever he wrote. He boasts, in the epilogue, that Mays asked him to change only one thing in the entire tome, all 628 pages of it. (He wanted Hirsch to include the fact that, after a fight with a teammate - Orlando Cepeda, i think - that they made up. Well isn't that special?) But then after reading those 628 pages, I can kind of see why Mays didn't feel the need to squelch anything: According to Hirsch, the man almost never did anything wrong.

Not that Hirsch says he's perfect, exactly, just that even his "faults" were sort of strengths in disguise, like saying that you "work too hard" or "care too much" at a job interview.

His bouts of exhaustion that sometimes required hospitalization, for example, were because he tried too hard, not because he didn't have the discipline and self-awareness needed to pace himself when the situation called for moderation. His inability to hold down a regular job as a teenager to help support his poor family gets spun as his father's sacrificing to help him concentrate on baseball, rather than his own selfishness.

His dismissal of the advice of friends who warned him not to marry the older, twice-divorced, more worldly woman who would surely take him for all he was worth - which she did, by the way - well, he doesn't even bother to explain that one. His refusal to support - or even try to understand - Curt Flood's case against the MLB owners and the Reserve Clause is billed as "not wanting to get involved" rather than an acknowledgment that Willie Mays clearly didn't care about anyone who wasn't, well, Willie Mays.

To his credit, Hirsch does explain that Mays' famous "Say hey" catch phrase had more to do with his inability to remember his teammates' names than with some kind of giddy schoolboy enthusiasm. But really, when you compose 600+ pages on a man who's been in the public eye for more than six decades, who was famously curt and often sulky with the news media, got himself into an ill-advised marriage, couldn't manage his own finances, rarely gave any real credit to his contemporaries like Hank Aaron and Mickey Mantle, well, somehow you shouldn't close the back cover of the book feeling like this guy was just a victim of his circumstances, you know?

I wish I could explain it better than that, but I can't. Somehow the book just left me feeling used, or like there was more to the story, but I couldn't scratch below the surface of the facade that Mays allowed Hirsch to create.

None of this is to disparage Mays' incredible talents, which were many, nor his accomplishments, which were great and are given their due in this work. But Mays the man comes off as something less than admirable, if you can sift through Hirsch's prose a little.

In any case, it is an interesting book, and I recommend reading it, but I also recommend trying to read between the lines a little, because I think you can learn almost as much from what Hirsch doesn't tell you as from what he does.

Jeter Not So Young, Young Not So Old

2011-03-01T12:54:00.001-05:00

Let me introduce you to two players:

Name       AB   R  2B  HR  RBI  BB  SO  SB  CS   AVG   OBP   SLG
Player A  627  74  41  14   63  41 104   7   3  .272  .316  .413
Player B  633  90  26  11   64  60  95  19   3  .291  .355  .391

Fairly similar, wouldn't you say? Player A has a little more power, but less speed and patience, and therefore scores fewer runs, though they both drive in about the same number. Players A and B both play for pretty good offensive teams, and hit near the tops of their respective lineups. Both players have hit over .300 for their careers though both just had a fairly down offensive year for them.

Both play the left side of the infield, and both have won Gold Gloves as shortstops, though by most modern analysis, neither is very good on defense. Both players hold their franchise's all-time career records for at-bats and hits, and are on the top-10 lists for a bunch of other counting stats.

The Gold Glove remark probably gave me away, though the stats never would, in themselves. Player A is Mike Young and Player B is Derek Jeter, but the stats shown are compilations of their road splits for the last three seasons, prorated to look like one year. Though there are some differences, you could hardly find two more seemingly similarly players overall, especially given their defensive positions, abilities, and their iconic statuses to their respective franchises.

I recently read an article in which Mike Young's road stats were used as evidence that he can't really hit anymore, and that his home ballpark is really the only reason he finishes each season with respectable looking traditional stats. This seemed like a curious way of going about things - i.e. completely ignoring half of a man's games for three whole seasons - and it made me wonder whether Jeter might show a similar effect, especially given the reputation that New Yankee Stadium received for boosting offense early last year.

As you can see from the first line of stats above, those numbers are really nothing special, about what Howie Kendrick or Cody Ross hit last season overall, an eminently forgettable performance. Add to this the fact that he's already in his mid-30's, he's a terrible fielder (whether you prefer fielding percentage and Range Factor or more modern stats like FanGraphs UZR/150, Baseball Prospectus' Fielding Runs, and Bill James and John Dewan's +/-), and you can see why the Rangers felt the need to sign a free agent third baseman.

And Young's trade request, for all the team's official posturing about wanting to move forward with their plan of having Young DH most of the time, was probably welcome news to Nolan Ryan and the Texas front office. Why wouldn't they want to unload an aging, sub-par defender whose offence had slipped to the point of being barely passable, but who still looks respectable only because of his home park? Why would they want to pay another $48 million over the next three seasons for him?

Jeter's line, as I mentioned, is better, but not a lot better. He gets a few more hits, takes a few more walks, steals more bases, but that's about it. He has less power, is two and a half years older than Young, and plays an even tougher defensive position. He's not much good on defense either, according to most modern metrics, though he does well in fielding percentage presumably because his poor range limits his opportunities to Knoblauch a ball into the stands.

So why, given their similarities, would the Rangers be looking to limit the exposure of Michael Young as much as possible while the Yankees were willing to give a guaranteed $51 million new contract to Jeter? What are we missing?

Well, for one thing, it's generally not good practice to simply ignore half of a man's stats for three years. While his road stats might not look like much, Young has also hit .318/.376/.490 over the last three years in Arlington. Those numbers happened, and are worth considering. (For the record, Jeter's .311/.384/.436 line at home is nothing to sneeze at either, though less disparate from his road splits than Young's.)

For another, home/road splits can be misleading. Colorado hitters tend to show huge home/road splits while playing for the Rockies, and yet, generally do not completely wilt in the sea level air of other ballparks when they go off to play for someone else. Some do, certainly, but the good players don't generally perform as poorly as their road splits would suggest when they depart Denver.*

*Though not always. While crunching numbers for this, I discovered that Larry Walker had hit .280/.383/.514 in his time in Colorado, spanning nine and a half years, and that after leaving, he proceeded to hit .286/.387/.520 as a Cardinal over the next year and a half. Not that this constitutes a "poor" performance by any stretch, only one that was amazingly consistent with his road splits. Usually it's not this easy.

Most players end up somewhere between their road and home numbers, though generally closer to the road ones. Rob Neyer once referred to this as a "polar bear effect", wherein Rockies hitters essentially wind up adapting to Coors Field so well - like a polar bear, uniquely adept at thriving in one particular environment - that they're no longer all that good at hitting at lower altitudes. The difference is that hitters seem to re-adapt to sea level when they get back there, eventually. Arlington is not so severe a hitter's environment as Coors Field, but maybe there's a similar effect. Maybe opposing pitchers wilt in the Texas Summer heat but find their groove when they get back home?

Additionally, if the discussion in the new book Scorecasting is to be believed, everyone hits better at home. The umpires, whether they know it or not, are on Mike Young's side when he's in Texas, giving him fewer called strikes, more called balls, more benefits of the doubt on safe/out calls, and etc. Virtually every year, the major leagues as a whole hit about 30-40 OPS points better at home than on the road, almost entirely for this reason, so why should Michael Young be any different?

None of this is to say that the Jeter contract was a good idea, or that performance statistics should be the only deciding factor in whether or not a player gets re-signed (and for how much), only that it can sometimes be interesting and/or instructive to compare players who have similar - if slightly hidden - resumes.

Generally speaking I think the Yankees will end up regretting this contract by the time it's half over. Shortstops simply don't tend to remain shortstops when they get to be nearly 40 years old, even great ones like Cal Ripken, and certainly not mediocre (at best) defensive shortstops like Jeter. Except that the Yankees don't have any place else to put him.

They're not going to make Jeter a third baseman, as Texas did with young when Elvis Andrus was promoted. Alex Rodriguez is over there and is signed through 2017. They're not going to move Jeter to first, where Mark Teixeira is signed through 2016. And unlike Texas, New York has a serviceable DH, their former catcher, Jorge Posada, who's signed through 2011 and making a shade over $13 million.

They may be thinking that they'll have to cut Jorge loose after 2011, especially if his offense dips any further. His OPS has already fallen in each of his last two full seasons from a high of 970 in 2007 down to 811 last year. He'll be 39 this season and won't be adding much to the team if he hits any worse than he did in 2010. American League designated hitters averaged .252/.332/.425 last year, while Jorge hit .248/.357/.454, only marginally above average.

Jorge's retirement or departure as a free agent would enable them to slot Jeter in as a DH for the remaining two years (three if he exercises the 2014 player option) of his contract. Of course, that too would require some improvement. As a shortstop, Jeter's 710 OPS in 2010 was still a tick or two above the AL average (669) but it would be well below the 758 OPS that Junior Circuit Designated Hitters average.

If he can perform at something closer to his career level of 837, it could work, and that's not necessarily impossible. He hit only .307 when he put the ball in play last year, well below his career average of about .356, so if that was just a fluke and not an indication of declining skill, we should see a significant bounce in his batting average and therefore in all his other numbers.

Baseball Prospectus has him pegged to hit .282/.348/.386 while Bill James is a little more optimistic, projecting .295/.365/.410. Tom Tango's Marcel system splits the difference: .283/.350/.397, shading to the cautious side. Those are all somehow based on the averages of players' performances who were similar to Jeter at a similar stage in their careers, but then Jeter is nothing if not unique, or at least, atypical.

Two years ago he nailed his PECOTA projection almost exactly, hitting .300/.363/.408 when his projection said .297/.365/.407, but then in 2009 he blew his projection (.288/.353/.383, six homers) out of the water with a sterling season, hitting .334 with 18 homers and 30 steals. Would any of us really be all that surprised if Jeter hit .315 this year with 15 homers? Not really. His Clutchness has spent the better part of the last two decades surprising us.

Of course if the Yankees to slot Jeter into the DH spot, they'll then need a shortstop, but that's a problem for next winter.

Cardinals Don't Need to Sign Pujols Now

2011-02-16T11:49:00.000-05:00

There's never been a player quite like Albert Pujols, and so it stands to reason that there probably has never been a contract negotiation like the one going on now in the St. Louis Cardinals' spring training camp in Jupiter, Florida. Pujols' contract option for 2011 was exercised by the Cardinals last October, so they're set for this year, but after that Pujols can become a free agent.

He's already stated that he won't negotiate a contract during the 2011 season and he's already extended the deadline to come to some agreement once, with the second deadline to be Wednesday at noon. The Cardinals, of course, would like nothing more than to keep the best player in baseball, but given the literally historic nature of his talent, the Cards are likely to end up paying historic dollars - maybe $300 million or more - for the second half of his career.

But paying a player for the second half of his career and expecting the kind of production you saw in his youth is often a losing proposition. To wit, we need look no further than the list of similar players (based on Bill James' Similarity Scores) on Baseball-reference.com:

Those stars mean that the player is in the Hall of Fame, and it's worth noting that several others on that list might still become Hall of Famers someday. It's also worth noting, however, that Belle was out of baseball after his age 33 season, a victim of a degenerative hip condition that prevented him from playing without alleviating the Orioles from having to pay for the remaining three years and $35 million on his 5-year contract.

It's also worth noting that few of these guys would have provided anything close to fair value if they had received a contract consummate with their talents at age 30, as Pujols expects to get. Greenberg retired after his age 36 season. Mize was no longer a regular after age 35. Gonzalez had his last productive, healthy season at 31. Walker was a shell of his former self at age 36, a part time player by age 37 and retired at age 39. Klein was washed up at 33, but played several more years as a part timer.

Berkman is 34 and looks like he's nearing the end. Helton is playing regularly still, but is averaging about half as many homers and RBIs per season since he turned 31. Giambi had some good years in New York, but only one anywhere near as good as his last few in Oakland, and that was at age 32, when he first arrived. He missed halves of two different seasons to injuries and has struggled to remain employed as a bench player for the last two years.

The list of most similar players by age is not much more encouraging:

Jimmie Foxx (863) *
Frank Robinson (845) *
Ken Griffey (840)
Lou Gehrig (839) *
Hank Aaron (839) *
Mickey Mantle (821) *
Mel Ott (800) *
Juan Gonzalez (763)
Eddie Mathews (751) *
Manny Ramirez (744)

Now we've got seven Hall of Famers, and presumably Griffey will someday make eight. the other two would likely be in the Hall as well someday if not for the taint of PEDs, but in any case, the numbers are there. But again, the picture looks kind of bleak when you start trying to justify something like a ten-year contract starting at age 32.

Foxx was washed up at 34. Mantle? As famous for his injuries as for his prodigious skills, his career started unraveling after age 32. Griffey had exactly one season in which he amassed at least 600 plate appearances after age 30. Gehrig was forced to retire due to failing health at age 36 and was dead a year later. Ott and Mathews were both done around age 36.

Only Robinson, Aaron and Manny Ramirez offer glints of hope, and even they need to be taken with a grain of salt. Manny Being Manny has been being pretty productive when he's played, but he hasn't played more than 104 games in a season since age 36. Hank was still hammerin' at age 42, and was wonderfully productive in his 30's, but even he saw a drop off in his fourth decade. He went from a 162 OPS+ in his 30's to a 107 OPS+ in his 40's, and averaged 35 fewer games per season.

Robinson was also very good through his mid 30's - better than the raw numbers would have you believe - but his playing time dropped off precipitously at age 38. If Albert's contract goes into his 40's, as Alex Rodriguez' contract does and as has been speculated will be the case, the Cards are bound to get burned.

With all that said, it's worth noting also that Albert is unlike most of the men we've mentioned. He's not seeing significantly inflated numbers because of the era or the parks in which he plays, as was the case with Klein, Walker, Foxx, Ott, and Helton. He's not already injury prone like Mantle or Juan Gone, and he isn't likely to come down with some bizarre, career-ending ailment like Belle or Gehrig. Of course, neither were they until it actually happened.

Well, on the other hand he has had some issues with a bad throwing elbow, which he opted to treat with a nerve transportation rather than Tommy John surgery two winters ago, so theoretically that could show up at any time. But even that should - I repeat: should - only keep Pujols out for about one season if it proves necessary. The Cards can still get their money's worth even if they get only nine of the ten seasons for which they're paying (or seven of eight, or whatever).

The real issue, as was the case with the Jayson Werth signing, is whether the Cards will get fair value for their dollars. If they sign him to, say, a 10-year, $300 million contract, can they expect to get burned? If you start with the value of a WAR (a Win Above Replacement) at about $4 million (according to FanGraphs.com), and then use 5% inflation for each of 10 years starting in 2012, you end up with a rate of about $6.9 million per win by 2021.

That sounds ridiculous and almost certainly won't be the case, but then 10 years ago the value of a Win was something like half of what it is now, and I wouldn't have believed then that it could rise so much as it has, so I suppose anything's possible. This gives us an "average" cost per win of about $5.5 million over the life of the supposed 10 year contract. So, if the Cardinals pay him $300 million over that span, he'll need to somehow accrue about 54 Wins Above Replacement over that time.

There have been only four players in the history of professional baseball who managed to amass 54 or more WAR between the ages of 32 and 41, and you know each of them by one name: Barry, Willie, Babe and Honus, and one of those probably owes a lot of that success to "better living through chemistry", if you get my drift.

Three others, Hank Aaron, Cap Anson and Tris Speaker, earned a little over 50 WAR in that span, and three others more had at least 45. Those include Ty Cobb, Edgar Martinez and Ted Williams, who almost certainly would have been in the 54 WAR+ group if he hadn't spent most of his age 32 and 33 seasons flying bombers over North Korea.

So that gives us four guys, Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Honus Wagner. Four guys in the history of baseball, in which about 17,500 players have spent at least one day in the majors, and about 4,500 have spent at least one day there between the ages of 32 and 41. Pujols has a better chance of being hit by lighting at some point in his life than he does of living up to such a contract.

But of course Albert Pujols has already defied the odds. He won the Rookie of the Year award at age 21, in his debut season, something only a handful of others had done. He's one of only 10 players in history with 3 or more MVP Awards. He's one of only about a dozen guys in history who have finished in the top 10 in the MVP voting at least ten times, and he's the only one to ever do it 10 years in a row.

How good is Albert Pujols? His wors season was 2002, his second in the majors. Pujols' "Sophomore Slump"gave him an average line of .314/.394/.561, along with 34 homers, 118 runs and 127 RBIs. That was the first and only time he didn't get on base at least 40% of the time in any season, and his work was good for 5.8 WAR, according to Baseball-reference.com.

That was his worst season.

There are, by my count, 23 Hall of Fame position players who never had a season that good. Granted, that list includes a lot of questionable Veterans committee selections and/or guys who were known predominantly for their defense, like Bill Mazeroski, Rabbit Maranville and George Kell, but it also includes prolific hitters like Sam Rice, Jim Bottomley, Lou Brock and Pie Traynor. ANother 19 Hall of Famers have only one season as good as Pujols' worst, including Monte Irvin, Enos Slaughter, Mickey Cochrane and Dave Winfield.

Jim Rice, Zach Wheat, Sam Thompson, Roy Campanella and a dozen others had only two such seasons. First-ballot guys Tony Gwynn, Eddie Murray and Willie Stargell fall in with a group of 17 who had only three such seasons. You see where this is going. In fact, of the 134 Hall of Famers elected as position players, 118 of them don't have 10 seasons as good as Pujols' worst year.

So it's possible, though I dare not say likely, that Pujols will continue to defy the odds and actually live up to such an incredible contract. Projections that far out are all but impossible to make. Baseball Prospectus, who's about as good at this on a year to year basis as anybody out there, shows Pujols in 2019 hitting .306/.409/.554 - but in only 301 plate appearances. Don't you think that if you had a 39-year old who could hit like that, you'd find a way to get him into the lineup more than every other game? Yeah, me too.

But even if he does produce enough over the life of the contract, the likelihood of him still being even a productive player, much less a superstar, at age 41 is pretty low. Barry Bonds, for example, racked up enough WAR in his 30's that even with a lost season at age 40 and reduced playing time at age 41, he still would have made the contract a bargain. Ditto for Babe Ruth, who played only a handful of games at age 40 and none at all at 41, but was so good from 32-39 that the team would easily have made its money back on a contract like this one.

But those are the exceptions, not the rule, and anyway, getting enough value overall is not the only concern. Having an albatross of a contract around a franchise's collective neck is going to be a real problem if Pujols gets hurt or even if he becomes gradually less productive, like everyone else who's ever played major league baseball. Few things tend to jade a fan base like knowing that the team is throwing money away on an unproductive player. Even if he wins the MVP five more times in the next eight years, getting stuck with two years on the end of the contract during which Pujols will earn $50 or $60 million and not do much will sour a lot of folks on both him and the team, and more important, may hamper the team's ability to field a competitive roster.

Therefore, the Cards would do well to limit the length to, say, seven or eight years instead of 10, if at all possible. That might require them to go up a little in average salary, but it could be worth it to avoid having to pay the man $25 or $30 million to ride the bench in 2020.

Better yet, though, they should wait. Pujols is under contract for 2011, and what's the worst that could happen? he wins another MVP award, and now they have to re-sign a 4-time MVP award winner rather than a 3-time winner. Maybe now it's $32 million per instead of $30. Big deal. But if he gets hurt or something, and they're on the hook for $300 million? Well, that would be disastrous. Or if he plays, but shows some signs of decline, at least they have a leg to stand on in the negotiations, a way to justify not paying him quite so many millions for quite so many years.

Additionally, other teams will suddenly have a reason to be wary of signing him away from St. Louis. They're already at the top of the market for this player. He's as valuable as he's ever going to be, so why buy now? He'll have just as much reason to stay in St. Louis next winter as he does now, maybe more if they make a run or win another World Series or something.

So, my advice is: Wait.

Book Review: Strike IX - by Paul Lonardo

2010-12-13T00:31:00.000-05:00

Everybody loves an underdog. Paul Lonardo has brought you the compelling story of 25 of them in his new book, Strike IX: The Story of a Big East College Forced to Eliminate its Baseball Program and the Team That Refused to Lose.

The background on the book is that Providence college, despite having fielded a baseball team since 1923, found itself in the midst of an era in which a myriad of colleges were scrambling to comply with Title IX regulations - the US laws against gender discrimination by colleges receiving federal funds - or risk being sued. Providence, like most colleges,decided that it was simply easier to eliminate some existing mens' sports, especially those with large rosters, than it was to support additional womens' sports teams, and a 25-man baseball team seemed the perfect candidate.

The twist comes when the 1999 Providence College Friars decide to fight back, not by actually saving the team - that only happens in Disney movies, folks - but by playing so well that everyone would know exactly what they're missing when the Friars depart. It's not exactly The Bad News Bears or Major League, but you definitely get the impression that the athletes kind of think of themselves that way.

Lonardo covers the story predominantly from the perspective of the student athletes, though he does a good job of creating context for the reader, including the history of Providence College, the culture of baseball programs in the northeast, and the pros and cons of the Title IX law and its results in more general terms, particularly with statistics demonstrating the law of unintended consequences.

But he mostly gives you the story of the players' feelings and experiences, including some of their game feats, which were many for a team that went 47-14 and came within one game of playing for a national championship. Still, he manages not to bore you with gory details from game stories (unlike some other books I've reviewed), striking a nice balance, at least in terms of sports vs. human interest.

The book is not, however, terribly balanced when it comes to telling the school's side of the story vs. that of the players and coaches. That's acceptable, I suppose, as most people don't want to hear about the trials and tribulations of a large corporation, or even a modestly sized college. Guys in dirty baseball uniforms make for more sympathetic figures than a bunch of middle aged white men in business suits.

Providence, being in Rhode Island instead of Georgia, Arizona, California or Florida, is hardly a breeding ground for major league talent. In fact, journeyman infielder John McDonald is the second best player ever to come out of Providence, and he wasn't on this team. So you likely won't recognize any of the players' names, and that somehow helps them to feel even more like underdogs. And the fact that they did things like hitting .342 as a team and winning almost 75% of their games can only add to your admiration of them.

