Dan (windowless office): Should we ignore the Hit List while interleague play is going on? It's making a hash of the standings...will it make a hash of the List as well?
JJ: Good question. The past few years have seen a considerable advantage for the AL when it comes to interleague play, and those results have shown up in the AL's dominance of the Hit List. This year the NL looked much stronger early on, but the AL now holds a 48-40 record in interleague play, and they've actually got four of the top six spots on the most recent Hit List. Just as I've been skeptical about the early season scoring dip, I've retained a good deal of skepticism when it comes to those who say the balance of power has shifted to the NL. I see the interleague results as more of a correction than anything else.
johnpark99 (Boston): Jay, for a while now, your Hit Lists have had the A's ranked significantly higher than the Angels, even though the Angels have the division lead. What is the right interpretation of your rankings? Do you mean to say that you expect the A's will take the division by season's end, or do you simply mean to say that you think the A's are a better team than the Angels despite their records?
JJ: Ah, the eternal A's-Angels battle on the Hit List has provided me with plenty of material for columns. Right now what you're seeing on the Hit List and the adjusted standings is all based on the fact that the A's have outscored their opponents by 55 runs -- nearly one per game -- while the Angels have been outscored by two runs. The latter owns the largest discrepancy between their predicted record and their actual one at 7.7 games.
In other words, the Angels have been more lucky than good, and that's not necessarily the kind of thing you can bank on over time. That doesn't mean that I necessarily think the A's will take the division, because I don't expect the Angels' offense to keep underachieving to the extent that it has, but I do think the gap between the two teams is closer than the standings make it appear.
B. Bavasi (Seattle): Any jobs for me at BP?
JJ: Sure, Bill! Given your height you should be an ace at cleaning the leaves out of our office's rain gutter. We haven't been able to convince anyone else to go up there ever since Steven Goldman fell off the roof.
David (NJ): We know the way it was handled was wrong but were the Mets right in firing Willie Randolph?
JJ: Well, as botched a job as it was, I don't entirely disagree with the decision to dismiss Randolph. As Rob Neyer pointed out at ESPN, there's a good argument to make that he's not the right manager at the right time for this club, even given its flimsy construction.
Managers aren't solely tacticians. They're leaders of men (some very boyish men at times). Different managers have different styles, but some seem to be better at protecting their teams by placing themselves in the line of fire and drawing the attention away from the struggles of their clubs. Ozzie Guillen is a good example of this now, as batsh*t crazy as he may seem, there's a method to his madness. Joe Torre does the same thing while exuding an aura of pure calm. Bobby Valentine, Casey Stengel, Leo Durocher, Tommy Lasorda - the styles can vary but that function is an important one.
Randolph didn't handle that aspect of the job very well. The Mets have carried a very negative aura around them since last year's collapse, and not even the acquisition of Johan Santana could erase that. At some point Randolph should have just said strong words to the effect of "Don't connect this club to last year's mess, it's a new day and we've moved on so you should too." Instead he played the race card and in doing so started the countdown on his own sell-by date.
Lots of Dodgers and Yankees questions in there, and A's and Mariners as well. Check it out.
• As for the Hit List, I took aim at the aforementioned notion of the shifting balance of power between the two leagues right in this week's title: "AL 75, NL 51." The Junior Circuit won 27 out of 38 games in the three days since that chat, and now occupies five of the top seven spots on the list, with the Red Sox taking over the top spot and the Yankees moving up to number seven. Excerpt a few of the more interesting entries:
Blue Jays (#11) Where's Shea Hillenbrand to Tell Us the Ship Is Sinking Now That We Really Need Him? With five losses in a row and 13 in their last 17, the Jays fall below .500 and into the AL East basement as the the cracks in their facade of sanity start to show. A.J. Burnett stirs up controversy by suggesting he'd welcome a trade to the Cubs -- who could possibly want out of this mess? -- and GM J.P. Ricciardi trashes Adam Dunn on a radio call-in show. Yeah, when you rank 13th in a 14-team league in SLG, with every position save for catcher and right field slugging under .400, you wouldn't want anything to do with a slugger like Dunn.
Brewers (#13) Stop and Smell the Box Score: Let us pause from any rational evaluation of the Brewers' ups and downs to simply appreciate the wonders of a single game containing a no-hit bid by David Bush (5.73 ERA entering the game) that ends after a hit by Lyle Overbay, the man he was traded for in 2005, and also includes an inside-the-park homer by Prince Fielder (the man who replaced Overbay), Russell Branyan's 10th homer in 20 games since being recalled, and a two-out, ninth-inning grand slam by Joe Inglett that caps a six-run rally and turns a rout into a squeaker. I mean, seriously, who writes this stuff?
Giants (#22) Following an 0-5, 7.61 ERA start and a brief exile to the bullpen, Barry Zito looked as though he was making progress towards thinking about possibly pondering the idea of maybe getting it together at a date to be named later. That was because he posted a 3.49 ERA in May, struck out more hitters than he walked, and even stuck around long enough in a ballgame to collect a win. But just when you thought Zito might settle into a comfortable mediocrity, he's back to his old ways: a 9.00 ERA in just 17 innings over four starts in June, not to mention an 8/17 K/BB ratio. Yes, Mr. Sabean, that $18 million club option in 2014 is starting to look like a real bargain.
Mariners (#29) Two Down, One to Go: the Mariners fire GM Bill Bavasi, architect of what may well be the first 100-loss team with a payroll above $100 million. Never the sharpest tool in the GM shed, Bavasi erred drastically by fundamentally misjudging last year's club; though they finished 88-74 they were outscored by 17 runs, and hardly just a blockbuster away from a run at the AL West flag. Not content to stop there, the team cans manager John McLaren, on whose watch they went 66-88, and they may be poised to ditch designated albatross Richie Sexson, who's hitting just .220/.294/.380 and hasn't homered since May 24.
Fun stuff, no? Though Gibbons' firing didn't happen in time to make this week's list, the appearance of arch-nemesis Hillenbrand suggests I was feeling the bad vibes coming from Toronto. And while I'm scratching my head wondering why Riccardi hasn't been fired as well, from a Hit List standpoint he is truly the gift that keeps on giving.
• Up and down the Hit List I made reference to the 2008 Replacement Level Killers, the subject of this week's Prospectus Hit and Run. Picking up on an idea I first used for It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over and then applied to last year's most egregious offenders, I took a look at the players whose lousy play and whose teams' complacency or lack of a suitable alternative threatens their shot at the playoffs. The starting nine, using Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) and Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP), the former to get a more accurate sense of hitting contributions and the latter to better account for defense:
C: J.R. Towles (-7.6 VORP, 0.4 WARP) and Brad Ausmus (-5.8 VORP, 0.1 WARP), Astros 1B: Daric Barton (-2.7 VORP, 1.0 WARP), Athletics 2B: Adam Kennedy (-2.3 VORP, 0.4 WARP) and Aaron Miles (-0.4 VORP, 0.4 WARP), Cardinals SS: Chin-Lung Hu (-9.7 VORP, -1.0 WARP) and Angel Berroa (-1.4 VORP, -0.1 WARP), Dodgers 3B: Mike Lamb (-11.6 VORP, -0.3 WARP), Twins LF: Garret Anderson (-1.4 VORP, 0.3 VORP), Angels CF: Andruw Jones (-8.3 VORP, 0.1 WARP), Dodgers RF: Jeff Francoeur (-1.0 VORP, 0.5 WARP), Braves DH: Travis Hafner (0.2 VORP, 0.2 WARP), Indians
Given center field's particular relevance around these parts, I'll fill that one in:
CF: Andruw Jones (-8.3 VORP, 0.1 WARP), Dodgers In his free agent walk year, Jones played through a hyperextended elbow and wound up with a spot on the 2007 Killers. Nonetheless, the Dodgers figured the 31-year-old would rebound, and signed him to a two-year, $36 million deal, one that appeared to force Juan Pierre into richly-deserved (and richly compensated) fourth-outfielderdom. Then Jones showed up to camp looking rather plump, and he performed so miserably that when a torn meniscus forced him to undergo surgery, Pierre's return to the lineup--shifting to left field, with Matt Kemp in center--came as a relief. Not that Pierre has been producing (2.5 VORP, 1.1 WARP), but at least Dodger fans have been spared the daily drama of reading Joe Torre's lineup.
