While Buzz Bissinger continues to be raked over the coals, the baseball world lost one of its titans on Thursday, as longtime executive Buzzie Bavasi died at age 92. The old-school Bavasi is best remembered as the architect of four World Champion Dodgers teams and eight pennant winners (1952, '53, '55, '56, '59, '63, '65, '66, champions in bold), serving as the team's general manager from late 1950 (when he took over from Branch Rickey) to mid-1968, a period encompassing the franchise's transcontinental shift from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, their longest run of success and their days as the National League's predominant powerhouse.
Bavasi's accomplishments weren't limited to that span, however. He joined the Dodger organization in 1938, and worked in their farm system until 1943, stepping aside to serve in the Army during World War II. When he returned he played a key role in the game's integration: in 1946, as Jackie Robinson was smashing through organized baseball's color barrier in Montreal, Bavasi took the fight to American soil, running the Dodgers' Class B Nashua affiliate, which featured Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe and was skippered by Walter Alston. As the Los Angeles Times' obituary recounts:
"I'll never forget one night in Lynn, Mass.," Campanella said in 1983. "Newcombe had pitched, and I hit a home run, and we won the game. We were all dressed and sitting in the bus. Buzzie said he was going inside to pick up the check. All of a sudden, we heard Buzzie and their manager fighting. We went in and broke it up. We found out later that their manager" had used a racial slur when he told Bavasi, " 'Without those two [black players], you wouldn't have won.' Buzzie went after him."
In 1947, he was summoned to work for the Dodgers, and one of his duties was to scout the Vero Beach Army base that became Dodgertown and hammer out an agreement with the city. Bavasi then spent three years as the Montreal Royals' GM before being named to the Dodger post in late 1950. As the club's GM, he was well known for both his tight purse strings and his paternal attitude towards players:
I always had a warm feeling of gratitude toward Buzzie because he took a chance on bringing me up from the minors after eight years. He stuck by me," former Dodgers shortstop Maury Wills said Thursday. "He had a way of getting me to play hard without paying me a lot of money."
One of Bavasi's favorite ploys was to draw up a phony contract in the name of a player coming off an excellent season and type in an artificially low salary. When another player who wasn't as good came into his office to negotiate, Bavasi would leave the phony contract on his desk, then excuse himself from the room. The player inevitably would take a peek at the contract, read the low-ball salary and back down in his own negotiations when Bavasi would return to the room.
Bavasi took pride in his ability to operate on a budget, but as the Dodgers' success took its toll on their payroll, he met something of a personal Waterloo when he presided over the dual holdout of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale in the spring of 1966, a year which wound up being the final season of Koufax's career and the Dodgers' last pennant until 1974. As Bavasi recounted in Sports Illustrated in 1967:
To tell the truth, I wasn't too successful in the famous Koufax-Drysdale double holdout in 1966. I mean, when the smoke had cleared they stood together on the battlefield with $235,000 between them, and I stood there With a blood-stained cashbox. Well, they had a gimmick and it worked; I'm not denying it. They said that one wouldn't sign unless the other signed. Since one of the two was the greatest pitcher I've ever seen (and possibly the greatest anybody has ever seen), the gimmick worked. But be sure to stick around for the fun the next time somebody tries that gimmick. I don't care if the whole infield comes in as a package; the next year the whole infield will be wondering what it is doing playing for the Nankai Hawks.
...The double holdout started on February 26, 1966, when spring training opened and Sandy and Donald didn't show. It looked in the papers as though they had made a big salary demand on the club and the club had turned them down. But it wasn't that simple. Being three good friends, as I hope we still are, Donald and Sandy and I had met and talked things over. In the first meeting, right after the 1965 season, we got no place. We sat down in my office at Dodger stadium and they said they had an agent—Sandy's lawyer, Bill Hayes—and that they wanted a three-year no-cut contract totaling $1 million and that neither one would sign unless both were satisfied. I told them I would negotiate only with them, that any discussions they had with their agent were their own business but please keep him away from me, that the amount of money they were asking was ridiculous, and that nobody on the ball club, including me and Walter Alston, was ever going to get more than a one-year contract. As I recall, I said something like, "You're both athletes, and what you're selling is your physical ability, and how can you guarantee your physical ability three years in advance? If you guarantee me that you will both be healthy and strong and still winning 20 games each in 1968, I'll give you a three-year contract." Since not even Cassius Clay could make a guarantee like that, the meeting broke up. But there was plenty of time; this was only October, the World Series was barely over and I was in no rush to get them signed, especially at their asking price of $166,000 per year apiece. From the beginning I was willing to give them raises on their 1965 salary, which were $80,000 for Don and $85,000 for Sandy. I had it penciled into my budget: $100,000, more or less, for Sandy, and $90,000, more or less, for Donald.
...The double holdout was over, but I can't say that I felt good about it. We wound up giving the boys much more money than we had intended, and if you had to pick a winner in the whole argument, you'd have to say it was Drysdale and Koufax. Donald got a $30,000 raise and Sandy got a $40,000 raise, and neither would have commanded that much money negotiating alone. After all, they got the biggest raises in baseball history. To that extent, the double holdout worked, although they gave in on the three-year contract for $1 million, which I don't think they ever meant, anyway. But, as I said before, the plan only worked because the greatest pitcher in baseball was in on it, and also they caught us by surprise. Believe me, Walter O'Malley and I have talked the problem over many times, and no double holdout will ever work again on the Los Angeles Dodgers. We're firm on that. The next time two of them come walking in together, they'll go walking out together. Koufax and Drysdale took advantage of a good thing, that's one way to look at it, and another way to look at it is, why shouldn't they? All's fair in negotiating, as I have also said before. This was a unique situation, and it will never happen again.
Anyway, the double holdout didn't cost the ball club quite as much as the figures would seem to indicate. In the first place, I had anticipated the possibility of having to come up with high figures for Don and Sandy, especially after the season they had had, and therefore I had not been quite as generous with some of the other players as I might have been. I don't mean I cut anybody just to get money to pay the two pitchers. It worked more like this: let's say a kid comes into my office and I've got him penciled in for $27,000, and he sits down and says that he wants $23,000. This happens all the time, believe me, and my natural inclination is to say, "I've got you down for $27,000, and that's what you are going to get." But not this time. This time if the kid said he'd sign for $23,000 I'd let it go at that, or maybe I'd sign him for a thousand more. The net result was that our 1966 budget for ballplayers went up exactly the $100,000 I had planned on, with Koufax and Drysdale getting $70,000 of the increase and the other 24 guys getting the rest. I'd have liked to give the other players more, but a budget is a budget and I stuck to it.
Full of more than a little bravado, the four-part series offers a revealing window into the tactics of a Reserve Clause-era executive so smug about holding the best cards in the negotiation game that he could afford to lay them on the table for the world to see. These fascinating articles -- first brought to my attention by Alex Belth, who dug them out of the SI clip library for me a couple years back -- are now fully available online via the recently debuted SI Vault :
After 1968, Bavasi left the Dodgers for the expansion San Diego Padres, where he served as team president and part-owner, but he couldn't replicate his success, as the team finished in the NL West cellar for its first six years. The Padres' fate improved in 1975, as they escaped the basement for the first time, but Bavasi clashed with new owner Ray Kroc and left following the 1977 season.