The writing itself is not bad, but nothing special either, and Lonardo's use of profanity in his own prose comes off as unprofessional and distracting, at least to me. Because the book is self published, and this is the first edition, there are some errata in it that can also be distracting if you're as nitpicky as I am, but hopefully you're not.

Still, the book's real appeal is its compelling, underdog story, and in that it truly delivers. The 1999 Providence Friars may not have won it all like the Cleveland Indians in Major League, but they made such an impressive run and turned so many heads in the process that they assured their legacy along side some of the great Cinderella stories in history.

Carl Spackler would be proud.

Werth's Worth: Have We Seen the Best of Jayson Yet?

2010-12-08T16:13:00.002-05:00

The Washington Nationals made the biggest splash of the 2010 offseason to date on Monday, announcing a seven-year, $126 million contract for journeyman outfielder Jayson Werth. A Scott Boras client, Werth appears to be yet another exhibit in the case for Boras as the best agent in the business and the argument that one really good season can make almost anyone an extremely rich man.

Nationals' GM Mike Rizzo was quoted as saying,

"We got the inside scoop on who the man is and who the person is. [field manager] Jim [Riggleman] is a great judge of character and clubhouse presence. He was very flowery in his praise in Jayson on and off the field. He feels, like I feel, Jayson's best days haven't been had yet."

He refers to Riggleman's experience with Werth when he was a coach for the Dodgers, though it should be noted that

A) That was almost five years ago now, and

2) His enthusiasm over Werth's "character and clubhouse presence" didn't help much when Werth was trying to get recalled from a AAA rehab assignment and/or struggling for playing time over the likes of Dave Roberts, Ricky Ledee, Steve Finley and Jason Grabowski.

Werth was drafted by the Orioles in the first round of the 1997 draft and spent four seasons languishing in their inept farm system before getting traded to Toronto in December of 2000. In the majors he has been with the Phillies, Dodgers and Blue Jays, though he didn't become an everyday player until about the middle of 2007, when he was already 28 years old.

In roughly three and a half seasons with Philadelphia, Werth hit 95 homers, drove in 300 runs, hit .282/.380/.506 and stole 60 bases at a high rate of success. In 2010 he was one of the dozen or so best players in the National League, with 5.2 WAR (Wins Above Replacement, according to Baseball-reference.com, which was used for all of the calculations in this post).

But the real question, naturally is, "Is Rizzo right?" Do we have yet to see the best of Jayson Werth? And, even if we do, can Werth possibly do enough over the next seven years to justify this contract?

Noting that 2010 constituted what is generally called a Career Year for Werth, I looked at all players who have qualified for the batting title and put up at least a 140 OPS+ in their age 31 season. (OPS+ = On-base-Plus-Slugging, adjusted for league and park factors and set to a scale on which average equals 100. The age 31 season is so defined based on the players' age on June 30th of that year.)

There were 103 of them, including Werth and Adrian Beltre, who also turned 31 this year, and therefore cannot be used to estimate what might happen down the road. For each of those 103 players, I checked to see what their previous career highs were in OPS+ (in a qualifying season) and at what age they occurred. Was this a career year for them? If not, when did they peak?

I also checked for the highest OPS+ in a qualified season* between the ages of 32 and 38, which is the span over which Werth's new contract will stretch. Is Rizzo right about Werth's best days still being ahead of him in spite of the fact that he's now potentially "over the hill" in baseball terms?

*Some of them never again qualified for a batting title after their age 31 season, so instead I took their total OPS+ from ages 32-38 and used that as their "high" setting the age at 32. It seemed the best way to keep from completely skewing the averages. There were only three of these anyway: Larry Hisle, Elmer Flick and Juan Gonzalez.

Finally I tallied and averaged the total WAR between the ages of 32 and 38 for each player, to see whether any of them might have lived up to the Jayson Werth deal. Some of them actually did, as we'll see.

So, as I mentioned, there are 103 such player-seasons, and recall that these are only the players who were 31 years old AND got enough at bats to qualify for the batting title when they accomplished this, and only since 1901. Therefore, the first thing we can notice is that this was hardly an historic season.

If we lower the plate appearance requirement to 400, we get 116 names. If we go back to 1876 instead of 1901, we get 118, even with the qualification requirement. If we change the criteria to a minimum of 5 WAR at age 31, we have 140 names, and so much data to sift through that my wife will never speak to me again, so let's stick with the OPS+ requirement. Since Werth is a right fielder, most of his value is in his bat anyway, and that seems mostly fair.

In any case, we've generally been told that players tend to peak in their late twenties, plateau for a while into their early thirties and then decline in their mid thirties. But Werth peaked at 31, it seems, and the question must be asked whether this is a mountaintop or a plateau, or - dare we say it? - merely the upward slope to still greater heights.

Stop laughing, I'm serious.

Well, anyway, of the aforementioned 103 players, about half (49) really did experience a career year at age 31, including Jayson, but not Beltre. That is, their OPS+ at that age was the highest they had yet posted in a qualified season. Of the remaining 48 for whom we have data for after their age 31 seasons, only 10 went on to still greater OPS+ heights in a qualified season.

Two others from that group, Alex Rodriguez and David Ortiz, are still playing and have not yet turned 38, so it's possible that they will top the peaks they reached at age 31, but it's not very likely. That suggests that for players who hit a new peak of at least 140 OPS+ at age 31, there is only about a 20% chance of improving on that at any point in the next seven seasons.

The remaining 54 players who had peaked before they turned 31 were still very good at that age. Though two of those (Beltre and Todd Helton) have not yet completed their age 38 season, Helton is 36 now and has five seasons of production worse than his age 31 year, so I think it's fair to assume that he's not suddenly going to rebound at age 37 or 38. That leaves us 53 players for whom we can make some claim about their production over these ages.

Of those 53, 21 of them (40%) hit better than they did at age 31 some time in their mid-thirties, though not necessarily better than they had in their twenties. Werth is not in this group, as his previous OPS+ high was just 127, but it could be argued that if he had not suffered from a misdiagnosed wrist injury and/or the incompetence of Dodger management, he might have, so these data are still somewhat instructive.

Overall, 31 of the 101 players who have at least one season in the age 32-38 range managed to improve upon that age 31 season. And two-thirds of those had given some indication of being even better when they were younger, which Werth has not. Even being charitable toward Werth's lost time, then, it seems that he has only about a 30% chance of making good on Mike Rizzo's assertion that his best days lie some time in the future.

And keep in mind that many of the players, in their age 31 season or before, were vastly better than Werth has ever been, so there was more reason to expect great things form them going forward. While Werth just barely cleared the 140 OPS+ threshold we set, at 145, more than a third of the other 102 players posted an OPS+ of at least 175 either at age 31 or some time before that. For reference, 2010 National League MVP Joey Votto's OPS+ was 174, so that gives you an idea of how good these guys were at some point in their careers.

Looking at it another way, if a Win Above Replacement is worth about $4.5 million, and that value increases by 3% annually due to inflation (even though baseball inflation is much different from traditional economic inflation, but we'll be conservative here) then in order to "break even", Jayson Werth must amass about 26 WAR over the next seven seasons to justify his $126 million in total salary. That's assuming an average salary of $18 million, since exact terms are not yet available. The average production of the aforementioned 101 players was a shade under 18 WAR, so you can see we've got our justification work cut out for us.

Of course, we can debate all day about the value of a Win, but that $4.5 million seems reasonable in that a lot of outlets are using something like it, and it's unlikely that Wins will become less expensive over the next decade.

There have only been 46 players in the history of major league baseball who have amassed at least 26 WAR between their age 32 and age 38 seasons. Twenty nine of those 46 are already in the Hall of Fame, and seven more of them have Hall of Fame numbers but either aren't yet eligible (Chipper Jones, Gary Sheffield, Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds, Jeff Kent), have been shut out due to the steroids scandal (McGwire) or have been banned for life (Pete Rose).

Four others are borderline Hall of Famers themselves (Larry Walker, Jim Edmonds, Lou Whitaker and Edgar Martinez). The remaining six (Dolph Camilli, Gavvy Cravvath, Bob Johnson, Ken Williams, Tony Phillips and Jose Cruz) were all exceptional old players who either got a late start in the majors (Johnson, Camilli, Cravath, Williams) or were not that good in their twenties but hit their strides later on (Phillips and Cruz). And Phillips may constitute an exception given the fact that his 30's coincided with the so-called Steroid Era, and that he may very well have been a part of it.

Of course, there is some debate about the value of a Win. Some say it's really lower than $4.5 million, that one year contracts and the overvaluing of free agent relief pitchers skews the number higher, but I think it's probably about right when you consider certain recent signings.

If you call the inflation rate 5% instead of 3%, Jayson would "only" need to amass about 24 WAR in the next seven years for the Nationals to break even, assuming they keep him for the length of the contract. That benchmark brings four other Hall of Famers into the mix (George Brett, Johnny Mize, Earl Averill and Luke Appling) plus five non Hall of Famers (Ichiro, Lefty O'Doul, Bill Dahlen, Dixie Walker, and Dwight Evans).

It's worth noting that Evans and Dahlen have (arguably) Cooperstown-worthy numbers when examined by modern metrics like WAR, but were under appreciated in their own times. Ichiro and Lefty both played the first halves of their careers away from the major leagues, but clearly were major league talents* even in their 20's.

*O'Doul was a great young pitcher who went 25-9, 2.39 ERA in 312 innings in the Pacific Coast League as a 25 year old, but he had arm trouble. So he turned himself into a power hitting outfielder, hit .369 over four seasons in the Pacific Coast League, and then went back to the majors and hit .365 over the next five seasons, winning two batting titles and narrowly missing two MVP awards in that span. Eat your heart out, Rick Ankiel.

So essentially, we've got a batch of 55 players, and about 90% them either are already in Cooperstown, will be someday, or played like Hall of Famers between the ages of 32 and 38.   Among our 101 players who had at least a 140 OPS+ at age 31, only 25 amassed 24 WAR between the ages of 32 and 38, and 20 of them are Hall of Famers.

Anybody think Jayson Werth is about to become a Hall of Famer?

Me neither.

So there we have it. Werth is only about 20-30% likely to improve upon his numbers this year, at best, which is actually a better chance than I'd have given him before I began this exercise.

And even if he does improve, in all likelihood he'll only improve at age 32 or 33, and will decline thereafter. In the block of 101 players who played after their age 31 season, the average age at which they hit their next high in OPS+ was 33, and the most common age was 32. So Rizzo's probably wrong about that.

There have been about 4,260 players in history who have played at least one MLB game between the ages of 32 and 38, but only 55 who have played well enough to live up to this contract. That works out to about 76-to-one odds, which for comparison is roughly the preseason betting line on the Baltimore Orioles winning the 2011 World Series. Actually, it's a little worse than that.

The only ways for Werth to somehow be (forgive me...) worth his $126 million is either

1) to beat ridiculous odds and earn a huge pile of WAR over the next seven seasons, something that there is little evidence to suggest he can do, or

2) for the cost of a win to get really, really expensive. Like, six or eight million dollars.

That latter option may not be as ludicrous as it sounds, given that seven years ago it was only $2.8 million, or about 60% of what it is now. Still, even at that rate, by the time this contract ends in 2017, Werth will still need to be worth about three wins, which is hard to envision for a 38 year old outfielder. That's not impossible, but it's pretty unlikely, unless we can somehow convince ourselves that Werth is really as good as Bonds, Ruth, Mays, Aaron, Cobb, Speaker or another half dozen or so of the best players in history, and we just haven't gotten to see that side of him yet.

I for one, can't.

Don't Make Burnett the Goat in Yankees Loss to Rangers

2010-10-20T11:04:00.010-04:00

The only thing that could have made last night worse for New York was another successful terrorist plot.

OK, so that's a bit of a stretch, but seriously, last night was really a drag.

The Yankees took an early lead in Game 4 of the 2010 ALCS when Robinson Cano hit his third homer of the series in the second inning, making it 1-0. Two batters later, things seemed to be going well for New York when Lance Berkman mashed a Tommy Hunter fastball deep into the upper deck in right field, which would have made it 2-0. The umpires reviewed and overturned that decision, though, calling the ball foul, and almost nothing has gone the Yankees' way since.

Well, that's not precisely true either, but these are dramatic times.

AJ Burnett gave up two runs in the top of the third inning, despite the fact that the Rangers never hit the ball out of the infield. A walk, a wild pitch, a hit batter, a bunt, a fielder's choice grounder, a dribbler to third base on which Alex Rodriguez couldn't make a play, and suddenly the Yankees were down 2-1. This was exactly the kind of thing that seemed to rattle Burnett and throw him off his game during the regular season, but he got another grounder to end the inning and limit the damage.

The Yankees came right back in the bottom of the third and tied the game, but couldn't plate any more runs. They did manage another run in the fourth, but only one, even though they had the bases loaded with only one out. Perhaps the worst blow of the night came when Mark Teixeira pulled a hamstring running out a grounder, resulting in an injury that will keep him outof the rest of the playoffs.

Burnett pitched two and two-thirds more innings without giving up a run, and looked like he was on the cusp of redemption when he allowed a three-run homer that Bengie Molina accomplished with his remarkable patience and textbook power swing.

No, wait. I mean he was lucky.

Burnett had allowed a lead off single to Vlad the GImpaler (TM)*, who was forced out at second on a fielder's choice grounder by Nelson Cruz. Cruz then advanced to second on a deep fly ball out to center field, which left first base open. So they walked David Murphy (.847 OPS against right handed pitchers in 2010, about the same as his career mark) to get to Molina who hit just .213 against them this year and has only a .680 OPS against them in his career.

Seemed like a good move, and even leaving Burnett in to face one more batter doesn't strike me as a terrible idea, since he'd thrown only 97 pitches to that point, and it had been 17 days since his last start. But Burnett missed his target though, which was low and away, and his fastball went up and in to Molina, who smacked it just over the left field wall.

People will tell you that this was a mistake on Burnett's part, and certainly that's true. But look, if you throw a ball 92 mph in on a guy's hands and he hits it out of the park, maybe we should just tip our caps to him and give him credit for a job well done. Not every hit or even every homer happens due to a pitcher's mistake, you know? Even mediocre major league hitters are major league hitters.

In any case, that homer seemed to take the life out of both the Yankees and their fans, symbolized by nothing better than the image of Alex Rodriguez, in his crouch waiting for the pitch, dropping his head in disappointment without even turning around to see the ball sail out of the park.

The Yankees went down in order in the bottom half of the 6th inning as well as the 7th. Texas refused to reciprocate though, scoring two more runs in their half of the 7th on a homer by Josh Hamilton (I think his ribs are probably healed...) and a bloop single by Ian Kinsler with two men on.

The rangers tried to give back a little in the eighth, using three different pitchers to walk the bases loaded with only one out, but the Yankees just couldn't come up with a big hit to close the 7-3 gap. The Rangers then showed them how it's done in the ninth inning, when Josh Hamilton hit another homer, his fourth of the series (Yep, the ribs are definitely OK!) and then Nelson Cruz hit his 4th, also off Sergio Mitre. That made it 10-3, and that's where the score stayed as the Yankees couldn't capitalize on Brett Gardner's leadoff single in the ninth.

They're down three games to one in the ALCS now, which, while not impossible, is a pretty unlikely position from which to mount a comeback. In the 75 times in MLB history a team has been down 3-1 in a seven game series, only 10 teams have come back to win, but that's still less than a 15% chance.

Most fans will look no further than the "L" next to Burnett's name in the box score and the five runs he gave up and assume that Burnett had yet another terrible outing, but really he was perhaps one mistake away from escaping with a 1-run lead and six innings of effective work. Most of us would love to make only one mistake for every 97 things we try in our lives, but Burnett may have run himself out of town with his.

But Boone Logan failed to do his job for the second night in a row. Mitre gave up three runs on two homers in only one inning. Yankee hitters left 18 men on base. There was plenty of blame to go around last night, so let's not turn Burnett into the goat simply because it's easy and convenient and we need a put a face on our frustration.

In any case, even if CC Sabathia pitches well tonight, the Yankee bats need to manage more than two runs against CJ Wilson. Also, both teams might want to invest in some pitchers with actual names, instead of just initials. I'm just sayin'.

Yankees Squander Best Chance at Beating Rangers

2010-10-19T09:39:00.009-04:00

The Rangers' Cliff Lee was masterful yet again last night in New York, striking out 13 Yankees in eight innings without allowing a run as he helped push Texas ahead, two games to one in the American League Championship Series. For their part, the Yankees squandered their best pitching performance of the ALCS to date, letting Andy Pettitte's seven inning, two-run effort go to waste as they not only failed to score a run, but also watched in horror as the bullpen imploded to let six more runs score in the top of the ninth, putting the game out of reach.

For the Yankees, whose starting pitching as they entered the post season had consisted of a Cy Young candidate followed by a bunch of question marks, the loss had to be particularly disappointing. Pettitte turned one of those question marks into an exclamation point with a seven-inning, two-run performance against the Twins in the Division Series, then repeated the feat last night against Texas in wasted effort.

In fact, Pettitte really only made one mistake all night, the home run he allowed to Josh Hamilton, which came on a 3-2 cutter that he left out over the plate. Hamilton's famously injured ribs have kept him from being particularly effective against good fastballs, but he's been able to catch up with off-speed pitches, especially when they've been left out over the plate, as he did with CC Sabathia's slurve on Friday night, and as he reminded us last night.

Pettitte could have won this game, perhaps should have won it. He's the most experienced post-season pitcher in major league history, with more Wins, more starts and more innings than anyone who's ever lived, and those all by large margins. Nineteen times in his career he'd allowed three runs or fewer in a postseason start with New York, and the Yankees had gone 16-3 in those games. In two of those three losses they scored no runs at all, and of course last night makes their record 16-4 in such contests.

If they could simply have gotten to Cliff Lee, or, barring that, tired him out soon enough to get him out of the game and take a few shots at the Rangers' bullpen, they might have won it. Heck, the man was ready to come back out for the ninth when he'd already thrown 122 pitches. They might have seen him tire in the ninth, or at least gotten his pitch count up to 135 or so before their night was over, perhaps preventing him from being quite so effective in a Game Seven scenario.

But alas, they could do neither. The so-called "plan" for facing Cliff Lee is to either to be aggressive and swing at the first pitch - because he throws a lot of strikes - or to be patient and wait for your pitch, because he also throws a lot of pitches that look like strikes, but aren't. Which is to say that there is no effective plan, or somebody would have already made a fortune by selling it to the Yankees.

Your best chance is to be patient and hope he screws up, because in any given game of 100 pitches or more, he might only make five or six pitches that are eminently hittable. And even these are likely to follow such a baffling series of wholly unhittable pitches that you simply watch them sail past into the catcher's mitt and then walk dejectedly back to the dugout before the umpire even has a chance to yell, "STRIKE THREE!" (This happened four times last night, by the way.)

The real problem wasn't Andy Pettitte or (obviously) Kerry Wood, who continued to do his job very well in retiring the side in the 8th inning. It wasn't even the Yankee hitters, who managed only three baserunners the entire night, and only got one of them past first base. The problem was that Girardi missed an opportunity with his bullpen in the ninth inning.

No, I'm not talking about the manager's refusal to use his closer in a tight game in the ninth inning. I think with two more games in the next two days and a bullpen full of generally effective, well-rested relievers, using Boone Logan and David Robertson is exactly what Girardi should have done. It's just not the way I would have done it.

Logan was exactly the right choice - the only choice, really - to face Josh Hamilton leading off the ninth inning. He's the Yankees' only lefty reliever, and he held lefties to a .190 batting average with only one extra base hit all season. In his career in the major leagues, lefties have hit only .248, while righties have hit .325, so there was no question that this was the man for that particular job.

Granted, he didn't actually get that job done, but still, they had no better options, really, once you took Mariano Rivera off the table. And I'm not entirely certain that it was Logan's fault either. He threw a 95 mph fastball to the outer edge of the plate and Hamilton did all he could with it, i.e. slap it to left field. But Brett Gardner and Curtis Granderson were inexplicably late getting to the ball, which scooted past both of them, all the way to the and Hamilton went to second easily.

Logan's night was over. Girardi then brought in David Robertson to face the right handed hitters coming up: Vlad Guererro, Nelson Cruz, Ian Kinsler, etc. A seemingly good move, in that Robertson strikes a lot of batters out and gets a lot of outs on pop-ups, which should theoretically keep Hamilton from going any further, right? Except that Guererro is all but impossible to fan, so he singled a 1-2 curveball, which was actually an excellent pitch, below the strikezone, into left field, moving Hamilton to third. Julio Borbon ran for Vlad the GImpaler (I just made that up!), giving the Rangers a little more speed on the basepaths.

So now the Yankees have to deal with runners on first and third with nobody out, and they're down by two runs. Not a good situation, but not impossible. The Rangers' best hitters have already batted and their opponent in the ninth inning will be either a potentially tiring Cliff Lee or someone from the Texas bullpen, a bullpen that has recently shown some weaknesses. Do you give up the run on third base in order to try to get a double play? Or do you try to cut down the run at home?

Girardi went for the latter option, bringing the infield in to try to keep the two-run deficit where it was, but in doing so, he squandered an opportunity to go to the ninth inning down only three runs instead of, you know, eight. Robertson - who is a fairly extreme fly ball/strikeout pitcher - went against his character by inducing a ground ball off the bat of Nelson Cruz. Unfortunately, it skipped past the drawn-in Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez into left field, plating another run.

Three-nothing.

Then, inexplicably, Girardi kept the infield in again. Ian Kinsler has some speed, but he was also doubled up 11 times in the regular season, so it might have been possible to turn two. Regardless, Robertson reverted to form, inducing a strikeout with a curveball in the dirt, but Cruz advanced to second on the wild pitch, giving the Rangers an open base. Pinch-hitter David Murphy was intentionally walked to load the bases, and finally Girardi realized the futility of pulling the infield in, just a bit too late.

Bengie Molina, who is so large that the Giants had to trade him away (he and Pandoval were making their making the field tilt when they both played), should be an easy guy to double up, given how he'll swing at just about anything and can't run at all. But alas, yet another grounder snuck between Jeter and A-Rod, playing close to the third base line to prevent a double, I think, which plated another run.

