SEAT LICENSE RENEWALS It's almost spring
when a young man's thoughts turn to... those expensive
seat licenses. An online cash advance can help relieve the anxiety.
As for the centerpiece, who ever heard of an All-Star Game played in less than three hours? It was downright old-school, a competitive affair that turned on a spectacular defensive play (Carl Crawford's catch of Brad Hawpe's drive) and a triple by speedster Curtis Granderson, and kept the suspense right up to the final out. But all of the early-count swinging -- 15 at-bats ended after a single pitch, another 14 after two pitches -- kept the contest feeling like an exhibition. Swing at this, because I've got a plane to catch.
Anyway, between the actual midpoint of the season (which was a week ago Sunday) and the All-Star break, it's a convenient time to look back at the first half, and at Baseball Prospectus we've been using the time to examine how our PECOTA projections have fared thus far. In Tuesday's piece I gave an undignified burial to three teams whom PECOTA saw as potentially playoff bound, the Diamondbacks (88-win Wild Card favorites), the A's (84-win AL West favorites) and the Indians (86-win AL Central favorites. All three are well below .500, with the latter two in last place in their divisions, and all have seen their Playoff Odds approach zero. Hence, "The Flatliners."
In today's piece, mirrored at ESPN Insider, I expand upon that piece to show which teams have seen their Playoff Odds change the most since our preseason projections:
The three-day All-Star break is a convenient time to begin the grieving process, and so yesterday made for a timely opportunity to shovel dirt on three teams whom PECOTA tabbed as potentially playoff-bound back in April. The Diamondbacks, A's and Indians may not be mathematically eliminated from postseason contention yet, but with their odds of joining the dance falling below 0.5 percent, a burial seemed in order.
As the BP staff has taken the past several days to examine how our preseason PECOTA forecasts have fared with regards to teams, hitters, starters and relievers, it's worth remembering that such projections don't equal destiny. They're simply a shorthand for a wider range of probabilities centered around the weighted mean forecasts we publicize, and all kinds of real-world factors — injuries, bad luck, mismanagement, imperfect information, and so on — can affect their accuracy.
Bearing that in mind, today we'll examine which teams have helped or harmed their postseason chances the most relative to our initial forecasts using our plain vanilla version of the Playoff Odds report, thus isolating the effect of our projections from our expectations for these teams going forward. In that report, each team's current record and third-order Pythagorean record — their record after adjusting for scoring environment, run elements, and quality of opposition — are factored into a Monte Carlo simulation of the rest of the season, with their records regressing not to .500 but to their third-order winning percentages. Run differentials play a big part here; a team that's above .500 but being outscored won't see favorable odds.
Surprisingly enough, none of the freshly buried teams rates as the biggest disappointment from this perspective:
...From this vantage, it's the Cubs who have disappointed the most, though at least they maintain about a one-in-six shot at October. Expected to pace the circuit with 95 wins and an MLB-high 11-game cushion, they're instead tied for third in the NL Central, 3 1/2 games back. Injuries to Milton Bradley and Aramis Ramirez, disappointment from Alfonso Soriano, and a hole in the lineup where Mark DeRosa used to be (their second basemen have hit a combined .224/.280/.294) have limited the Cubs to just 4.1 runs per game and the league's third-lowest EqA.
The Diamondbacks' offense ranks directly above them, a problem compounded by the loss of Brandon Webb, who hasn't pitched since Opening Day, and a wretched bullpen. The A's main problem has been a lack of offense, some of which is attributable to bad luck on balls in play>. The Indians merely have a staff that's been the league's worst in terms of run prevention because they don't miss enough bats; they're 12th in strikeout rate and 13th in Defensive Efficiency. The Mets have been without offensive stalwarts Jose Reyes, Carlos Delgado and Carlos Beltran for weeks now, and their pitching depth has been compromised by injuries as well; their playoff hopes aren't dead yet, but please excuse their weak pulse, clammy skin and stiffening limbs.
The Yankees wind up in the middle of the pack; their overall preseason odds of 66.6 percent have fallen slightly, to 58.9 percent, but they're still very much alive. The Dodgers wind up second from the top of the final list, those teams whose odds have improved the most; they went from heavy pre-season favorites (57.2 percent) to near-certainties (99.3 percent) despite Manny Ramirez's 50-game suspension.
Anyway, I've also got another piece up today on BP and ESPN that looks forward to the second half; I'll save that for another post.
By midnight tonight, the All-Star balloting will have ended, and on Sunday the starting lineups will be announced. Inevitably, deserving players will be left out in the cold (even after managers Joe Maddon and Charlie Manuel have stocked their benches and bullpens), whether they be unheralded veterans amid career years, youngsters whose stars haven't fully risen, or players nudged aside to ensure that every team is represented. What follows is a mixed-league lineup of players who might not get that trip to St. Louis, though they should. Space considerations prevent me from showing the entirety of my mental math for both leagues at each position, so I've spotlighted what I felt was the more interesting decision of the two.
