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When our initial PECOTA projections were unveiled in mid-February, the Dodgers' overall chances at reaching the postseason only stood around 29 percent, with an eight-win gap separating them from the Diamondbacks. By the time the season opened, their odds were up to 57 percent (48 percent for a division title, nine percent for the wild card) thanks to the late-February addition of Orlando Hudson and the early March re-signing of Ramirez.
Those two deals, along with the early February signing of Randy Wolf, came at substantial discounts in a bad economy. This was a feather in Colletti's cap, as he was able to reduce the Opening Day payroll by about $18 million relative to 2008.
As it was, PECOTA's 93-win forecast was pretty accurate, particularly given that it nailed both the Dodgers' ranking as the league's stingiest pitching staff (they tied with the Giants for the fewest runs allowed at 3.77 per game) and fourth-highest scoring offense (4.81 runs per game). While [Chad] Billingsley didn't live up to the system's expectations due to a bad second half, Wolf put together a career year and [Clayton] Kershaw pitched well beyond his years, posting the league's lowest hit rate (6.3 H/9), second-best homer rate (0.4 HR/9) and fifth-best strikeout rate (9.7 K/9) and ERA (2.79). Jonathan Broxton led the league with 4.9 WXRL while anchoring the circuit's top bullpen.
As for the offense, its .273 EqA ranked second in the league. [Manny] Ramirez was projected to rank seventh in the league with a .315 EqA, and while his 50-game suspension prevented him from getting enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, his .327 EqA would have ranked fifth. [Andre] Ethier (.301) and [Matt] Kemp (.298) both beat their projections slightly as well while becoming the first Dodgers to top 20 homers since 2005.
Key Stat: .346 OBP
Despite playing in one of the league's top pitchers' parks, the Dodgers put up the NL's highest OBP as well as batting average (.270), enabling them to overcome a meager .412 slugging percentage (seventh in the league) and the third-lowest percentage of runs scored via homers (30.1). There simply wasn't an easy out to be had in their lineup; of their eight regulars, only leadoff man Rafael Furcal (.335) finished below .350, and even he came on strong late in the year. Though Ramirez (.418) cooled off after his suspension, he nonetheless set the tone, walking 71 times in 104 games; his 21 intentional passes ranked third in the league behind Albert Pujols and Adrian Gonzalez despite his lengthy absence. Juan Pierre (.365) filled in admirably during that 50-game stretch and elsewhere off the bench. [Casey[ Blake (.363) set a career high. Kemp (.352) and Ethier (.361) set career highs in walks as well as homers, a sign of growing respect in the eyes of opposing pitchers. Russell Martin (.352) and James Loney (.357) kept the line moving despite mysterious power outages which raised questions about their future viability.
This will be a big winter for the Dodgers, with Billingsley, Ethier, Kemp, Loney, Martin and Hong-Chih Kuo all arbitration-eligible and ready to take up a significantly larger chunk of payroll. But whether it's a spillover from the Dodgers' ownership turmoil or a firm belief in their own resources, Colletti doesn't sound inclined to try signing or trading for a true ace who could properly orient the rotation for a short series, as Joe Torre ultimately failed to do. One would think the Dodgers could consider dangling Billingsley in a deal for the Blue Jays' Roy Halladay, or throw a significant amount of money at the Angels' John Lackey, who's been one of the game's top 10 starters over the past five years according to ERA+, and who's been battle-tested in the postseason.
I guess we Dodger fans shouldn't hold our breaths for such an ace. On the contrary, perhaps we should thank our lucky stars that as bad as the internecine struggle between Frank and Jamie McCourt over control of the team appears to look, it's considerably less likely to turn into the kind of fire sale that the Padres underwent in the wake of owner John Moores' divorce, at least in the near term.
That's the combined showing of all Reds batting in the top two lineup spots, constituting 24 percent of the team's total plate appearances and proving that [Reds manager Dusty] Baker's ideas about what make an offense work are completely out of touch with reality. During a ghastly stretch in which the team lost 45 out of 68 games, [Willy] Taveras batted an appalling .216/.230/.243, and the lineup's production shriveled to 3.6 runs per game. Once Taveras mercifully went on the disabled list with a quad strain in mid-August, Baker reacted by locking rookie Drew Stubbs (.260/.313/.438 overall) in the leadoff hole and weak-hitting shortstop Paul Janish (.215/.297/.308 overall) in the second slot. Despite this rather appalling second act of managerial malfeasance, the Reds have gone 26-15 since Taveras went down, though that performance has more to do with a pitching staff that's held opponents to 3.8 runs per game via strong finishes from [Bronson] Arroyo, [Homer] Bailey, and [Johnny] Cueto.
The Bottom Line: With [Joey] Votto, [Brandon] Phillips, [Jay] Bruce, Stubbs, Cueto, Bailey, and a rehabbed [Edinson] Volquez, the Reds can still claim a promising young nucleus. Alas, Baker's work this year shows that he may be the biggest obstacle to the team's success, and with one more year on his deal, he's not going anywhere. Trading either Arroyo or [Aaron] Harang is certainly an option; the two players have about $28 million remaining on their deals via 2010 contracts and 2011 buyouts, so moving one of them might create an opportunity for a midlevel signing. Still, it's difficult to envision this team breaking out of the middle of the pack without keen vision and bold steps.
Suffice it to say that Baker's ineptitude as a manager relative to his reputation really leaves me baffled. Forget his well-earned reputation as an old-school hardass of an arm mangler (Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, now Volquez), where the hell does he think runs come from, the stork?
More to come on playoff-relevant topics later today.
A few of the high points were obvious, centered around the accomplishments of Joe Mauer (who's on his way to becoming the 16th player to lead his league in all three "triple slash" categories (batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage), Albert Pujols (whose greatness has become routine) and Zack Greinke (one of the finest seasons of the decade by many measures). Some were drawn from my recent work on topics such as the Angels' Pythagorean overachievement, the Nationals' underachievement, the Rangers' improved defense, and the failures of the Brewers' and Indians' rotations.