Four-nothing.

It wasn't Robertson's fault. He delivered another good curveball, which broke below the strikezone, bur Molina got hold of it and it found its way through. Jeter ranked 20th out of 21 qualified MLB shortstops in Range Factor this year, and Rodriguez was 15th out of 19 third basemen, making them, I think, the worst rated left side of the infield combo in the majors, and it showed.

Mitch Moreland then singled to right field, for a change, this time on a fastball from Robertosn that was down and in, again a pretty good pitch, the result of which snuck between Mark Teixeira and the first base line, and plated two more runs.

Six-nothing.

Robertson then battled shortstop Elvis Andrus, getting the count to 2-2 before leaving a fastball about belt high over the middle of the plate, and was reminded that even guys with "warning track power" can actually hit the ball pretty quickly to the warning track if you leave a meatball out there for them. Andrus' double sailed just over the outstretched glove of right fielder Nick Swisher, plating yet another run, and mercifully endiN. Robertson's night.

Seven-nothing.

Sergio Mitre came in to mop up and needed only five pitches to retire two batters, though even one of those went wild and allowed the eighth run of the night to score.

In the bottom half of the inning, Neftali Feliz retired all three batters he faced, fanning two of them. Why they'd bother using their best reliever in an 8-0 game is beyond my comprehension, but perhaps the 20 pitches he threw last night will make him less effective tonight if they need him.

Obviously, a baseball game is not as cut and dried as one might like. It's an agglomeration of lots of moving parts, many of which are all but unmeasurable. But in the midst of wondering whether the Yankees should have done something different against Cliff Lee, who seems to thrive no matter what you do, or whether they should have burned their closer in a game they were already 92% likely to lose, it's worth wondering whether it was really a good move to bring in the infield three times in a row.

Especially on the left, where the infield defense already has painfully minimal range, you've reduced that even more. And all of this on the off chance of getting a flyball pitcher to not just induce a grounder, but to induce one directly at one of the infielders. And then to do that two more times, after it doesn't work the first time, just seems asinine to me.

Hopefully Girardi won't make such a call tonight. Hopefully AJ Burnett finds the form that helped him win 13 games last year, and 18 the year before that, and The Yankee bats awake again and Girardi has only to worry about how much rest to give his starters as they go into the eight inning with a 13-2 lead, or something like that.

But don't bet on it.

NLDS Preview: Cincinnati Reds @ Philadelphia Phillies

2010-10-06T14:28:00.006-04:00

The Reds surprised everyone by ending a decade and a half playoff drought - not to mention a failure to place higher than 3rd in their division in this millennium - by winning their division and blowing away the competition in the process.

They flip-flopped with the Cardinals a few times for the division lead, at one point trailing by as many as five games in early May, but they won five of their next six after that, and never found themselves more than a game and a half out of first. They took over first place for good on August 11th and ended up winning by five games.

Their offense is led by MVP candidate Joey Votto's 37 homers and .324 batting average, though really there are few weak spots in the lineup. Four other players hit at least 18 homers, and the two headed catching monster, Rya mon Hern anigan dez, hit .298 with 88 RBIs. The only soft spot in the offensive underbelly is shortstop Orlando Cabrera, who hit only .263 with no power or patience, and that's not much of a weak spot. Most teams have two or three players like that. The 2010 Mariners would have sold their souls to Donald Trump for a hitter as good as Cabrera.

The Reds led the Senior Circuit in Runs, home runs, batting average, slugging percentage, OPS, and missed leading the league in OBP by one point to the Braves. They also had the fewest errors in the NL, so you know their defense isn't likely to give any games away.

Good thing, too, because after Bronson Arroyo and Johnny Cueto, the starting pitching is pretty questionable. Edinson Volquez has no shortage of talent, but is a huge question mark after two years of just four wins and a 4.3ish ERA each, due to injuries. He's as likely to surrender five runs in two innings as he is to rack up ten strikeouts in seven shutout frames.

They won't likely feel comfortable throwing Volquez out for Game 4 on three days' rest, given his injury history, so I expect that rookie southpaw (and awesomely-named) Travis Wood will get the ball for that contest. Wood pitched only half a season and went only 5-4 (with a 3.51 ERA) but he's absolute poison to lefties, allowing them a paltry .136 average and two extra base hits in 67 at-bats. I'm sure that Ryan Howard, Chase Utley and Raul Ibanez are hoping that the series is decided in three games.

Jason Werth and Shane Victorino both provide power and speed, and Placido Polanco and Carlos Ruis both hit around .300, with doubles power and a few walks to boot. Ross Gload, Mike Sweeney, Ben Francisco and Wilson Valdez give them an experienced and capable bench both on offense and defense.

And it may very well be. With Roys Halladay and Oswalt and lefty Cole Hamels likely to start every game of the series, it may not matter. Halladay is practically a lock for the NL Cy Young award, and Oswalt and Hamels both pitched as well as anybody in baseball this season, giving the Phillies the three of the top seven pitchers in the NL in Wins Above Replacement for 2010.

The Phillies were second in the NL in Runs Scored, were 4th in the NL in steals and led the league in SB percentage, with an incredible 84% mark, so you know they won't run themselves out of a scoring opportunity. Their defensive was excellent too, with only a handful more errors than the Reds, good for 4th in the NL.

Neither team has a particularly good or bad bullpen, both ranking around the middle of MLB with ERAs around 4.00. Brad Lidge, the Phillies' closer, has a reputation for choking, but that may just be because I live near Philadelphia and hear their fans whining about him a lot. He only blew five Saves this year, compared to eight for Francisco Cordero, and his ERA is almost an entire run lower. I'll take him over 'Cicso any day.

The rest of the Phillies bullpen consists mostly of seasoned veterans who have been to this thing before, and won't be rattled by the bright lights in the playoffs. LAIM Joe Blanton figures as the long man out of the bullpen - the one they don't expect to need. Cincinnati has a lot of youngsters out in the 'pen - Bill Bray, Homer Bailey, Logan Ondrusek, Nick Masset and of course Aroldis Chapman - though Arthur Rhodes should be able to help calm the seas.

If the Phillies have a weakness to exploit, it's that they do not hit well against so-called "power" pitchers, with only a .219 batting average and 19 homers in more than 1100 plate appearances against pitchers who rank in the top third of the league in combined walks and strikeouts, according to Baseball-reference.com. The reds as a team are only in the middle of the pack in that regard, but some of their key pitchers -Volquez, Cueto, Bray, Chapman, Bailey - are power pitchers who need to strike batters out to succeed.

If they can do that, they Reds' stellar offense - apparently not a mirage of what used to be referred to as the Great American Bandbox - may be able to chip away at Halladay, Oswalt or hamels and steal a couple of wins.

But I doubt it. Phillies in three.

2010 ALDS Preview: Texas Rangers @ Tampa Bay Rays

2010-10-06T11:15:00.004-04:00

The Rays locked up home field advantage throughout the AL playoffs on Sunday, with a win against the Royals, or with the Yankees' loss earlier in the day, depending on how you want to look at it. They're going to need it, too, because this Rangers team is no slouch. They were 4th in the AL in run scoring, though they got a little help from their ballpark.

Josh Hamilton leads the team in most offensive categories, capping his Cinderella story by winning a batting title and returning from a rib injury in time for the playoffs. Vladimir Guerrero bounced back from an off season in 2009 to post a traditional line of .300/29/115, though that belies the somewhat pedestrian .278 with 9 homers he hit after the All-Star Break. Mike Young and Nelson Cruz each hit over 20 homers, but the lineup gets pretty power-starved after that, as nobody but David Murphy has more than nine.

Murphy only hit 12, and only did that because he got a lot of playing time when Cruz and Hamilton were missing half a season's worth of games between them . Ian Kinsler's not a bad hitter, getting on base at a .382 clip, but both his extra base hits and his steals were essentially cut in half compared to last year. Center fielder Julio Borbon and shortstop Elvis Andrus are both defense-first singles hitters. Andrus may be slick with the glove, but his .301 slugging percentage would be dead last among the 149 players who qualified for a batting title this year if it weren't for the fact that Caesar Izturis is still employed.

The Rangers' catching corps (Matt Treanor and Bengie Molina) are singles hitters who don't even hit singles anymore, ranking third from the bottom among MLB catchers in OPS. The Rangers struggled all season to field a decent first baseman, as their composite OPS ranks 4th from the bottom, though Mitch Moreland's .833 OPS would rank 12th, which isn't horrible.

Overall they manage to score runs on the strength of their team batting average, which led the majors, and their speed, as they have five different players with double digit steals. Andrus also got caught 15 times to go with his 32 steals, so he does as much harm as good in that regard, but their opponents certainly can't forget about the stolen base.

And for once their pitching was actually really solid too.

For all the hoopla over Philadelphia's Big 3 Starters, the Rangers' trio of Colby Lewis, C.J. Wilson and Cliff Lee was excellent as well and is unmatched in the Junior Circuit. They combined for 39 Wins (including Lee's efforts in Seattle), a 3.41 ERA, 551 strikeouts and only 173 walks in 617 innings. And unlike Philly, the Rangers' #4 starter is actually pretty good. Tommy Hunter went 13-4 with a 3.73 ERA overall including 7-0 with a 3.06 ERA at home. they'll throw him in Game 4 in Arlington, playing to his strength.

The Bullpen is great, too, led by flamethrower Neftali Feliz and his 40 Saves, and with a composite 3.38 ERA that was second in the American league. If the starters falter, the bullpen should be able to keep them in the game long enough for Hamilton, Young or Cruz to do something special.

The trouble for Texas is that almost everything they're good at, Tampa is even better.

The Rangers' bullpen ERA of 3.38 is secondin the AL...to Tampa's 3.33. Their 46 Saves are second to Tampa's 51. Texas has four starting pitchers who won at least a dozen games (including Lee's work in Seattle)...but Tampa has five. Their pitchers struck out more batters than all but three teams in the AL...but one of them was Tampa. The Texas offense was 4th in Runs Scored...but Tampa was 3rd. The Rangers stole 123 bases, at a success rate of 71%, more than any other playoff team...except Tampa, who stole 172 bases at a 79% clip.

The Rays' starting pitching, while not exactly a weakness in the playoffs, is kind of an unusable strength. They don't need five starters, and maybe don't even need four, depending on how things shake out, so Jeff Niemann will likely waste away in the bullpen unless they're in a blow-out. The Atlanta Braves of the mid 1990s had similar experiences, winning only one championship despite 14 trips to the playoffs, largely because they didn't need the 5th starter that had helped them pad their regular season records.

Their offense reminds me of the so-called "Hitless Wonders", the White Sox who beat the heavily favored Cubs in the 1906 World Series despite a team batting average of .230 that was last in the AL. The Rays hit .247 as a team, 4th worst in baseball, but scored the 3rd most runs on the strength of their patience and speed, as they ranked first in both walks and steals, and hit some home runs.

Unfortunately for Tampa, Evan Longoria had a quadriceps injury that sidelined him for most of the last two weeks of the season, and nobody really knows how well he's going to bounce back. If he's not 100%, or if he re-injures the leg, the Rays will have a hard time producing enough to keep up with Texas.

If there's a ray (rimshot!) of hope for the Rangers, it's that the team they're running out there today is not exactly the one that lost four of six games to Tampa in the regular season. They averaged more than five runs per game in those six contests, but their pitchers allowed almost seven runs per contest.

Fortunately for Texas, two of those four losses were suffered by Rich Harden and Derek Holland, who don't figure largely into the Rangers' playoff plans. In fact, 18 of the 40 runs they allowed to Tampa in the regular season were surrendered by pitchers who either aren't on the post season roster (Chris Ray, Frank Francisco, Pedro Strop, Rich Harden) or who now have greatly reduced roles (Holland). Unfortunately for Texas, Lee and Wilson did not pitch well even in the two games they won, so hopefully those uncharacteristic performances won't be repeated.

The key for the Rangers will be to keep the Rays off the basepaths, which won't be easy, given how patient the rays are and the fact that the Rangers walked the 7th most batters in MLB. The Rays may not be able to hit their way to a win in this series, but they could potentially walk - and run - to victory.

My prediction is that the Rays will win it in four, unless Longoria is injured or doesn't hit.

Florida Marlins Can Blame Themselves for the Nyjer Morgan Mess

2010-09-02T14:24:00.016-04:00

Well, I suppose you have to do something to liven things up when the two teams playing are a combined 32 games out of first place in their own division, with only a month left to the season. This goes double when the game is already a blowout in the 6th inning.

The Marlins and Nationals apparently decided to liven things up, ironically, by trying to kill each other.

Well, it was a little more complicated than that.

In the top of the 6th inning of a 15-5 drubbing, Nationals' centerfielder Nyjer Morgan evidently took umbrage at the fact that the Marlins were throwing at him, and charged the mound. What Morgan (generously listed at "six feet" tall and 175 lbs) thought he was going to do to Chris Volstad (6'8", 230 lbs) is beyond my comprehension.

For his part, Volstad seemed singularly unimpressed as Morgan charged at him, throwing his glove down in arrogance and dodging Morgan's only real punch, that jumping left hook he learned from watching too many action movies.

It didn't work.

And, I would guess that among the things going through Morgan's mind as he ran out to the mound, he probably didn't imagine being flattened by a man named "Gaby".

Marlins firstbaseman Gaby Sanchez, not much taller but about 50 pounds heavier than Morgan, clothes-lined him and brought him to the ground, whereupon everyone else joined in the scrum. It took 10 or 15 minutes for the figurative dust to settle and when it did, both Volstad and Morgan had been ejected, of course.

Additionally, Florida manager Edwin Rodriguez was ejected, presumably for complicity in, if not actually ordering the plunking, as was relief pitcher Jose Veras. His only crime, as far as I can tell, was the fact that he happened to be standing next to one of the umpires when they were looking for another scapegoat.

During the course of the brawl, various players, coaches and even (I think) the Nationals' bullpen catcher had gotten into the mix. Nationals coach Pat Listach was clobbering Volstad at the bottom of the melee, and others can clearly be seen throwing hard punches on the video replay, but nobody else was ousted.

In most of the highlight reels, Morgan ends up looking like the bad guy, and with good reason:

Namely, that he makes himself look like a bad guy. I mean, not like a Hitler-type of bad guy, more the professional wrestler type of bad guy. A guy who shoots off his mouth and tries to back his words up with action and even when he's more or less defeated, feels the need to save face by, well, yelling more. A guy who seemingly walks around all the time as though he's still hitting the .351 he smacked for the Nats last year, rather than the .257 mark he's posted this year.

The truth, however, is rarely that simple.

The problem did not start in the top of the 6th on Wednesday night. It didn't even start Wednesday, but rather Tuesday night, in a scoreless tie in the top of the 10th inning. Running full speed, Morgan bowled over Marlins' catcher Brett Hayes, trying to score from second base on a fielder's choice grounder to shortstop Hanley Ramirez. The result was a separated shoulder for Hayes and probably the end of his season.

Morgan went back to touch the plate, just in case, but Hayes had held onto the ball, and he was out. Morgan reportedly didn't say anything to Hayes either then or after the game, and evidently the Marlins didn't appreciate that. I guess they think that an opposing player ought to apologize for trying to win the game any way he can, even though it was essentially a clean play that just ended badly for their guy.

What they should have taken exception to, if anything, was Hanley Ramirez' slow reaction and lazy throw to home plate, which clocked only 69 miles per hour (see below). The speed in the graphic on this screen capture is not the speed of the pitch, which was an 82 mph slider, but rather the speed of the throw from second base, which happened to cross the path of the radar gun.

Ramirez has a major league shortstop's arm, and is certainly capable of throwing a baseball at 90 mph, perhaps more. But this lobbed throw forced Hayes to catch it as Morgan came barreling towards him, giving him no time to set himself for the collision. A 90 mph throw would have given him an extra 0.2 seconds to set himself, which is longer than it sounds like, and might have helped him to stave off injury.

For that matter, if Ramirez had been paying closer attention to Morgan, he might have seen him running full steam sooner and therefore given Hayes enough time to avoid the collision all together. If the Marlins are looking to blame someone for Hayes' injury, they need look no further than their own All-Star shortstop.

Morgan, for his part, was just playing heads-up baseball - risking injury to himself as well, it should be noted - trying to win a scoreless, extra-inning game for his team. His effort to hit the catcher hard enough to dislodge the ball is no more or less than thousands of players have done in thousands of baseball games over the last century and a half of professional baseball. That the Marlins didn't appreciate the outcome - and they did eventually win the game, after all - is their problem.

But they didn't see it that way. With the score 14-3 Marlins, with one out in the top of the 4th inning the next night, Morgan came to bat and the Fish saw their opportunity. Volstad hit him with a 92 mph fastball and then stared Morgan down, waiting for a reaction. Nyjer didn't give him the satisfaction though, turning away from the pitcher, briefly rubbing his highly-padded elbow and scampering down to first base.

But the Marlins made a bad gamble, doing for Morgan the one thing he's largely been unable to do for himself this year: They put him on base. While Morgan is not a terribly effective base stealer, on a pace to lead the NL in times caught stealing for the second time in his career, he also had 30 successful steals so far this year, so he's nothing if not fast.

Plus, he's got a chip on his shoulder and a reason to show them up now, so he stole second base, and then stole third three pitches later. That gave him all the opportunity he needed to score a run when Marlins' secondbaseman Donnie Murphy stumbled and sustained an injury catching a pop-up. They really showed him, huh?

So the Marlins, feeling that the "lesson" had not yet sunk into Morgan's head, decided to try to sink a baseball into it instead. But Volstad missed this time, throwing behind him and eliciting the Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon response you've probably already seen a dozen times on SportsCenter.

Obviously warnings were given to both benches after the fracas, so when Gaby Sanchez got plunked an inning later both Washington pitcher Doug Slaten and manager Jim Riggleman were ejected. Everyone else was allowed to finish their regularly scheduled program, in the form of a 16-10 trouncing that was frankly an embarrassment for both franchises.

Yankees, Cashman Lying About Not Wanting Kuroda

2010-08-26T11:25:00.006-04:00

The Yankees have fallen into a tie for first place in the AL East with the Tampa Bay Rays, and were fortunate enough to maintain that tie last night, despite a 6-3 loss to the Blue Jays, when the Rays were rolled by the Angels, 12-3. Both teams enjoy a comfortable, five and a half game lead on the Red Sox, who have been so decimated by injuries this season that they now get a special group rate at Mass General.

They're going to need that cushion, too, because 29 of the team's remaining 35 games will come against teams with winning records. Four of those are against the Oakland A's, whose record is just barely in the black at 63-62, and the six other games are against Baltimore, easily the worst team in the American League. They're already 10-2 against Baltimore and 5-1 against Oakland, so presumably they should win at least seven of those 10 games.

But the rest of the Yankees' remaining schedule is brutal. It includes:

Six more games against Toronto, who lead the major leagues in homers by a comfortable margin, and who also have some talented - if inconsistent - young pitchers.
Three games at Chicago, where the White Sox are 36-25
Three games at Texas, where the Rangers are 42-22(!)
Seven games against the Rays, tied with the Yankees for the best record in baseball, and
Six games against the Red Sox, including three at Fenway Park to close the season.

It's perhaps also worth noting that the only AL teams who have winning records against the Yankees this year are the Rays (6-5) and the Jays (7-5).

In light of all of this, it is even more surprising to me that the Yankees' general manager, Brian Cashman, would have no apparent interest in bolstering the team's starting pitching for the stretch. Reports yesterday indicated that the Yankees had no interest in Hiroki Kuroda, the Dodgers' right hander who was supposedly being put on waivers.

Given how inconsistent A.J. Burnett has been, and how poorly Javier Vazquez has done of late after a stretch in which he looked pretty darn good, and the fact that Andy Pettitte is still hurt, how can the Yankees justify NOT looking for help?

But Cashman's assertion is that,

"What we got is what we're going with. I anticipate we are going to use the alternatives we have here."

According to Wallace Matthews of ESPN,

"That means youngster Ivan Nova, journeyman* Dustin Moseley and, hopefully, a return to form by Andy Pettitte, out since July 18 with a groin strain."

*Since when does pitching for two major league teams qualify someone as a "journeyman"?

Nova is 23 and has an impressive, 12-3, 2.86 record at AAA Scranton this year, an dthe peripherals to back that up. He may be in the franchise's long range plans, but it would surprise me if the Yankees really wanted to lean on a rookie like that.

This is a team that historically has not been gun-shy about shoring itself up for the stretch drive - and indeed was thisclose to acquiring Cliff Lee about six weeks ago, at a time when Pettitte was still healthy and Vazquez was pitching well - so I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't want Kuroda or someone like him.

But then Cashman starts to really lay it on thick: "I haven't thought about him. I don't even know if he's on waivers yet. Besides, I'd be hard-pressed to find a pitcher on the waiver wire who can pitch better for us than Dustin Moseley has."

Really, Brian? A guy with a 4.53 ERA who's got a K/W ratio of 18/23 in 46 innings? That's, well, I'll just say it: mediocre. You can't imagine that there's someone better than that out there? Ted Lilly cleared waivers. So did Kerry Wood - for whom you actually traded - Jake Westbrook, Randy Flores, Kyle Farnsworth and Octavio Dotel.

As for Moseley, despite his 4-2 record (and the fact that he's won both a major and a minor league game I attended this year) he's really nothing special. He's got a 5.22 ERA in his spotty major league career and has been generally unimpressive in the minors, with a 4.97 ERA in 95 starts at AAA.

By comparison, Kuroda is 9-11 with a 3.48 ERA this year, and his ERA is no mirage of Dodger Stadium either, as his career road and home ERAs are nearly identical (3.67 vs. 3.69). So the man can pitch. And this year at least, he's managed to stay in the rotation all year.

He's 35 years old and will be a free agent at the end of the year, after making another $2.7 million from someone this year, but that's pocket change for the Yankees. He would obviously be an upgrade on Nova or Moseley and would provide some insurance in case Pettitte doesn't fully heal or Vazquez doesn't find his form again.