Dishonorable Mention: Melky Cabrera (2.5 VORP, 0.5 WARP), Yankees. Cabrera's ascension into a full-time role last year helped shore up an aging, porous Yankee outfield while pushing Johnny Damon over to left and Hideki Matsui into limbo. The 23-year-old Melkman looked as though his long-awaited power surge had finally arrived when he got off to a .299/.370/.494 start in April, but since then he's lost his way at the plate, hitting just .229/.278/.312. His defense (-4 FRAA) has been a step down as well, Tuesday night's stellar catch notwithstanding.
Anyway, the point of the whole exercise is that there's still time for teams to address these issues, but sometimes that simply means letting a veteran play through their struggles. Sooner or later, though, a reckoning has to come; for the Yankees that may mean moving Johnny Damon back to center field and Hideki Matsui back into left.
For the Dodgers that may mean biting the big Juan for the rest of the year while remaining optimistic about the fact that their biggest problem, injuries, clearly points back to their GM. As I noted in the chat, the Dodgers lead the majors with the most dollars and highest percentage of payroll lost to the DL, and the guys who are filling it up -- Jones, Rafael Furcal, Nomar Garciaparra and Jason Schmidt -- are Stupid Flanders' marquee free agent signings. It's tough to think he's going to dodge the bullet if the Dodgers finish at .500 or below because of all that. Furthermore, if I'm Frank McCourt, the minute that the Mariners or some other team calls to ask permission to interview assistant GM/scouting guru Logan White, I put the caller on hold, fire Colletti and promote him to GM myself. No reason the Dodgers should lose their best and brightest homegrown front office talent anymore than they should their players.
Watching Tuesday night's Yankees-White Sox game in an attempt to keep my mind off the Pennyslvania Democractic primary results, I saw Jason Giambi homer to left field in the second inning. Giambi came into the game hitting .109/.288/.283 in 46 at-bats, and more ominously, just .174/.323/.366 in 213 at-bats going back to last May 1. In the wake of Frank Thomas' unceremonious release from the Blue Jays, Steven Goldman floated the idea in today's New York Sun that it may be time for the Yankees to cut ties with the 37-year-old 1B/DH, who's in the final year of his seven-year, $120 million deal. The Blue Jays cut Thomas while owing him $8 million, but Giambi's contract is an even bigger pill to swallow; he's owed $21 million for this year plus a $5 million buyout for next year.
I'm not buying it, at least not just yet. It's unlikely the Yanks can find a trade partner to take Giambi off their hands even if they pay virtually every red cent of his deal AND convince Giambi to waive his no-trade clause. His results last year were skewed by the plantar fascitis woes which cost him two months and limited his availability; thus far this season there's no reason to believe he's in anything but a slump, as opposed to dealing with yet another injury. The Yanks aren't so desperate for a roster spot that it makes sense to cut him just for the sake of cutting him. Now, if Jorge Posada were to get to the point where he could hit but couldn't catch, I could understand, because his bat has far more life in it than does Giambi's. But Posada is back behind the plate tonight, so his arrow is at least momentarily moving in the other direction.
There may be something to the fact that Giambi homered to left; on the YES telecast, Michael Kay and Paul O'Neill spent a bit of time talking about his work with Yankee hitting coach Kevin Long and how he needed to return to going the other way. It's no secret that since coming to the Yankees, and particularly since 2003, Giambi has gotten away from his ability to hit to the opposite field; that's what the infield shift and his declining batting averages are all about. According to the data at Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index, the percentage of Giambi's homers that go to left field or left center is less than half of what it was during his Oakland heyday:
LHR Tot Pct Career 46 367 12.5
Oak (95-00) 28 187 15.0 NYY (01-08) 18 180 10.0
2001-2003 13 94 13.9 Since 2004 5 86 5.8
Obviously, the asymmetry of Yankee Stadium and the way it favors lefties (318-399-408-385-314) has something to do with that change; by comparison, the Oakland Coliseum was a more symmetrical 330-362-400-362-330. But as the last breakdown shows, this is something that's gotten more pronounced during his Yankee tenure, suggesting that it's more a function of choice or habit to focus on puling the ball to right field, than anything else. If he can't break out of that cycle -- and it's not just homers; O'Neill was incredulous that Giambi doesn't just take his pokes to the left side of the infield -- his career will continue its downward spiral. For the sake of the 2008 Yankees, here's hoping tonight's homer plants the seed for what he needs to do.
Update: good stuff at Replacement Level Yankees Blog on Giambi's lousy batting average on balls in play.
• • •
Regarding Thomas, Joe Sheehan appropriately savaged the move over at Baseball Prospectus:
So, as you read the coverage of the Jays’ decision to release Thomas yesterday, on the heels of their decision last week to reduce his playing time, remember that the “slow start” being cited as justification isn’t a slow start at all. It’s a slump that lasted all of 10 games, beginning April 9 against the A’s. Thomas was hitting .240/.296/.640 a week into the 2008 season, which is the kind of awkward line you get when you have 27 plate appearances, but it's nonetheless productive. In the subsequent nine games, Thomas was awful: 4-for-35 with no extra-base hits and 10 walks.
There were any number of ways the Blue Jays could have handled this. They could have given Thomas a day or two off, diddled with his spot in the lineup, put him into a platoon with Matt Stairs for a week or two, kept everything quiet and private. No, the Blue Jays had to turn it into a project, telling Thomas that he would be playing less, which invited Thomas to question their motivations. After all, Thomas is a bit more than 300 plate appearances shy of vesting his 2010 option for $10 million, and has already lost one contract to the invocation of a “diminished skills” clause. He would, justifiably, see this as an attempt to take money out of his pocket rather than a baseball decision.
Whether motivated by baseball or money, the Jays released their DH and #5 hitter based on a 10-game slump. Thomas was unquestionably awful over the last two weeks. If only there were evidence of him emerging from similar early-season stretches to be productive over the course of a season. It’s not like he hit .097/.243/.129 in a stretch of 37 PA last April, then went on to hit .285/.382/.500 afterwards. No, wait, that happened. Of course, that’s another small sample size. It’d be something else if, in 72 PA, he hit .154/.236/.323. That would be meaningful. He could never come back from that and hit .289/.403/.575 the rest of the way. What? He did that in 2006? Boy, I don’t know. Keep reading things like this, and you’d think that stretches of ineffectiveness weren’t all that meaningful when put up against Thomas’ career. But that would mean the Blue Jays had made a bad baseball decision, and that doesn’t seem…. No, wait.