...Outfield: Adam Dunn, Nationals; Adam Jones, Orioles; Matt Kemp, Dodgers In the NL, Raul Ibañez, Ryan Braun, and Carlos Beltran lead the voting. With the latter out of commission due to injury, Mike Cameron or Shane Victorino (who rank fifth and sixth in the voting) are likely to replace him as starter, but Kemp is even more deserving. He's hitting .302/.363/.474 with the second-best EqA (.302) among NL starting center fielders. The fact that Joe Torre has mainly hit him sixth, seventh, or eighth in the lineup suggests that his accomplishments, which include outstanding defense (+12 FRAA, +11.5 UZR), could be overlooked; he's just 13th in the voting. Also likely to be overlooked is Dunn, who's batting .260/.396/.528 while ranking second in walks and fifth with 20 homers. A polarizing figure, he hasn't been invited to the midsummer party since 2002, but only Pujols and Alex Rodriguez have bashed more homers since then. From the AL ranks, I'll channel Joe Sheehan and put in a plug for 23-year-old Adam Jones, who has tacked superb defense onto his .305/.359/.509 performance while ensuring that the name "Bavasi" will be cursed in Seattle for years to come.
Starting Pitcher: Edwin Jackson, Tigers Figuring out who's in or out on the All-Star pitching staffs is a trickier game than it is for the hitters due to starters' schedules and teams' understandable reluctance to part with their aces. Rather than pull my hair out overthinking this, I'll simply stump for a less-obvious choice: Jackson, who's finally living up to the promise shown when he beat Randy Johnson on his 20th birthday. He's second in the league with a 2.49 ERA, fifth in SNLVAR (ahead of his more heralded teammate, Justin Verlander), and ninth in strikeouts.
Yeah, as a Dodgers fan, that Jackson one still stings.
•Skipped the 2003 game in favor of a Staten Island Yankees-Brooklyn Cyclones game, where I saw an 18-year-old center fielder named Melky Cabrera go 5-for-5.
• Trekked to East Brunswick, New Jersey to watch the 2004 gamechez Steven Goldman, with Will Carroll and Cliff Corcoran also in tow. Whatever suspense the game had was bulldozed by Roger Clemens' launchpad explosion.
• Missed most of the 2005 game to attend Star Wars Episode III: Just Give Us Your Money, but not enough to avoid blowing a gasket over Fox Sports' emphasis of everything but the game via some over-the-top corporate advertising disingenuousness. This was the nadir not only of the All-Star Game, but of human civilization in the 21st century, at least until I watched The Squid and the Whale.
• Boycotted the 2006 game over the previous year's debacle. The 2007 one too. "[O]nce I stuffed my mouth full of aluminum foil and found an old hemostat to clamp on the webbing between my finger and my thumb, I was able to recreate the aggravation of watching Tim McCarver, Joe Buck, Scooter and the Foxies at the Taco Bell Midsummer Poxcam Classic without even turning on the television," I wrote, which I still think is pretty funny.
After a bit of soul-searching ("Hmmmm... where did I put that damn Otis Redding CD?"), I lifted the embargo for last night's affair, primarily because it was at Yankee Stadium, my home field, and secondarily because it meant participating in a roundtable with fellow Baseball Prospectus colleagues Carroll, Goldman, Kevin Goldstein, Derek Jacques, Rany Jazayerli, John Perroto, Joe Sheehan et al. And wouldn't you know it, a compelling ballgame broke out, a 15-inning, 4:50 epic won by the AL, 4-3.
Luckily, I didn't have to sit through the entire contest in real time. I cooked dinner for my wife and had the rather cool opening festivities on in the background, then whisked through the first four-and-a-half innings of the actual game via TiVo, which spared me about an hour of tsuris. And then I was pleasantly surprised. I may be off base here given how much I fast-forwarded through, but while I still revile Joe Buck ("I'd feed Buck to the hogs before McCarver, but that's just me. At least we know Tim Mc likes baseball and has some sense of history. Buck... probably makes his old man spin in his grave," I wrote), the Fox presentation was comparatively understated relative to the debacles that drove me from the spectacle a few years back. No clanking graphics, no idiotic Scooter (if there's any justice his creators are in Guantanamo Bay being waterboarded), just baseball and lots of it.