Incidentally, keeping Vazquez in the bullpen might be the best thing for everyone involved. He's allowed a .219 composite batting average on his first 50 pitches in games this year, but the opposition has hit .325(!) off him on pitches #51-75.

In any case, methinks that Cashman doth protest too much. He could obviously use the help that Kuroda would offer, now more than ever with Alex Rodriguez nursing a gimpy leg, and would gladly part with three million dollars of the SteinBrothers' money to get him, not to mention a few marginal prospects.

But of course since the Yankees have the best record in baseball, every other team (except perhaps the Rays, given that they're tied) would get a chance to claim the Japanese righty before the Bronx Bombers would ever get their chance.

The Red Sox in particular could probably use him, especially if Josh Beckett doesn't straighten himself out or if Dice-K's back flares up again. So, if there's any hint that the Yankees want him, Kuroda would never clear waivers. Cashman's doing his best to play that possibility down, but I for one am not buying it.

Yankees-Rangers Two Game Series Review

2010-08-16T11:56:00.001-04:00

Boy, was that a lot of fun! Who says a two-game series isn't worth the effort?

One night after losing in unlikely and dramatic fashion to the Texas Rangers, the New York Yankees won a game in even more dramatic, if not precisely unusual fashion. Coming back from a 5-run deficit, the Yankees managed to beat one of their their likely postseason foes by a score of 7-6 in Arlington, on a night that still reached well above 90 degrees Fahrenheit by the time the game ended, around 11PM Central time.

I say that the 4-3 loss was unusual not because the "L" went on Mariano Rivera's record. He's got 54 losses now in his career, an average of about four per season. These things happen. I say it was unusual because nothing worked for Mariano that night, and that is rare. It had been almost 40 months since Mariano Rivera had faced four or more batters in a single outing without getting more than one of them out. And at that time, the event had people calling for his resignation, wondering whether he was washed up.

This was not such an occasion. With the Yankees and Rangers tied, 3-3, Joe Girardi brought in his best reliever to assure that his team had its best chance of staying in the game, rather than holding him back for a save situation that may never arise, and he deserves credit for that. Too few managers take such an approach, and pay for it with losses.

As it happens, Joe paid for his good decision with a decidedly bad outcome, but you can't blame him, really, and while you can technically blame Rivera, he was a lot closer than the boxscore would suggest to escaping that 10th inning unscathed. Rivera induced a grounder to shortstop, but it was a hard grounder to deep short, and even Derek Jeter's legendary cannon arm could not nail Michael Young at first base.

That brought league leading hitter Josh Hamilton to the plate. Rivera induced another infield grounder, but this too was hit rather hard and eluded both firstbaseman Lance Berkman and Young, the runner, and ended up in right field. Vlad Guerrero dutifully grounded out to third base for the only out Rivera would record, the runners ending up on second and third with one out.

That meant that they could walk Nelson Cruz - hitting .315 overall, .347 at home and .374 with runners in scoring position - to pitch to David Murphy, hitting just .271 overall, .281 at home and .235 with RISP. Seemed like the safer bet, even with the bases now loaded and only one out. The trouble was that they would have needed a double play to get out of the inning, and you couldn't really count on that.

So they brought the infield in, to cut down the runner at home. Perhaps it wasn't a great bet, but they had to try it, right? Though it seems to me I've seen this tactic employed successfully against the Yankees somewhere before...

No matter. Anyway, the problem was that all Murphy had to do was fist a ball over the infielders' heads and the game was over.

And so it was.

A couple of hard hit grounders, an intentional walk, a bloop single, and that was the ballgame. A great deal of fun to watch, even in a loss, as it was really a nail-biter all the way.

But Wednesday night's game, the 7-6 win for New York, was even more fun, and not just because my team won it. To begin with, the Yankees started Javier Vazquez against the Rangers' Cliff Lee, who would have supplanted Javy in the rotation if they'd been able to complete the trade everyone was expecting about a month ago. I had recently opined that Lee would have been an improvement on Vazquez, but not a sufficiently large one to justify all the talent they would have had to surrender, so for me this matchup was particularly compelling.

Granted, Vazquez has complained of a "dead arm" of late, and was not exactly stellar in this outing. He started by surrendering perhaps the cheapest home run in history - a bloop fly off righty hitting Michael Young's bat that just skimmed the right side of the right field foul pole, about six feet above the wall - to put the Rangers up, 1-0.

Lee had allowed a leadoff single to Derek Jeter, then retired 10 straight, including four strikeouts, before a Marcus Thames single and an Alex Rodriguez double evened the score at one run apiece. It stayed like that until the fourth, when Vazquez allowed a leadoff double to Josh Hamilton, got two outs, but then intentionally walked David Murphy and unintentionally walked Bengie Molina, who only draws an unintentional walk about once every five games, on average, so maybe that should have been a sign that Vazquez was losing his touch. In any case, rookie Mitch Moreland singled home two runs, and the Yankees were down, 3-1, though Vazquez got out of the 4th without further damage to his ERA or the Yankees' chances for victory.

Lee kept the Yankee bats at bay in the top of the fifth, bring his total tally to seven strikeouts in five innings, but in the bottom of the fifth, things really went to pot for Vazquez. He allowed solid singles to Elvis Andrus and Michael Young, and a double to Hamilton that plated Andrus, making it 4-1. He did finally record a couple of ground balls, but the second of these resulted in a botched rundown of Mike Young at third base.

That's right: Somehow Jorge Posada, Jeter and A-Rod - with a combined six Gold Glove Awards, three MVP awards and 16 more top-10 finishes in the voting and 29 All Star Games - could not figure out a way to tag Michael Young before he got back to third base safely, which left the bases loaded for David Murphy. Vazquez allowed a double to Murphy that scored Hamilton and Young, making it 6-1 Texas and ending Javy's night.

Sergio Mitre - who like cod liver oil and iocane powder is best taken in small doses (he has a 2.49 ERA as a reliever, 5.93 as a starter) - came in to relieve and actually did his job. He got Bengie to hit a pop fly to short right field, which Nick Swisher caught on a run and instantly threw to third to try to catch Nelson Cruz trying to get to within 90 feet of home plate.

He didn't make it.

Granted, they were up by five runs and Cliff Lee was pitching about as well as anyone ever has, so maybe it was worth the risk, but of course it turns out that perhaps they could have used an extra run later, and they missed an opportunity.

The game went through waves of being variably exciting, but even when the Yankees went down 6-1 in the fifth inning, it never felt like they were out of it.

In the 6th inning, Jeter led off with a triple, badly played off the right field wall by Cruz, and then scored on a 3-2 wild pitch that Bengie Molina would likely have blocked five years ago, making it 6-2. Lee, evidently feeling that he could rely on nobody but himself, promptly struck out the next three batters on 10 more pitches.

After an uneventful bottom of the 6th for Sergio Mitre, the Yankees came out to bat in the top of the 7th, at which point Lee's dominance of them abandoned him. Robinson Cano turned on an 0-2 pitch for a double, and though Jorge Posada racked up his third whiff of the night, the two newest Yankees, Austin Kearns and Lance Berkman, hit a single and an RBI double, respectively, to make it 6-3.

Then Brett Gardner singled up the middle, plating another run, sending Berkman to third and effectively ending Cliff Lee's night, only the second time all season that Lee has not lasted through the seventh inning. Darren O'Day (oDAYoDAYoDAY...) relieved and though he did allow Gardner to steal second base, he also struck out Jeter. Ancient LOOGy Darren Oliver fanned Nick Swisher (who would strike out four times in a dismal 0-5 performance) to end the threat.

In the bottom of the frame, another new Yankee took the mound, as Kerry Wood pitched against Mike Young and got him to fly out. Josh Hamilton then strode to the plate again - I'm pretty sure he has some kind of special clause in his contract that allows him to bat 4,237 times per game - and rapped a hard single again - not because of his contract, just because he's that good. The man came into the series hitting .355 and actually increased his batting average by two points, no easy feat.

When the aging and increasingly immobile Vlad Guerrero also singled I thought Wood might get yanked soon, but he buckled down and got an inning-ending double play by Nelson Cruz, Jeter-to-Cano-to-Berkman, to end the threat and maintain the 6-4 score.

Leading off the 8th against Frank Francisco, who throws a pretty mean folding chair but evidently doesn't have what you'd call "pinpoint control" with you know, baseballs. Marcus Thames made the most of batting in Mark Teixiera's spot in the lineup by hitting a solo homer to put the game within one run, 6-5.

A-Rod whiffed on a splitter, but then Francisco walked Cano and Posada before having pitching coach Mike Maddux visit the mound, evidently to remind him that he's supposed to be retiring batters. This prompted an inning ending double play by Kearns and gave the Rangers a chance to pad their lead against the Yankees' questionable middle relief corps.

But it was not to be. Kerry Wood pitched a second inning, and though he walked a batter, threw a wild pitch that allowed the runner to advance to scoring position and went to full counts on three of the four batters he faced, nobody actually scored a run, which is the main thing, after all.

That meant that rookie flamethrower Neftali Feliz would face the bottom of the Yankee lineup in the ninth. Feliz can throw close to 100 mph, and has a nasty slider to boot. He's been pretty darn good this year, and in a season with fewer impressive rookies, might have taken away the Rookie of the Year award.

More important, he had just pitched two scoreless innings against the Yankees the night before to get the Win, and had done the same in the only other appearance he had against the Yankees, in August of 2009. Moreover, he was still throwing 98 mph when he entered on this night, but alas, not with his usual control.

He walked Lance Berkman, who admittedly walks a lot anyway, but of course does not run worth a damn anymore. Curtis Granderson ran in his stead, and went to second base when Brett Gardner singled to left. That prompted a coaching visit to the mound, perhaps to get Feliz to settle down, to remind him of the success he's had against the Yankees in the past, or perhaps just to get his take on whether that blonde in the stands behind third base might be available.

Whatever they talked about, it didn't seem to work, as Feliz quickly went to 2-0 on Derek Jeter. Granderson's speed came in handy when Feliz threw a pitch over the catcher's head, bouncing off the wall behind home plate and back to Bengie Molina, but not in time to nail Curtis at third base. Berkman would have been out by a mile. Jeter then slapped the next offering - one of his textbook, inside-out singles - into right field to score a run and tie the game, sending the fleet footed Gardner to third.

Feliz went to mostly sliders instead of fastballs against Nick Swisher, who couldn't do anything with such a diet and retired on strikes for the fourth time that night. That ended Neftali's night and brought in another rookie fireballer, Alexi Ogando, who quickly worked the count to 0-2 against Marcus Thames with straight heat. But Thames was prepared for the slider, smacking a grounder through the left side to score Jeter and give the Yankees the lead, 7-6. Ogando then struck out Alex Rodriguez on eight pitches but needed only four to sit Robinson Cano back down, and the inning was over.

That meant that Mariano Rivera would get a chance to redeem himself for the previous night's loss. His outing did not begin well, as he allowed Elvis Andrus a leadoff triple to right field. That patrol, thanks to the Granderson substitution, was now manned by Austin Kearns, who had been assigned to left field all night and isn't much of a flycatcher anyway.

Still, he caught Mike Young's fly ball to right, which brought Josh Hamilton to the plate as the go-ahead run and with the tying run only 90 feet away. (See? I told you he comes to the plate a lot!) Rivera went to 2-0 on Hamilton and things started looking bleak, but Josh grounded back to Rivera, who calmly looked Andrus back to third base and then threw to Swisher at first for the second out. Vlad Guerrero then grounded to Rodriguez to end the game and salvage a tie in this brief but action packed series.

Of note:

This brings the Yankees 2010 record against the Rangers to 4-1, a good sign for them as they may face Texas at some point in the playoffs, though they've got another three-game series in Arlington in mid-September. Two of the other three losses came against starting pitchers (Rich Harden, who's on the DL, and Scott Feldman) who are no longer starting for the Rangers, so clearly this is not the same Ranger team the Yankees swept at home in mid-April.
This was only the second time in Yankee history, as far as I can tell, that they've managed to win a game in which they struck out at least 15 times. The other time was in August of 1997, when they beat the Mariners 10-8 in Seattle while fanning 16 times. Among Yankees, only Jeter, Posada and Rivera remain from that game. A-Rod is the only other player from either side of that game who's still in the majors, though there are a few others from the rosters who are still around.
That game also happened to include Mariano's 8th Blown Save of the season, a number he's never duplicated since. At the time, Joe Girardi was catching for the Yankees and Mike Maddux, now the Rangers' pitching coach, was pitching for Seattle. Kerry Wood was walking almost a batter per inning at AAA Iowa, and Andrus and Feliz were both 9-year olds in the Dominican Republic. Darren Oliver was -wait for it - pitching for the Texas Rangers. Some things never change.

Kansas City Royals' Gil Meche Done For Year. Of Course.

2010-07-29T15:07:00.001-04:00

Baseball news Wednesday morning included the story that Royals starting pitcher Gil Meche will have surgery on his ailing right shoulder and is likely done for the season. This isn't really "news" in the sense of being surprising or unexpected or even noteworthy. Royals pitchers get hurt and miss the rest of the season all the time, it seems. It would be "news" if it turned out that the moon really was made of green cheese or if France was suddenly invaded by, say, Liechtenstein.

But a Royals starter getting hurt is not news. Indeed, in the last decade, the Royals have had only 13 pitchers make 30 or more starts in a season, and have only once had more than two in the same year. In six of the last ten years, they've had only one, and in 2006, they had none at all.

And that doesn't even consider quality, just quantity. Five of those 13 pitcher-seasons resulted in ERAs well over 5.00, and one of the rare seasons in which the Royals could boast two pitchers healthy enough to make every scheduled start, 2005, those pitchers had two of the four worst ERAs in the major leagues. Zach Greinke (5.90), long before he got his act together, and Jose Lima (6.99) long after his fell apart.

This year, astonishingly even without Meche, they're on a pace to have three pitchers with at least 30 starts apiece. But, as in 2005, two of those three - Brian Bannister and Kyle Davies - will be among the worst pitchers in the major leagues.

Bannister is an interesting guy, smart and eloquent and open minded, but for all of his respect for and understanding of sabermetrics, he can't seem to put any of them to good use. He's 29 now, has exactly one season in the majors with any characteristics you could call "good", and sports a 5.82 ERA that currently ranks 104th out of 107 qualified MLB starters. Getting 30 starts out of him is not necessarily a blessing, you know?

Davies is still thought of as "young", because he's 26, even though he's been in the majors for parts of six seasons. When you talk to Royals' fans, they're always telling you how he's just shy of putting all his talent together and really having an impressive season. But at this point, it's time to acknowledge that he's amassed over 630 innings of major league service and has a 5.54 career ERA, which is almost exactly what he's doing this year. Again, 30+ starts of such dubious quality will kill any team's chances, especially one with so little margin for error as the Royals.

But this story was about Meche. The AP story about his surgery included this curious nugget:

"Meche, the first upper-tier free agent the Royals signed, has battled injuries the past two seasons. He has one year left on a five-year, $55 million contract"

I'm not sure where they're getting "upper tier" from. Maybe it's like the old expression "first division", which meant nothing more than that your team finished in the top half of the league. That would be fair, since Meche was certainly better than half the pitchers in baseball at the time. But of course, saying that he was the first "above average" free agent they signed doesn't sound nearly so impressive.

In any case, I don't think that's what the writer intended, as evidenced by the next sentence, referring to the (frankly, ridiculous) contract Meche signed with the Royals in December of 2006. I think the writer means either that Meche actually was one of the best starters in baseball or at least that he was paid like one, which he was. But looking back on that winter, it's hard to say that he was really in the "upper tier" of free agents.

ESPN had him ranked 13th overall in their Free Agent Tracker, but he was just 7th among 15 starting pitchers, decidedly mediocre amongst a pretty weak class. And for that matter, even that ranking seems a little generous in light of some others on the list. Meche had gone 43-36 with a 4.75 ERA in a pitcher's park (adjusted ERA 8% below average) in the previous four seasons with Seattle, including 113 starts and three relief appearances. In one of those four seasons he missed several starts due to some injury or another. In another season he spent about a third of his time at AAA. In none of them did he amass more than 187 innings in the majors.

Even the Elias Sports Bureau, with its flawed and arcane ratings system, did not consider Meche in the "upper tier". He was a Type B Free Agent that year, meaning that he was in the 30th to 50th percentile among starting pitchers in their rankings.

Meanwhile, Jeff Suppan, the consummate LAIM, had gone 57-37 with a 4.01 ERA (109 ERA+), had never made fewer than 31 starts or amassed fewer than 188 innings in any of those same four seasons. ESPN ranked him 27th. He's about three years older, I'll grant you, but for all intents and purposes, was also a notably better pitcher at the time. He ended up with a 4-year, $42 million contract from Milwaukee that was also criticized at the time, and rightly so, but there was little reason at that point to think that Meche would give more value over the next several years than Suppan.

Greg Maddux, much older than both of them at 40, had gone 60-51 with a 4.11 ERA in that span, never making fewer than 33 starts or amassing fewer than 210 innings. He was ranked 26th. Tom Glavine was 20th. Barry Zito, coming off six consecutive years of 34 or 35 starts, 210+ innings and (usually) 15 Wins, including a Cy Young Award, was ranked 15th, two spots lower than Meche(!). Clearly someone at ESPN, probably Keith Law, has some curious ideas about how to do those rankings.

Nevertheless, Meche was paid like an upper tier free agent, his $55,000,000 deal ranking second only to Zito's deal for $126M that winter in total dollars for a starting pitcher, and only Zito and Dice-K got more years. The Meche deal was widely panned at the time, by almost everyone. Meche had some talent, no doubt, but he had a fairly lackluster career to that point, a penchant for injuries, and at 28, was not exactly young anymore, though admittedly neither was he old.

To call his track record "spotty" is to give a bad name to Dalmations. He missed the second half of the Y2K season with a "dead arm", had shoulder surgeries both before and after the 2001 season, and didn't make it back onto a major league pitcher's mound until 2003. When he did, on the merits of simply staying healthy (if not actually good) he won the un-coveted Comeback Player of the year Award.

In 2004 he was still healthy, but even less good, and made only 23 starts in the majors (along with 10 more at AAA). In 2005 he amassed only 143 innings due presumably to various ailments and ineffectiveness. Then in 2006 he (sort of) put things together, tallying a winning record for a team that frequently lost, and setting career highs in innings and strikeouts, all in his walk-year.

That set him up for a big payday, and who better than David Glass and the Royals to provide it? Maybe they were foolish and just got lucky, or maybe General Manager Dayton Moore really knew something that nobody else did. Certainly if the Yankees had any inkling that Gil Meche would be worth 9.4 WAR over the next two seasons, they would gladly have given him $55 million, the second half of the contract be damned. Seriously, that's only nine million more than they paid for the rights to and contract of Kei Igawa, who's been nothing short of a disaster.

What is certain is that by any objective analysis, the Royals had no right to expect much more than what Meche had previously provided: i.e. about 180 innings per year of slightly below average work. What they got instead was, if not spectacular, at least an above average, 210-inning workhorse, for the first two years anyway.

And then the wheels came off.

It's tempting to point to one game - like the complete-game shutout he pitched on June 16th 2009, in which then-manager Trey Hillman left him in to throw a career-high 132 pitches, or the 121-pitch outing he had a couple of weeks later, AFTER he complained of a "dead arm" - but really he was fumbling and stumbling even before that.

He'd allowed more than three runs in a game only 10 times in 34 starts in 2008, but by the end of May 2009, he'd already done it seven times in 11 starts. That included poor outings against the Tigers and Orioles, who would finish 10th and 11th in total runs scored in the 14-team American League, not a good sign at all.

Still, when he threw that 132nd pitch, his record stood at a respectable 4-5 (for a team that was 29-34) with a 3.31 ERA in 84 innings of work. But he pitched in only nine more games last year, amassing an 8.46 ERA in 44 innings, and was done for the season by the end of August. This season he started out on the DL and usually pitched badly when he did, before finally being shut down for the year.

It's worth noting that on the one occasion that he actually pitched well, he was left in for 128 pitches in a losing effort against the Texas Rangers on May 8th. And this, despite the fact that Ned Yost had some relievers available, having only used Kyle Farnsworth the night before, for one inning, and nobody else. So Trey Hillman isn't the only Royals' manager capable to incredible myopia when it comes to pitchers' arms.

Yost is saying all the right things about how the doctors need to "get in there' to see what's really wrong and fix it and that the important thing is having him healthy for 2011. When asked about the surgery, Yost said:

"I imagine it will be some type of cleanup in there with the scope. He still has irritation. It's not getting better. We're probably looking at scoping it somehow and getting him cleaned up and having him ready for next year."

And when asked whether this was the end of Meche's season, Yost said,

"I would imagine so"

Well, it's nice that there are still managers out there with a little imagination, don't you think? What would be even nicer, if you're a Royals' fan, would be if the GM had a little imagination. it would not have taken a ton of the stuff to figure out that they had gotten more than they bargained for out of Meche in the first two years of that contract, that the team was not on the cusp of contention just yet, and that therefore Meche was one of their most marketable commodities.

For example, I am one of the least imaginative people I know, and even I was able to figure this one out:

Now would be a great time to take a chance and trade Meche, who, after two solid years, looks like a consistent, LAIM-plus, but who probably won't be worth the $35 million they still owe him for the next three years. The team should be trading away expensive players who won't likely help them toward a championship, instead of acquiring them. Lots of teams could use a guy like Meche, or what they think Meche will be, and the Royals could probably get a pretty good outfielder in return.

That was written in October of 2008, when the Royals inexplicably traded Leo Nunez, a young, useful, talented and cost-controlled relief pitcher, for Mike Jacobs, an arbitration-eligible DH/1B who hit for occasional power and showed no other discernible skills, unless he makes a mean sandwich or plays jazz guitar or something.

Jacobs predictably hit .238 with 19 homers last year, for which they paid him $3.25 million, and was released after the season. Nunez is currently the Marlins' closer, having saved 50 games with an ERA about 20% better than his leagues over the past year and a half. And has made only $2.4 million combined over that span.