It would be one thing if the Blue Jays were so larded with talent that they had to create space for it, and this was the only way to do so. On Saturday, the Blue Jays DH’d Matt Stairs, batted Rod Barajas sixth, and played Joe Inglett in left field. On Sunday, their DH was Barajas, who batted fifth; their left fielder was Marco Scutaro. I give you Jays’ GM J.P. Ricciardi:
I don't know that we have the luxury of waiting two to three months for somebody to kick in because we can't let this league or this division get away from us.
Really, now. Well, let me help you along with that, J.P. Rod Barajas is 32 and has a career OBP of .288. I seriously doubt it’s all going to “kick in” for him. Marco Scutaro is 32 and a utility infielder. Not playing him in left field is one good idea if you want to help your club's offense. Joe Inglett is 30 and might be a serviceable replacement for Scutaro, but is also not suitable for the outfield. These are all the guys who Frank Thomas is too done to play ahead of, based on 10 bad games.
Did I say savaged? There are days I read Joe as a fan rather than a colleague; like editor Christina Kahrl, I eagerly awaited seeing pounce on this petty little decision. Like a lion eating a rabbit (a particularly clueless one so as to better resemble the Toronto GM) -- "disembowled" would have been more appropriate. "Eviscerated" maybe. Classic Sheehan stuff.
• • •
Meanwhile, out in Milwaukee, there's been much made of Prince Fielder's decision to go vegetarian, not in an effort to slim down his bulky 260+ pound frame but for ethical reasons. Fielder started the season in a slump, and came into last Thursday's game hitting .224/.350/.286, without a single homer; he bashed 50 last year. By that point, even Brewers fans were begging Prince to go back to carnivory, and the national media was making a fuss. Luckily, Brewers' beat reporter Anthony Widtrado showed a good grasp of the situation with his piece the day before:
The national media, ESPN in particular, has been all over the topic of Prince Fielder not having any home runs in 45 at-bats. Oof course, people are blaming his vegetarian diet because it's an easy topic of conversation and makes Prince an easy target after his 50-HR season.
PTI and Around the Horn both had Fielder as subjects, and it amazes me that some people are still thinking that his diet is a way to lose weight and that it is contributing to his lack of home runs. I'm sure the Cardinals don't feel that way since they completely pitched around the slugger last night.
...Prince is struggling. Period. He isn't driving the ball because he is not squaring it up on the meat of the bat with any consistency. He's proven to be a good, patient hitter. His groove will probably come. The guy hit the ball 8 miles last season, so a drop in power won't mean he can't hit the ball over the fence. It'll just mean that instead of hitting balls off the scoreboard, he'll hit them into the bullpen.
Maybe, if there is a drop in power, and I'm not saying there is because I don't think that's the case, it would affect the balls that get to the warning track. But in reality, how many home runs of Prince's do we remember scraping the back of the wall? Not many.
He plays for a professional baseball franchise, and that franchise has enough money to hire qualified nutritionists to help Prince and all the players with what their bodies need to perform.
Fielder did homer last Thursday, just in time for me to note it in the Hit List, and he's now up to .250/.386/.368. His diet will continue to draw more scrutiny than merited, and he may not top last year's monster season, but we should at least wait for a larger sample size before trying to connect the dots between his lack of cheeseburgers and his lack of homers.
PECOTA sees the Rays scoring about the same number of runs, with a drastic reduction in runs allowed thanks to improved pitching and defense. that's all well and good, particularly given the arrival of pitcher Matt Garza to give the team a good third starter and third baseman Evan Longoria, a potential rookie of the Year candidate who was promoted from Triple-A over the weekeend. Nonetheless, the projection sparked some skepticism in me, and I decided to peek under the hood to see if I could pin down what it was that was bothering me. Suffice it to say that I found it:
Nonetheless, despite all of these good things, there are reasons to be skeptical about that Rays' projection. Perhaps the biggest -- beyond the fact that [Scott] Kazmir has yet to throw a pitch this year, and [Matt] Garza has been sidelined after just two starts -- has to do with the quality of defense behind that staff. Last year's Devil Rays allowed a major league-worst 944 runs thanks to one of the most inept defenses this side of the Bad News Bears. Their .662 Defensive Efficiency rate is the worst full-season rate in our database. (Note that this is the "1 - BABIP" version of Defensive Efficiency, which doesn't include Reached on Error totals). Taking into account their pitcher-friendly park, they had a Park-Adjusted Defensive Efficiency of -5.64 last year, meaning they were nearly six percent worse than the league average at converting balls in play into outs.
...Cumulatively, the position players were an astounding 119 runs below average, about 15 runs to the bad apiece. Among the regulars, only [Carlos] Pena was above average, and every position save for catcher was in double-digit negatives, which in each case means that awful defense at those positions cost the team more than one win apiece. [Brendan] Harris and [B.J.] Upton "contributed" to the problem at multiple positions, though the latter's move from second base to center field did stop a bit of the bleeding in the outfield.
The Rays have taken steps to improve their defense this season, particularly on the left side of the infield. Shortstop Jason Bartlett, acquired from the Twins in the Young/Garza deal, was 12 runs above average last year, while Longoria's performance at the hot corner was six runs above average between Double-A and Triple-A. Couple that with some improvement from the developing youngsters and a bit of regression to the mean, and expectations for the defensive performance of the new lineup doesn't look too bad...
A couple of months back, Nate [Silver] noted that the Rays' pitchers' PECOTAs improved considerably -- by 30 to 50 points of ERA -- in the light of this sunny defensive forecast. Still, it's worth questioning the fundamental assumption of how much the new alignment will improve its results on balls in play. To examine that, I took every team's depth chart-derived pitching statistics and calculated their expected Batting Averages in Balls in Play using the formula (H - HR)/(2.89 * IP + H - HR - SO), which gets the individual pitchers within 1-2 points of their PECOTA BABIPs without the messy work of figuring out how many batters each pitcher is estimated to face per our depth charts, and centers the major league average at .2994, within a point of last year's .3002. Again using Defensive Efficiency as 1 - BABIP, here are the 2008 figures as compared to the 2007 ones:
Team 2008 2007 change NYN .711 .707 .004 TBA .708 .662 .046 SLN .707 .700 .007 WAS .706 .706 .000 LAN .706 .691 .015 SFN .706 .699 .007 CHN .705 .712 -.007 OAK .704 .698 .006 DET .704 .699 .005 PHI .703 .691 .012 CIN .702 .682 .020 NYA .702 .696 .006 SDN .701 .706 -.005 ATL .701 .703 -.002 ARI .699 .700 -.001 BOS .699 .712 -.013 MIL .699 .684 .015 TOR .699 .714 -.015 CLE .699 .693 .006 SEA .698 .678 .020 HOU .697 .692 .005 CHA .697 .689 .008 PIT .696 .676 .020 MIN .694 .694 .000 KCA .694 .689 .005 TEX .692 .691 .001 BAL .692 .691 .001 FLO .692 .669 .023 ANA .691 .688 .003 COL .691 .703 -.012
If you're ready to call "bull(durham)" on this forecast, I can't say I blame you, because the combination of PECOTA and our best estimates for playing time show the Rays vaulting from a historical worst to the majors' second best. Meanwhile, the Red Sox and Rockies, the two teams who finished atop the PADE standings and were second and eighth, respectively, in the rankings for unadjusted Defensive Efficiency, they're expected to decline to be about average (in Boston's case) and the worst in the majors (in Colorado's case). This despite the two teams turning over at most one lineup spot apiece, the Rockies trading in a freakishly good season from Kaz Matsui (+20 FRAA) for rookie Jayson Nix (forecast for +9 FRAA), the Sox going from a similarly freakish season from Coco Crisp (+29 FRAA) to a job share between Crisp and Jacoby Ellsbury (forecast for about +5 based on the division of playing time). Now sure, we should expect some regression to the mean at either extreme of the Defensive Efficienty rankings, but this is ridiculous.