Angels owner Gene Autry soon hired him to be his team's executive vice president, and Bavasi oversaw their first division championship in 1979, an accomplishment that was dimmed by the acrimonious departure of Nolan Ryan following the season. The Angels won the AL West again on Bavasi's watch in 1982, but although he signed big-name free agents such as Don Baylor, Rod Carew, Bobby Grich, Reggie Jackson and Fred Lynn, he struggled to adjust to the GM's loss of leverage in the post-Reserve Clause era, traded far too much of the Angels' young talent (Willie Mays Aikens, Tom Brunansky, Brian Harper, Carney Lansford, Rance Mulliniks, Dickie Thon...) and retired in 1984. Two of his sons, Peter and Bill, became GMs at the major league level, though neither has come close to filling their father's shoes; the latter is currently the Seattle Mariners' GM.
Bavasi remained lucid and communicative well into his later years; both Biz of Baseball domo Maury Brown and New York Times columnist Dave Anderson recount their correspondences with him in recent articles. The Times also carries the inevitable obit, and there's another worthwhile one over at MLB.com.
Update: The San Diego Union-Tribuneobit is worth a read as well, particularly for the sidebar of short, colorful stories: "Don Zimmer said 'Play me or trade me.' We played him, and now we can't trade him."
In a season of great divisional and wild-card races, last year's NL West scramble may have been the best of the bunch. The Dodgers, Padres, and Diamondbacks all spent at least six weeks in first place, and by the end, just one full game separated the top three teams in the standings after the Rockies beat the Padres in a Game 163 playoff to decide the wild-card. The West looks similarly wild this year, as Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA projection system forecasts the Dodgers, Diamondbacks, and Rockies to finish with 87, 87, and 82 wins, respectively, the tightest three-team cluster in any division. As with last year, the outcome may well rest on the shoulders of young, homegrown talent. The Dodgers, Diamondbacks, and Rockies have earned reputations as three of the game's top player development machines, offering a pipeline of top prospects to combat the ever-rising cost of signing free agents - especially important for the small-market Rockies and Diamondbacks. All three are poised to augment their lineups and pitching staffs with even more prized prospects as the year goes on.
Hardly anyone predicted the Rockies could win the NL pennant last year, and nobody foresaw their season-ending 14–1 dash. However, BP prospect guru Kevin Goldstein ranked the Rockies' minor-league system the game's second-best at the outset of the season, noting their ability to provide instant help in the form of 22-year-old shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, who hit .291 AVG/.359 OBP/.479 SLG with 24 home runs while anchoring the league's best defense. The system also produced a pair of hard-throwing hurlers -— 23-year-old right-hander Ubaldo Jimenez and 21-year-old lefty Franklin Morales -- who patched a rotation wracked by injuries in time for their amazing stretch run. Meanwhile, 24-year-old Manny Corpas, a second-year reliever, took over the closer role from Brian Fuentes by midyear, saving 19 games after July 6.
Strong player development is hardly a new thing for the Rockies; it's arguably the only area in which the team (once notorious for a $172 million binge on free-agent busts Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle) has ever excelled. Their 2008 Opening Day lineup featured seven homegrown players, including five-time All-Star Todd Helton, 2007 MVP runner-up Matt Holliday, and former first-round draft picks Tulowitzki (2006), Jeff Francis (2002), and Jayson Nix (2001). Three days later, with Chris Iannetta behind the plate, and Ryan Spilborghs in center field, they featured an all-homegrown nine. Nix, 25, is a late-arriving, good-field/no-hit rookie; PECOTA forecasts him for a .245/.300/.379 showing but defense at second base that's nine runs above average. Iannetta, also 25, was expected to win the starting catcher job last year, but a .158 AVG in April coupled with a solid performance from Yorvit Torrealba consigned him to the backup backstop role. Still, Iannetta forecasts as the better hitter, and he may yet claim the job.
I've remarked before about the prescience of Goldstein's ranking of the Rockies' org, but left on the cutting room floor was Tulowitzki's role in helping the Rox lead the NL in Park-Adjusted Defensive Efficiency. I had plenty to say about the D-backs and Dodgers, of course, particularly with regards to the latter's new skipper:
Even more tantalizing [than third base prospect Andy LaRoche] is 20-year-old southpaw Clayton Kershaw, a blue-chip pitching prospect. Despite less than 25 innings above A-ball under his belt, he spent most of March in the big-league camp and drew raves for his poise and his arsenal. Though sent to Double-A to start the season, he's poised for a midsummer promotion, either as the fifth starter or -- of particular interest given new manager Joe Torre's experience last year -- in a Joba Chamberlain-esque setup role.
It's Torre who may draw the most scrutiny of any newcomer in the division. As the Yankee skipper, he often drew criticism for preferring marginal veterans over untested prospects, but his latter-day ability to integrate Robinson Cano, Melky Cabrera, Phil Hughes, and Chamberlain into the mix mitigated that somewhat. Already he's drawn fire for juggling Kemp with expensive, unproductive Juan Pierre in the outfield, and if Garciaparra and LaRoche are ever healthy at the same time, all eyes will fall on that choice, too. Given a slim margin for error, nothing less than a playoff spot may ride on Torre's willingness to choose youth over experience.
Given the Sun's space constraints, I didn't even have room to tackle the Padres, whom PECOTA forecast for a paltry 78 wins on the heels of their agonizing near-miss last year. As noted in my essay for Baseball Prospectus 2008, the Pads are at a real disadvantage against those divisional talent factories. They ranked 24th in Opening Day payroll last year, with the Rockies 25th and the Diamondbacks 26th; furthermore, Forbes.com's 2007 estimates show them second-to-last in Operating Income. Their farm system has improved in a year's time; Goldstein ranked them 29th in 2007, but they've risen all the way to 12th thanks to strong seasons from Matt Antonelli and Chase Headley and a stockpiling of free-agent compensation picks. Still, Antonelli's a year away and Headley, farmed out to begin this year, figures to help only so much once he arrives. PECOTA has him at .231/.316/.388 due to a shaky track record; an equivalent translation of his searing season in Double-A is .255/.356/.474, but he'd have to surpass his 90th percentile projection to reach that.
Back to Torre and the Dodger outfield, here's what I had to say in the Hit List, where they ranked 19th:
Ding-dong, Juan Pierre's consecutive game streak is dead at 434, but the early returns on Joe Torre's ability to manage the crowded outfield are less encouraging. Thus far, Andre Ethier's started nine times, Andruw Jones eight, Pierre and Matt Kemp five apiece, and the four outfielders are hitting a barren .204/.241/.301. On a more positive note, Rafael Furcal looks like the 2006 model as opposed to the 2007 one, and Jeff Kent has been solid despite missing most of spring training.
That's not very encouraging so far, particularly when it appeared towards the end of spring training that Torre had let go of the idea that Pierre would be a regular. It does appear I missed one significant choice, via this article: when Torre sat Jones on Wednesday, Kemp started in center field -- where he played just 17 innings last year -- instead of Pierre, with Torre again kicking the latter in the head: "I'd much rather have someone with the confidence and aggressiveness that [Kemp] has... I'd rather have his arm in center field." Thunk.