The Royals seem to have a knack for paying extra to lose more. Since 2003, the last time the Royals had a winning record, they've averaged 98 losses per season in every full year, and they're on a 95-loss pace this year, easily the worst total record in the majors in that span. the Pirates have been similarly dismal, but have won 12 more games while losing 15 fewer. The Nationals have won 26 more games and the Orioles have won 27 more, but these four franchises are in a class of their own.

Every other team in the majors has won at least 45% of its games in the last six and a half years. but the Royals have spent $32 million more on salaries than the Nationals have, more than a million dollars for each additional loss. They've spent

A HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION DOLLARS

more than the Pirates, to win 12 fewer games. That's just staggering. Say what you want about how terrible the Pirates have been, and you could go on for a while, I know you could, but at least they know how bad they are and they haven't overspent for the privilege of finishing last every year.

Only the preposterous largess of Peter Angelos and the Baltimore Orioles keeps the Royals from being the worst team in this regard. Baltimore has spent $57 million more than the Royals, though they have won a handful more games, as I mentioned.

It's not that they shouldn't have traded Nunez, it's just that they shouldn't have traded him for Mike Jacobs. This happens to Kansas City a lot. They trade from their strength (young relievers, Carlos Beltran, etc.) but don't manage to get fair value in return. Or they sign the type of guy a team struggling for last place doesn't need, for too much money (Mark Grudzielanek, Jose Guillen, etc.) and then ask too much for him in trade, settle for too little or keep him and get nothing at all.

And it's not that they shouldn't have signed Gil Meche (well, they shouldn't, but that's beside the point), it's that they shouldn't have looked a gift horse in the mouth by keeping him past his expiration date. And now the one bit of luck they've stumbled upon in the last half a decade had slipped from their grasp.

To their credit, they've gotten something for the hot hands that were Alberto Callaspo and Scott Podsednik, and may yet trade Farnsworth, Guillen, or others, but they really botched this Meche thing, lemme tellya.

It's a fine Meche.

Lamentations on the 500 Home Run Club

2010-07-23T16:05:00.002-04:00

Joe Posnanski ruminates on the impending 600th home run of Alex Rodriguez, likely to be surrendered this weekend by one of Kansas City's many bad, bad pitchers, or perhaps their one good one. Dave Pinto thinks he's making too big a deal about it:

Baseball goes through cycles. There was a high home run cycle in the 1950s and 1960s. There’s been a high home run cycle in the 1990s and 2000s. I suspect there will be another one in the 2030s and 2040s.

This is not precisely true. Baseball has gone through cycles, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we can expect the same going forward. If you're going to suggest that, you need a better reason than, "Well, it's happened before".

I would posit that the McGwire/Bonds/A-Rod generation is different from the influx of 500-clubbers from 1965-71 in a couple of ways. That generation of players (Mays, Aaron, Mantle, Robinson, Killebrew, Matthews, and Banks) was all born between 1931 and 1936. (Personally, I would add McCovey, born in 1938 to that group too, even though he didn't hit his 500th til 1978).

The current group is bracketed by McGwire (1963) and A-Rod (1975), a much wider range.

Oddly enough, only two players from the Baby Boom generation, Reggie Jackson and Mike Schmidt, made the cut, even though you might expect that the deepening talent pool would have allowed more players with that kind of talent to find their way to the majors. Evidently the efforts by the Powers-That-(ML)Be to restore some balance to the pitchers in the 1960s and 1970's helped the Baby Boom pitchers a great deal more. But I digress.

Anyway, you'll notice that five of those eight players from the 60's and 70's are black, and would therefore not have had the chance to play in the majors 25 years earlier. There was, as we now know, tremendous talent in the Negro Leagues that never got the chance to compile numbers like that, or else Josh Gibson or Oscar Charleston or someone else might have joined the club sooner.

That Mays/Mantle/Aaron generation was the first one in which young, black athletes got the chance to play most or all of their careers in the majors, instead of in the Negro Leagues and/or barnstorming. They had access to better medical care, earned more money, and generally had an easier life that made it possible to stay in shape and play into your 40's. That made for a huge influx of talent, more or less all at once, and that group all happened to hit that milestone about the same time because they'd all been playing about the same length of time, and were around the same age.

Offense did kind of go down after that for a while, or really had been going down for a while, since the early 60's, which depressed the numbers who could join the club (only Schmidt and Reggie in the 1980's). But baseball was sort of wallowing, losing market share to the NBA and especially the NFL, embroiled in cocaine scandals, gambling scandals, collusion scandals, and it appears that MLB wanted to get the fans' focus back on the field.

Somehow, MLB seems to have changed the fabrication of the baseball, or something, because around 1993, BABIP numbers took a sudden and irreversible jump up. It wasn't the dilution of pitching talent thanks to expansion, because it had never happened in an expansion year before, and would not happen again in 1998. It wasn't the ballparks because the new ones didn't all open up that year. It wasn't steroids, at least not yet.

The only theory that seems to make any sense is that they started winding the balls tighter, or making them of a different kind of yarn, or cork, or something. And before you ask, no I don;t have any proof.

Not that it matters anyway. if MLB wants to make the balls differently to make the game more offense-oriented, that their prerogative. I'm OK with it. I wish they'd been honest about it, but I sort of understand why they wouldn't.

The more sinister thing - the thing that had numbed us all to the home run total, as Posnanski says, has been the steroids. Of the ten players who have joined the 500-homer club since 1999, seven of them have some taint of the steroid scandal. And would we really be all that surprised if someone told us that Thome, or The Big Hurt or even Junior was also tainted? Probably not.

So of course people don't care. This generation has sapped all the wonder out of the achievement. With the Mays/Mantle generation of 40 years ago, unless you were an outright bigot, you must have felt that there was something right about these men being allowed to compete on the same field, compile similar - and similarly impressive - numbers. That was how it should have been all along.

But this? McGwire and Sosa and Palmiero and A-Rod and the rest, all on steroids or HGH or some cocktail of the two? That's not how it's supposed to be. We may be impressed still, and we may cheer for the guy on our team, but we've got to ladle in a healthy dose of skepticism with that. We just don't know what to believe anymore. Maybe we never will again.

How Much Better Would Cliff Lee Have Made the Yankees?

2010-07-16T09:30:00.004-04:00

Anyone care to guess the identities of these two mystery pitchers?

           GS  IP   H/9  H   R  BB  SO  HR   ERA  SO/9  HR/9  BB/9  pit/GS
Player A    8  68  8.5  60  18   3  49   8  2.25   6.5   1.1   0.4   107
Player B    8  53  6.6  32  15  16  44   6  2.55   7.5   1.0   2.7   105

In their last eight starts, dating back to the beginning of June, both pitchers have been very good. Player A has been all but impossible to beat, having completed almost every game he's started, and going fewer than eight innings only once, when he went seven. He almost never walks anyone, generally keeps the ball in the yard, strikes batters out...everything you could want in a pitcher.

Player B, while not such a workhorse, has still been very effective. His team has gone 5-3 in those eight games, with him getting the win in four of those five. He strikes batters out just as often as Player A, and is just slightly more parsimonious when it comes to round-trippers. He's got very good control, too, though not the insanely low walk rate that Player A shows.

It's also worth noting that Player A has faced much stiffer competition than Player B. His eight starts have come against teams averaging 4.58 runs per game, while Player B's opponents have averaged only 3.96 runs per game so far in 2010.

Player A's opponents have included five of the six division winners and another team within two games of its division lead. Player B's opponents have included three of the six teams bringing up the rears of their divisions (two starts against one of the bottom-feeders), plus two teams within the bottom three in run-scoring in their leagues. Only one team with a winning record was in that group.

Player A, as you probably know, is Mariners' ace starter and top prize of this year's trading deadline market, Cliff Lee. He's awesome. No doubt about it. He automatically makes the Texas Rangers better, prohibitive favorites to win the AL West. They gave up a lot of talent to get him, but it should be worth it this year, at least.

But Player B, as you probably don't realize, is Javier Vazquez, who would seem to have been the odd man out if the Yankees had dealt for Lee last week, as was so widely rumored. The Yankees have set a limit on Phil Hughes' innings for 2010 -probably around 175.

Andy Pettitte, being 38 years old - and frankly, never this good before - is not likely to win another 11 games in the second half. I still expect him to pitch reasonably well and to be part of the postseason rotation, but of course you've gotta get there first, and the Rays and Sawx aren't exactly going away.

That leaves Pettitte, CC Sabathia and (come playoff time) two huge question marks in the rotation.

1) A.J. Burnett, who's usually fine as long as his starts aren't aired on national television, and

B) Javier Vazquez, aka "Player B".

Of course Vazquez was atrocious in his first month or so of the season, as I mentioned, but he seems to have gotten back whatever it was that deserted him for the first month of the 2010 season, and has been as good as anybody for the last six weeks or so. Well, anybody but Cliff Lee, I suppose.

But how much better would swapping out Vazquez for Lee really have made the Yankees? At their current rates, over the remainder of the season, Lee could be expected to be pitch about 14 more times, around 119 innings at the rate noted above, and allow about 30 earned runs.

Vazquez projects for only 93 innings and about 26 earned runs. That's four runs difference, but in 26 fewer innings, and those of course would fall to the Yankees' bullpen. That bullpen has thus far allowed 103 runs in 224 innings in 2010, so at that rate they'd be expected to allow about 12 runs in 26 innings. So now Lee is better than Javy and the bullpen by a mere eight runs.

Except that in reality, the Lee will not finish nearly every game for the rest of the season. Indeed, pitching away from the cavernous, offense-depressing SafeCo Field, he would presumably give up a couple of runs once in a while and perhaps occasionally need to come out in (gasp!) the sixth inning.

So let's say that Lee throws 20 more innings than Vazquez over the second half instead of 26, still a generous improvement. In those 20 innings, the bullpen will probably allow about nine runs. Subtract from those the four runs that Vazquez "saved" by not pitching as much, and now Lee is worth a meager five runs more than Vazquez, given these assumptions. Given the aforementioned difference in qualities of their opponents we'll be magnanimous and say that Lee is really worth 10 runs.

Additionally, Lee and vazquez have both had unsustainably low batting averages on balls in play in that span. Lee's was .259, while Javy's was .192(!), and therefore clearly likely to bounce back to more normal ~.300ish levels. S, just for the heck of it, let's account for that differenc ewith an additional 10 runs, giving us 20 total.

Are 20 runs over the second half of the 2010 season worth, say, Jesus Montero, Mark Melancon and David Adams, names that were rumored in the deal the Yankees considered? Are 20 runs even worth a journeyman reliever and a bucket of used baseballs? Well, yes, in a close race.

More to the point, you're probably thinking, "It depends on which runs," and you're right. Lee helps a team win both by the innings he pitches and by those he prevents the bullpen from pitching, both by preventing runs from scoring and by allowing the offense to win without the pressure of having to score eight runs every night.

If the runs he saves are those that make a difference in getting the team into the playoffs, then they're worth just about any trade. If he then makes the difference in getting the team to later tiers of the playoffs and even to winning the World Series, then the trade is really worthwhile.

Do you think the Blue Jays and their fans mind that they traded away Jeff Kent to get David Cone in 1992, given that he pitched well down the stretch that year and helped them win their first-ever World Series? I doubt it. I know that Yankee fans would not ultimately have cared much if Marty Janzen or Mike Gordon or Jason Jarvis had become stars.

Those trading chips got the Yankees to the Promised Land in 1996, and helped cement Cone's place in Yankee history, winning four world championships. Nobody would have lamented the loss of prospects, even ones who blossom in another uniform, if it meant a 28th World Series title.

As it is, since the Rangers gave up a lot of prospects - who may not only eventually thrive, but may do so for a division rival - they'll have a lot of 'splainin to do if they miss the playoffs, or get ousted in the first round. For the Yankees and their fans, at least, they can take some solace in the hope that Lee would not have been such an incredible improvement over the man currently holding that spot in the rotation, Javy Vazquez, if all goes well.

If.

Catching up with the BA Top 20...

2010-07-01T12:30:00.000-04:00

Given that we're nearly half way through the season - and frankly, I'm a little bored - I thought I would check in on some of my comments and predictions on Baseball America's top 20 prospects list. Let's see how I did with #1 through #10 and then next week I'll look at the rest...

#1. Jason Heyward, about whom I had nothing negative to say, won the Braves' right field job with a stellar spring training and, frankly, no real competition from anyone on the roster. He mashed right out of the gate and was continuing to do so when he injured his thumb, which diminishes his Rookie of the Year chances but not his long-term prospects. His 11 homers, 42 walks and 45 RBI currently lead all qualified MLB rookies, and his .821 OPS is second only to Gaby Sanchez.

#2. Stephen Strasburg: I assume you've heard of him. If it's possible, he's been even better than expected, though for what it's worth, Walter Johnson doesn't think much of him.

After going 7-2 with a 1.30 ERA in 11 minor league (AA and AAA) starts, he was promoted to Washington where they continued, for one game at least, to allow him to face minor league hitters. He beat the lowly Pirates like a Disney villain beats a wayward step-child, fanning 14 in seven innings and generally embarrassing them all night. He then proceeded to tie a record for strikeouts in his first three and first four career games, before his teammates' lousy defense and inexperience cost him a potential win against Atlanta on Monday night. Seems like he's gonna be OK.

#3. Mike Stanton: I've taken a lot of flak over the years for my criticism of Stanton - based mostly on the fact that players who strike out as often as he does in the minors rarely become successful major leaguers - and for a while there it looked like I was going to have to eat my words.

Stanton - whose full name is a much more interesting Giancarlo Cruz-Michael Stanton - came out of the gate swinging, as he always does, and destroyed AA pitching for about two months. His .313/.442/.729 line gave him the Southern League lead in OBP, Slugging and of course OPS, and his batting average was 8th. Good time for a promotion, right?

Well, yes, but probably, given that he was still striking out about once every three and a half at-bats, you would think they'd want him to get some seasoning in AAA first, wouldn't you? See if he can hit Chris Waters' curveball, or Brandon McCarthy's change-up, or Clay Mortensen's slider or Brian Bruney's fastball or Michael Kirkman's assortment of junk before exposing him to (I kid you not...) Roy Halladay, Neftali Feliz, Jeff Niemann, C.J. Wilson, Heath Bell, Francisco Rodriguez, Brad Lidge and, in case he wasn't already flabbergasted enough, R.A. Dickey, among others. Heck, Kevin Millwood even fanned him twice, and he sucks.

To date, he's hitting only .217 in the majors, having struck out in 30 of his 69 at-bats. Four of his 15 hits have gone for extra bases, including two homers, but he's clearly overmatched for the moment. let him get his feet wet against competition that's not so far over his head, and he may impress you next year.

#4. Jesus Montero, the biggest prospect in the Yankee system, has not hit quite as well as hoped so far this year. He's still hitting doubles and taking walks at a decent rate, but his batting average is down to about .250, perhaps due to bad luck or perhaps to all the work they're doing to develop his awkward catching mechanics.

He's hit .228 with a .665 OPS as a catcher so far this year, but .311 with a .948 OPS as a DH, so maybe he can't get out of his head when he's catching. He's only caught 20% of base stealers so far this year (18 of 90) but then the rest of the Scranton catching corps is even worse (2 for 24), so maybe he's not so bad and his pitchers just need to learn a slide step or something.

In any case, he hit .284/.324/.505 in June, so maybe he's coming around. I saw him hit a double and a triple at Lehigh Valley a couple of weeks ago, both off the wall, and he looks to me at least like the real thing. Look for him to heat up in the second half as he either gets more comfortable behind the plate or abandons catching all together, and look for him in the Bronx this September.

#5. Brian Matusz leads the AL with nine losses, but this belies the fact that he's actually pitched reasonably well for a rookie in his first long exposure to the majors, and this without any seasoning at AAA at all. Five of those nine losses occurred in Quality Starts, which happens a lot to pitchers on a team like the 2010 Orioles. If he can keep from getting dismayed by his teammates' porous defense and limp offense, he should turn out to be a very solid major league pitcher.

#6. Desmond Jennings was expected - by Baseball America and by me - to reach the majors in mid summer, and nothing he's done in the first half of the season has changed my mind. He's currently hitting .301/.376/.439 and is 19-for-20 in stolen bases at AAA Durham, but the Rays were in first place until a couple of weeks ago, and anyway, where would they put him?

Carl Crawford has been great, and Zorilla, while not the beast he was in 2009, and been fine too. BJ Upton is hitting only .226, but he's also the youngest and the best base stealer of the group, so they can't exactly bench him either. Probably they use one of those guys as a DH and then put either Hank Blalock or Willy Aybar on the bench, and DFA the other one. In fact, I fully expect them to come to this conclusion within the next couple of weeks or so. Mark my words.

#7. Buster Posey - I said the following about the young Giants' catcher in early March:

Posey will likely get some more seasoning in AAA, but assuming that he continues to hit the cover off the ball, he should be up in the majors for good by the end of May.

[...] If the Giants fall out of contention, he'll probably get more playing time in the majors, so they can help him develop, but if they can somehow stay within earshot of a playoff berth, look for them to give Molina the bulk of the playing time while Posey wiles away on the bench or in AAA.

And of course the Giants just traded Molina to the Rangers, which may or may not mean that they're bailing on 2010. While I would imagine that they still fancy themselves as contenders this year - they're currently 40-37, 5.5 games out in their own division with more than half the season left to play - it's likely that they also know that 55 of their remaining 85 games come against winning teams or teams with positive run differentials, and that they would have to leap-frog three teams to win their division this year.

If this isn't giving up but actually the first of a few steps in making a real push, Posey should be a help, though they'll need more of it.

While Posey has yet to really "hit" much in the majors, he was hitting .349 in the Pacific Coast League at the time of his promotion, and clearly has nothing left to prove down in the bushes. He isn't likely to bloom into the second coming of Mike Piazza in 2010, but he probably won't embarrass himself either.

#8. Pedro Alvarez. Well, he mashed at AAA, kind of the Giancarlo Cruz-Mike Stanton of the International League, hitting .277/.363/.533, with 13 homers and 68 strikeouts in 66 games. In the two weeks he's spent in the majors, he's hit only a buck-fifty-two and has made two errors at the hot corner, but then Andy LaRoche (.229/.295/.313) seems determined to give his job away, so Alvarez will get a chance to improve.

The Pirates, in dead last and with perhaps the worst offensive team in almost 40 years, have little to lose by giving him a chance to play. Look for him to eventually start to make some more contact and produce some power, though even at his best in the minors, he was striking out a little more than once per game, so don't expect that to change any time soon.

#9. Neftali Feliz leads the AL with 21 Saves as I write this, and he's struck out 37 batters in 34 innings with a 2.62 ERA. I'd say he's adjusted well to the majors. And if they keep him in the bullpen, then the control problems he showed as a starter may be behind him. That's probably asking a bit much, but it's not so outlandish as to be impossible.

#10. Carlos Santana did not seem fazed by his first exposure to AAA pitching. He hit .316/.447/.597 there, averaging an extra base hit in just about every other game and amassing more walks than strikeouts. While there was thought to be no rush - at least by me - to promote him to the majors, those numbers and the dismal performances of Lou Marson and Mike Redmond (a combined .200/.251/.270 with one homer between them) made it necessary to do something.

Enter Senior Evil Ways himself, who has hot .345 with four homers and more walks than strikeouts in his forts two weeks. Santana's not likely to keep hitting like this, but he's a good bet to finish the year with something like a .310 average and 15 or 20 homers, despite spending the first two months in the minors.

A Tale of Two Pitchers: Yankees' A.J. Burnett

2010-06-23T11:00:00.001-04:00

The Yankees maintained their loose grip on first place in the American league Eastern Division Monday night despite being handed an embarrassing, 10-4 loss to the last-place Arizona Diamondbacks. Since the Tampa Bay Rays and the Bostons did not play, the Bronx Bombers retained a slim, 1/2-game lead on their division rivals.

That contest marked the fourth straight poor performance - and fourth straight loss - for starting RHP A.J. Burnett, whose once-sparkling 6-2 record and 3.28 ERA have ballooned to 6-6 and 4.83, respectively. Having a streak of four starts in which you allow nine homers and 23 runs in just 20 innings will do that for you, it seems.

The Yankees signed Burnett last winter, despite my impassioned pleas not to, though to be fair, my skepticism was based on Burnett's health, not his skills. In any case, in my frustration with Burnett's apparent inability to either throw strikes (at all) or throw strikes that batters would actually miss, I began wondering how it's possible that this man once won 18 games in a season. For that matter, how is it possible that the man won 13 games last year, when it seems that every time I watch him pitch, he allows six runs in five innings or something like that?

Burnett's troubles - or at least his inconsistencies - have been pretty well documented. The broadcast team on ESPN last night started describing their perceptions of Burnett, who seemed to be "frustrated" and "having mechanical issues" and "not on the same page" as catcher Jorge Posada, and so on.

Lack of focus, front shoulder flying open, bad karma...whatever. It seems that everybody has an explanation for how a guy who can consistently throw a baseball 94 miles per hour and has a curveball that dives toward the plate as though being suddenly pulled by an electromagnet can be so...so...mediocre.

They mentioned the supposed difficulty Posada and Burnett had last year in connecting with each other, though they didn't mention the specifics: That Burnett had a 4.96 ERA when Posada caught him in 2009 and a 3.22 ERA for anyone else. Granted, he pitched badly a couple of times in the playoffs with Jose Molina catching him, too, but still, that's a big difference. This year's even worse: 6.06 with Posada, 3.63 with Francisco Cervelli. (For the record, Burnett didn't seem to connect with Chad Moeller all that well either: 5.21 ERA).

There are other bizarre splits as well. Burnett is 3-2 this year with a 3.47 ERA when he gets five days of rest, but on normal four days' rest or on 6+ days, he's got an ERA well over five and a half. He's got a 3.46 ERA at home, 5.85 on the road. Last year's split was not quite as pronounced: 3.51 at home, 4.59 on the road. And this despite New Yankee Stadium's reputation as a hitter's park.

Or, here's a fun one: He's 3-0, 1.23 in day games, but 3-6, 5.97 at night. Maybe 7:05 PM is past his bed time? Probably just a fluke, since last year that split was reversed (5.38 ERA during day games, 3.14 at night). Most pitchers tend to do better at night overall, since hitters can't see the ball as well.