Ok, that's a pretty liberal excerpt, but you can read the whole thing for free at BP. I'll be very interested to see if Nate addresses this in the near future. I try to learn as much about PECOTA as possible so that I can speak fluently about it when I do radio or promo events, but I wonder if there's something I missed in my reverse engineering here.
• • •
Elsewhere, I spent more time this past weekend attuned to the Mets-Brewers series than the Yankees-Red Sox one as I played host to my two Milwaukee-native brothers-in-law, and their respective significant others as they came to New York. One of them, Adam, went to Friday night's tilt with a friend, where he saw the Brewers fall to Mets 4-2; what was interesting about that game was the storybook plotline involving Mets starter Nelson Figureroa, a 33-year-old journeyman who journeyed as far as Mexico and Taiwan to pitch professionally -- this New York Observer article covers his odyssey -- before finally enjoying a storybook outing in front of a hometown crowd.
With the other brother-in-law, Aaron, arriving in town the next day, we TiVoed Saturday's contest, a marquee matchup pitting Ben Sheets, who hadn't given up a run in his first two starts, against Johan Santana, making his Shea Stadium debut. Sheets was shaky in the early going, giving up two runs in the first before settling down to retire 18 straight hitters. Meanwhile, the Brewers chipped away at Santana and touched him for five runs on the strength of homers by Bill Hall, Rickie Weeks and Gabe Kapler, thus carrying the day.
On Sunday, Aaron and I and our wives went to Shea to see the series finale, which featured Jeff Suppan and Oliver Perez on the hill in a rematch of the 2006 NLCS Game Seven. The weather was way too cold for our under-dressed tastes, and the pace of play too slow; with tickets in hand for a Sunday night Broadway show, we left after six innings, just shy of the three-hour mark. By that point the Brewers had gone up 2-0, fallen behind 6-2, and roared back to take an 8-6 lead thanks to a lackluster performance by Perez, who surrendered six runs in 4.1 frames before departing. Aided by inning-ending double-plays in five consecutive innings, the Brewers held on to win the game 9-7, thus taking the series. For those of us who remember back to last year when the wind was taken out of the Brewers' sails at the exact moment when they arrived in town -- they were 24-10 when arriving in New York on May 11 but just 59-69 the rest of the way -- we can hope that this year, things will turn out differently.
So it didn't take too much for me to be impressed by these Lego ballparks, some of them replicas of existing stadiums. By far the winner in terms of innovation and sophistication is this fully functional model of Milwaukee's Miller Park, complete with a motorized, retractable roof. Given that I've been to the park several times with my Milwaukee-native wife and my in-laws, this one hits close to home. Built by Milwaukee School of Engineering student Tim Kaebisch, the model is three feet tall and contains 99.9% Legos, with a bit of string and twist ties making up the rest. Kaebisch has his own page devoted to the model, showing previous phases of construction, photographing the current model from numerous angles, and showing the roof in action.
Though extra innings from the Tigers-Royals game pre-empted the start, we joined the action in time to catch Jeff Kent's two-run homer, saw Juan Pierre's soul shrivel as his consecutive game streak ended at 434 (score one for Torre, who correctly identified Andre Ethier as the better ballplayer), watched rookie Blake DeWitt collect his first major-league hit as he subs for three-count-'em-three injured third basemen, and wondered if Barry Zito's uniform number (75) was an advertisement for his current fastball speed. Zito had nuthin' as the Dodgers rapped out eight hits and four runs in his five innings, and the Giants compounded that with a bunch of mental mistakes. Brad Penny and the relievers held the Giants to five hits in winning 5-0. Congrats to Torre on his first win as a Dodger; here's hoping for many more.
The always-controversial preseason Prospectus Hit List went up on Sunday. Derived from BP's state-of-the-art PECOTA forecasting system, the staff's playing time projections, and Clay Davenport's Postseason Odds Report, it has the Yankees ranked first with a 97-65 record and a 64 percent shot at making the playoffs. The Mets are second at 95-67 -- a projection that I think considerably understates their injury risks -- and about a 60 percent shot at October. They're followed by the Indians, Cubs, Tigers, Angels, Red Sox, Brewers and Dodgers. Boston at 91-71 is the only one of those teams not projected to top their division or win the Wild Card, though given the dead heat they're in with the Indians and Tigers projected for 92-70, that one may as well be a toss-up if you're scoring at home.
For each of the comments, I took a hard look at the PECOTA projections underlying the rankings, noting, for example, that Detroit's shaky bullpen (Denny Bautista and his 6.93 ERA as the new setup man) was likely to undo that advantage over Boston, that the Rays' defensive gains over last year were overstated (I like them at .500 assuming Kazmir comes back soon, but 88 wins is a stretch and a half), and that the Rockies' defensive prowess is understated. A few excerpts of the personal favorites around here:
1. Yankees Torre's out, Girardi's in, and everybody's a year older, but the lineup remains a threat to top 900 runs again. Even as Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui and Jason Giambi battle for playing time, four other hitters figure to top 30 VORP, and nobody's an easy out. The real focus will be on the remade pitching staff, where Philip Hughes, Ian Kennedy and Joba Chamberlain (71.9 combined VORP projected by PECOTA) will battle inning caps while the Yankee brass fights the temptation to turn them loose to cover for a shaky bullpen. Is Girardi up to maintaining this delicate balancing act?
8. Brewers As close as last year's Brewers came to reaching the postseason for the first time since 1982, they frittered away their chances with a horrid defense, some bad bullpen management, and abbreviated seasons from Ryan Braun and Yovani Gallardo. They've addressed the defense and thrown money at the bullpen, and from the outset of the season they'll carry one of the game's most enviable cores of young talent; even with Mike Cameron's 25-game suspension, the top seven hitters in the lineup forecast above 20 VORP. The real key is at the back of the rotation, where they'll need Manny Parra and Carlos Villanueva to exceed PECOTA's low expectations.
9. Dodgers Ousted from the Yankees and the perennial two-team battle in the AL East, Joe Torre wound up with the Dodgers in a much wilder NL West. He's got some potential minefields to navigate--a three-injury pileup at third base, and the Andre Ethier/Matt Kemp/Juan Pierre situation in the outfield, which appears may shake out with the Dodgers carrying the league's most expensive fourth outfielder. Beyond that, Torre inherits some of the game's best young talent, including the league's top catcher in Russell Martin, not to mention a pitching staff that blends experience and youth and forecasts to be nearly every bit as good as the unit he'd be guiding in the Bronx if that bug spray had worked.