One of the items that fit neither of those descriptions was this lowlight:
Hell With the Lidge Off: One year after converting every save opportunity that came his way in the regular season and postseason en route to the Phillies' World Championship, Brad Lidge has not only blown 11 saves and posted a 7.34 ERA, but he's set a single-season record for the lowest WXRL of any reliever since 1954 (which is to say ever)... Speaking of replacements, the Phillies head into the playoffs in the awkward position of still auditioning potential successors.
Due to space issues, I didn't run the table I had originally intended to. Here it is:
NAME TEAM YEAR G IP FRA WXRL
Brad Lidge PHI 2009 66 57.7 8.59 -3.273
Doug Jones CLE 1991 36 32.3 8.77 -3.183
Steve Wilson LAN 1992 60 66.7 4.92 -2.856
Rich Gossage CHN 1988 46 43.7 5.39 -2.738
Pete Ladd MIL 1984 54 87.0 5.49 -2.644
Bobby Ayala SEA 1998 62 75.3 7.31 -2.565
Ron Perranoski MIN 1971 36 42.7 8.98 -2.531
Lindy McDaniel NYA 1971 44 69.7 5.42 -2.448
Jason Isringhausen SLN 2008 42 42.7 6.31 -2.342
Mitch Williams HOU 1994 25 20.0 9.53 -2.320
Jack Baldschun PHI 1965 65 99.0 5.90 -2.309
Dan Spillner CLE 1983 60 92.3 5.74 -2.303
Rollie Fingers SDN 1979 54 83.7 5.78 -2.296
Norm Charlton SEA 1997 71 69.3 8.26 -2.276
Rod Scurry PIT 1983 61 68.0 6.25 -2.250
Rick Camp ATL 1978 42 52.7 6.37 -2.240
Kyle Farnsworth CHN 2002 45 46.7 8.77 -2.229
Pete Mikkelsen LAN 1971 41 74.0 4.62 -2.216
John O'Donoghue MIL 1970 25 23.3 9.97 -2.211
Matt Herges MON 2002 62 64.7 5.89 -2.194
So many memories, though I'm pleased to note that the Dodgers' Wilson isn't one of them, falling in the college-era days when I could scarcely be bothered to follow baseball. Back in a moment of pre-Futility Infielder creativity, Charlton ("The Arsonist" as I christened him) became my muse. Elsewhere on the list are atypically horrible seasons from Hall of Famers Gossage and Fingers as well as ageless relief stalwarts Jones, Perranoski, and McDaniel, all of whom appeared in over 700 games in otherwise esteemed careers, quintessential journeymen like Spillner, Camp, and Herges, and Charlton's partner in conflagration, Ayala. There's also "Wild Thing" Williams' follow-up to the 1993 World Series; in an interesting bit of irony, he was traded for Jones and the eternally unpopular Jeff Juden less than six weeks after surrendering Joe Carter's series-clinching homer. And speaking of eternally unpopular, there's Kyle Farnsworth!
• • •
Thanks to a late tip from Alex Belth, I found myself at the Gelf Magazine "Varsity Letters" night on Thursday night in Brooklyn, where authors Joe Posnanski (The Machine), Larry Tye (Satchel) and Jennifer Ring (Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball), and filmmaker Jonathan Hock (The Lot Son of Havana) held court. Hock's excerpts of his film about Luis Tiant's return to Cuba looked fantastic; his movie runs on ESPN Classic this Sunday. Ring's reading was provocative, Tye's a bit overly polished but nonetheless engaging. Batting in the cleanup spot nearly two hours into the affair, Poz's was a treat as he read excerpts from his book about the 1975 Reds and discussed Tony Perez's Hallworthiness, Pete Rose's ferocity as a player, Joe Morgan's contrarian nature, Sparky Anderson's love/hate relationship with his pitchers, and his previous book with Buck O'Neil (The Soul of Baseball). In a nice bit of synergy, he followed Tye's presentation on Satchel Paige with the infamous "Nancy" story before turning to the Reds.
The Gelf site has lengthy interviews with the aforementioned authors which more or less capture the flavor of the presentations they made. Here's Posnanski discussing Morgan at length:
Gelf Magazine: Joe Morgan is sort of inevitably a fraught character for the contemporary reader. As brilliant as he was on the field, as a broadcaster he really has made himself a villain of sorts to a certain type of sports fan, and it's hard not to try to reverse-engineer the carping, negative, revanchist mic-jockey of today in reading about the dazzling, instinctive, driven player he once was. Considering that you're in the vanguard of a style of writing and thinking about baseball that Morgan has aligned himself so decisively against, did you find it difficult to talk to Morgan? And if I could ask you to do some soothsaying, how do you think he went from being nearly the ultimate Moneyball-style player to being the chief exponent of this proudly ignorant anti-information movement?
Joe Posnanski: The disconnect between Morgan the player and Morgan the announcer is one that I'm just not sure anyone has figured. Bill James tells a great story about how one time Jon Miller showed Morgan Bill's New Historical Baseball Abstract, which has Morgan ranked as the best second baseman of all time, ahead of Rogers Hornsby. Well, Morgan starts griping that this was ridiculous, that Hornsby hit .358 in his career, and Morgan never hit .358, and so on. And there it was, perfectly aligned — Joe Morgan the announcer arguing against Joe Morgan the player.
You're right about Joe Morgan being the ultimate Moneyball-style player, too. It wasn't just his style of play, either; Joe Morgan quotes from 1975 sound like they could have gone into the book Moneyball, verbatim. He talked all the time about how batting average was overrated, and how you had to get on base, and how RBIs were just a context statistic, and how you had to steal bases at a high percentage, and so on and so on.
If I had to take a stab at what became of that Joe Morgan, I think it would be that Joe always had this belief, common among great players, that to play baseball well takes something more than athletic ability, practice, and a certain mental dexterity. He always believed that it takes moral courage, the nerves of a cat burglar, the strength of a thousand men. He believed even then that the people who played baseball well had something inside that regular, ordinary people were missing. And that belief has grown since 1975. He is anti-Moneyball, I think, not because he has spent a lot of time analyzing it but because it was written by a guy who didn't play baseball (and it's about a guy who wasn't good enough to play baseball). He is anti-Bill James because James didn't play baseball. These people couldn't possibly understand the game. They had never stared into the eyes of Bob Gibson. They had never been upended by Willie Stargell. They can't understand.