But perhaps the most glaring disparity is the one I mentioned first: How can a guy who wins about 15 games a year seem to be so terrible whenever I get to see him pitch? The answer is a simple one: Because he is.

Let me explain. I live in Pennsylvania, outside the usual area of the YES network, which means that I only get to see Yankee games when they're either on national TV (like FOX, TBS or ESPN) or when they're on the local New York stations that happen to get broadcast in eastern PA, like WPIX and WWOR. That means that I only see a handful of Yankee games each year, perhaps 20 or 30 at most. And, as I mentioned, it seemed to me that every time I saw Burnett pitch, he was terrible.

If it seemed that way, that's only because, well, he was:

2009-2010 National broadcasts (ESPN/TBS/FOX)      
GS   Dec   IP      H  ER  BB   SO  HR   ERA  IP/GS   H/9  K/9  BB/9  HR/9
12   2-6   66.0   85  61  38   47  15  8.32   5.5   11.6  6.4   5.2   2.0

2009-2010 Local NY Broadcasts (YES/WWOR/WPIX)      
GS   Dec   IP      H  ER  BB   SO  HR   ERA  IP/GS   H/9  K/9  BB/9  HR/9
36  17-9  232.1  206  81  94  215  23  3.14   6.5    8.0  8.3   3.6   0.9

If you include his postseason performances, which are all nationally broadcast, his numbers improve very slightly, to 3-7 with a 7.44 ERA, which, on a scale of one to ten, is still awful. Overall, Burnett has been more than twice as likely to surrender a home run on national television as he has been on local TV. He walked two more batters per nine innings, struck out two fewer and gave up about three and a half more hits per game. And of course he allowed more than twice as many earned runs.

Including his postseason outings, that makes a total of 93.1 innings on national television, 17 games. It's not a small sample size, though perhaps not as large as I might prefer. And he was only able to provide a Quality Start in seven of those 17 games. Compare that to his locally broadcast work, where he made 23 Quality Starts in 36 outings, and you can see why someone like me may have gotten a skewed impression of his pitching acumen.

In short, Burnett looks every bit like a Cy Young candidate on local New York TV, or at least he looks like the $16.5 million workhorse the Yankees thought they were getting when they signed him last winter. But if you see him on national television? Well, let's just say they'd be hard pressed to justify letting him keep his rotation spot over, say, Kyle Davies.

Why is all of this important? Well, for one thing, Burnett's next start is scheduled for Saturday.

On the road. (@ the Dodgers)

On national TV. (FOX)

Since becoming a Yankee, Burnett is 2-5 with a 9.88(!) ERA in nationally broadcast road games. Lots of minor league clubs do fireworks after the game on the weekends. This game should have plenty of fireworks before that.

Walter Johnson Evaluates Stephen Strasburg's Debut with Washington

2010-06-09T13:22:00.011-04:00

Today's blog post has been - ahem- "ghost"-written by one Walter Perry Johnson. Don't mind him. He's been dead for over 60 years and has only the vaguest ideas of what's going on in the world.

Mr. Nelson has been kind enough to wake me from my eternal slumber to weigh in on a subject of obviously eternal importance: The major league debut of one Stephen Strasburg.

As it happens, I could hardly acquire a wink of sleep anyway, rolling in my grave as I listened to all this hype comparing him to me. Applesauce! Do you know what the Washington Post said about me before I first set foot on a major league hill?

"No youngster that has broken into fast company in recent years is attracting as much attention as..."

...well, Yours Truly. That's who.

And with good reason: I had spent the previous six weeks racking up goose eggs on minor league scoreboards around the country. I hadn't allowed a run in 75 consecutive innings, finishing most of the games I started! I had struck out 166 batters in those innings, nearly three quarters of all the outs I recorded, and about two out of every three men who stood in against me!

And that was only after I was found by a scout in Idaho, working for the phone company by day and decimating opposing lineups at night. I spent my boyhood working on the family farm in Kansas. Working, not playing ball. Then I worked in the California oil fields when I was just 15 years old, and I was proud to know that my efforts would help keep America hustling and bustling, working and building for centuries! That was work, I tell you, not like kids these days, having everything handed to them.

But what has this Strasburg kid done? Led a coddled life, getting rides in some spruced up jitney to his baseball games against other towns and schools? I had to walk to most of my games, or hitchhike for a passing mule wagon, until I was in a semi-pro league and could afford a jalopy of my own. Took days. That's why we couldn't play every day.

But this Strasburg kid, I hear he even attended college. College! Anyone who tells you that a college campus is a good place to find a baseball player is all wet, I say. Sure, that Matty fellow turned out all right - not as good as me, mind you, but definitely the real McCoy - but the list is short after that.

No, if you want a real talent, go and find yourself some hard-boiled reuben on the side of a country road, someone who's worked hard his whole young life and developed the muscles needed to withstand the daily grind of a long life in baseball.

You need someone who's honed his skills against grizzled veterans of sandlots across the great wide expanse of the West, and proven himself against them, not against kids who are barely old enough to wipe their own noses! All the best come from this stock: Cobb, Wagner, Wheat, Alexander, Three-Finger Brown, Ruth, Coveleski. You can take that to the bank!

And another thing: I'm sorry to be the wet blanket here, but from what I've learned, he's hardly pitched! Fifty five innings? In more than two months of "work"? Heck, they've been giving this guys some kind of runaround, or else he'd have pitched more. What is he, some prom-trotter who's too busy filling out his dance card to finish his own games?

Those teams he's played on in Syracuse and Harrisburg must not have wanted to win very badly. Perhaps the Tri-State League plays a shorter schedule these days and the pennant was already wrapped up. How else can you explain limiting a kid with so much supposed talent to starting only once every six or seven days? And then yanking him for a reliefer after only five or six innings?

Talent? Phenomenon? Horsefeathers! They've obviously been hiding something, else they'd have let him finish what he started once in a blue moon. Or they'd let him barnstorm the way we did back in those days, racking up almost as many innings in the winter and in between games as we did during the real "season". That's a way to keep yourself in shape, none of this bunk about exercise machines. Just exercise!

Maybe it's that hard overhand delivery of his. That can't possibly be good for the man's limbs, all those elbows and knees flailing about. Reminds me a little of that Feller kid the newspapermen were all getting stuck on just as I went to meet my maker. Whatever happened to him? Probably got hurt and was never heard from again! Why, I'd bet my all Bethlehem Steel stock that guy never made an impact in the majors!

In my day, I threw in a smooth, sidearm motion, keeping the ball behind me til the last moment and whipping it around on the strength of my gut and my gams, not just my arm. That's how I was able to pitch for over 20 years and strike out more batters than anyone ever has or ever will! Over 3,500 of them! Young Stephen has a long way to go before he can eclipse that record!

This kid's an injury waiting to happen, and then what? God help him if he tears his ulnar collateral ligament, something I once heard my old teammate Curly Ogden harping about up here. Can't do a darned thing if that sucker snaps! All that lettuce the Washingtons are supposed to pay him will be lost! He won't get a single Mercury dime! They'll just release him and he'll have to go work in a soap factory. Then he'll see what real work is like!

For now, well, he mostly looks the part. With that on the table, there have been other impressive debuts that would make you think the guy was the dog's bollocks, when he just turned out to be Joe Average. So last night didn't mean much in itself.

I'll give him credit where it's due, since he did strike out 14 batters in the seven innings he did pitch, whereas your humble author fanned only three in his own debut. Still, though, I also pitched eight innings, not seven, and these came against the eventual pennant winning Detroit Tigers, including the Georgia Peach himself, who was so impressed with me he said,

"The first time I faced him, I watched him take that easy windup. And then something went past me that made me flinch. The thing just hissed with danger. We couldn't touch him..."

The soon-to-be American League champions resorted to bunting against me to get on base, which is mostly why I struck out so few that day. Then later Sam Crawford, a two time home run champ, smacked one off me in the eighth. But then I didn't surrender another circuit clout for almost two years! Let's see if young Stephen can rack up 450 or so innings before someone circles the bases on his credit again!

Strasburg gave up his lone home run, I hear, to someone named Delwyn Young, a lusterless reserve who's got no business hitting a homer of anyone mentioned in the same sentence as The Big Train. What kind of name is "Delwyn" anyway? What a hoot! Next thing you'll be telling me that there are players named Daric, or Denard, or Dustin! Kids these days!

And anyway, these were not exactly the Pirates of my day, with the likes of Pie Traynor, Max Carey, Stuffy McInnis, Kiki Cuyler, Big Poison and Little Poison in the lineup. But Milledge? Cedeno? Walker? Jamarillo? There's not a single guy in that Pittsburgh lineup who would have passed muster as a waterboy with those Pirates, much less on the playing field.

In short, while everyone's yammering on about how this kid is the bee's knees and how everything with the Washington Nationals will soon be Jake, remember that my Washingtons had a winning record only six times in my first 17 seasons with them. Remember too that Strasburg will face a lot tougher competition than the ragamuffin Pirates as the season plods on, and that the babe might not be so berries pitching against first division teams.

And finally, remember that injuries happen, and only the Big Cheese up here really knows if and when, and mum's the word from him.

Wait...Washington Nationals?

The Even More Perfect Game

2010-06-04T13:32:00.003-04:00

My mom tells me that in her high school English class, during a discussion of how, grammatically, certain words should be modified (i.e. is it "narrower" or "more narrow", "certainer or more certain"?) the word "perfect" came up. Some students thought "more perfect" the correct usage. others thought "perfecter" was acceptable, if somewhat clunky.

My mom pointed out that it was neither. Perfect, is, by definition, without the possibility of improvement, and so there was no need to modify the word. You could not be more perfect than perfect. And her teacher agreed.

But Wednesday night, Armando Galarraga taught us what my mom and her high school English teacher could not: You can improve upon perfection after all.

As you by now know, the Tigers' 28-year old Venezuelan pitcher retired 26 consecutive Cleveland Indians that night in Detroit, and then disaster struck. Well, not disaster, exactly, but certainly an injustice. Galaragga induced a little grounder to the right side of the infield, which was cleanly fielded by Tigers' firstbaseman Miguel Cabrera, who threw to Galaragga, covering the bag, as the pitcher should. It was the ideal, textbook ending for a gem of a game, 83 pitches of remarkable efficiency and effectiveness, leaving the pitcher holding the ball with which he had entered the record books.

Except it wasn't.

The now infamous umpire, Jim Joyce, despite having a clear view of the play and plenty of time to call it, somehow called it wrong, making an out batter safe and a perfect pitcher flawed.

Replays showed that Joyce was clearly in the wrong. Galaragga has the ball in his glove and his foot on the bag while Donald's foot is still perhaps 12 to 18 inches from touching the bag. Granted, that's just a fraction of a second, but this is what umpires train for, hone their skills for a quarter of a century for, and this is what they're paid to do. He's got to get that call right, especially now.

Normally, as I understand it, an umpire makes that call with both sight and sound, watching the base for each player's feet while listening to hear the ball hit the fielder's glove. If you watch the replay (and I know you have, lots and lots of times already) you see that Galaragga didn't catch the ball right in the meaty part of his hand, which would make the loudest 'pop'.

The fact that Miguel Cabrera only had to throw the ball about 15 feet means it wasn't thrown that hard, and the fact that Galaragga caught it in the webbing, as you're supposed to, and that it rattled around a little only makes it tougher. It didn't rattle much. He essentially had control of it, but it was enough to dull the sound and perhaps make it difficult for Joyce to hear it. To his credit, Joyce doesn't cite this as the problem. He just admits to screwing it up and asks for forgiveness, something Galaragga has already given him, even if the Detroit Tigers' fans never will.

Umpires make that call all the time. Joyce makes that call all the time and has never previously been challenged like this, because if he's ever been wrong about it before, it was never in so momentous a spot. Never with 18,000 fans watching in rapt attention, waiting to be able to tell their grandchildren that they Witnessed History.

But he blew it. An umpire's mistake accomplished what 27 Indians' intentional actions couldn't, and just like that, history was, well...made anyway.

It's been said frequently that Galaragga's "failure" to accomplish the feat will actually make him, and this game, more famous than if he'd actually done it. That may be true. After all, Kenny Rogers, Len Barker and Mike Witt all had careers that belied their one-time perfection, making that hardly the first thing you think of when someone brings one of their names into the conversation. Galaragga likely would have fallen into the same category. Now he's in a class by himself.

No, commissioner Bud Selig can't - or at least won't - overturn Joyce's call. He could. He's got the authority, both from his title and from the "best interests of the game" clause in his contract, that is too frequently interpreted as "the best interests of the owners' bank accounts". But make no mistake: Selig could call the now ruined game "perfect" and it would be recorded as such in the record books.

He's done it before. Randy Johnson once struck out 20 batters in nine innings, but was told that his game wouldn't be remembered along with those of Kerry Wood and Roger Clemens, because the game went 11 innings, and he left after nine. But then MLB reversed its decision and eventually decided to recognize it as an official 20-strikeout game.

Others have done it before. The judges and committees at the 2002 Winter Olympics made a similar wrong "right" when they awarded gold medals to two sets of skaters. One of the judges had been coerced into modifying her scores to favor the Russians over the Canadians, in exchange for better votes for the French in the ice dancing competition. When this came to light, her score was discarded and the two pairs were declared tied, and both were awarded Gold Medals. Two sets of "the best" which is technically impossible, and yet, allowed.

Selig could do the same. What if it came out that Joyce was paid to blow that call? I don't think he was, but if he was, wouldn't Selig be forced to succumb to pressures to reverse the call? Is it really any better to leave it this way simply because it was an honest mistake?

The mistake happened, and it's been said that we can't simply ignore that Trevor Crowe batted again and made another out, but of course that's not true. Until recently, stats accumulated during games that failed to go the requisite five innings were ignored, with MLB essentially pretending that they, and the game, never happened.

Selig could effectively pretend that the blown call, and Crowe's subsequent at bat, didn't happen. He doesn't even have to mutter magic words and cast a spell. He can just do his best Captain Picard impression and say "Make it so." and it will be so. Literally nobody can stop him, and there are probably a lot more people upset about the current state of affairs than would be upset by that.

I don't think he should, but I don't want to hear him saying he can't. In true Seligian fashion, Bud isn't even saying that. He hasn't yet even addressed the blown call or the review of it directly, only the general idea of instant replay, and this in the midst of an admission that the umpire blew it and that Galaragga should have been given credit for perfection.

...there is no dispute that last night's game should have ended differently. [...] ...it is vital that mistakes on the field be addressed. Given last night's call and other recent events, I will examine our umpiring system, the expanded use of instant replay and all other related features. Before I announce any decisions, I will consult with all appropriate parties...

To summarize, that means, "No."

Selig won't overturn the call, in spite of the fact that this seems exactly the right thing to do. Perhaps not the correct and precise thing to do, but the good and right thing.

And that's OK. The really impressive thing about this feat is that Galaragga, upon seeing that he's been robbed of his pending immortality, only smiles. He doesn't explode, or plead with the umpire or even so much as kick the dirt. He just smiles, as if to say, "OK, if that wasn't good enough, let's try this." He then goes and retires Crowe on five pitches, making him the only man in history to have to retire 28 batters to finish his perfect game.

And that's exactly how he should be remembered. Galaragga's game ball and glove should go to Cooperstown, to be displayed along with the other 20 balls from the perfect games throughout history and the hundreds of no-hitters, and perhaps a photo of him smiling at Joyce when he sees the bad call.

After the game, Galaragga was interviewed and showed no malice or resentment toward Joyce, ironically reminding us all that "Nobody's perfect,". And he was right about that.

He was more perfect.

Omar Vizquel and the Hall of Fame, Revisited

2010-06-01T10:30:00.005-04:00

I originally opined on the subject of Omar Vizquel and the Hall of Fame about two years ago, and I notice that I have gotten a lot of traffic and comments on that post lately, so I thought I would update it a bit. But feel free to go and read the original post and especially the comments, as some people made some good points with which I was forced to grapple.

Two years ago, Henry Shulman of the San Francisco Chronicle suggested that some writers might be thinking of voting Omar Vizquel into the Hall of Fame, once he's eligible. Shulman said that he conducted "a small straw poll of hall voters" which probably means he asked two guys while they were sitting in the press box together, covering a game. More recently, due to the fact that Vizquel has surpassed 2,700 career hits and continues to add to his record for career games as a shortstop, the subject of whether Omar = Hall of Famer has come up again. Let's examine the case, sort of a sports interaction review, one merit at a time:

1) Lots of Hits

Of course, 2,700 career hits on its own is not such a big deal. Harold Baines has about 150 more hits than Vizquel and the BBWAA writers have shown no particular inclination to enshrine him. Derek Jeter currently has 99 more hits than Omar, and continues to widen that gap, but obviously has a lot more going for him than a lot of singles (and a lot more outs). Roberto Alomar has more, too, and will probably be elected to the hall of Fame this or next year, as will Barry Larkin. The presence of two contemporary middle infielders who combined defensive acumen with offensive prowess will only make it harder for the light-hitting Vizquel to get in.

Andre Dawson just recently got into Cooperstown, but he's got over 400 homers and an MVP award to his credit as well, plus a cool nickname. Vada Pinson and Al Oliver and Bill Buckner and a bunch of other guys all have 2,700 or more hits and have no hope of ever being elected. They all had their merits, but none was considered a sufficiently great player to get real consideration for the Hall.

2) Lots of Games

Being the career leader in games played as a shortstop is a meritorious achievement too, but again, not enough. The other defensive positional leaders (Pudge Rodriguez, Eddie Murray, Eddie Collins, Brooks Robinson, Barry Bonds, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente) were all great players in other ways than simply their ability to repeatedly answer the bell.

To look at this another way, if the #2 or #3 player at each of these positions had in fact made it to #1, would that make him a Hall of Famer? Carlton Fisk, Joe Morgan, Jake Beckley, Luis Aparicio, Rickey Henderson, Hank Aaron and Tony Gwynn are already in, and Fred McGriff and Roberto Alomar are on the edge, likely to get in eventually.

But the #2 center fielder - another position that requires some defensive prowess - is Steve Finley, and #3 is Willie Davis. The #3 catcher, just one behind Fisk, is Bob Boone, a man known primarily for his defense. Greg Nettles (whom Bill James calls the "Incredible Leaping Octopus") and Gary Gaietti are the next two third basemen, and Luis Gonzales is the next left fielder. Do you really think that any of these guys would be a solid candidate for Cooperstown if they'd played a few more games or if the leader had played fewer?

Neither do I.

3) Lots of Gold Gloves

Another argument in his favor is his cache of 11 Gold Gloves. the number of course is not enough. Keith Hernandez also has 11. Andruw Jones has 10. Mark Belanger, Paul Blair, Don Mattingly, Frank White and George Scott all have at least eight, and none has ever gotten serious consideration for Cooperstown. A great defensive reputation simply is not enough. Rob Neyer argued that the fact that the man was never considered a great player, not just defender, should mean that the writers wouldn't even consider voting for him.

Look, Gold Gloves are more of a popularity contest than anything else. Derek Jeter, who truly is a great player, has four of them, even though he only recently turned himself into an adequate defensive shortstop. Steve Garvey's got four of them, despite the fact that the man never threw the ball to second base. Jason Varitek has one, for crying out loud. At best, perhaps they reflect a player's ability to repeatedly look impressive or acrobatic while making the same plays that look routine when accomplished by better prepared defenders. Adam Everett, let's say.

There's little question that Vizquel has been a very good defender over the course of his career, but much of his defensive reputation rests on his appearance rather than on his results. In 2006, for example, he won a Gold Glove largely on the merits of his league-leading .993 fielding percentage, but the more advanced metrics - Total Zone Runs, Fielding Bible +/-, UZR, FRAA,- all seem to suggest that he was somewhere between the 5th and 10th best defensive shortstop in MLB that year. Granted, there have been years (2007, for one) where he actually was the best, and didn't get the Gold Glove, but the former occurrence is much more common.

The Case Against: Career Value

The truth is that, despite his longevity, Vizquel has never been a great player, and the baseball writers, the ones who vote for the Hall of Fame, know it. He only received any votes for the MVP once, finishing a distant 16th in 1999. He was worth about six Wins Above Replacement that year, a true all star caliber performance, and the only time in his 22-season career that he crested the 4.0 WAR plateau. MVPs are typically about 8 WAR or more in that year and Hall of Famer shortstops, though there is a significant range, average about 64 WAR for their careers, as you will see.

This lack of MVP appreciation has occurred despite the fact that Vizquel frequently anchored the infield defenses of playoff teams with the Tribe in the late nineties and early aughts. For getting into the playoffs, especially playing in a world series, odds should increase of getting MVP votes, but alas, not so much. Also, he's not much of a singer.

Comparison to the Elite:

There are the 23 players whom the Hall considers shortstops, and the following list shows their Baseball Prospectus career WARP3 totals, which is Wins Above Replacement Position, encompassing offense, defense and even pitching, adjusted for all time. Additionally, I have included his WAR, Wins Above Replacement, as calculated by Sean Smith of baseballprojection.com.

This means, by definition, that these numbers allow us to compare players across different eras.

Shortstop          WARP3     WAR
Luis Aparicio       47.4    49.8
Luke Appling        70.7    68.9
Dave Bancroft       38.2    46.3
Ernie Banks         62.9    64.3
Lou Boudreau        73.6    55.9
Joe Cronin          69.0    62.6
George Davis        76.5    90.8
Travis Jackson      43.7    43.4
Hughie Jennings     56.8    47.9
Pop Lloyd            ???    ????
Rabbit Maranville   39.9    38.0
Pee Wee Reese       63.1    66.4
Cal Ripken         102.4    89.8
Phil Rizzuto        47.5    41.6
Joe Sewell          51.5    48.1
Ozzie Smith         92.0    64.7
Joe Tinker          51.4    49.0
Aarky Vaughan       85.2    75.6
Honus Wagner       140.6   134.7
Bobby Wallace       60.5    60.4
Monte Ward*         58.9    64.5
Willie Wells         ???    ????
Robin Yount         66.8    76.8
Average             66.6    63.8

Omar Vizquel currently sports a total of 41.0 WARP and his WAR is 42.8.