Elsewhere on the Hit List, the Yankees were just above the Dodgers at #18 (that's what happens when your offense is down to 3.1 runs per game) and the Brewers were fourth thanks to the anomalies of a Ben Sheets complete-game shutout (his first since his rookie year in 2001) and a sizzling start from Jason Kendall (.538/.567/.731). Most importantly, this week's pop-culture cameos include The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Keith McCready, the Capital Punisher, David Bowie and the former Attorney General, the latter of which should (and does) come with a suggestion to try the veal.
One brief but neat aside about the Hit List: Baseball Prospectus has long had a function called "Audit Team" available via a drop-down menu in the upper righthand corner throughout most of its site. They function as team-at-a-glance pages, handy to have up while watching a ballgame or mulling your local nine's lineup, but recently, they've received a massive and very cool overhaul, adding headshots, graphics, links to the oft-cited PECOTA projections, and a whole slew of BP-flavored sortable stats, including current Hit List ranking and recent Transaction Analysis entries. Here's what the Yankees page looks like -- if you're not familiar with their predecessors, let's just say that the new ones are like stepping into Technicolor. As I found while putting together this week's piece, this is a great resource that's worth taking advantage of, and you can't beat the price (free).
Hat tip to Dave Pease, not only for his hard work on this, but also for eliminating the single most painful hour of my week, the agonizing mad dash to finish each week's list that involved hand-coding each player mentioned in the Hit List with opening and closing < player > tags in order to link them to their BP player cards, often upwards of 100 per week. A very clutch performance.
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.
But having done enough of thatlast week, I switched gears for this week's Prospectus Hit and Run. I tied up up a few loose ends by revisiting the 2013 Hall of Fame ballot, the close-but-no-cigar crew who topped Jim Rice's 72.2 percent, and correcting myself regarding a slip on David Justice. Finally, I turned my attention to the forthcoming season via a topic I covered in the forthcoming Baseball Prospectus 2008 (which ships February 18), namely the Brewers' abysmal defense:
As I wrote a few months back, the Brewers finished 28th out of 30 teams in Park Adjusted Defensive Efficiency. They were 3.44 percent below average in converting batted balls into outs, a shortcoming that translates to -44.7 runs (every one percent away from average equals 13 runs). A look at the defensive numbers of the infielders suggests that number isn't far out of line. Based on their Fielding Runs Above Average totals and a simple Linear Weights conversion of Baseball Information Solutions' Plus/Minus ratings into runs, the quartet of Prince Fielder, Rickie Weeks, J.J. Hardy and Ryan Braun came in a whopping 49 runs below average.
In a tight but winnable division, that simply won't do, so kudos to the Brewers for not sitting on their hands. The recent signing of Mike Cameron to play center field created a domino effect, shifting incumbent Bill Hall, who struggled to hold down the middle pasture, to the hot corner, and Braun, who put up a ghastly .895 fielding percentage, to left field. According to the Davenport fielding numbers, Hall has performed as a league-average third baseman in 84 career games, 59 of them in 2005. Braun, however, is untested in the outfield.
How much will all these moves improve the defense? I set out to do a quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation, incorporating 2007 FRAA, Plus/Minus and the new kid on the block, Dan Fox's Simple Fielding Runs...
I did two estimates, one the those numbers, the other using the 2008 PECOTA projections, which account for multiple years of data, player aging patterns, and regression to the mean. Between the two estimates, I bracketed the defensive improvements as worth between 1.5 and four wins, something that should comfort my Brewer-loving in-laws.
• • •
Elsewhere at BP, yesterday was a big day, as Kevin Goldstein published our Top 100 Prospect list, then submitted to a full afternoon of interrogation. Topping the list is Cincinnati center fielder Jay Bruce, and the Reds can also boast pitcher Homer Bailey (#), first baseman Joey Votto (21), and pitcher Johnny Cueto (41). That's a nice bit of high-end talent, but nobody can touch the Rays, who have five of the top 25 prospects; their days as the AL East's doormat may be at an end.
The Yankees' Joba Chamberlain comes in ranked an impressive #4, though that won't be enough to appease the nitpickers who sweat Boston's Clay Buchholz being ranked #2. The Yankees placed five kids on the list, the Red Sox seven, but beyond that raw count, it's it's actually a tossup between the two beasts in terms of strength. Boston has the higher-rated player and two in the top 20, but the Yanks have four in the top 50. Ian Kennedy is ranked 34th, outfielders Austin Jackson and Jose Tabata 47th and 48th, respectively, and pitcher Alan Horne 67th (Philip Hughes, in case anybody was wondering, is no longer eligible for the list, having topped 50 innings last year). Beyond Buchholz, the Sox have center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury (16), starting pitcher Justin Masterson (53), "shortstop" Jed Lowrie (57), outfielder Ryan Kalish (60), starting pitcher Michael Bowden (95th) and first baseman Lars Anderson (100).
The Dodgers fared well, too. Starter Clayton Kershaw ranks fifth; according to Goldstein he's the early favorite for next year's #1. Third baseman Andy LaRoche is 14th, shortstop Chin-Ling Hu 32nd, and pitcher Scott Elbert 66th. That's solid but not incredibly strong, but when one considers that the system has graduated Chad Billingsley, Jonathan Broxton, Andre Ethier, Matt Kemp, James Loney and Russell Martin to the bigs in the last two years, whoa. Goldstein's Top 11 Dodger prospects will be up later today; I'll check back with a link.
• • •
We won't know until this evening whether the deal will become official or not, but the Mets are poised to steal Johan Santana from the Twins. You know it's bad when Baseball America's home page boldly greets you with the headline "Twins Didn't Get Enough."
Of the four prospects headed Minnesota's way, the highest-ranked on BP's list is center fielder Carlos Gomez at #65. He's a toolsy guy with what they call a projectable body, which is to say he causes scouts' hearts to go pitter-patter despite the fact that he has yet to translate his physique into results. As a 21-year-old he was pressed into big-league duty by injuries in the Mets' outfield last year, he hit just .232/.288/.304 in 125 big-league at-bats. As bad as that is, the kid has hit just .278/.336/.399 in four minor-league seasons, and between being overmatched in the bigs and suffering a broken hand, he lost a good bit of development time. PECOTA forecasted a weighted mean equivalent performance of .265/.315/.392 in 2007 (that's translated from wherever he played in the minors); for this year it's .253/.310/.371 -- about 25 OPS points lower. Backwards moving is he.
The deal gets worse for the Twins. Neither pitchers Phillip Humber nor Kevin Mulvey crack BP's Top 100; both are seen as back-of-the rotation guys. Nineteen-year-old pitcher Deolis Guerra ranks 79th, but that's again a function of his projectable body rather than his results to date. After an impressive 2006 as a 17-year-old, he put up a 4.01 ERA and 6.6 K/9 in the Florida State League last year; he'll need to bulk up his repertoire so that he actually misses bats if this deal is to be salvaged for Minny.