Anyway, the article is free, so you can enjoy or gripe about the rankings to your heart's content. The staff picks go up at BP tomorrow; I'll link back to them here along with a bit more commentary.
The Brewers have become one of the best teams in the league in terms of managing injuries (they won the 2005 Dick Martin Award for best team health system), but as a small-market team, their margin for error is slim. While their rotation is eight deep at the outset of spring training, youngsters Yovani Gallardo, Manny Parra and Carlos Villanueva as well as nominal ace Ben Sheets all turn up as red lights under BP's system, which uses an actuarial base to determine the likelihood of injury. A red player has at least a 45 percent chance at serving some time on the DL this year, though the system doesn't distinguish between a torn rotator cuff and a blister. In other words, the Brewers will need some of that depth, a point underscored by Gallardo's early-spring misadventures:
No sooner was I set to tie a bow around this THR and send it to our editors than the news broke that Gallardo would undergo arthroscopic surgery to repair a torn lateral meniscus in his left knee, something which will knock him out of action for a month. While this is a minor surgical procedure, the real danger is if his return compromises his mechanics, along the lines of Kerry Wood in 2006. Assuming Gallardo's not rushed back and doesn't encounter any mechanical hiccups, the injury may actually help by moderating his workload. Prior to the knee problem, Gallardo already turned up red; between Nashville and Milwaukee, he threw 188 combined innings last year, the highest total among 21-year-olds in organized baseball this side of Felix Hernandez. Intuitively, the Rule of 30 would suggest he's got headroom to maintain or slightly increase his workload without excessive risk, but the hitch is that the Rule of 30 is based on major league innings, not a combination of major and minor league innings. Even using the Davenport Translations or a similar adjustment, those minor league frames just don't bear the same predictable relationship to risk as the major league ones, all of which means that the risks increase for Gallardo beyond 140 big-league innings -- a cap that suddenly doesn't look too far out of line when you factor in some extended training and minor-league rehab.
Elsewhere, the team's young infielders, particularly Rickie Weeks, carry some risks as well. But while it certainly looks as though the Brewers are carrying a lot of red lights -- more than any other team in the NL Central -- a peek at the THR spreadsheet available to BP subscribers shows them in relatively good shape among the NL Central contenders. The spreadsheet lists the projected starting lineup, five-deep rotation, closer and top setup man for each team. Taking yellow as a default equal to zero, green as +1 and red as -1, the Brewers net out at zero (as many greens as reds), while the Reds come in at +2, the Cardinals and Cubs both as -2 by this crude analysis. Still, the bottom line is that winning always takes some luck in the health department, and the Brewers will be no exception.
Clearing the Bases -- Down from the Mountain Edition
First things first: I'm chatting today at 1 PM Eastern over at Baseball Prospectus, and I'll have a Division Series preview of the Yankees-Indians matchup there tomorrow. The regular season finale of the Hit List will follow later this week.
Yes, I'm back from my European sojourn, though you'd barely know it around these parts. Since returning, I've done a promotional appearance for It Ain't Over, written a Prospectus Hit and Run covering a second-half Hit List and the hottest and coldest hitters and pitchers in September, and watched one of the most thrilling final weekends in baseball history. Thanks in part to my Extra Innings package, I watched more than 24 hours of baseball from Thursday through last night, and while relatively little came up Milhouse from my point of view, the ride has been pretty fun.
The biggest news around these parts, of course, is the Mets' collapse, one in which Nate Silver and Clay Davenport estimated to be the second-worst in baseball history based on the Prospectus Postseason Odds Report methodology, which measures the likelihood of a team making the postseason via a Monte Carlo simulation which plays out the season one million times, accounting for run-scoring and -allowing proclivities, home field advantage, and opposition strength. The Mets, according to the report, had a 99.8 percent chance at reaching the postseason as of September 13, the day I left for Switzerland. They proceeded to blow a seven-game lead with 17 to play, finishing with a 1-6 homestand against the sub-.500 Nationals, Cardinals, and Marlins that culminated with 300-game winner Tom Glavine making a shocking first-inning exit in which he was charged with seven runs.
One of the problems of being away so long at such a crucial time of year is that there's really no adequate way to catch up with all the nuances of what's been missed. Here's how I started my column, which got lost in the editorial shuffle and didn't run until Saturday morning instead of Friday:
I'm back from a nearly two-week European vacation that fell smack in the middle of the playoff hunt. News of distant pennant races trickled through on either end of my journey, but I was totally off the grid for a six-day period while hiking in the majestic Dolomites--no Internet, no newspapers, no TV, and the last thing my wife wanted to discuss when I called her from Rifugio Fanes at a $1 per minute clip was the status of the NL Wild Card hunt.
As such, I was mercifully spared the demise of my Dodgers. Discovering their seven-game losing streak upon returning was no more traumatic than being told that my goldfish died while I was at camp--no tears, just the accompanying solemnity of an imagined, unceremonious flush several thousand miles away. On the other hand, plugging in to discover the misdirected acrimony in the wake of their fade has my blood boiling. Along those lines, getting back into the swing of things isn't easy; one can read the standings and the game reports for the handful of relevant teams, but two weeks is too long an absence to grasp the nuances of everything that's gone down. Late rallies and bullpen meltdowns are most viscerally understood in real time or at most within one news cycle. To pick the most obvious example, the Mets had a seven-game lead in the NL East when I left, and even with their postseason odds falling below 90 percent after a huge loss on Wednesday, it was difficult for me to accept their shellshock until tuning in to Thursday night's game, where if I closed my eyes, I could hear Roky Erickson strumming "I Walked with a Zombie" and know that he wasn't singing about my jet lag.
Friday night's game, which I took in with Alex Belth, was even more revealing. Oliver Perez, the only crazy man who might have been sane enough to salvage the Mets' futile run, showed up in his Mr. Hyde guise and was wild all over the place, walking Jeremy Hermida before yielding a homer to Dan Uggla in the first, and hitting three batters in the third. Perez is one matter, but the telling moment for the Mets, the one that said they were cooked, occurred in that inning, when Hermida's bases-loaded grounder was fielded by David Wright, who threw home for the force out. Catcher Paul Lo Duca threw back to third, but Wright, forgetting the force was still in effect, tried to tag Hanley Ramirez instead of stepping on the bag, and all hands were safe. After a huge strikeout of Miguel Cabrera, Perez was so adrenaline-charged that he hit the next two batters, bringing home two more runs to widen the lead to 4-1. The Mets would cut the lead in the bottom of the frame, but that moment, when MVP candidate--perhaps favorite--Wright made such a crucial mental lapse, was the skid in a nutshell.
I'm not really a Mets fan, but I have enough of them -- not to mention enough experience with collapses going back to the Jaffe family institutional memory of 1951 -- to understand their pain, and while I empathize, I'm glad I can shut the emotion off at some point. The sting for me is that via BP I was credentialed for the Mets' playoff games at Shea Stadium, a plum opportunity that it hurts to miss. In the immortal words of Joe Schultz, aw, shitfuck.