Since the first time I looked at these numbers, Baseball Prospectus has significantly changed its WARP3 formula. The average last time was about 111, almost double what we have now, though the scale is roughly the same.

Also, since I've added WAR to the evaluation, we can see that the two do not always agree. On average, WARP3 and WAR agree to within less than 3, but there are a few significant differences. These generally seem to be in the upper echelon of players though - Ripken, Wagner, Smith, Vaughan, Boudreau and Davis - so it's really only a question of how MUCH better than everyone else those guys really are.

It should be noted that some of these guys spent significant amounts of their careers at other positions, and it's therefore perhaps not fair to compare Vizquel to them directly. Ernie Banks actually played more games at first base than he did at short. Yount played almost half his career as an outfielder. Vizquel deserves credit for staying at shortstop, something few 40-year olds ever do, much less do well.

Boudreau and Cronin were, in addition to being very good players, managers for a long time, with some degree of success, and their selections to the Hall may have benefited from this legacy. In truth, though, both had top-10 MVP finishes half a dozen times or so, and probably didn't need any help from their managerial credentials.

Wells and Lloyd were both presumably very good players in the Negro Leagues, but we don't really have any credible numbers for them. Monte Ward was also a pitcher, amassing about 1/3 of his WAR value as such, and was a pioneer in the early days of major league baseball, so he gets some extra credit too. Joe Tinker was elected by a suddenly generous Veterans Committee in 1946, right after a World War, when they were feeling especially nostalgic, apparently. But even if you throw all of those guys out, the average for the remaining players stays almost exactly the same, 67.7 WARP3, hardly any difference at all. So don't worry about that.

With the current formula for either of these statistics, Vizquel is near the bottom of the list, in the neighborhood of a couple of questionable Hall of Fame choices in Travis Jackson and Dave Bancroft, as well as Rabbit Maranville, who only squeaked into the Hall in his 15th year of eligibility - right after his death - after a big nostalgia vote jump.

In any case, Maranville's kind of a special case, something of a baseball whip, a defensive whiz at the toughest defensive position at a time when runs were scarce, so his value, or at least his perceived value, doesn't show up directly in the numbers as much as it does the MVP voting of the time.

But Omar is well below Rizutto, Pee Wee Reese, Aarky Vaughan, Lou Boudreau or Luke Appling, all five of whom lost time to the War and yet still come out ahead of Vizquel in WAR and WARP.

You can argue that he's no worse or less valuable than some of the gentlemen already in the Hall. It seems obvious that Omar has done more in his career than some of those guys, given his longevity, despite never being great in a single season. But it's also debatable whether guys like Travis Jackson belong in the Hall in the first place, so that's not a terribly convincing argument.

If you want to use the benchmark of where the average is, it would seem that Vizquel would significantly drag down the median level of MLB HoF shortstops. By contrast, Bill Dahlen (77.9 WARP3, 75.9 WAR) would considerably raise that bar, and I don't see anyone clamoring for his candidacy.

This type of argument is something of a slippery slope. It's not a bad starting point to only enshrine players would maintain or even raise the standard of the existing crop at a given position, but that's not enough, in my mind. We ought to want to make the Hall more exclusive, and therefore more impressive, not less.

Did He Do Enough?

Omar Vizquel was never a great hitter, and rarely even a good one. In 22 seasons in the major leagues, he has only twice had an adjusted OPS above the league average. One of those, 1999, when he had an OPS of 110, was essentially a fluke. He hit .354(!) when he put the ball in play that year, even though his career mark is .294 and the league average BAbip that year was .302, about what it usually is.

The other time was 2003. His OPS that year was just 104, but that's the only other time it's ever been above 100, and this one looks legit, as his .284 BAbip is actually a little lower than the league. So congrats, Omar, you earned your career-high 14 homers and 72 RBIs that year, even though the rest of your career marks are pretty pedestrian.

Speaking of walking (see what I did there?), Omar Never took free passes all that often, something that might have helped to bolster his general mediocrity with the bat. He did walk 87 times in Y2K, but only walked more than 60 times twice in his career besides that, and rarely posted an OBP much more than .350 or .360. And that was perhaps the best part of his offensive game.

He had only one season in which he hit double digit homers. At his peak, he cracked the 30-double mark four times in seven seasons, but never hit more than 36 in a season. he hit a few triples, as he was reasonably fleet of foot in his prime, but for all their excitement, they're of limited value. His supporters may point to the fact that he has stolen almost 400 bases in his career, and that at his best, he twice nabbed more than 40 in a season.

I would point out that he's also been caught 158 times, which ranks as the 21st most in history. For comparison, Juan Pierre has been caught stealing 159 times, but has about 90 more successes. Kenny Lofton was gunned down 160 times, but succeeded 622 times. In an era in which power is increasingly common place, the value of individual bases is severely diminished, while that of baserunners is increased, so Vizquel may have harmed his teams more with those 158 failed attempts than he helped them with the 389 successful ones.

Sure, we can put Omar Vizquel in. He's better than Dave Bancroft, and almost as good as Travis Jackson, right, even though he doesn't have as cool a first name? But then we've got to let Ron Santo in too, since he's better than George Kell, right? And what about Harold Baines, since he has the most games and hits and what-not as a Designated Hitter? Shouldn't he be considered Hall-worthy, given that he was apparently so good at what he did?

If you think instead about where the bar should be, instead of where it is, I think you have to leave Vizquel out of the Hall. Not everyone in the Hall has to be Honus Wagner or Cal Ripken, but "appreciably better than Gary Gaetti (38.4 WARP3)" doesn't seem like such an outlandish requirement to me.

We've had more than 125 years to see what great players look like, and to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, I think we should know them when we see them.

Omar Vizquel is not one of them.

Another Long, Boring Yankees/Red Sox Game Finally Ends

2010-05-18T13:24:00.004-04:00

Joe West would have been bored out of his mind last night.

Six weeks ago, after the Yankees began their title defense with a three-game opening series against the Boston Red Sox, major league umpire Joe West complained about the length of time the Yankees and Red Sox take to play each other. Among his criticisms, he said,

“They’re the two clubs that don’t try to pick up the pace. They’re two of the best teams in baseball. Why are they playing the slowest? It’s pathetic and embarrassing. They take too long to play.’’

Well, last night's contest, at three hours and forty seven minutes, was no exception. West was not working this game - or any MLB game, for that matter - so perhaps he was watching it on ESPN in his hotel room or at home. Probably while telling his kids to hurry up and finish their math homework without worrying so much about whether they got any of the answers correct.

If so, he would have been none too pleased at how long Monday night's game took. The 20 runs scored, seven pitching changes, 26 hits (including seven home runs, with those excruciatingly slow home-run trots), the six walks (Walks?!? For Christ's sake, run!!!), and the 348 total pitches. Heck, 29 of those pitches were thrown by knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, whose pitches take almost 40% longer to reach the plate than an average major league fastball. The nerve!

I kid, of course. Unless you either hate or completely misunderstand baseball, you could hardly have asked for a more exciting game. Besides the general excitement created by any Yanks/Sawx contest, you had the added appeal of:

The Monday Night game on ESPN, with one-time Yankee and Red Sox heroes Aaron Boone and Nomar Garciaparra among the commentators
A new ballpark with 48,000 screaming fans, most of whom stayed for all four hours
The pitting of the Yankees' budding ace, Phil Hughes (5-0, AL-best 1.39 ERA entering the game) against the Red Sox expensive, imported reclamation project (Dice-K, coming off one of the best starts of his American league career).
The Yankees' efforts to catch red-hot Tampa for first place in the AL East
The Red Sox' effort to stay above .500
The Yankees depleted bench and bullpen, without Curtis Granderson or Nick Johnson, with Jorge Posada questionable, and either Joba or Mariano unavailable out of the bullpen, and Chan Ho Park having just come back from an injury.

So there was plenty of intrigue to go around. Early on, Matsuzaka was as terrible as ever, allowing five runs in the first inning, before he settled down. It also looked as though Hughes would continue to be the American League's best pitcher, as he took a 6-2 lead into the 5th inning, but a couple of long at-bats by Marco Scutaro and Dustin "Laser Show" Pedroia and a three run jack by JD Drew brought the game to within one run.

The Yankees got a so-called insurance run on a double by Marcus Thames, but an inning later, the struggling Victor Martinez homered to make it 7-6 Yankees. That lead only lasted until the top of the eighth, though, as Chan Ho Park, clearly not fully recovered from his ailment, allowed a single to Drew and then back-to-back homers by Kevin Youkilis and Victor Martinez, this time from the other side of the plate.

That made it 9-7 Boston, their first lead of the evening. Flame throwing Daniel Bard made quick work of the Yankees in the bottom of the eighth, but then Boston got two men on base with two out in the top of the ninth, whereupon Javier Vazquez was called upon to relieve. Vazquez, you may recall, last relieved for the Yankees in Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS, whereupon he surrendered a grand slam to Johnny Damon that basically put the game 0 and the pennant - out of reach for New York.

But despite his early struggles, and unlike his track record late in 2004, Vazquez had been pitching better recently, including a seven-inning, two run performance against the Tigers last week. He struck out Youkilis on four pitches, setting the stage for the heart of the Yankees' order against the Red Sox closer, Jonathan Papelbon.

papelbon allowed a double to Brett Gardner, who apparently can occasionally acquire an extra base with his bat after all, and then got a fly out from Mark Teixeira, whereupon Gardner went to third. This move proved to be an unnecessary risk, as Alex Rodriguez hit the very next pitch 420 feet, over the center field wall, to tie the game at 9-9.

This event may have rattled Papelbon, who's no stranger to choking against the Yankees, as his second pitch to light-hitting catcher (with the new Gazoo helmet!) Francisco Cervelli hit him on the arm. And then Marcus Thames deposited the very next pitch 381 feet away, just over the left field wall, to end this tedious, boring game, 11-9, 227 minutes after it started.

What a drag.

Texas Rangers Showing Promise against the Oakland A's

2010-05-14T14:00:00.002-04:00

I had the distinct privilege to see a Texas Rangers' game in person Wednesday night.

The AmeriQuest Rangers Field BallPark at Arlington, or whatever it's called these days, is really a heckuva nice place to watch a game. It opened in 1994, which means that this is its 17th year, and frankly, it still looks brand-spanking new. The Rangers and their fans have done a great job of keeping the place in pristine shape, and there's no reason to think that this Texas baseball cathedral should ever be as decrepit ans outdated as, say, Yankee Stadium used to be. On the other hand, I'd be willing to wager a BetUS bonus code that another 60 years might put a few cracks in the facade, both literally and figuratively.

I understand that there are all sorts of cool things to do in the ballpark, such as a huge baseball museum, a walk of fame, a picnic area and other stuff, but I missed all of that, since I got there right as the game was starting. I sat in the box seats between first base and the right field foul pole, and found that I had a pretty good view of just about everything, a comfortable seat, and a cool breeze for most of the game.

In the last three innings or so, the cool breeze gave way to some fairly impressive swirling winds, presumably caused in some part by the steady, straight winds coming directly into the ballpark from the outfield, keeping the pennants as straight and stiff as writing tablets for a solid hour. How tiny little Eric Patterson managed to hot a home run into that is beyond my understanding of the laws of physics.

Unfortunately for the Oaklands, that was their only run. The Rangers, though they took a few innings to find their stroke, managed 10 of them, including five homers of their own, mostly before the winds started. Josh Hamilton and Vlad Guerrero hit back to back homers off starting pitcher Gio Gonzales and (not much) relief pitcher Chad Gaudin.

Yes, that Chad Gaudin. Fortunately for Yankee fans, the Yankee brass were not fooled by Gaudin's two months of smoke-and-mirrors pitching in Pinstripes toward the end of last season, perhaps thanks to the info they found at Pinnacle Sportsbook Review, and they let him go as a free agent. For his part, though he had not been good this year, Gaudin was at least striking out about a batter per inning in 2010.

Entering a game with an ERA of 6.23 and making it worse is no easy feat, but don’t tell Chad that. No siree. After giving up that homer to Vlad, Gaudin allowed two more homers, also back to back, in the next inning, making this the first time in his major league career he’d ever surrendered three homers in a so-called “relief” appearance. One of those was to catcher Max Ramirez, only the second of his brief major league career, and the other was to Michael Young. No, the Yankees don’t miss this guy.

The Rangers, cheered on by 26,682 of their fans, managed to take over first place in their division by a game, this after a tough, extra-innings loss to the Oaklands the night before. The loudest and most obnoxious of these fans happened to be sitting about 15 feet in front of me, the realization of which initially annoyed me – how do I always manage to find these people? – but later gave me an appreciation for the fact that baseball games are meant to be enjoyed, and that this man was doing little more than enjoying himself. A lot.

Having seen more games in New York and Philadelphia than anywhere else, I’m no stranger to obnoxious fans. But this guy was not like those. Primarily, he was sober. He may have had a beer or two, but clearly was not drunk, as evidenced by the fact that every time, and seriously, I mean EVERY time the organist played something on the loudspeaker, this guy got up and danced to it, or ran in place, or mimicked playing the organ himself, or whatever.

I briefly even considered sitting next to him myself, if only to save me from the dead-fish middle aged woman on my right and the two hipsters on my left who were too cool or jaded or apathetic to bother talking to me.

After the third inning I went to get something to eat and decided to take full advantage of Wednesday Dollar Dog Night, buying three of the generic pink tubes of nondescript ground up what-not. And a beer. Some dark, local brew that was pretty solid.

The dogs, I’m convinced, must be brought in especially for dollar dog night, as I can’t imagine that a major league baseball team that once spent $55 million on Chan Ho Park would be able to sleep at night charging $3.50 for hot dogs that clearly where not worth the effort to remove small pieces of bone, or gristle, or, for all I know, polycarbonate from them before turning them into franks. Seriously, all three of them had something in them that I was forced to remove from my teeth and examine further, a texture consummate not with food but with perhaps sand or a rough polishing compound.

Upon my return I took a different seat and ended up near some friendlier fans, and closer to the loud one, who by then had recruited at least two other young men and a boy of about eight to remove their shirts and sing and chant and dance around the aisles with him. At least until the Fun Police showed up in the form of a Rangers security guard. At one point, during the 7^th inning stretch, as two of them were square dancing in the aisle, he ordered them back to their seats, which was lamentably understandable, as concrete stairs are not exactly the safest environment to go running around in circles.

But later, when they were doing nothing more than cheering and chanting and yelling and pumping their fists, the same curmudgeonly member of the F.P. came back and ordered them to sit down and (I assume) stop having so much fun. This is a baseball game, dammit, not an Irish wake. Now sit down and think about what you’ve done, mister.

And then, to make sure they complied with the official F.P. Decree Against Having Fun at Baseball Games, he sat down right behind them. This was possible because, of course, there was nobody behind them. For, like, five or six rows. Which means that they were blocking the view of exactly nobody, were not drunk, were not throwing anything or hitting anybody or picking fights. At worst, they could be accused of yelling too loud. At a ballgame. Fanatics, indeed.

They did, at one point, encourage the crowd to boo a fan wearing an Oakland jersey, which isn't unusual. What was unusual was that the guy wore a garish yellow replica jersey that said "RUDI 26" on the back, which means that this particular fan was old-school and knew his stuff, and didn't particularly care that few people would remember or appreciate his favorite player. I imagine that someone showing up where the Red Sox are the visiting wearing a George Scott jersey might be similarly regarded, and similarly underappreciated.

But besides the cheap-ass hot dogs – which I can hardly complain about because, as everyone knows, you get what you pay for – and the F.P., there wasn’t much wrong with the Rangers or their ballpark on this night. Well, they for some reason forgot to set off the fireworks when Ramirez hit his homer, even though they did so for all of the other Rangers’ bombs, the fifth and last of which came smoking off the bat of rookie firstbaseman Justin Smoak.

A Wave got started late in the blowout game, and though I’ve been at dozens of games where this was attempted with some success, none of which ever made it around the ballpark more than three times, the origins of the movement had never previously occurred to me. There’s probably some Official Story as to when and where the Wave first started, and who thought of it, but whomever is responsible could thank one and one thing only: boredom.

There are few things less exciting than a game that’s way out of reach, even if yours is the team that’s winning. And of course there’s little to do, if you don’t want to leave early, other than start some kind of chant, except that only maybe a hundred people can hear even the loudest voice in the midst of a large ballpark, even a relatively quiet one. Even if you got a chant started, who would know? And how long would it last? Only til the next batter struck out or got on base or whatever. But the Wave? Sheer, simple genius.

All it takes is standing up and sitting down, throwing your arms up in the air in sequence with 27,000 others, and maybe a loud “Oh!” or “Hey!” when you do so. It could go on like that for an entire inning or more. And everybody can do it. Everybody knows exactly what to do and when, and there’s no worry that your initial chant of “Julio Borbon, Julio! [clap, clap-clap] will sound on TV like “Here we go, Morons, here we go!” [clap, clap-clap]. Or vice-versa.

Anyway, the Rangers.

Additionally, they managed to get prized pitching prospect Derek Holland a Win in his first major league appearance of his sophomore season. Holland had been pretty terrible in his rookie year, amassing an 8-13 record and a Gaudin-esque ERA of 6.12. But on this night, after having torn up the PCL for a month, Holland was very good, striking out seven and walking only one in six scoreless innings.

He was followed up by Darren O’Day, for whom both the obnoxious fans and, when he got out of the inning, the public address system, sang a chant of “O-DAY o-dayo-dayo-DAY, o-DAY, OH-oh DAY!!!” Doug Mathis pitched the last two innings for Texas, allowing the homer by Patterson, but little else, despite the fact that he only threw strikes about half the time.

Not that it should be so difficult to dominate a team like the Oakland A’s. Their cleanup hitter had a slugging percentage of about .350 coming into the game, and two thirds of the lineup was hitting about .250 or worse, generally without any power either. Heck, even their designated “hitter”, Josh Donaldson, was hitting .071 coming into the game, and his 0-for-4 dropped him down even further into the abyss.

I saw Donaldson a few years ago, when he was a hot hitting catching prospect in the Cubs' class A short season team in Boise. He was sent to the A's in the Rich Harden trade almost exactly a year after I saw him play. Back then I'd have put a few bucks down on him to pan out as a solid major leaguer, especially if I had a bookmaker bonus code. He's cooled down quite a bit since that hot season in the high Idaho desert, but still shows glimpses of the keen batting eye and doubles power he displayed last season in AA, such as last night, when he singled in the tying run in the 4th inning. Maybe he's better when he catches.

Catcher Landon Powell looked promising as he laced a ball into the left-centerfield gap and then dragged his lumbering, 6’1”, 260 lb frame around the infield, stretching a double into a double, as they say. He singled again later, less dramatically, but other than he and Daric Barton, nobody else on the team got on base more than once.

I expect the A's to more or less disappear from contention as the year wears on, that's my second half betting advice. Unless something truly special happens, like the King of Bradenia hurling another dozen or so perfectos, they just don’t have the bats to keep in the race. The Rangers may have both the bats and the pitching, if Holland is the real thing. But the Texas heat has caused many a Rangers team to fade over the course of the year, and this one is not above that fate.

At least the ballpark is still nice.

What's Wrong With Javy Vazquez?

2010-04-27T12:32:00.001-04:00

There are probably fewer things more frustrating to a sports fan than watching an expensive, recently imported veteran player repeatedly fail in his efforts to help the team. The more prior success he's had, the more money he's making, the more you had to give up to get him...well, that all just makes it worse.

And then there's Javy Vazquez.

Vazquez had all of those things against him:

He was probably one of the five best pitchers in the Senior Circuit last year,
He's guaranteed $23 million combined this year and next, and
The Yankees traded their young centerfielder, inexplicable fan favorite Melky Cabrera, plus two pitching prospects and half a million dollars to get him.

In addition, Vazquez had the ghost of his former, unsuccessful stint in the Big Apple looming over his head. Despite high hopes for him last time he came to New York, and an impressive first half, Javy Vazquez left New York in ignominy having walked five batters and surrendered two home runs to some bearded, homeless hippie, making the Yankees the first team in over a hundred years of professional baseball playoffs to ever lose a series they had led three games to none.

Granted, Kevin Brown gave up five runs all by his lonesome, and the Yankees only scored three all day, so it's not like Vazquez really made things much worse, but his efforts out there put the game ostensibly out of reach, and that's what everyone remembers.

Still, in the intervening time, he's been nothing if not consistent. Heck, "consistency" is Vazquez' calling card. He's the only pitcher in baseball who's provided his teams with at least 32 starts, 190 innings and double digit wins every season since Y2K, the very definition of LAIM. Granted, his ERA has fluctuated by more than two whole runs from year to year, but the innings are there and he's occasionally been something close to brilliant.

This is, perhaps, what many Yankees fans thought they were getting when the Vazquez trade was completed this winter, but the Yankees had no right to expect that. They've now bought high twice on Javier Vazquez - he set personal career bests in ERA, adjusted ERA, and virtually every rate stat last year - but at least this time they didn't give up the kinds of prospects you usually have to surrender for an ace.

They only really need him to be a good #4 (or perhaps #3) starter, since the heavy lifting is supposed to be done by CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett, and perhaps Andy Pettitte or Phil Hughes, if he comes into his own. The trouble is that Vazquez has been, in three of his four starts, anyway, God-awful. In the other one he was just bad.

There is some hope in that Vazquez seemingly has hit into some poor luck so far this year. He is still striking batters out at just about his career rate, a little over eight batters per nine innings. Also, his BABIP (batting average on balls in play, something over which pitchers have little if any control) is .345 this year, compared to a career average of .302 and a major league average that is perennially about the same as that. Both of these facts are encouraging, but that's about all the encouragement you can get out of his performance so far this year.

Still though, he's only had 58 at-bats where the ball has been put in play this year, so the difference between .345 and .302 is generously speaking, three hits. That, my friends, is not the difference between Vazquez's current 9.00 ERA and the expert projections, which generally put him in the range of about 3.50 to 3.75 or so.