And the more years that pass, the more intently he pushes that line of thinking. For Joe, getting a single with a man on second in a tie game isn't just a good piece of hitting, it's a moral triumph. And, yes, that's hard to listen to. The shame of it is, I don't think Joe was a bad announcer in his early years, before this part of himself set in. He's an extremely smart guy and very funny in the right setting.
I'll tell you one more Joe story that struck me. They had a gathering of the Great Eight in Cincinnati last year. It was a fun dinner, and the guys talked about the old days, and it was really great. And at some point, they were talking about how Joe wasn't much of a player in Houston before he came to the Reds. And Joe explained that he was still a good player then but he was playing half his games in the Astrodome, which was a terrible hitters' park. He's absolutely right. And it was as if the words had come right out of the mouth of Bill James. Joe averaged almost 100 walks a season in Houston, and he hit twice as many homers on the road. He did become a better player in Cincinnati, but some of that improvement is just context. But the other guys on the team didn't buy it for one minute and they ripped him and mocked him for talking about how bad a hitters' park the Astrodome was. And Joe kind of smiled and then admitted that, yes, it was being around the winners in Cincinnati that made him a better player. It's like a little bit of that old Joe wanted to get out.
After the reading, I had a brief chat with Poz as he signed my book; I didn't get to talk to Tye because I was so busy catching up with local amigos Belth, Emma Span, and Joe Sheehan, none of whom I see often enough, and a few other acquaintances from the world of sportswriting. The conversation eventually took itself to a bar around the corner, where a handful of us knocked a few back while bullshitting about baseball and other sports well into the wee hours, with a good chunk of the conversation centered around Tom Verducci's ace cover story on Mariano Rivera in this week's Sports Illustrated. But for the morning's deadlines, I think we could have gone all night. Fun stuff.
I've contributed to two of these thus far, last week covering the Brewers, and this week the Indians. Interestingly enough, both teams had something in common: rotations that outside of one guy, largely stunk on ice. Here's my take on the Brewers:
Despite reaching the postseason last year for the first time since 1982, PECOTA pegged them for an 83-79 season, with an 18.5 percent chance at winning the division and a 10 percent shot at the NL Wild Card. Interestingly enough, even given the free-agency departures of [CC] Sabathia and [Ben] Sheets, the team projected to be stronger on the run prevention side (sixth in the league) than on the scoring side (ninth), a counterintuitive forecast given the fact that six of the lineup's eight projected regulars are between the ages of 25 and 29 — or in their statistical prime as far as their expected production. Fielder and Ryan Braun have certainly lived up to expectations, ranking third and eighth in the league in EqA, respectively. Although Rickie Weeks suffered a season-ending injury in May, and J.J. Hardy, Corey Hart, and Bill Hall all disappointed, the team got solid enough work from the likes of Mike Cameron, Craig Counsell, Casey McGehee, and Felipe Lopez that they actually rank third in the league in team EqA. On the other hand, the rotation has been an utter disaster.
Key stat: 5.59
That's the ERA of all of the Brewers' starting pitchers aside from Gallardo, whose 3.84 mark is the only one that's better than the park-adjusted league average. Braden Looper (4.77) has eaten innings but done little else worthy of note. Jeff Suppan (4.87) and David Bush (5.85, including 8.24 since the end of May) have combined injury and ineffectiveness, while Manny Parra (6.42) has been dreadful. Fill-ins Carlos Villanueva, Seth McClung, and Mike Burns combined for a 7.25 ERA as starters, not only revealing the organization's sheer lack of rotation depth, but also compromising their bullpen depth via their absence from the relief corps (in the cases of the first two) and their short starts. As a unit, the Brewers rank 15th in the league in Support-Neutral Winning Percentage (.444), and dead last in rotation ERA (5.19).
The fault here lies with Melvin for his failure to replace Sabathia and Sheets with anything approaching adequacy. Getting a full season out of Gallardo, who was limited to just four starts in 2008 due to a torn ACL, was enough to partially offset those front-end losses from the rotation, but when it came time to open the wallet last winter, the best the Brewers could do was to sign Looper to a one-year, $4.75 million deal with incentives and an option. The bigger problem, of course, is the four-year, $42 million deal they're still paying to Suppan, who's rewarded the Brewers with a Looper-like 4.80 ERA through 91 starts thus far. Freed of that obligation, they might have been able to afford another midrotation starter who could have helped keep them afloat
As for the Indians...
Key Stat: 5.75
That's the ERA of the starting pitchers aside from [Cliff] Lee, who was traded to the Phillies on July 29. The only starter besides Lee with at least 10 starts and an ERA below 4.92 is Aaron Laffey, for whom the team didn't even have space in the rotation until the season was already going down in flames. Laffey's also the only starter this side of Lee with a Support-Neutral Winning Percentage above .500. For all of the bullpen's woes, the starters simply didn't give the Indians a chance to win; aside from Lee, their combined SNWP is just .431.
In retrospect, it's clear that the cast that GM Mark Shapiro assembled behind Lee offered too much risk. Shapiro's plan hinged on rebounds from mostly-lost 2008 seasons by Carl Pavano, Anthony Reyes, and [Fausto] Carmona — with a comeback from Tommy John surgery by Jake Westbrook supposed to provide a mid-season lift. None of those pitchers miss many bats, so it's not terribly surprising that the Tribe staff is last in the league in strikeouts. Pavano was erratic and homer-prone; the team eventually dealt him to the Twins in early August. Reyes made just eight starts before needing TJ surgery. Carmona put up a 7.42 ERA through 12 starts before being sent all the way down to A-ball to iron out the mechanical problems which first took hold last year. Despite an initially promising return, he's been pummeled for a 10.72 ERA over his last five starts. To that unhappy brew, add a parade of lefties (Zach Jackson, Jeremy Sowers, David Huff) each more hittable than the last, and rough introductions for a couple of mid-season acquisitions (Justin Masterson, Carlos Carrasco), and you've got a rotation whose ERA bests only Baltimore's, but without the high-upside prospects which mitigate the Orioles' showing.