Not much to say about the Phillies, who snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, except "Wow!" Whatever the flaws of laid-back manager Charlie Manuel, he earned his keep patching the team's decimated pitching staff together all year long; five of the six starters they held at the outset of the season, all except Jamie Moyer, were injured at one point, with one, Punchy Myers, later shifted to closer to compensate for the loss of the injured Tom Gordon. Ace Cole Hamels, who threw just eight innings over a six-week span due to elbow woes, made the kid gloves treatment pay off with eight scoreless innings of 13-strikeout ball on Friday to move the Phils into first place. After Adam "Completely Useless" Eaton and company came up short on Saturday, Moyer, who had put up a 6.16 second-half ERA up to that point, was at his soft-tossing best, flummoxing the Nationals as fellow grizzled vet Glavine faltered in New York, giving the Phils the NL East title.
As for the rest of the slate, I won't pick over the Dodgers in too much detail except to say that when I heard a rumor Ned Colletti was contemplating a Matt Kemp/Clayton Kershaw for Johan Santana deal, I sent a faux telegram to BP's internal list: "AM ON WAY TO AIRPORT STOP. WILL KILL COLLETTI, PLASCHKE STOP. TELL MY WIFE I LOVE HER." The idea that youngsters like Kemp (who hit .342.373/.521 but couldn't get 300 at-bats from Grady Little) are responsible for the team's collapse for lack of veteran herbs and spices isn't just laughable, it's downright criminal. At a time when Dodger assistant GMs Logan White and Kim Ng have drawn consideration for other teams' GM openings, it's clear that the Dodgers' best play would be to fire Stupid Flanders and promote one of them rather than lose either, but it appears Ned gets at least one more year. God save the Dodger prospects.
Beyond the Dodgers, the Brewers' demise disappointed me. It had been a slow leak from that 24-10 start, characterized by the fact that the team lost 22 straight games (18 starts) in which Chris "Angel of Death" Capuano appeared. Plus they had to endure yet another incomplete season from Ben Sheets, who threw just 22 innings after July 14 and only one in the season's final two weeks, so dogged with injuries was he. Still, the team mounted a respectable 16-12 September after going 20-34 in July and August, and remained alive until losing to the Padres on Friday night. They exacted no small amount of revenge against the Pads, beating them in extra innings on Saturday; the game-tying hit off Trevor Hoffman came via Tony Gwynn, Jr., of all people, and the winning hit was by Vinny Rotino, fellow passenger on a puddle-jumping flight I took a year ago upon his initial recall. The Brewers found plenty of sweetness in that victory; their 82nd win of the year meant they recorded their first winning season since 1992; my wife (in Milwaukee on business) and in-laws called to celebrate that bit of good news. The Brewers weren't done, kicking Padre ass on a crazy Sunday to force a Game 163 playoff for the NL Wild Card on Monday night.
That loss tied them with the Rockies, who went on an incredible 13-1 run (including seven straight over the Dodgers) to vault from fourth place in the NL West into the thick of the Wild Card race. I'm no Rox fan, but I do like their storyline. The fact that the team's vaunted youngsters -- BP's Kevin Goldstein rated their organization second at the outset of the season -- like Franklin Morales, Ubaldo Jimenez (both filling in within a decimated rotation) and especially Troy Tulowitzki came up so big down the stretch should serve any Dodger exec with a reminder that the NL West is a pirhana tank full of young talent in Denver and Arizona, making the perils of Ned all the more clear.
So I was mildly pulling for the Rox last night although I actually picked the Padres to win the World Series back in March. My reasoning on the latter is that they no longer stood a chance with the losses of Mike Cameron and Milton Bradley, the the latter of whom while I was gone stepped on the former's hand, tearing ligaments in Cameron's thumb then tore an ACL amid an umpire-baited tirade later in the same game, thus wiping out 2/3 of the team's starting outfield in one night. That, plus the late-season struggles of Chris Young (6.33 ERA since missing time in July with oblique and back trouble) and the presence of Brett Tomko in their rotation, prompted me to compare the Padres to Randall Patrick McMurphy at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Pass the pillow.
Anyway, even with the Padres' maladies, they helped leave us with a 13-inning epic that culminated such an incredible weekend. Jake Peavy, who appears on his way to winning the Cy Young award I predicted for him, must have gotten stuck in the humidor while a cleverly disguised impostor surrendered three early runs to the Rox. They came back to take a 5-3 lead thanks in part to a grand slam by Adrian Gonzalez. The look on Rockies' starter Josh Fogg's face when he watched that ball go out was priceless. Something along the lines of: "Shit, I left the car in neutral, and now it's down in the river. My wife is gonna be PISSED. We got any more of those PBRs?"
In the end, the game came down to a pair of questionable umpiring calls. Up 6-5, Garret Atkins appeared to have a home run over the leftfield wall, but out-of-position ump Tim Tschida ruled the ball hit the yellow cushion atop the fence -- which would have absorbed the blow -- instead of the chair just behind it, which caused a sizable deflection. He, or rather pinch-runner Jamey Carroll, was left stranded. The Pads tied the game up in the eighth, and things remained knotted until the top of the 13th despite the Rockies hauling out an unenviable parade of shamed closers -- Latroy Hawkins, Brian Feuntes, Matt Herges, and finally Jorge Julio, who surrendered a two-run homer to Bradley's replacement, Scott Hairston. On came Hoffman, and at this point I was fully pulling for the Rox, if only because Hoffman has symbolized the Padres' superiority in the NL West for so long. But he didn't have it, as Kaz Matsui, Troy Tulowitzki, and Matt Holliday laced consecutive loud hits off him to tie the game.
One out later, Carroll came up and lined to Brian Giles, whose throw home appeared to beat Holliday, who tagged up. The runner went in head first, narrowly missing catcher Michael Barrett's cleat but apparently -- replays were inconclusive at best -- not touching home plate even as he got a faceful of dirty. Home plate ump Tim McClelland made no signal until the ball dribbled away from the catcher. The only explanation for this sequence, as I understand from BP rules expert Bil Burke, is the rarely-invoked application of rule 7.06(b): "The catcher, without the ball in his possession, has no right to block the pathway of the runner attempting to score. The base line belongs to the runner and the catcher should be there only when he is fielding a ball or when he already has the ball in his hand." Lacking possession, the catcher has committed obstruction and the runner is therefore safe -- except that rule goes against the de facto precedent of the last quarter century which has seen catchers block the plate with impunity whether or not they had the ball.
It was a controversial end to a thrilling ballgame and a fantastic regular season, and while I'd love to pick it over further, I've got plenty to do over the next 24 hours, so check in at BP, where we've got your October covered.
It didn't take genius to foresee the collapse of the World Champion Cardinals. With a poorly-executed off-season plan and a nearly barren farm system, general manager Walt Jocketty did little to upgrade a club that limped into last year's playoffs with an 83–78 record before their unlikely title run. With ace Chris Carpenter sidelined by bone spurs in his elbow since Opening Day, plus sluggers Albert Pujols, Jim Edmonds, and Scott Rolen all off to slow starts, it's been clear for weeks that a repeat performance just isn't in the Cards.
Filling the power vacuum in the NL Central so far have been the upstart Brewers. Storming out to a 24–10 record behind the potent 1-2 punch of first baseman Prince Fielder and shortstop J.J. Hardy, the Brewers opened up a 6.5-game lead on the retooled Cubs before the latter's irascible new manager, Lou Piniella, had earned his first ejection. Even when gravity brought the Brewers back to earth — they lost 19 of their next 28 games — neither the Cubs nor any other Central team seized the initiative; Milwaukee's lead never dwindled below 4.5 games.