Again, it's probably the TiVo and my attention to the roundtable talking, but the game itself seemed to be passing by with an almost surreal rapidity and lack of action -- save perhaps for Ichiro Suzuki's perfect throw to nail Albert Pujols trying to stretch a single into a double in the fourth -- until J.D. Drew bopped a game-tying two-run homer in the bottom of the seventh. From there it was genuinely compelling theater, with Jonathan Papelbon's Bronx Cheer-fueled meltdown (shut up and go back to Boston, schmuck), Billy Wagner's choke (shut up and go back to Queens, schmuck), Mariano Rivera's extended, five-out appearance (not closing as planned, but very Houdini-esque and October-like), Joe Girardi's surprise appearance as bullpen catcher (which I guess justified his inclusion, since he wasn't there on managerial merit), Dan Uggla's incredible fielding butchery, Cristian Guzman's stellar professional debut at third base, three game-extending outs at home plate in a two-inning span in the 10th and 11th, Russell Martin's umpire-aided defensive wizardry ("Martin sets the standard for catchers who are fun to watch defensively. He's like this every night," I wrote), the sheer number of runs stranded at third base (three by the AL in the 10th, 11th and 12th, two by Uggla in the 10th and 12th), and the odd list of not-quite-stars who figured so prominently in the game's late action after the marquee players were tucked in (Uggla, Guzman, Dioner Navarro, Ryan Ludwick...).
Perhaps the most interesting aspect, however, was figuring out how managers Terry Francona and Clint Hurdle would handle their dwindling supply of pitchers once the extra innings started to pile up. Francona milked a combined 5.2 innings and 81 pitches out of Rivera, Joakim Soria and George Sherrill, while Hurdle ("As a Rockies fan, I have to say - why would Hurdle start using his bullpen correctly now?" wrote one BP reader) squeezed three frames and 42 pitches out of his own pitcher, Aaron Cook. The prospect of a similar occurrence to 2002, when both sides ran out of pitchers and Bud Selig called the game a tie, loomed large and made us particularly giddy. I wondered aloud:
"So, what do you think Bud will do about home team advantage in the World Series if the two teams get to the point of the 2002 ASG where they're out of pitchers and still tied? Award HFA to the AL on the grounds of interleague play results? Award it to the NL based on the AL having it last year? Figure out who would have had it under the old rule, which would mean having the AL in an even-numbered year?"
I never got a satisfactory answer, but that didn't spoil the fun I had watching and yapping with friends (I had both Skype and iChat going on the side in addition to the roundtable) and colleagues. "Does that count against Team Beat with the Uggla Stick's stats?" asked my friend Issa. Carroll was shuffling through electronic gadgets as fast as they could re-juice: "I started out with a full charge on the [MacBook] Air, then switched to the iPhone for a couple innings while the Air recharged. Now the Air is back to 40% and I've switched back. Long game." Goldstein, in particular, was rooting for the splatter: "Words cannot describe how much I'm hoping for extra innings, just for the mess it would create," he wrote in the ninth. "Bud looks beyond miserable on the inning's closing shot and I've never had so much fun watching an All-Star game," he added at the end of the 12th. By the 13th he was in slumber party mode: "We go to the bottom of the 13th! Who's still with us! Let's stay up all night!" Upon the impending Seligocalypse, Jacques noted, "Anyone who says that an All Star Game tie would be 'everyone's worst nightmare' doesn't have vivid enough nightmares."
In the end, those of us pulling for entropy nearly got our wish. Francona ultimately had to go against the wishes of his Red Sox's closest competitor in the standings, the Rays, and use their best pitcher, Scott Kazmir, two days after he'd thrown 104 pitches. Both the team and the pitcher had requested that Kazmir, who began the year on the DL due to elbow woes, not pitch, but he worked a relatively tidy 15th inning for the AL as we wondered what came next. Fortunately for Francona and Selig, it was the game-winning run, courtesy of a Justin Morneau single, a Navarro single (thereby putting two of this game's slowest runners on base), a Drew walk and finally a short fly ball by Michael Young. Morneau plodded to the plate as Corey Hart uncorked a pretty decent throw, but the runner was indisputably safe (unlike the one-game playoff last October) and the ballgame ended with the AL on top.
Even for a hardened All-Star cynic like me, that was a pretty great time. I might even watch again next year.
Yes, I'm still boycotting the All-Star Game. It sure was tempting to cave in, what with Fox's seven-year broadcast rights re-up and the choice to play the game in front of the only crowd gullible enough to worship Barry Bonds. But once I stuffed my mouth full of aluminum foil and found an old hemostat to clamp on the webbing between my finger and my thumb, I was able to recreate the aggravation of watching Tim McCarver, Joe Buck, Scooter and the Foxies at the Taco Bell Midsummer Poxcam Classic without even turning on the television.
If you're a hardier soul than me and plan to tune in, by all means tell Jeanne Zelasko I said hello. And don't say I didn't warn you...