Definitely a pair of disappointments, though I'm more optimistic about the Brewers' chances of rebounding than I am of the Indians, who appear headed for a very lean year, with or without the braintrust that got them into this mess.
In today's Baseball Prospectus/ESPN Insider double cheeseburger special, I grapple with the American League's persistent advantage over the National League in interleague play. The AL has gotten the upper hand in each of the past six years and has won at a .566 clip over the past five, or .560 over the past three.
To figure out what the strength of the two "teams" are that could produce a result where one won at a .560 clip, we turn to what Bill James called the Log5 method, one I've referenced in my articles on schedule strength and one that Clay Davenport uses — literally millions of times a day — to generate the daily Playoff Odds reports. The formula boils down to WPct = .500 + A - B, where WPct is the observed outcome percentage (.560) and A and B are the two teams. Since we also know that in this case, the winning percentages are complementary (A + B = 1.000), it's simple algebra to determine that a .530 team playing a .470 team would produce that observed .560 winning percentage.
...One revealing aspect about the AL's advantage over the NL is that even the lousier Junior Circuit teams are beating the Senior Circuit ones consistently. Sticking with the last five years of data (including this unfinished season) and splitting each league into upper and lower halves in terms of interleague records — the 35 best (or worst) team-seasons in each half in the AL, 40 in the NL — we find that AL's better half, which won at a .561 clip in those intraleague games, boosted their winning percentage to .610 in interleague games. The lower half, which produced a measly .438 winning percentage in intraleague, kicked NL tail at a .523 clip. The NL's better half posted a .551 winning percentage in intraleague play but just a .447 mark in interleague play, while the lower half dipped from .450 to .421.
This tendency persists if we break the teams into smaller groups. Here it is in quintiles:
Granted, we're not talking about huge sample sizes here (14 seasons apiece in the AL groups, 16 in the NL groups), but… wow. Every NL grouping, from the best 20 percent to the worst, won significantly less than 50 percent of its games against the AL. The top three AL groupings dominated interleague play, and while the fourth AL group won less than half its games, the bottom grouping won at a robust .556 clip, thanks to a couple recent Orioles teams going 11-7, a couple of Royals teams posted winning records (including 13-5 in 2008), and just two of the 14 teams in the group finishing below .500 in interleague play.
There's no shortage of theories as to why the AL enjoys such an advantage, from the DH rule to the evolutionary pressure of keeping up with the AL East arms race to the decrepitude of the NL's worst teams to the notion that the AL somehow enjoys a market size advantage, but that's a topic for another day, and maybe another writer, as I'm mostly interested in the practical applications for this when it comes to strength of schedule and Hit List rankings.
As the recent scrum between supporters of the candidacies of Joe Mauer and Mark Teixeira reminds us, nearly every Most Valuable Player award is capable of producing controversy. Not only do the Baseball Writers Association of America voters rarely elect the player who's worth the most wins to his team via some objective formula, they appear to shift the standards from year to year, instead constructing narratives to fit whatever loosely-gathered facts are at hand. Particularly in recent years, defensive value is often minimized or entirely ignored in favor of heavy hitters with big Triple Crown stats, almost invariably from successful teams.
The question is whether the voters' behavior can be predicted. Towards that end, I was tasked with building an MVP predictor in the spirit of a system such as Bill James' Hall of Fame Monitor, one that awards points for various levels of achievement in an attempt to identify who will win, as opposed to who should win. My initial bursts of enthusiasm for the assignment were soon followed by endless hours of cowering in the fetal position before a massive spreadsheet, but in the end I emerged with a system — Jaffe's Ugly MVP Predictor (JUMP) — which correctly identified 14 of the 28 winners during the Wild Card era (1995 onward), and put 27 of those winners among the league's top three in its point totals.
I limited the scope of the system to that post-strike timeframe for three main reasons: none of the 28 winners were pitchers, only one (Alex Rodriguez in 2003) played for a team that finished below .500, and 22 of them played on teams that qualified for the expanded postseason — extremely strong tendencies that could help separate seemingly equal candidates. Instead of focusing on round-numbered benchmarks like James did (a .300 batting average, 100 RBI), I chose to dispense with actual stat totals and rates and focus on league rankings among batting title qualifiers (3.1 plate appearances per game) in 12 key offensive categories...
So anyway, I built a point system which rewarded top 10 placement in 12 categories (a few of which — OBP and hits, among others — turned out to be insignificant in predicting voter behavior), added a very strong team success component which could be worth more than two or three category leads, and then gerrymandered the hell out of the thing to increase the number of successful hits and top threes, the latter a concession to the fact that at some point subjective elements take over for a number of voters. My maneuvers included adding positional bonuses for middle infielders and a penalty for being primarily a DH, a penalty for playing for the Rockies, fractional weighting for a couple of categories — moves which through endless, tedious trial and error increased the system's accuracy bit by bit.