That lead is back up to seven games, and if you were in the vicinity of Miller Park Monday night, you may have heard the window of opportunity slam shut on the rest of the division. Yovani Gallardo, considered one of the top 20 prospects in the minors by both Baseball Prospectus and Baseball America, put together an impressive major league debut, limiting the Giants to four hits and three runs over 6.1 innings. Rickie Weeks doubled twice in his return from the disabled list, and Fielder socked his NL-best 26th homer to give the Brewers their sixth win in eight games.
That ought to make the in-laws happy. I didn't see more than brief highlights of Gallardo's start, but by all accounts he's the real deal. After leading the minor leagues with 188 strikeouts in 155 innings last year, he had put up a 2.90 ERA with a 110/28 K/BB ratio in 77.2 innings at Triple-A Nashville before his recall. My BP colleague Kevin Goldstein ranked him 14th in his Top 100 Prospects list, while Baseball America had him 16th. Here's Goldstein's tale of the tape from his Top 10 Brewer prospects piece last December:
Yovani Gallardo, rhp DOB: 2/27/86 Height/Weight: 6-3/215 Bats/Throws: R/R Draft: 2nd round, 2004, Texas HS What He Did In 2006: 2.09 ERA at High A (77.2-54-23-103), 1.63 ERA at AA (77.1-50-28-85) The Good: Very good stuff plus excellent command equals outstanding pitching prospect. Pitches off a heavy 91-93 mph fastball that touches 96, as well as two plus breaking pitches – a hard-sweeping slider and a downer curveball. Throws strikes and has advanced polish well beyond his years. The Bad: Changeup is an average pitch, but that's nitpicking. Body doesn't offer the same projection as other top pitching prospects. That's nitpicking as well. The Irrelevant: Are groundball ratios fluky? Gallardo was nearly 2 to 1 (83-43) in the Florida State League, yet gave up more flyballs (79) than grounders (61) at Double-A. In A Perfect World, He Becomes: A No. 2 starter and occasional All-Star. Gap Between What He Is Now, And What He Can Be: Low – Gallardo will turn 21 in Spring Training, yet he's ready for Triple-A, and the Brewers don't think he'll need a full season there in preparation for the big leagues.
The bottom line is that Brewers fans have every reason to be as excited about him as Yankee fans are about Philip Hughes, with the bonus that Gallardo's actually healthy, and his team is in first place. Can't beat that with a baseball bat.
Given my recent disappointment with the tense Yankee Stadium scene and its heavy-handed security, Friday evening at Shea Stadium felt like a breath of fresh air -- the first time in the history of the English language that sentence has been written, I'm sure -- with the Brewers and the Mets squaring off for the first of a three-game series. My brother-in-law Adam had surprised me by scoring tickets through his friend Matt and driving up from Wilmington, Delaware with girlfriend Nicole. With the league's best record at 24-10, holding a seven-game lead in the NL Central, the talented young Brewers are suddenly worth crossing state lines to see.
From our seats way down the leftfield line, we craned our necks -- our seats faced centerfield because Shea was apparently designed by inbeciles who had never seen a baseball game -- to watch as the first three innings passed without a hit. Both the Brewers' Jeff Suppan and the Mets' Jorge Sosa befuddled the opposing bats, but Milwaukee made a couple ugly mistakes along the way. Rickie Weeks, who walked to open the ballgame, was skewered at the back end of a strikeout-throwout double play to end the first frame, while centerfielder Bill Hall embarrassingly dropped a fly ball in the second. Oops.
The Brewers' J.J. Hardy, whose 19-game hitting streak (.418/.459/.835 with eight homers) had ended on Wednesday, registered the game's first hit in the top of the fourth, a clean single up the middle that nonetheless went for naught. In the bottom half, the Mets responded by bombarding Suppan, who baffled them last fall as a Cardinal in the League Championship Series. David Wright led off with a home to left-center, just his third shot of the year. Carlos Delgado followed a Carlos Beltran infield single with a two-run blast to leftfield. Moises Alou doubled noisily off the right-center wall (Willie's Wallbangers?), and one out later, scored on a Paul Lo Duca single. Damion Easley singled Lo Duca to third, but Sosa's sacrifice wasn't effective enough to plate the run. The six hits the Mets collected off Suppan in the inning would be the only ones he surrendered on the night.
As childhood friends Adam and Matt reminisced about ancient Brewers with the help of a handheld connection to Baseball-Reference.com (Rob Deer! Glenn Braggs! Ron "The Creature" Robinson! The legendary Chuckie Carr, who drew his release soon after swinging through a take sign and popping out on a 2-0 count, then explaining to manager Phil Garner, "That ain't Chuckie's game. Chuckie hacks on 2-0."...), the modern-day Brew Crew chipped away at the lead with solo homers by Geoff Jenkins in the fifth and Prince Fielder in the sixth. The latter was so emphatic that the Mets outfielders didn't even turn around; it was Little Big Daddy's 10th dinger in 20 games and his league-leading 11th of the year.
The Brewers threatened against a tiring Sosa in the seventh, alternating outs and walks until pinch-hitter Gabe Gross and reliever Pedro Feliciano ushered the starters offstage. Brewers manager Ned Yost countered by burning Gross in favor of Corey Hart -- generally a deplorable strategy in this age of short benches and ever-expanding bullpens, but the lefty Gross is just 4-for-50 against southpaws in his career, and sidearming southpaw Feliciano probably would have eaten his lunch and the sack too. Hart, apparently not wearing his sunglasses at night (admittedly, it was tough to see from our vantage), struck out to end the threat.
With Suppan gone, reliever Carlos Villanueva's second pitch was launched for another home run by Easley to start the bottom of the seventh, running the score to 5-2. But again the Brewers came back, likely buoyed by the sight of an ardent fan standing proudly in his ancient Pepsi Brewers Fan Club tank top in our vicinity (you know, just like Glenn Close in The Natural). Weeks reached on an infield single off Aaron Heilman, and Hardy followed by smacking the game's sixth homer, again to left -- our angled seats were good for a great view of something -- to trim the lead to 5-4. That was all she wrote, however. Heilman set down the next three Brewers in order, while Billy Wagner came on for a 1-2-3 ninth, leaving our foursome in the very small minority disappointed that the Mets came out on top. Still, it was fun to catch a bit of the Brewer buzz with folks for whom this is no annual occurrence.
• • •
Thanks to the efforts of Dan Fox and William Burke, this week's Prospectus Hit List yielded enough interesting data for two Unfiltered entries along the way. The first begins thusly:
While burrowing through various stat pages in the service of assembling this week’s Hit List, I noticed that Kansas City’s David DeJesus was second in the AL with 27 runs scored, certainly surprising for a player on a team averaging just 3.76 per game. Turning to the Royals‘ team stats, I quickly calculated that the DeJesus has scored 21.1 percent of his team’s runs, a level which set off a vague memory I had about an old Bill James Baseball Abstract player comment for Tim Raines that included a list topped by future streetclothes-wearing Dodger manager (my sole frame of reference for him up to that point) Burt Shotton. Both were in the vicinity of 20 percent.
As I queried our stat gurus to find out whether this level had been approached since, not only did I get the data but a note from our own Jim Baker, who served as James’ assistant back in the day: "By coincidence, it was I who put that list in the ‘84 Abstract inspired by the work of Tim Raines. I wonder if he’s been topped since then?"