Here's what BA's Jim Callis had to say:
Guerra (No. 2), Gomez (No. 3), Mulvey (No. 4) and Humber (No. 7) all ranked prominently on our Mets Top 10 Prospects list. But there’s simply too much risk involved in this deal for Minnesota.
The two best prospects in the trade, Guerra and Gomez, come with high ceilings but also lack a lot of polish and have a long ways to go to reach their potential. The odds that they both will do so are slim.
Guerra has an 89-94 mph fastball and a promising changeup and he’s only 18. But he also has a below-average breaking ball, has yet to pitch more than 90 innings in a season and while he has held his own, he hasn’t dominated. Gomez had the best package of tools in the Mets system, but his bat is still extremely raw...
Mulvey has an arsenal of four average pitches and throws strikes. He’s not overpowering and he’s most likely a No. 4 starter. Since having Tommy John surgery in 2005, Humber hasn’t fully regained the stuff that made him the No. 3 overall pick in the 2004 draft. His curveball is his best pitch but his fastball now sits at 87-91 mph. He too projects as a No. 4 starter.
The Twins have traded Santana for two high-reward but also high-risk prospects, and two back-of-the-rotation starters. They didn’t get a prospect whose combination of ceiling and certainty approaches that of Hughes, whom the Yankees were willing to deal for Santana earlier in the winter. They didn’t get a package comparable to the ones the Red Sox reportedly offered earlier, fronted by either Jacoby Ellsbury and Jon Lester and also containing two solid prospects nearly ready for the majors: righty Justin Masterson and shortstop Jed Lowrie.
BPs Joe Sheehan was none too wild about the haul either, though he did counter some of the conventional wisdom based on the rumors that have floated around all winter:
The package just wasn’t the right one. I’m not going to compare this trade to the long-rumored and varying offers that were reportedly on the table at varying times this winter, because I’ve come around to the idea that what’s actually offered and what gets reported are two wildly different things. We can’t compare an actual trade to rumors. However, evaluating this deal in a vacuum, we see that it adds just one position player of note, one with some major flaws and who wouldn’t be one of the top ten prospects at his position in the game. The rest of the deal is mid-rotation pitching prospects.
There are mitigating circumstances here that must be noted. Santana forced Bill Smith’s hand by threatening to invoke his no-trade clause, which would have ended all talks and forced the Twins to either sign Santana or lose him at the end of the year for nothing. With the Twins looking up at the Tigers and Indians in the division, and the Red Sox and Yankees in the league, it didn’t seem reasonable to keep him in a push for success in 2008, and the Twins have never acted like signing Santana was a reasonable option for them. With Santana pointing the gun, apparently wishing to have his 2008 status settled right now, Smith had little choice but to make a deal. This trade does little for me, but when positioned as “one year of Johan Santana or this trade,” it’s a bit more defensible... Blame Bill Smith for the deal that he did make, but save a little ire for Terry Ryan, whose decision three years ago [to grant Santana the no-trade clause] set these events in motion.
What's really funny is that I spent nearly six years at a design studio with a boss named Bill Smith. Didn't know much about baseball; the story goes that when he was taken to a game, he brought magazines to read and asked when halftime was. Possibly more legend than fact, but good for a punchline in this context.
Mainly I'm relieved that the Yanks didn't give up Hughes to get Santana, and that they won't have to face him in what would have been an insanely stacked Red Sox rotation. If it goes through, the Mets are a solid bet to finish the job they botched last year and take the NL East, though I really think the Braves, with a full season of Mark Teixeira and continued development of their young nucleus (Brian McCann, Kelly Johnson, Yunel Escobar, Jeff Francoeur) will be a continued threat (Philly's lack of pitching will doom them).
Anyway, I've got more links to share, but that's enough blogging for one entry.
Buzzie Bavasi claimed that along with Jackie Robinson, Podres was one of the two greatest competitors of the GM's 18-year career with the Dodgers. It's fitting that those two players were responsible for the signature moments in Brooklyn sports history, Robinson with his breaking of baseball's color barrier on April 15, 1947 and Podres for bringing Next Year to Dem Bums. But that was hardly the only thing Podres accomplished in baseball. Over the course of a 15-year career, he went 148-116 with a 3.68 ERA (105 ERA+), including a league-leading 2.66 in 1957. He pitched for the Dodgers from 1953 to 1966, mostly slotting into the middle of the rotation behind Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. Along with Koufax and Jim Gilliam, Podres holds the distinction of being one of the three players who were part of all four of the Dodgers' championships under Walter Alston. Gilliam was the only one to play in each of those World Series (1955, 1959, 1963, and 1965); Podres was on the roster for the latter but didn't pitch, while Koufax wasn't on the 1955 roster (he made up for it later). Podres had such a big-game reputation that Pee Wee Reese nicknamed him "Mr. Clutch." True to that, he came up big in postseason play, going 4-1 with a 2.11 ERA in six World Series starts.
Podres' best pitch was his change-up:
Podres' biggest weapon was a straight change-up that was taught to him and [Carl] Erskine by former Dodgers executive Branch Rickey. [Don] Newcombe and Maury Wills, another Dodgers teammate, said the change-up was the best they'd ever seen.
"No Dodger pitcher has ever used that particular kind of grip since," Erskine said. "You let the ball recess back so that you use your middle knuckles like the ends of your fingers. The wrist had to collapse behind the ball. It had the same rotation as a four-seam fastball, so it was difficult to pick up. But it was also difficult to get over the plate."
Podres was traded to Detroit early in the 1966 season, and wound up his career -- wait for it -- as a member of the expansion San Diego Padres. Later he worked as a pitching coach for the Red Sox, Twins and Phillies, most notably with the 1993 NL pennant winners. No less than Curt Schilling credits him with instilling the mentality he needed for big games.
As former teammate Tommy Lasorda might say, Podres has gone to the Big Dodger in the Sky. Rest in peace.
With Joe Torre now officially in as Dodger manager, many have asked me what I think about Torre and Alex Rodriguez vis-à-vis the Dodgers. Here are a few selected snippets and parting thoughts for the week:
• On the impact of Torre to the Dodgers: Jon Weisman of Dodger Thoughts put together an in-depth look at Torre's tendencies as Yankee manager, calling upon Bronx Banter's Cliff Corcoran and BP/YES man Steven Goldman, who put together a Bill James-style Manager in a Box feature upon Torre's departure, for some insight. I weighed in via the comments, and Weisman wound up appending what I had to say to the original post:
Having watched Torre at close range for 12 years from my New York vantage, I have fewer reservations regarding his taking over the Dodgers than I think most of you do here. Yes, he has his foibles, but he's also shown himself to be more adaptable than commonly given credit for. He handled the in-season integration of Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera into the lineups pretty well, and particularly this past year, showed that he wasn't afraid to bench expensive, gimpy and ineffective veterans like Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi. Yet he was also able to quell any major clubhouse dissent over those moves, which is pretty impressive.
A few other things to add:
• He's done an outstanding job managing Jorge Posada's heavy workload, keeping him effective all year long - there's virtually no difference between Posada's first- and second-half splits careerwise, and his September numbers have historically been strong. Granted, he won't have the DH to help Russell Martin out in the same way, but Torre was a catcher, and he understood the workload.