Here's how the actual award winners fared in JUMP, along with the players it flagged as the likely winners in years where they differed from the voting:
Year AL Winner Rank System Winner 1995 Mo Vaughn 3 Albert Belle 1996 Juan Gonzalez 2 Albert Belle 1997 Ken Griffey 1 1998 Juan Gonzalez 1 1999 Ivan Rodriguez 10 Manny Ramirez 2000 Jason Giambi 1 2001 Ichiro Suzuki 2 Bret Boone 2002 Miguel Tejada 2 Alfonso Soriano 2003 Alex Rodriguez 1 2004 Vladimir Guerrero 1 2005 Alex Rodriguez 1 2006 Justin Morneau 3 Derek Jeter 2007 Alex Rodriguez 1 2008 Dustin Pedroia 1 Year NL Winner Rank System Winner 1995 Barry Larkin 3 Dante Bichette 1996 Ken Caminiti 1 1997 Larry Walker 2 Jeff Bagwell 1998 Sammy Sosa 1 1999 Chipper Jones 1 2000 Jeff Kent 3 Barry Bonds 2001 Barry Bonds 3 Sammy Sosa 2002 Barry Bonds 1 2003 Barry Bonds 1 2004 Barry Bonds 3 Albert Pujols 2005 Albert Pujols 1 2006 Ryan Howard 2 Albert Pujols 2007 Jimmy Rollins 3 Matt Holliday 2008 Albert Pujols 2 Ryan Howard
Ivan Rodriguez's 1999 victory — which still chafes my ass a decade on, because Derek Jeter had a monster year (349/.438/.552 with 24 homers, 134 runs and 102 RBI, all career highs) - is the system's big outlier, not to mention the only catcher who won during this era. That bodes poorly for Mauer, who as it is doesn't rank in the top 10 in any counting stat category and plays for a team unlikely to make the playoffs; he ranked just 28th when I ran the numbers on Sunday, and with his team's win to get right back to .500, that only pushes him to 15th. Mind you, this isn't a prediction that Mauer would finish 15th in the voting, or that he deserves to; as Mae West famously said, "Goodness has nothing to do with it." Basically what JUMP is saying is that history tells us that unless Mauer scores in the league's top three, he's got no chance of actually winning the award. Meanwhile, "Golden Boy" Teixeira leads the AL rankings thanks to running first in RBI, second in homers, and sixth in slugging while playing for a playoff bound team.
In all, it was a fun and satisfying project. I've got a few ideas that might increase its accuracy a hair, and I'll revisit the topic if they turn out to be worthwhile.
For each team, I computed opponents' strength of schedule, both for the games played through August 24 and for the balance of the schedule beyond that:
Instead of plugging in the Hit List Factor uniformly, we've again applied historically-derived adjustments to account for the home team winning 55 percent of the time, and for the AL winning 58 percent of interleague games. Using the log5 method, this boils down to a 25-point (.025) bonus or tax applied based on whether the opponent is at home or on the road, and a 40-point (.040) one applied for interleague play. To apply some revisionist history to our Big Apple example—indeed, ongoing strength-of-schedule calculations are the definition of revisionist history—when the Yankees (.604) played the Mets (.460) at Yankee Stadium, the latter's adjusted winning percentage was recorded as .460 - .025 - .040 = .395. When they play at Citi Field, it was recorded as .460 + .025 - .040 = .445. From the Mets' point of view, the Yankees were a .669 team (.604 + .025 + .040) in the Bronx and a .619 (.604 - .025 + .040) team in Queens.
Both leagues have eight teams apiece with nominal chances at reaching the postseason. Here's how the AL contenders stack up (BP/ESPN Insider), along with their chances of reaching the postseason from our Playoff Odds report (through Wednesday):
In the AL, the next five weeks feature the contenders playing each other about half the time; the White Sox play 23 of their remaining 35 games against other contenders, including the one they played against the Yankees tonight. For the Yanks, it's 18 out of 35, including nine of their final 12. The Twins, who have the easiest schedule remaining, play just 16 out of their final 35 against contenders — but they've also got Carl Pavano. Push.
Despite having eight contenders, the Senior Circuit has a lot more stratification, with three teams nearly locks for the playoffs and the Rockies heavily favored for the Wild Card (though as I write this, the Giants' Tim Lincecum is shutting out Colorado while the Rockies' Ubaldo Jimenez yielded a solo homer to Pablo Sandoval). Not only that, but most of the contenders will only play about a third of their remaining games against each other. From that group, the Giants have the toughest schedule by 20 points, and they play 18 out of 34 against contenders, while the Dodgers play just nine.
In all, it definitely looks as though the NL will see a lot of September scoreboard watching interspersed with a handful of meaningful series, while the AL will see a lot more head-to-head action with playoff implications.
Today's Baseball Prospectus/ESPN Insider double dip concerns the Rockies' Todd Helton, and in particular his Hall of Fame chances. If you were quietly minding your business by not thinking about Helton's Cooperstown case, you weren't alone; I was somewhat surprised when I was offered the assignment:
Is Todd Helton bound for the Hall of Fame? On the surface, that's not exactly a burning question, even given the resurgent Rockies first baseman's .323/.400/.505 showing to date. At 35 years of age, under contract through 2011, and approaching no major milestones, it's not as though his moment of reckoning has arrived, though he did recently become the 50th player to reach the 500-doubles milestone. That has to count for something, right?
When it finally arrives, Helton's Cooperstown candidacy will be built upon numbers compiled under what have been arguably the most optimal conditions ever afforded a hitter over an extended period of time. He did his best work in high-altitude Coors Field at a time when scoring rates soared higher than they had been in seventy years. His monster performance of 2000 — 42 homers, 147 RBI, and a .372/.463/.698 line — was produced while playing half his games in a ballpark that increased scoring by 25 percent relative to the league, this in a year when the league average of 5.0 runs per game was higher than any year since 1930 (although it did match 1999's rate). His decline from that lofty peak has been masked by his hitter-friendly park, to the point that his career rate stats are still a sterling .328/.427/.569, numbers he hasn't exceeded since 2004 (save for a .445 OBP in 2005).