What's more worrying is that much of the stuff he can control is also way off his career rates. He's allowed five homers in only 20 innings of work, after taking more than twice as long to allow his 5th homer last season. He's also walked a good number of batters - 11 of them in only 20 innings - so that both his homer and walk rates are more than double their 2009 levels.

He has faced pretty stiff competition - two games against the defending NL West champion LAnahfornia Angels, one against the first place Tampa Bay Rays and one against the upstart Oakland A's, also in first place right now. Still, though, part of a pitcher's job, especially on the Yankees, is to be able to beat teams they might face in the playoffs, and so far Javy has shown little ability to do that.

The change to the generally higher quality batters of the American League probably isn't helping either. KFFL.com reports that Vazquez' record against the NL since 2008 is 16-10 with a 3.28 ERA, but that against the Junior Circuit he's just 12-19, 4.71. Even that, however, is a far cry from how terrible he's been to this point in 2010.

The most troubling part is that there seems to be a real, tangible reason for the lack of success so far this year. According to FanGraphs, Vazquez' fastball is almost two and a half miles per hour slower this year than last, an average of 88.8 mph, compared to 91.1 last year, and 91.3 mph in his career.

He's only pitched 20 inning so far this year, but he's thrown just about 400 pitches, and about half of them have been fastballs, so we have a decent idea of what he can do. The percentages of each pitch thrown (slider, curve and changeup) are about the same as usual, so it doesn't seem like he's favoring one of his offspeed pitches to compensate for what he's lost on his fastball, just that his fastball isn't what it used to be.

I don't think it's simply that he's still building arm strength, as he had about 19 innings of official work in spring training, about the same as Sabathia, and Burnett both of whom are generally pitching well. And their fastballs are within 0.9 mph of last year's averages.

Joe Girardi says that Javy's issues are mechanical, that he "gets under the ball", whatever that means. You would imagine that a guy who has thrown nearly 35,000 pitches in major league games in the last decade, more than anybody this side of Livan Hernandez, would have a pretty good idea of his mechanics by now. But still, maybe there's something to that. Maybe there's a way to tell if Vazquez is messing up his delivery somehow.

If he were "getting under the ball" you would imagine it would show up somewhere. Or if "getting under the ball" were so terrible for a pitcher, you would imagine it would be tough to pitch a complete game against a major league team and allow them only one run on three hits, while striking out seven and walking one right? Yes, even the Nationals.

For what it's worth, the game charts for this past Sunday's lousy start against the Angels do not show any appreciable difference in release point when compared with a start from late last year, a one-run complete game against the Washington Nationals.

20 April 2010, Javy Vazquez vs. Angels

25 September 2009, Javy Vazquez vs. Nationals

One potential explanation to consider is that Vazquez is having trouble with his two-seam fastball. The main page of FanGraphs lumps his fastballs all together, but when you go to the Pitch f/x pages, they separate his regular four-seam from a supposed two-seam fastball, which he only started throwing last year (4.6% of the time). This year he's throwing it 10.8% of the time, more than twice as often as he did in 2009.

Here's where it gets really sketchy and speculative, because we don't know much about this alleged two-seam fastball, including whether it even exists (more on this later).

It's possible that...

...having lost his feel for the pitch, he's trying to throw it more to regain that feel.
...having lost confidence in his "stuff", he feels a need to throw the 2-seamer more often to keep batters honest.
...he's experimenting with a new grip on the two-seamer and hasn't quite got it yet.

But it's just as possible that what Pitch f/x thinks is a two-seam fastball is just his normal fastball, with a couple of mph lost. The Pitch f/x technology can't always tell what the type of pitch is. It just makes an assessment of the pitch based on velocity and movement, but isn't always correct, as we found while trying to sort out Chien-Ming Wang's problems last year.

In any case, while I think four starts is a little too soon to start giving up on Vazquez - he has, after all, had similarly poor streaks in the past, but has always bounced back - the drop in velocity is somewhat troubling. Part of Joe Girardi's job is to keep the peace and to protect his players, so naturally, he's not going to lay into his pitcher whenever the beat writers are looking for an explanation. Naturally, he's going to say it's a mechanical glitch and that they're working on it and that he'll be fine.

But if there's something wrong, like really, physically wrong with Vazquez already, of if the mechanical glitch that's causing the drop in velocity is also causing stress on his arm that could lead to an injury, well, then we've got a real problem. My best guess is that within the next two or three starts, if we don't see some real improvement, Vazquez may end up on the disabled list for the first time in his career.

UPDATE: Curt Schilling (of course) has an opinion on the matter too. Silly me, it's not his fastball slowing down or a possible injury. It's Vazquez not being "equipped" to get outs in the American League. My bad.

An Open Letter to Oakland A's Pitcher Dallas Braden

2010-04-23T09:43:00.004-04:00

Dear Mr. Braden,

Congratulations on beating the Yankees Thursday afternoon and ending their winning streak at six games.

Now shut up.

You sound like a fool.

When you yelled at Alex Rodriguez for taking a shortcut (not a "detour") across the diamond, back to first base after a long foul ball by Robinson Cano in the top of the 6th inning yesterday, well, you intimidated exactly nobody. Alex Rodriguez was already the best player in the major leagues when you were still growing hair in awkward places of your anatomy. He doesn't care what you think.

The Yankees don't care what you think. The fans don't really care what you think. Frankly, I doubt that your teammates are buying this crap about how you own the mound, but they're contractually obligated to back you up even if you start pontificating about how aliens from the planet Snorg are responsible for everything from the Kennedy assassination to the fact that the cost of postage stamps seems to rise every 20 minutes. (Whoops, there they go again! Damn Snorgians!)

Nobody has ever heard of this rule before except you. Well, not nobody, exactly, but nobody seems to take it quite as seriously as you do. I have seen lots of quotes from you about how A-Rod should go out to the bullpen if he wants to run across a pitcher's mound. You do understand that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, right? Rodriguez was trying to save time, as he doesn't want to piss off another umpiring crew. Well, maybe not.

You also argued that you, "don’t go over there and run laps at third base." You are an American League pitcher. You almost never have any reason to be at third base, so the point is moot. You also said,

"I don’t care if I’m Cy Young or the 25th man on the roster, if I’ve got the ball in my hand and I’m on that mound, that’s my mound."

Fair enough. The rules should be the same for everybody, but of course this rule is largely new to many of us. ESPN's Baseball Tonight crew, including Rick Sutcliffe, who spent 18 seasons in the major leagues and won a Cy Young award before you were potty trained, and has spent much of the last 15 years as either a major league coach or a TV commentator, had never heard of it. You'd think a guy like that would know, right?

Or maybe there's something about this issue in writing somewhere. I have a book, given to me for Christmas, called The Code: Baseball's Unwritten Rules and its Ignore-At-Your-Own-Risk Code of Conduct. It's not a very good book, honestly. Most of what I've read so far has been a lot of anecdotes about how hitters shouldn't show up pitchers and pitchers shouldn't show up hitters and you have to pitch inside but don't hit a batter in the head and expect to get hit if one of their guys got hit and blah, blah, blah. Seriously, it goes on and on like that for almost 300 pages.

But nowhere in those pages does it say a single word about how nobody is allowed on the pitcher's mound during an inning or during a game. Other than, you know, the dozens of people from both teams who come out there during mound conferences and pitching changes, plus the umpires and the grounds crew and what not. But definitely NOT Alex Rodriguez, under any circumstances.

When asked where you picked up this particular tidbit of baseball etiquette, you mentioned American Legion Ball, and that your coach told you that, as the pitcher, you are (I am not making this up) "the center of the universe" when you're out there on the mound. Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds? Everybody knows that Rickey Henderson is the center of the universe. Duh.

Seriously, though, we all know you need to be a little arrogant to make it in your business. Nice Guys Finish Last and all that. But even if you actually think you're the center of the universe, you don't say so out loud. You sound like an idiot.

My two year old son is just now learning that he's not the center of the universe, and it's a painful lesson at times. You should have figured it out a long time ago, and that silly tantrum you threw on the way back to the dugout just reinforced the fact that you need to grow up. If your mommy was watching, she would have given you a timeout, mister.

The only argument I've heard that actually makes much sense of this bizarre incident was Rob Neyer's as he rightly pointed out that when you were cursing at Rodriguez on national television, the mound was, in fact, NOT yours. Not any longer. The inning was over, and the mound therefore belonged to CC Sabathia. Apparently, CC Sabathia is the center of the universe, and given the gravitational pull a guy that size must have, that's not so hard to believe.

But you, with your 17 career wins, are most certainly not it.

Mostly, I get that you think your team deserves a little more respect. You guys did, in fact, finish last (nice guys or not) in 2009, so if saying stuff like this helps get your teammates fired up, then so be it:

“Maybe it doesn’t come across his mind to do that to the Oakland A’s, but maybe it does enter his mind to not do it against the Boston Red Sox, or to not do it against another team. So what I did was, I aided him with that. I don’t throw 95, so the point might not get across from me, but any kind of disrespect like that…it’s got to be handled."

But you know what really works? You know what will really inspire your teammates?

Win.

Build on that 3-0 record you've compiled so far this year. Help the Oaklands to a division title and, oh, I dunno, maybe a playoff series victory for once. That, and only that, will get you and your teammates the respect that your fragile little ego apparently needs.

In the mean time: Shut up and pitch.

Yours truly,

Travis M. Nelson,
The Boy of Summer

Yankees Winning a Team Effort

2010-04-19T09:52:00.005-04:00

Well, it's fun being a Yankee fan these days.

The Yankees are currently 9-3, sitting atop the American League East division (albeit tied with the Tampa Bay Rays), with a nice five-game lead over the despised Red Sox and their small fiefdom. Their 69 runs scored and +25 run differential are both best in the AL, though not the best in baseball. Over in the Senior Circuit, the Phillies have scored a whopping 78 runs and both they and the Giants (??!?!) have a slightly better differential than the Yanks, though both are "only" 8-4.

The Yankees have not had a start this good since 2003, when they went 18-3 in the first three weeks of the season and finished the year with 103 wins and an American League pennant. Given that six of the team's next nine games come against the last-place Baltimore Orioles (2-11) and the other three are at home against the last place White Sox (4-9), achieving that 18-3 mark doesn't seem so far out of reach. Not that your April record wins you anything, unless your MLB betting regimen goes month-to-month.

The Yanks aren't exactly hitting on all cylinders, but those who are hitting are doing so well enough to more than make up for those who are struggling. Mark Teixeira, for example, is a notoriously slow starter, and is hitting only .114 at the moment. Indeed, his career .239 batting average in April is about 40 points lower than in any other month. however, he did hit his first homer of the season yesterday, so perhaps that's a harbinger of better days.

Nick Johnson has struggled, too the tune of a .158 batting average, though his league-leading 14 walks give him a more than respectable .404 OBP. But Jeter and Posada are both hitting about .380 and have three homers to their credit. Robinson Cano leads the team with four bombs and his hitting .340 in his own right. He had a hit in every game before Saturday's contest against the Rangers. New CF Curtis Granderson is hitting .311 with a couple of homers and four steals in four tries, and Alex Rodriguez had a .938 OPS, thanks largely to his team leading five doubles.

Nick Swisher's hitting only .200 at the moment, though he generally...well, Swisher doesn't generally do anything, except hit 20+ homers. In the five more or less full years he's been in the majors, he's only had one season in which his final OPS differed by less than 90 points from the previous seasons. Sure, he'll probably end up around .250 with 25 homers and an OPS around .825 or so, but he could just as easily hit .220 as .260, for all we know.

The real oddity is Brett Gardner. I had my doubts about him last year, and frankly the odds were and still are against him becoming a good everyday player, but he's certainly done his job so far this year. He's played in 10 of the team's 12 games, hitting .333, scoring nine runs and stealing seven bases.

His current "pace" would have him scoring 144 runs and stealing 112 bases despite never hitting the ball hard enough to get an extra base under his own power. Since the record for runs scored without an extra base hit is just 29 - and that was only accomplished by a former sprinter who was recruited as a designated base stealer by wacko A's owner Charlie Finley in the 1970's - well, I wouldn't bet on anything like that happening. More likely, Gardner will finish with something like a .280 batting average and 80 runs scored, with 40 or 50 steals at a high success rate. If he continues to slap singles, take walks and steal bases, he'll certainly earn his pay.

One of the biggest surprises so far this year has been the resurgence of Andy Pettitte. At 38 years old, you could hardly have expected him to improve on the level he's set for himself the last three years. That's about 15 Wins and an ERA slightly over 4.00, which is solid, if not Hall of fame material. But he's got a 1.35 ERA in a team leading 20 innings, having just quieted the Rangers' formidable bats for eight innings on Sunday. He's due to regress, of course, but if he can somehow win another 15 games this year, he would move into the top 50 in career wins. While the chance to tie Amos Rusie and Iron Man Joe McGinnity may not sell a lot of baseball tickets, it sure would like nice on his resume, don't you think?

Not that CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett have been slouching, mind you. Both are 2-0, like Pettitte, and both have an ERA comfortably under 3.00, though not as low as Andy's. Phil Hughes was far from sharp in his only start, walking five batters in as many innings, but at least he managed a Win.

Javy Vazquez has been awful in his two starts, surrendering 12 earned runs (14 total) in eleven innings. Granted, it a little early to start booing him, but at some point the guy who finished 4th in the 2009 NL Cy Young voting had better start pitching like the 15-game winner the Yankees thought they were getting when they ~~dumped off~~ traded Melky Cabrera to the Braves.

The bullpen has had its ups and downs, but the like the starting lineup, the good parts (Mariano Rivera, Joba Chamberlain, Damaso Marte) have more than compensated for the bad (David Robertson, Alfredo Aceves). Sergio Mitre has defied all the odds simply by getting through about two innings of work without allowing a run. Don't bet on that to continue.

Chan Ho Park has had his ups and downs, including a well-documented case of the runs, which he had and then allowed to the Red Sox on Opening Day. He deserves credit for taking the blame himself and not putting Joe Girardi in an awkward position (why would he use a pitcher who was weak and dehydrated from the flu? On opening day? Against the Red Sox?) but of course good character doesn't get that home run ball back.

In any case, though there a few guys over-performing, there are also several who have yet to hit their stride, and there's little reason to think that the Yankees can't continue to wreak havoc on the American League.

Press Release: Meet the SWB Yankees!!

2010-03-30T12:02:00.002-04:00

*****START*****

The Scranton-Wilkes Barre Yankees just released about 50 tickets for the Meet the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees Dinner on April 7 at PNC Field in Scranton.

There will be a private batting practice session at 3:45 followed by cocktails and light fare in the stadium restaurant. This will be followed by an autograph session with the 2010 Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees. They have added a silent auction this year with some game worn jerseys, fan experiences and NYY signed baseballs.

Tickets are $75 with proceeds benefiting the Kids Night Out Program that provides game tickets to needy children and groups. For tickets, call the SWB Yankees office at 570-969-2255 and ask for Kelly Byron.

Last year’s dinner was attended by Phil Hughes, Alfredo Aceves, David Robertson and Austin Jackson. It’s a great opportunity to meet the future stars of the Yankees and MLB.

Official Link here.

*****END*****

With that said, it's worth noting that there really are not a lot of "future stars of the Yankees and MLB" on this team, not that we can see at this point. Juan Miranda is probably the best bet, of all the baseball betting you could do, and he projects as a platoon DH, which isn't much. I mean, sure, he could turn into the next Travis Hafner, but that's a wager than no online sportsbook would give you.

The only SWB players on Baseball America's Top 10 prospects list fort the Yankees is RHP Zach McAllister, who hasn't yet thrown a pitch above AA, but could eventually turn into a solid back of the rotation starter. Mark Melancon makes the top-11 list for Baseball Prospectus, and projects as a set up man, at best. In short: No stars. All the Yankees' best prospects are in the low minors right now, or in a couple of cases, Double-A.

Still, you could potentially meet coaches (and former MLB journeymen Butch Wynegar, Scott Aldred or Aaron Ledesma, as well as manager Dave Miley, who never made it to the Show as a player, but managed the Cincinnati Reds for almost 300 games. You could meet Kei Igawa, who actually WAS a star in Japan, even though he's ind of lousy on this side of the Pacific.

And if nothing else, you can have a fun day/evening at the ballpark, and contribute to a good cause. Which is worth something.

Commentary on Baseball America's top 20 Prospects: #16 - #20

2010-03-11T16:00:00.000-05:00

#16. Starlin Castro, SS, Cubs
Opening Day Age: 20
ETA: 2011

It's tempting to compare Castro to Alcides Escobar, given that they're both Latin American, NL Central shortstop prospects, tall with wiry frames (6'1", 160 lbs) and known for their defense. Escobar is already 23, though, and has a starting job on a major league contender, whereas Castro won't be 20 years old for two more weeks, and will be given more time to develop as his major league team rebuilds.

The difference, however, is that while Escobar is expected to be a speedy, punch-and-judy hitter who wins Gold Gloves, Castro for some reason is expected to turn into Alfonso Soriano. As he has hit about .300 everywhere he's played professionally, and they're listed as the same size, I guess I can see that, but Soriano hit for power in the minors.

Castro seemingly has no power at all, having never hit more than three homers in any season in the minors, and none at all in over 110 AA at-bats last season. He hit one in the AFL, to go with his .376 batting average, but as you're probably tired of hearing by now, everyone hits in the AFL, so take that with a grain of salt.

I suppose it's possible, since he's so young, that he'll eventually develop some power, but more likely he'll become a hack and slash, or at best a line drive hitter who swings at everything and makes up for some of that with his speed and his glove. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, but when you're expecting Soriano and you end up with Royce Clayton, people are bound to be disappointed.

He does have some speed (47 stolen bases in his 3-year career) but perhaps not great instincts, given that he's gotten caught as often as once in two or three tries as some stops in the minors. If the speed is there, it will at least help him with his defense, even if it's not an asset on the major league basepaths.

Personally, I think it's a little early to dub this guy on of the best prospects in the game, as so far he's only shown glimpses of the player the scouts expect him to become. So much can happen between age 19 and reaching the majors, and so much that's expected can fail to happen, that anyone without shock the world talent at this age should be grasped loosely.

#17 Martin Perez, LHP, Rangers
Opening Day Age: 19
ETA: Mid-2011

Perez has a low-90's fastball an above average change-up and perhaps a major league quality curveball despite the fact that he won't be 19 years old for almost another month. After embarrassing players in the high-A Sally League for most of the year (105 strikeouts in 93 innings, 2.31 ERA), Perez got roughed up a little in AA. But don't let that "1-3, 5.57" next to his name on the stats sites fool you.

First of all, it was only 21 innings. Secondly, it was more due to bad luck (a .374 BABIP) than bad pitching. According to FanGraphs, his FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching, a metric that takes luck and defense out of the equation and scales it to look like an ERA) at Double-A was only 3.82. That's still well above the 2.46 he'd posted in Single-A, but also perfectly acceptable for an 18-year old at the second highest rung of the minors.

The Rangers will perhaps let him spend all of 2010 at that level to allow him to learn how to pitch a little more, but he could be in the majors by the middle of next year if everything goes well. At which time he'll still be just barely 20 years old.

Other than his youth, there's not much going against Perez. He's got good control (fewer than 3.5 walks per nine innings in the minors), good mechanics and two quality breaking pitches to go with a solid fastball. Baseball Prospectus called him "the best left-handed pitching prospect in baseball", and no, they did not forget about Madison Bumgarner and Brian Matusz.

The Rangers are the only team with three players in the top 20 this year. Though they haven't sniffed the playoffs in over a decade, that could change soon.

#18 Jeremy Hellickson, RHP, Rays
Opening Day Age: 22
ETA: Mid-2010

Hellickson's got unbelievable command and control, walking barely two hitters per nine innings in the minors while striking out almost ten. His fastball is only 90-92 at best, but he's got such command of it, and its movement, that it may not matter. He's also got a very good curve and a major league quality changeup that produce a lot of swings and misses.

There are two things he does not have, however:

1) Anything left to prove in the minors, or

B) Anywhere to pitch in the majors.

Which is a problem.

Given that the Rays already have a young, talented starting rotation, they have little choice but to start Hellickson out in AAA again, which is not completely awful given that he is just 22 and that he's pitched only nine games at that level. Command guys who don't have overpowering stuff tend to take a while to develop as major leaguers anyway.

#19 Aaron Hicks, OF, Twins
Opening Day Age: 20
ETA: Mid-2011

This first round draft pick out of high school impressed everyone by hitting .318/.409/.491 as an 18-year old in the 2008 rookie league, and he acquitted himself well in single-A in 2009, even though he only hit .251 there. Like Perez, he was victimized more by bad luck (only a .307 BABIP) more than poor performance, and his numbers should bounce back this year. He's a switch hitter with patience, speed and a cannon arm that threw mid-90's gas as a prep school pitcher, but with some work to do before he can get to the majors.

He's projected as a five tool player, though after getting caught eight times in 18 tries last season at Single-A, it appears that he needs to learn how to better utilize his natural speed if he's going to be a base stealing threat. Watching his swing, he reminds me of another switch hitting centerfielder, Carlos Beltran, though to be fair, it's pretty much a textbook swing.

#20 Logan Morrison, 1B, Marlins
Opening Day Age: 22
ETA: 2010

Though not the blue chip prospect he was after hitting .332 in 2008 in a pitcher's league, Morrison is still hanging on to his spot in the top 20. And this despite suffering through a wrist injury that limited him to only 82 games and eight homers in 2009. His pedestrian .277 batting average belies his skills at getting on base, which are more clearly evidenced by his .411 OBP. He hit 24 homers at A-ball in 2007, but hasn't shown that kind of power since, even though his body and his swing suggest that he should be a slugger.

Perhaps the wrist injury forced him to be more patient or perhaps he's just maturing as a hitter, but 21-year olds who walk more than they strike out are few and far between. Still, Morrison has shown the ability to hit for average, power or on-base percentage at different stops throughout his minor league career, but never more than one of those skills at a time. If he's healthy this year - and that's a big "if" since he's only 1-for-14 in spring training as I write this - he'll need to put together at least two of those three to stay at the top of prospect lists.