• Right now the Dodgers already have a deeper bullpen than the Yankees have had the last few years. In [Jonathan] Broxton, [Scott] Proctor and [Joe] Beimel, the Dodgers have three capable setup men, and that's not to say they won't be even deeper. Torre hasn't had more than one good righty setup at any one time in awhile, and his recent lefty relievers have primarily been LOOGYs or mop-and-bucket guys. Beimel is more of a Mike Stanton type, capable of pitching full innings without [his manager] worrying unduly about platoon matchups.
• Anyone pointing to Torre's lack of success in his pre-NYY days would do well to remind themselves that this Dodger club has far more to work with than some of those teams did, particularly in the rotation.
• Whatever the expectations are in L.A. with the ink still drying on Torre's contract, they're lower and more reasonable than they were in New York. Torre will do a good job of keeping the pressure off his guys by deflecting it towards himself, and this is a guy who can stand more heat than just about any manager I've ever seen. He'll demand accountability for the kind of BS that's gone on around problem children like Jeff Kent over the past few years, and I think he'll find his way through this mix of veterans and youngsters better than Little did last year.
Cliff did a particularly nice job of elaborating on the vets-versus-rookies topic:
Looking at the 2008 Dodgers," Corcoran says, "if the team decides to start the season with [Andre] Ethier and [Matt] Kemp in the outfield corners and [James] Loney and [Andy] LaRoche at the infield corners, Torre will give the youngsters a long rope. A player has to be really bad for a really long time to lose a starting job he's been given by Joe Torre. The challenge for young players, however, is getting that starting job in the first place.
"If Ned Colletti brings in another 'proven veteran' outfielder, or if Nomar [Garciaparra] has a blazing hot spring training and reclaims the third-base job, you're unlikely to see a change in the lineup before June, if at all, no matter how poorly the vets play.
"The one exception there, particularly regarding Nomar, is injury. Torre is not above allowing a young player to Wally Pipp a vet. If the team and the youngster excel while the vet is on the DL, that vet could come back to a spot on the bench, as [Jason] Giambi and Doug Mientkiewicz did this year. Heck, even Johnny Damon lost his center-field job to injury this year, and he didn't spend a day on the DL. Of course it took until June for that to happen."
• On the possibility of Rodriguez to the Dodgers: I don't think the Torre hiring increases the likelihood that Rodriguez will sign with LA. For all of Rodriguez's claims that he loved playing for Torre, he had to feel rather betrayed by his manager throwing him to the wolves in that Tom Verducci Sports Illustrated article in Septmeber 2006, and in Torre batting him eighth late in the Division Series against the Tigers.
But that's really only a small part of the issue regarding the A-Rod-to-the-Dodgers scenario. The biggest part is, of course, money. Dodger owner Frank McCourt is notoriously underfinanced, making it unlikely that he could absorb the operating losses stemming from adding A-Rod's $30+ million salary to a payroll that was $108 million on Opening Day last year. Though those annual losses could be countered by an increase in franchise value via increased attendance (even atop a Dodger record 3,857,036 this year), media revenues and other ancillary streams, McCourt's reputation for short-sightedness -- just look at the frenetic way he's handled his GMs and managers since taking the reins in early 2004 -- makes this scenario unlikely.
Furthermore, GM Ned Colletti's relationship with Scott Boras grew rather acrimonious last winter after Boras 1) engineered the opt-out of J.D. Drew; 2) reacted harshly to the team's refusal to pick up Eric Gagne's $12 million option for 2007 after he pitched just 16 games for them in 2005-2006; and 3) steered Greg Maddux away from the Dodgers and to the NL West rival Padres as payback. While Colletti is reportedly on thin ice in LA, the indications are that he's being given the opportunity to turn things around, but I doubt he'll wind up in any situation where he's negotiating with Boras.
Which is a good thing, since I'd have a hard time stomaching going through another go-round with Rodriguez. As much as I admire his talent, I'm tired of the baggage that comes with it, and thoroughly turned off by the way his departure from the Yankees has played out. It all plays into what's been said all along by jealous scribes, that the guy is a head case, insecure and desperate to be liked, putting a counterproductive amount of pressure on himself to succeed, hopelessly out of touch with reality, insulated by Boras and the bubble that only his kind of wealth can produce. Thanks, I'll pass. As fun as it was to watch him here in New York when he was at his best -- and I attended both his three-homer game and the one where he went yard twice in one inning -- and as much as the Dodgers could use his big bat in the middle of the lineup, the circumstances make it very easy for me to wish he'd just take his weak-willed, insecure ass elsewhere.
• On Rodriguez's other options: with the report that Boras and Rodriguez were seeking a $350 million package from the Yankees, it seems pretty clear why Boras is trying so desperately to remind the Yanks that they haven't closed the door on the possibility of A-Rod's return: without him, the market lacks momentum, not to mention an obvious leading contender for his services. Giants GM Brian Sabean doesn't sound optimistic about his club's chances. Boston's Leaky Larry Lucchino says Mike Lowell is his top priority (the Yankees are said to be very interested in him as well), which puts A-Rod further down the list; I think he's an impossible sell to their fan base. The Marlins, of all teams, appear interested in the Miami native, but if Rodriguez was worried about the instability atop the Yankees he can't be enamored of the Fish ownership situation and threats to relocate unless they can extort the local taxpayers. The Angels might be interested but find themselves in a similar position to the Dodgers financially; Mike DiGiovanna of the Los Angeles Times runs the numbers and illustrates how stretched even Arte Moreno's finances would be. The Mets might be capable of making the biggest splash of all, but with David Wright and Jose Reyes locked in on the left side of the infield, somebody would need to switch positions; the Mets have asked Wright to zip it on that score.
But one thing is clear: teams aren't exactly stampeding to get in line to talk to Boras. And every time the agent opens his mouth, he insults someone's intelligence and perhaps further isolates his client.
• This week's installment of Prospectus Hit and Run just went up. In it, I note that the 2007 Red Sox are in very fine company in terms of post division-play teams that went on to win the World Series after conclusively proving themselves as the best teams of the majors in terms of run differential, Pythagorean record, and/or Hit List ranking -- and went went on to win the World Series. It's a short list, just nine or 10 teams long (depending on which of those criteria you use) and it includes some true powerhouses: 1970 Orioles, 1975 Reds, 1978 Yankees, 1981 Dodgers, 1984 Tigers, 1986 Mets, 1989 A's, 1998 Yankees, 2002 Angels, and now the 2007 Red Sox. Not too shabby.
Elsewhere in the piece, I revisit James Click's work on Park-Adjusted Defensive Efficiency, providing 2007 numbers which were retro-engineered by our data department, since Click himself now has better things to do as the Coordinator of Baseball Operations for the Devil Rays. The Defensive Efficiency metric, a Bill James creation, tells you how often a team converts a ball in play into an out; it's the flip side of the Batting Average on Balls In Play coin, though it also incorporates the number of times an opposing team Reaches On Error. Like everything else in baseball, it's subject to distortions by park, since some fields are easier to defend than others based on symmetry, fence distances, the amount of foul ground, and the playing surface itself. And like just about everything else in baseball which we can measure, it can be adjusted to remove some of that distorting effect.