The first line of that second graf now has some additional information to back it up. Via Baseball-Reference.com's Sean Forman, I've obtained a long-sought leaderboard for B-R's AIR stat, which indexes the combination of park, league and era scoring levels into one number to provide an idea of how favorable or unfavorable the conditions he faced were, scoring-wise, with 100 being average. Helton tops the list:
Player PA AIR Todd Helton 7494 124 Neifi Perez 5365 123 Vinny Castilla 7305 120 Dante Bichette 6777 118 Fresco Thompson 2780 117 Mel Almada 2702 117 Beau Bell 2997 117 Terry Shumpert 2159 117 Larry Walker 7958 117 Garrett Atkins 3002 117 Brad Hawpe 2620 117 Ed Morgan 3205 116 Jack Burns 3900 116 Ski Melillo 5402 116 Earl Averill* 7160 116 Rip Radcliff 4398 116 Quinton McCracken 2700 116 Matt Holliday 3420 116 Don Hurst 3681 115 Dick Porter 2790 115 Max Bishop 5678 115 Odell Hale 4057 115 Moose Solters 3651 115 Joe Vosmik 6007 115 Mike Lansing 4486 115 Rusty Greer 4370 115 Jeff Cirillo 6026 115 Chad Tracy 2493 115 Sammy Hale 3067 114 Gene Robertson 2415 114 Butch Henline 2331 114 Bing Miller 6675 114 Mickey Cochrane* 6055 114 Mule Haas 4749 114 Marv Owen 4147 114 Billy Rogell 5819 114 Bruce Campbell 5337 114 Charlie Gehringer* 10096 114 Eric McNair 4805 114 Luke Sewell 5896 114 Jimmie Foxx* 9599 114 Danny Bautista 2681 114 Darren Bragg 2790 114 Pokey Reese 3082 114 Chris Stynes 2539 114 Jeffrey Hammonds 3354 114 Richard Hidalgo 3884 114 Tony Womack 5299 114 Todd Walker 4991 114 Henry Blanco 2480 114 * Hall of Famer
Eight of the top 11 players on the list spent some amount of their careers with the Rockies. Of the four Hall of Famers who make the list, it's interesting Averill ranks as one of Helton's top 10 comps via Bill James' Similarity Scores method; I listed the three HOFers who are among his top four comps (Johnny Mize, Chuck Klein and Hank Greenberg) but didn't mention Averill in the actual article.
In any event, the older Jamesian metrics (Similarity Scores, Hall of Fame Monitor and Hall of Fame Standards) suggest Helton is a Hall of Famer and provide a chance to (re)introduce JAWS in on the ESPN site. I've written about JAWS for SI.com (not once but twice), and former BP colleague Jonah Keri used JAWS for an ESPN piece a few years ago, but this breaks a small bit of new ground for me, which is exciting.
According to JAWS, Helton makes for a decidedly below-average Hall of Fame candidate at present. He entered the year with 54.6 WARP for his career and 46.1 for his peak, for a JAWS of 50.4. He's currently on pace for a season WARP of 4.4, which would not only boost his career total but rank as his seventh-best season, upping his overall JAWS score to 52.6. The average Hall of Fame first baseman, by comparison, scores at 75.8 for career, 48.4 for peak, and 62.1 overall. Just four of the Hall's 18 first basemen score lower than Helton, and three of them—Frank Chance, Jim Bottomley, and George Kelly—were elected by the much more permissive Veterans Committee. Helton needs to defy age and his bad back to produce four more seasons equivalent to this one to reach the career average for Hall first basemen, and even then his peak would rate as slightly below average.
JAWS is a prescription to improve the Hall's rolls via the election of above-average candidates. It is not, however, a predictor of what the voting body will do, as the 2009 balloting clearly illustrates. While Tim Raines (94.3 career/54.9 peak/74.6 overall JAWS) is clearly ahead of the Hall's established standard for left fielders (84.2/.52.5/68.4) in career, peak, and JAWS, but Rock received just 22.6 percent of the vote. On the other hand, Jim Rice (55.1/39.6/47.4) was elected with 76.4 percent on the ballot, a result that has as its foundation the lack of recognition of the influence that hitter-friendly Fenway Park had inflating Rice's statistics (to say nothing of inflating his legend). Indeed, the Hall is littered with hitters who accumulated hefty stats in favorable environments, though many owe their elections not to BBWAA voters but to the cronyism of the VC, which made a habit of grabbing flash-in-the-pan offensive stars from the 1930s, including the aforementioned Klein, whom JAWS ranks as 20th out of the 22 right fielders in the Hall.
I took the assignment thinking Helton really had no chance in Hell at the Hall, and while I remain unconvinced that he belongs — barring an especially productive late-30s run — I did come away with more respect for his accomplishments. Guys with .307 EqAs, excellent plate discipline (1095/862 career K/BB) and defense worth about five runs above average per year don't grow on trees. That doesn't mean we should put them all in the Hall of Fame, however. Consider the contemporary first base/DH types who rank above Helton according to JAWS:
Player Career Peak JAWS Frank Thomas 105.4 66.4 85.9 Jeff Bagwell 97.2 62.8 80.0 Albert Pujols 78.7 71.9 75.3 Rafael Palmeiro 96.0 52.6 74.3 Jim Thome 84.7 50.6 67.7 Mark McGwire 79.7 52.4 66.1 John Olerud 79.9 50.2 65.1 Will Clark 74.4 50.2 62.3 AVG HOF 1B 75.8 48.4 62.1 Jason Giambi 64.3 50.3 57.3 Fred McGriff 65.6 45.8 55.7 Carlos Delgado 61.3 42.8 52.1 Mark Grace 60.2 41.0 50.6 Todd Helton 54.6 46.1 50.4
Helton's surpassed Grace and has more or less pulled even with Delgado, but it will take one outstanding year or two OK ones to move past McGriff, and yet another one to top Giambi -- and he'd still be shy of the Hall standard. Suffice it to say, he's got his work cut out for him.
What's gone wrong in Cleveland? PECOTA's division-winning projection called for a meager 86 wins (around three more than the above method suggests) and a 38 percent chance of making the postseason, casting them as weak favorites over the Tigers. The offense, despite injuries to Travis Hafner and Grady Sizemore, has essentially lived up to expectations; projected to rank fourth in the league in scoring, they actually rank fifth. The pitching, however, ranks dead stinking last instead of the projected seventh.
The responsibility for that showing rests with both the rotation (13th in SNLVAR) and the bullpen (14th in WXRL). Blame Shapiro for assembling the rotation which has put up a 5.95 ERA beyond Lee. While his acquisition of Anthony Reyes was a worthwhile gambit that went sour due to elbow problems culminating in Tommy John surgery, his signing of Carl Pavano has brought plenty of bad (five disaster starts, with more runs than innings pitched) to go with the good (10 quality starts), with a 5.37 ERA and 1.4 homers per nine. Wedge and his staff own a share of the blame for failing to straighten out Fausto Carmona; hoping the sinkerballer would regain his stellar 2007 form after mechanical and injury woes ruined 2008, they suffered a 7.42 ERA over 12 gruesome starts before farming him out in June. The rest of the rotation fillers—Aaron Laffey, Jeremy Sowers, Zach Jackson, David Huff and Scott Lewis—apparently arrived from a big-box store where hittable lefties are sold by the gross; that quintet has given the Tribe 36 starts with a 5.73 ERA and just 4.7 strikeouts per nine.