The short answer is no, and in fact while many have come close to 20 percent, nobody has topped that mark. Check the top 30 over at BP.
Meanwhile, Baker also figures in the second entry, which is based on his "disaster start" stat, one in which a pitcher allows as many or more runs than innings pitched in an outing. In the Hit List I noted that Jeff Weaver had gone 6-for-6 in this department, but it took some persistent digging by Burke to find out whether this is indeed a record. Based on data going back to 1960, it turns out that Detroit's Willie Blair went seven consecutive starts in 1999, but those were interrupted by a stint in the bullpen. Seven pitchers have had six straight disaster starts interrupted by at least one relief outing, while five pitchers, including Weaver, accomplished a pure streak of six straight starts. These Masters of Disaster include the likes of Mike Morgan, Roy Halladay, and Kyle Lohse, and they'll survive in the spotlight at least until Weaver comes off the DL -- he was conveniently placed there on Friday -- to take another crack at infamy.
The only casualty may have been my wallet. Back when we were promoting Baseball Prospectus 2007 in New Haven, Steven Goldman and I bet a sushi dinner over how long Doug Mientkiewicz would be allowed to hold down the first base fort (which appeared to be constructed out of couch). I said Memorial Day, Steve had the All-Star break. Stinky Minky, who came into the game hitting just .211/.282/.380, started two rallies -- slapping a leadoff single in the third to ignite a three-run outburst, then stroking a two-out single in the fourth that was followed by two more hits and a run -- and made two sterling defensive plays in the field in the fifth. That's the kind of stuff Joe Torre eats with a spork, so I suspect Minky, who's actually 11-for-28 this month with an OPS north of 1.000, is locked into a job for awhile.
Meanwhile, the rotation is coming around. As I noted in this week's Hit List, in April the starters managed just 4.7 innings per start while compiling a 5.94 ERA, 1.64 WHIP, and five quality starts out of 23. Starting with Philip Hughes' Mayday no-hit bid, they've risen to 6.2 IP/GS, a 3.42 ERA (it was 2.57 before Chien-Ming Wang was waxed yesterday), 1.07 WHIP, and five quality starts out of nine. Mike Mussina has looked like the pitcher in the catalog since coming off the DL, Darrell Rasner gave Roger Clemens some thunder to steal, but perhaps the most surprising was Matt DeSalvo's seven-inning, three-hit shutout debut on Monday. My BP colleague Kevin Goldstein has a lengthy look at DeSalvo's career to this point. I had no idea he was such a Division III standout in college nor was I aware of his Steve Blass-like control problems last year. Here's what Goldstein has to say about DeSalvo these days:
With little fanfare, DeSalvo took the mound at Yankee Stadium on Monday night to face the Mariners in what was the American League's only night game on the slate. It's easy to assume that in his entire career, he never faced a hitter of Ichiro Suzuki's caliber, and it sure looked like it when Ichiro led off the game with a double to right. Three batters later, Raul Ibanez would single him home for a 1-0 Seattle lead, and things looked a bit grim.
Over the next six innings, DeSalvo would give up just one more hit, finishing the night with seven innings and just the one run. DeSalvo would walk three, including the first two batters of the third inning when his command troubles briefly appeared, and not strike out a single Mariner. It was one of the most dominating-yet-not-dominating performances you'll see, and awfully fun to watch. In the postgame press conference, DeSalvo mentioned how a pre-game meeting with catcher Jorge Posada limited his arsenal to just three pitches -– fastball, slider, changeup -- in order to keep things simple. But that was a simplification in itself, as DeSalvo mixed in six pitches once you break down all the variants. He threw both a two- and four-seam fastball, with the latter sitting at 88-91, and the former featuring better movement. He also occasionally mixed in what looked like a cutter, which featured late horizontal break. His slider is more of a slurvy, show-me offering, but the changeups were special. DeSalvo's natural mechanics have both a body turn and a hiccup, both which add to the deception of his pitches, especially on his off-speed offerings. His arm action is fantastic on his straight change, and then he also throws what scouts often refer to as a "changeup off a changeup", as the pitch is another 3-6 mph less than normal change, while featuring more fade. Posada called a wonderful game, stirring up DeSalvo's arsenal, and DeSalvo himself -- a player with a long record of praise for his makeup and mound demeanor -- looked like a 15-year-veteran on the mound, working quickly, showing no signs of emotion either good or bad, and showing no fear by challenging hitters at every opportunity.
Here I have to tweak Mr. Goldman for the fact that DeSalvo's not in BP07, while Sean Henn, Chase Wright, and Wil Nieves, all of whom have figured in the early-season Yankee plot, are in the one-sentence "Lineouts" of the Yankee chapter. Obviously, the injury problems have forced the Yanks to dig deeper than they otherwise would, but I suspect BP's readers might wish they could see full PECOTAs of some of those players in the book (DeSalvo's isn't even online yet).
While it was worth a wince or two that the Yanks squandered DeSalvo's effots when Mariano Rivera yielded a tiebreaking homer in the top of the ninth, I'm still willing to chalk up Mo's problems to rust; he hadn't pitched in four days. My back-envelope calculations show that in 2005-2006, Rivera put up a 3.05 ERA on three or more days' rests, 1.32 on less than three. Include 2007 (through Monday) and the figures jump to 4.06 and 1.55.
Anyway, back to the Hit List, as with Goldstein's article, it's behind the subscription wall these days, so if you're not a BP subscriber you'll have to take my word for it that the Yanks are a relatively low 10th (one notch ahead of the Dodgers) while the Red Sox have taken over the top spot on the list. Meanwhile, I got a call this morning that my brother-in-law Adam is making a surprise visit to the city tonight, having scored tickets -- including one for me -- to a matchup between the #2 Mets and #3 Brewers. My wife's family, of course, is from Milwaukee, and I've enjoyed sharing in their enthusiasm over the exciting young Brew Crew. I spent a good deal of time talking about them on my two radio gigs last week. On the latter, Norm Wamer had said the week before, "Am I crazy to be picking the Brewers in the NL Central?" No, I said, you're just reading your BP subscription because we've been touting them pretty heavily. With J.J. Hardy and Rickie Weeks finally healthy at the same time, Prince Fielder developing into a crusher, and a deep pitching staff, this team can do some damage, and I'm looking forward to catching them tonight.
In the meantime, I'll leave you with a special sight-gag-aided entry which includes the former scourge of the Bronx. My friend Nick (who did a fine job with the graphics here) and I would have played this card back in 2002-2003 if Wevo had ever pitched worth a warm bucket of spit during his days in pinstripes:
Six-Piece, Extra Crispy: Jeff Weaver's string of disaster starts--allowing as many or more runs as innings pitched, per our own Jim Baker--reaches six in a row with another pair this week. As scientists sift through the rubble of baseball history to determine if that in fact is a record, the good news is that Weaver's ERA dropped from 18.26 to 14.32 in that span. Given that the Mariner offense has scored just 13 runs in those six starts, one wonders if they've been in on the let's-all-mail-it-in plan all along. On the off chance that it's the Mariner uniform which is the source of the trouble--after all, Weaver has yet to pitch a non-disaster start in one--our fashion consultant suggests more appropriate attire for his next outing.