Factoring in the park adjustments and cutting through a lot of interesting details which shall remain behind the subscription wall, here are the revised Defensive Efficiencies based on a formula where DE = [1 - (H + ROE - HR) / (PA - BB - SO - HBP - HR)]:
Team ADE BOS .7093 COL .7083 CHN .7052 SFN .6983 NYN .6976 ARI .6954 TOR .6949 ATL .6948 DET .6928 SDN .6898 PHI .6882 NYA .6874 CLE .6873 WAS .6870 SLN .6845 OAK .6840 KCA .6840 BAL .6826 CHA .6823 LAN .6823 HOU .6794 MIN .6776 ANA .6765 TEX .6751 CIN .6726 PIT .6720 SEA .6666 MIL .6636 FLO .6607 TBA .6484
Note that the two leaders were the teams that squared off in the World Series, that most of the top 10 were contenders, and that the Brewers are very conspicuously near the bottom, having watched their NL Central hopes slip away one ground ball through their porous defense at a time.
One other thing to note regarding this is that Click's finding that teams consistently play better defense at home than on the road (the park factors average out to 1.0089, in line with recent data) jibes very well with my Chien-Ming Wang-related finding regarding the homefield BABIP advantage enjoyed by pitchers.
• Alex Belth and the Bronx Banter community have a provocative discussion going regarding Josh Levin's Slate critique of Sports Illustrated magazine. Belth himself is a guy who works particularly well in longer-form pieces -- he's got a very readable book about Curt Flood, Stepping Out under his belt -- and while he's broken through on SI.com, he can't buy a page in the magazine because they've moved away from the kind of literate, long-form pieces that used to be the magazine's hallmark. The web, blogs, the instant news cycle, corporate takeovers of print media... it's all in the discussion.
• Chatting with Neil deMause on IM last night about Joe Torre reminded me of a classic Peanuts strip, one that I clipped out of the newspaper back in December 1999, less than a week before Charles Schultz's retirement and about six weeks before his death. The next summer, I found out amid a Baseball Hall of Fame retrospective on Schultz that it was his last baseball-themed strip ever. In light of the news about Torre possibly taking the Dodger job, it seems fitting to run this:
I'm walking on eggshells until Torre's deal with the Dodgers is done. Having seen the way Ned "Stupid Flanders" Colletti operates, I'm not taking anything for granted.
• Speaking of Stupid Flanders, Nate Silver had some scathing words to say about the Dodger GM:
There is no bigger disconnect in baseball between the Dodgers’ ability to develop talent and the front office’s lack of appreciation for that talent. Matt Kemp is someone that they should be thrilled to have in their lineup for the next six years. Andy LaRoche’s time is now. So is Chin-Lung Hu’s, and the Dodgers should consider trading Rafael Furcal to make way for him.
Instead, all rumors are that Ned Colletti’s compass is pointed in the opposite direction. What I envision happening is something like the following: Kemp or LaRoche are included in a deal for a premium starting pitcher. And then -– guess what -– you do have a hole at left or third, and you do need to work the free agent market to repair it. But it isn’t a hole that existed before; it’s one that you’ve created yourself. The behavior is literally almost pathological, a kind of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome: Colletti seems determined to make the Dodgers sick so that he can make them well again. Playing the kids-–these talented kids from your farm system that embody everything that used to be called the Dodger Way -– well, that’s just too darn obvious.
The Dodger front office is a drunk with a loaded gun and bad aim. I wouldn't weep a bit if Colletti is the next domino to fall after he wraps up the Torre contract.
When one door closes, another opens, goes the old saying. Today's news not only finds Joe Girardi accepting the Yankees' offer to manage, but the man he replaced and the man he beat out headed to the dugout of the Dodgers. Reports out of LA have the Dodgers firing Grady Little and hiring Joe Torre, with Don Mattingly -- whose son Preston was the team's supplemental first-round pick in 2006 -- coming along for the ride as well as bench coach. Prior to Girardi being offered the Yankees job, rumors about him either joining Little's staff or replacing the current skipper had surfaced, hinting that the Dodgers were up to the kind of backroom intrigue that saw GM Paul DePodesta ousted in late 2005.
My head is spinning on this one, but I'd be elated to see Torre land on his feet in LA. Little did a very good job with the Dodgers in 2006, but it all fell apart for him last year. On July 16, they were first in the NL West, a season-high 13 games above .500 at 53-40. They went 29-40 the rest of the way, including a 1-10 skid in the second half of September that featured Plaschke-fueledsquabbling between the veterans and youngsters (notably Jeff Kent and Matt Kemp, with Luis Gonzalez and James Loney chiming in as well) and some frighteningly ignorant pitcher handling by Little. The manager called setup man Jonathan Broxton's number 10 times between September 6 and 19. Broxton, who'd been brilliant all year, put up an 11.05 ERA in that span, allowing five of his six homers and a .794 SLG. In one of the more damning quotes by any manager last year, Little dismissed both that stretch and Broxton's own complaints of arm soreness: "It's not a fatigue situation. It's a situation where they're doing more adjusting than he is.... He's just snake-bit right now and he's paying for mistakes with the long ball." Yikes.
Still, the open question is how well Torre will handle the youth movement that caused Little to stumble. The latter said the right things at times, but he found the club's two top hitters, Kemp and Loney, just 686 plate appearances in 2007, and he futzed with the third base situation all year long with no great resolution. While Torre's New York tenure was hardly flawless, his efforts the past few years to integrate Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera at the expense of higher-paid veterans while quelling clubhouse dissent, and adhering to the organizational mandates regarding Philip Hughes and Joba Chamberlain may be the key here. If, that is, the Dodger organization isn't in the total disarray it appears to be and simply looking for the quick PR fix that a man of Torre's stature can provide.
What has set apart the Torre era is not just winning but a sense of attachment and identification that he effortlessly inspired among the fans and the players and the millions of sports bystanders. Already known by the fans as a strong-swinging Brooklyn-born catcher (and, later, a third baseman) with an eighteen-year career with the Braves, the Cardinals, and the Mets, and then for his long tenure as a semi-distinguished manager of the same three teams, he became a sudden celebrity, a Page Six sweetheart, in his first season with the Yankees, when his brother Frank Torre, another former major leaguer, underwent successful heart-replacement surgery the day before the last game of the World Series. The fourth game, in which the Yankees, trailing the Braves by 2–1 in the Series and 6–0 on the scoreboard, came back to win in extra innings, beginning their rush to the championship, changed New York to a Yankee town overnight. Torre’s composure and steadiness in hard times became as familiar as his odd, tilting trudge from the dugout to the mound to call in a fresh pitcher. A habitual modesty interwoven with an awareness of the difficult daily grind powerfully secured him to his players. Whenever someone brought up the batting title and National League M.V.P. award he had captured in 1971 with a .363 average, he threw in a reminder about his .289 mark the following year. Mid-July often brought on a retelling of a game of his as a Mets third baseman in 1975, when he batted into four double plays and also committed an error. This ease with himself and his profession set the tone in his pre-game and post-game press conferences, delivered every day to thirty or forty writers, plus TV and radio and Japan.