The bullpen's been worse, a major reason the team is an AL-high 7.7 wins behind their projected third-order record, their Pythagorean record after adjusting for scoring environment, run elements, and quality of opposition. Poor early-season performances by Kerry Wood, Rafael Betancourt (since traded to Colorado), Rafael Perez (since demoted) and Jensen Lewis (recalled this past weekend after a five-week demotion) dug the team an early hole; they were already 4.7 games behind their third-order projection by mid-May. That was around the time the buzzards started circling Wedge, who presided over an uncannily similar debacle last year, when the relievers he rode hard late in 2007 spit the bit. Wedge has now presided over three slow-starting teams in the past four years, and while his overall record stands at 540-537, just two of his seven teams have finished above .500, and they've fallen a cumulative 29 games shy of their Pythagorean projections.
Shapiro will have to answer for his pledge to keep his skipper in place, and ultimately, for the drying up of the team's talent pipeline amid years of unimpressive drafts. From 1997 through 2008, the Indians' organization produced more major league talent than any other AL Central team, according to the Value Production Standings work which Steve Treder presented at the most recent SABR convention. Alas, an increasing proportion of that value, from Manny Ramirez and C.C. Sabathia down through Jeremy Guthrie, was delivered for other teams. As ESPN's Jerry Crasnick pointed out recently, Guthrie has been the most successful of the 19 first-round or supplemental pics on Shapiro's watch, but all of that success has been with the Orioles. Among those on their major league roster, top 2004 pick Sowers and top 2006 pick Huff, are among the glut of low-upside southpaws, while top 2005 pick Trevor Crowe looks like a card-carrying member of the Future Fourth Outfielders of America.
The article, and particularly the draft stuff, generated a lengthy discussion at the Lets Go Tribe! blog.
• Yesterday I previewed the Yankees-Red Sox series (BP/ESPN), exploring how the two teams' in-season upgrades have changed them, particularly since the Red Sox won the first five of their eight straight against the Yanks:
On Thursday evening, the Yankees and Red Sox—once again the AL East's top two teams—kick off a four-game series in the Bronx. Much has been and will continue to be made of the fact that the Yankees are 0-8 against their heated rivals this year. Beyond that lopsided tally, they've been the better of the two ballclubs to date, particularly since Alex Rodriguez returned from the hip surgery which sidelined him for the first month of the season, a period during which the Red Sox beat the Yankees five times in a two-week span. After all, it's the Yankees who lead the division by 2.5 games, the result of them currently having the upper hand in the division's never-ceasing arms race.
...The real turnaround has been in the bullpen, however. Since [Alex] Rodriguez's return — a point that more or less coincides with Alfredo Aceves' recall from Scranton — the relievers have put up a 3.78 Fair Run Average with 8.0 WXRL, the latter mark rating as the second best in the majors. That ugly first month aside, manager Joe Girardi has reasserted his ability to sift through a handful of off-brand relievers to build a bridge to Mariano Rivera, with Phil Hughes (1.8 WXRL) and Aceves (1.3 WXRL) emerging to supplant those aforementioned arsonists as well as injured and ineffective Brian Bruney, joining Phil Coke (1.4 WXRL) among the Yankees' late-game options. After struggling as a starter, Hughes has flat-out dominated in a relief role, with a 1.00 Fair Run Average and a 39/7 K/BB ratio in 30.1 innings. General manager Brian Cashman remains adamant that like Joba Chamberlain, his future lies in the rotation, but for the moment, he stands as one of the Yankee season's saviors. Thanks in large part to their remade relief corps, the Yanks are now 4.3 wins ahead of their first-order Pythagorean projection, second only to the Mariners among AL teams — a margin that's allowed them to leapfrog their division rivals.
As for the Red Sox... After enduring a three-week stretch in which the Sox hit just .224/.314/.386 while averaging a meager 4.2 runs per game and going 9-9, general manager Theo Epstein chose to make a deal to augment his lineup rather than his rotation, so instead of gunning for Roy Halladay, he dealt two pitching prospects for the Indians' Victor Martinez, also acquiring Chris Duncan, Casey Kotchman and (briefly) Adam LaRoche in smaller deals, moves which particularly provide manager Terry Francona with considerable flexibility at catcher, first base and third base. Since Epstein began dealing on July 22, the revamped offense has averaged 6.3 runs per game, highlighted by an 18-run breakout in which Martinez went 5-for-6.
It was quite a joy to watch the Yanks take it to John Smoltz last night (is it just me or did Paul O'Neill keep calling him "Schmaltz"?), not surprisingly a topic of discussion on my weekly radio hit on what's now being dubbed "The Boston Sports Post Game Show" on ESPN 890...
[#2 Yankees] Trilogy: Johnny Damon homers in three straight games, including once off Roy Halladay, whom he owns (.356/.426/.533 in 101 PA lifetime), and once off John Smoltz, his first career hit off the 42-year-old. It's hardly the only hit the Yanks collect off of Smoltz; they paste him for nine hits and eight runs in 3.1 innings to gain their first victory over Boston in nine tries this year. As lopsided as their series has been, the Yanks have been the better team since their early meetings thanks to the return of Alex Rodriguez and the revamping of their bullpen. They now lead the AL East by 3.5 games, a swing of eight games in the standings since A-Rod's May 8 return, and they've won 28 out of their last 38.
[#4 Red Sox] In just his second game with the Red Sox, Victor Martinez makes himself at home with a huge day (6 1 5 4) in an 18-10 drubbing of the Orioles, a nearly four-hour epic in which the two teams combine to score in every inning, just the third time that's happened this year. The win keeps the Sox just a half-game behind the Yankees, but Clay Buchholz's ugly performance and the three losses that follow provide a sobering reminder of the pitching upgrades they bypassed at the deadline, as Buchholz, Brad Penny and John Smoltz are torched for 24 hits, seven homers and 20 runs in 13.1 innings. All three have Support-Neutral Winning Percentages well under .500.