...The shock of Torre’s departure will not soon go away, but of course we should have known how it would play out. Only the owners, down in Tampa, seemed startled (at times, anyway) by his decision, but if they knew anything about him how could they not have known what would follow? Is it possible that they have no sense of the calamity to the franchise and to the fans and to baseball itself that the departure of Joe Torre from New York represents? He, at last, supplied the touch of class, the Augustan presence, that the Yankees had so insistently proclaimed for themselves and have now thrown away. For Torre, it was still about the players.
If all this does indeed unfold as reported, it won't be quite an equal trade for this bicoastal fan with Torre managing the Dodgers instead of the Yankees, since he won't be on YES to do what he does best, deal with the media crush. But after missing him more than I ever thought I would in the three weeks since he last managed, I'm damn glad to have Torre back in my life.
• • •
Speaking of the New Yorker, now's a good time to go back and read Ben McGrath's fine profile of Manny Ramirez which I discussed here. On the eve of the World Series, I joked that Ramirez would hit a seven-run homer in Coors Field, upon which he would bronze himself at home plate. Will Leitch, the Deadspin domo who did a great job blogging the postseason for the New York Times (read his eloquent description of the Yankees' last stand here), trumped my vision with this:
When they say "Manny Being Manny," what they mean is "Manny is An Alien Life Form Unfamiliar With the Mores and Vagaries of Earth." Someday he's going hit a game-winning grand slam and, when he flips his helmet off to run the bases, it will be revealed that he has antennae, and these antennae are draped in a feather boa.
With his flamboyant home run celebrations and his helmet flipping, Ramirez frustrates the hell out of a lot of purists, but once you read McGrath's piece, you'll gain a bit more insight into his world.
• • •
Alos, I've got a pair of aging Baseball Prospectus Unfiltered posts of mine to report, one on Curt Schilling's Hall of Fame chances, and the other an accompaniment to a video appearance I made at the Bleacher Bloggers website. The latter focuses on the most dubious achievements of teams in 2007, sort of a Hit List of ignominy. I'm about three minutes in on the video, if you want to skip the soccer-styled comedy. Enjoy!
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.
In the Hit List a couple weeks back, I suggested that the Padres' release of David Wells may have been premature, and that given their rotation woes, a couple teams were likely to target the big man:
Lowering the Boomer: a 5-1 run snaps the Pads out of their post-break funk, but the return of Chris Young prompts the team to release David Wells. The move may have been premature; though bombed for 26 runs in his last 16.2 innings, Wells had put up four quality starts in his previous five, and while the market for overweight 44-year-old hurlers with a history of gout may not be robust, the cost for a banged-up contender like the Dodgers or Phillies to bring him in after a couple weeks of rest and rehab is vanishingly small.
Last week, the Dodgers inked Wells, cutting bait on the struggling Brett Tomko (2-11, 5.80 ERA) and biting the bullet on a $176,000 per start incentive clause that I'd failed to account for but that didn't seem all that daunting given the possibility that the team may know after one start whether he has anything left.
Unsurprisingly, Wells made something less than a graceful entry:
In a surreal scene, Tomko talked to reporters about his fate while Wells, an unapologetic jokester, dressed not two feet away at the next locker.
Tomko: "I'm OK with it. Last night I saw it coming."
Wells: "Really? You saw it on the sports ticker?"
Tomko: "Funny."
The Dodgers have 10 days to trade Tomko or give him his unconditional release.
Tomko: "I hope the (general manager Ned Colletti) can get me to another team and not let me sit around and rot. I'll go home and start throwing at the local high school field. I don't know what to do first, it's uncharted territory."
Wells: "You've got to find a catcher."
The Dodgers kept Tomko on the roster through Thursday, allowing him to reach 10 years of major league service time and guaranteeing him the maximum pension.
Tomko: "That was important. It's a good time for me. I'm ready for a new opportunity. And it's not like they brought in a chump to replace me."
Wells: "Yeah, they did."
Ouch. As bad as Tomko has been at times, he's basically come off as an amenable guy while on the team, well aware of his limitations; there was little reason to add insult to injury. So much for the San Diegan staying classy, right?
Nonetheless, all is forgiven after Wells' debut in Dodger blue, on a Sunday night ESPN game against the NL's best team. What else would one expect from the biggest big-game pitcher around? Wells pitched five inning of two-run ball, not quite going Granny Gooden but hardly safe for the heart-attack prone. He was often one pitch away from disaster, puttin g10 men on base in his five innings but ultimately escaping jam after jam. He wound up his night on a high note, striking out Moises Alou with two outs and the bases load in the fifth on a classic hook. Boo-yah for Boomer!
The most surprising part of the night had already come and gone in the top of the inning, when Wells led off the frame by -- are you ready for this -- bunting for a base hit. If you had a 44-year-old 250-pounder with bad knees dropping one down and beating it out, you just hit the exacta, and if you had that sparking the go-ahead rally and scoring the tying run (just his seventh run of a 21-year career), we're talking trifecta; claim your winnings at the ticket window.
All in all, it was just one more memorable showing from a pitcher who's rarely failed to disappoint me no matter what uniform he's wearing. I've said it before and I'll say it again: "For a fat man, he doesn't sweat much."
For those who thought Juan Pierre deserved a spot on the Replacement Level Killers, he was left off due to his surprisingly robust VORP (on the strength of a .367/.405/.443 August) and the team's distance from first place, though his -12 FRAA does keep his WARP at 1.8. A stronger case can be made for the inclusion of Nomar Garciaparra (0.3 VORP, 0.3 WARP), or the team's handling of an eight-man pileup at third base.
Yesterday I came across a Dodgers.com piece on Pierre that has me reconsidering my exclusion of him in favor of Andruw Jones (3.1 VORP, 3.0 WARP). The piece is so blatantly idiotic it may deserve a Fire Joe Morgan-esque line-by-line carve-up [late note: great minds, etc.]. Start with the headline: "Pierre not bothered with OBP issues: Center fielder focused on doing little things to help team win." Marge, boil some coffee. And get me something sharp, I'm feeling stabby.
What is it about the on-base percentage that a player like Juan Pierre -- who leads the Dodgers in at-bats, runs scored, hits, stolen bases, triples and games played -- gets knocked for not having his higher than .350?
Pierre has been one of the most consistent players in the Dodgers lineup this season. He plays every day (395 consecutive games, which is the longest active streak in the Majors), makes diving catches in center field on a regular basis and steals second just about every time he gets on base, yet his OBP evidently isn't cutting it.
...The issue with Pierre is that he doesn't walk. Plain and simple, his OBP suffers because he averages one walk every 21 at-bats. On the season, he has just 24 walks in 510 at-bats, which is the lowest in the Majors.
Even with a torrid August showing, Pierre is hitting .289/.329/.344. So let's start with the fact that on a park- and league-adjusted basis (per Baseball-Reference.com), his OBP is 19 points below the .343 average, and his slugging percentage is 89 points below the .435 average. In other words, he's doing neither of the principal things necessary to create runs, getting on base or advancing runners (without using up outs, please).
THAT is why Pierre gets knocked.
That and the goddamned $44 million contract Dodger GM Ned Colletti dished him last winter.
Jeebus Cripes, I'm in one-line paragraph Plaschke mode, ready to disembowel someone and send the entrails to Stupid Flanders.
This is bad. It's not going to end well.
Pierre's Equivalent Average, which places his ability to produce runs on a scale similar to batting average (.260 is the league average), is .247. So he's about halfway between average and replacement level (.230).
In other words, his crippling the offense is why he's getting knocked.
Compared to some of the elite leadoff batters in the game, Pierre's .324 on-base percentage is considerably low. [Jose] Reyes has an OBP of .375, Hanley Ramirez is at .392, Chone Figgins is at .392 and Ichiro is at .396, so the consensus is that a No. 1 or 2 hitter in the lineup needs to have a .350 or higher OBP.
Gee, ya think? Pierre's OBP in the #1 spot is actually just .268, though he's got just 83 plate appearances there. In a move that recalls Seventies style like bad shag carpet, polyester leisure suits, and macrame plant holders, Manager Grady Little actually hits Pierre out of the #2 hole, where Pierre's OBP is still an offense-murdering, soul-curdling .329 in 478 plate appearances. Among the 19 hitters with enough PA in the #1 or #2 spots to qualify for the batting title, only Florida's Dan Uggla, Milwaukee's J.J. Hardy (both .321), Washington's Felipe Lopez (.300) and Houston's Craig Biggio (.294) have lower OBPs atop a lineup. All of them save for the truly hapless Lopez have enough power to put up higher OPSes than the big Juan.
But Pierre does the little things. How little? Futility Infielder's intrepid field reporter Nick Stone interviewed Pierre. Here's what he filed:
"My short at-bats allow me to sneak back into the clubhouse and help put together a really nifty post-game buffet," said the Dodger centerfielder. "I know from experience that it's really nice to come back to the locker room after a close defeat and find personalized place settings, and I think the guys really appreciate my centerpiece designs. Little things like that really do help team morale."
In full-on Martha Stewart mode, Pierre added, "And I also leave inspirational notes for the guys, written inside these handmade cards I do. That and back in spring training, I made some macrame plant holders for the other guys in the lineup. You can see how little things like that really help this ballclub."
In the interest of avoiding this blog entry turning into a death threat to either Pierre or Colletti, I'll stop here. Suffice it to say that under Colletti, this team has about as much idea of how runs are created as your average three-year-old does of where babies come from.
"The Run Stork?" asks the wide-eyed Stupid Flanders.
You can use your imagination to envision how much red I'd spill over these Dodger blues.
• • •
Friday's Hit List went up with a glitch that unfortunately I wasn't aware of until late in the evening. It's been corrected now but in case you were one of the readers who hit it early, the Red Sox entry should have read:
Clay Buchholz makes a solid debut (6 8 4 3 3 5), but he's sent back to Pawtucket, where he'll continue to build on the absurd 164/30 K/BB ratio he's compiled in 117.1 minor-league innings this year; he may be back for a September 1 start. There's more help from the farm as Kevin Cash -- subbing for injured Doug Mirabelli -- catches a Tim Wakefield start with nary a police escort from the airport, a ball rolling to the screen or a world coming to an end. Wakefield continues to bedevil the Rays with a 15-inning scoreless streak; he's 19-2 with a 2.72 ERA against them in his career.
The post-trade deadline Hit List is up at Baseball Prospectus, with a look at which teams improved themselves, which ones dropped the ball, and which ones merely treaded water. The Yankees, thanks to their recent offensive onslaught, climb all the way to #2 behind the Red Sox, with the Mets third.
The Dodgers come in at #7:
With rotation injuries sprouting up like mushrooms--Randy Wolf may be done for the year, while Brad Penny and Derek Lowe narrowly escape DL stints--the Dodgers trade away their most productive third baseman for an overworked reliever and spend the rest of their deadline arguing internally over which prospects to keep and which to deal without pulling the trigger. That this one's so obvious even Bill Plaschke gets it right is a sign that whatever the current regime's faults, they know how to deal in PR. Bad news: Jeff Kent strains a hammy after a .447/.500/.737 July.
Yes, that's a Bill Plaschke link in the Hit List, and for once, my nemesis actually written something about the Dodgers that I agree with:
For the first time in a decade, they are no longer the kind of team that needs to do calisthenics every July to be strong for many Octobers.
They have a nucleus. They have a surplus. They have a clue.
What they may not eventually have this season is a spot in the playoffs, but -- and I can't believe I'm writing this -- maybe that can wait.
Maybe they have to sacrifice a September for James Loney, Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier to learn how to play in the heat.
Maybe they have to lose a division for Jonathon Broxton to learn how to pitch under the glare.
Maybe Dodgers fans, just this once, will agree to pay for two months of soaring, skidding fun with an October of silence.
Having finally collected enough good players to contend for several years, the Dodgers smartly refused to break them up for the sake of this one.
Maybe, by taking no big steps, they have actually taken a giant one.
Sorry about that spacing; like high-powered magnets, Plaschke's thoughts continue to be too weighty to put side-by-side. Anyway, while none of the prospects Dodger GM Ned Colletti has traded have come back to bite the Dodgers thus far, every deadline gives Dodger fans the feeling that he's playing Russian roulette, willing to sacrifice a prospect or two in spectacularly shocking fashion. The GM puts up a unified front in the Plaschke piece, but the buzz leading up to the deadline had Colletti clashing with the team's player development arm over which prospects were tradable, particularly 19-year-old southpaw Clayton Kershaw, who stands a good chance of being one of the top three pitching prospects on next year's lists. Even with the Dodgers on the edge of a playoff spot, I can't fault them for keeping the kids together; 2007 won't be their last playoff chase by any means.
Anyway, elsewhere in the Hit List, you'll find Willy Wonka, Nightmare on Elm Street, "Twas the Night Before Christmas," Lays potato chips, Thomas Hardy, and Coach Krupt. I challenge you to find a more eclectic assortment in any set of power rankings for the big four sports (baseball, chess, curling, and yak rodeo).
As for the Dodgers, I watched most of their three-game series against the Giants, with Barry Bonds perched on the precipice of history at 754 home runs. As negative as I am about the whole record chase, the the idea of Vin Scully calling the shot, as he did Aaron's 715th, certainly held some appeal, as did the idea of Bonds at least tying the record in the ultimate enemy territory as a chorus of boos rained down. The possibility of that contrast wasn't lost on Scully:
“This to me is different,” Scully said. “Aaron was received with great love, affection, adoration. I’m not sure how this one will be received. The story won’t be what I say. The story will be what the crowd will say. So I will shut up and let them take it.”
Scully is famous for going silent at the right times. When Aaron hit his 715th home run, passing Babe Ruth, Scully let 26 seconds pass, allowing the crowd in Atlanta to roar. Only then did he reflect on the setting, the meaning and the times:
“What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-tim