Going up state this weekend, so any Yanks-Sox action I catch will be audio-only via my iPhone. Here's hoping the Yanks continue to kick serious ass.
• A Basseball Prospectus/ESPN Insider piece examining second-half strength of schedule, revisiting an earlier piece but using Hit List Factor instead of a team's projected winning percentage. Here's how the teams shake down:
Glad to see that two of my three teams have cupcake schedules, though for the Brewers it won't mean much if they can't improve their pitching.
• Last week's Hit List, which found the Dodgers and Yankees 1-2 for what I believe is the first time in the column's history.
• Speaking of the Hit List, I was lucky enough to get to take a time out during its creation to watch the final two innings of Mark Buehrle's perfect game. While I've seen a few no-hitters in their entirety (including Nolan Ryan's record-setting fifth) and caught the tail end of several more, this was the first perfecto I'd seen the end of; I missed those of David Wells (turned that one off early, d'oh) and David Cone. DeWayne Wise's spectacular catch to rob Gabe Kapler of a home run to lead off the ninth inning was worth the price of admission alone.
• Also from last Friday, in honor of Rickey Henderson's induction into the Hall of Fame, I took a at which contemporary players are most like Henderson:
Rickey Henderson will be inducted into the Hall of Fame on Sunday, an honor that feels long overdue for the player who holds the all-time records for both stolen bases and runs, is a member of the 3,000 Hit Club, and is widely acknowledged as the greatest leadoff hitter of all time. "If you could split him in two, you'd have two Hall of Famers," wrote Bill James of Henderson nearly a decade ago. The bearded bard of sabermetrics was onto something, and not only with regards to Henderson's Cooperstown credentials. Scanning the horizon in search of a truly similar active player, one comes up with only fractional Rickeys, players who possess elements of Henderson's game — his speed-power combo, his keen batting eye, his basepath derring-do — but nowhere near to the exact same blend.
In honor of Rickey's impending induction, I set out to search for the most Rickey-like player among the current crop of actives, devising a series of similarity scores in categories that typify the unique shape of Henderson's performance. Rather than use raw statistics to compare a player whose major league career began 30 years ago, I called upon Clay Davenport's translated statistics, which normalize all players to the same run-scoring environment. Instead of relying upon a single year's performance, I used a 3/4/5 weighted average of 2007, 2008, and 2009 stats for all players with at least 900 actual plate appearances over that span, then boiled those down to a per-650 plate appearance format for comparison to a similar encapsulation of Henderson's career. This sells the superstar short by including his decline phase, but with nobody even remotely close to Rickey Henderson at his peak out there today, the bar needs a bit of lowering.
The players were then scored in ten categories, with Henderson's performance defined as 1000 points, the least Henderson-like as zero, and all performances in between scaled accordingly. Occasionally, small-sample outliers had to be removed for this to work; crediting a player who's 4-for-5 in stolen bases with similarity to Henderson's 80.4 percent success rate on the basepaths isn't appropriate. It's important to note that players who exceeded Henderson in these categories — with higher slugging percentages or stolen-base success rates, say — were penalized, too; this process isn't designed to tell us the best player, just the "Rickeyest."
While obviously I had the upper hand because I was the one creating the system, I was as surprised as anyone else when the Orioles' Brian Roberts came out on top, with B.J. Upton, Johnny Damon, Jose Reyes and Carl Crawford following. "All of these players combine speed, power, and the ability to get on base to some degree, but none of them profile quite like Henderson does; each punts at least one category in this particular decathalon," I wrote, noting particularly that none of the overall leaders walks with Henderson's frequency. For more, see BP and ESPN Insider, and look for a follow-up at BP on Tuesday.
• Following up this item, which gave me ample fodder for the Mets' hit List entry, Tony Bernazard gets what he richly deserved: a pink slip. What an asshole. Meanwhile, Diamondbacks scout Carlos Gomez clarifies his part in one of the incidents that led to the firing. Contrary to the New York Daily News' earlier report, Bernazard did not directly address Gomez with his profanity-laced tirade, but rather berated a Mets official who told him to wait until the end of the half-inning before taking the seat occupied by Gomez.
[Update]: Via Shysterball, Mets GM Omar Minaya's performance at the press conference is worth a look. He tangles with Daily News Mets beat reporter Adam Rubin, accusing his coverage of being slanted by his own desire to join the Mets' player development department under Bernazard. This is turning into a parade of trainwrecks. And I can't stop watching.
• Finally, I'll be at the Society for American Baseball Research convention in Washington, DC from Thursday until Sunday. Don't be shy if you see me there and want to say hi — I don't bite.
TRADES: TEAMS SCOUR THE NON-HALLADAY OPTIONS Baseball Prospectus: The best of the rest behind The Doc
Beyond [Roy] Halladay, who's fourth in the AL with a 2.73 ERA and fifth in the majors with a .646 support-neutral winning percentage, the best commodity on the pitching market is Cliff Lee, whose 3.17 ERA and .632 SNWP also are high on the leaderboard. From there, the drop-off is steep, however. Doug Davis (3.95 ERA, .531 SNWP) is above average, Jon Garland (4.41 ERA, .496 SNWP) is average, and then you're into the dregs of Carl Pavano (5.48 ERA, .467 SNWP) and Brad Penny (5.02 ERA, .448 SNWP). - Jay Jaffe
TRADES: BECAUSE OF WAIVERS, MATT HOLLIDAY COULD LAND ANYWHERE Baseball Prospectus: With Holliday, what you see (in Oakland) is what you get
[Matt] Holliday's stock has been rebounding, thanks to a .311/.389/.557 (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) July with three homers in the past week, breaking a six-week homerless drought. No team acquiring him should expect a sudden return to his Colorado form, however. His numbers this season (.280/.372/.448) are a very good match for his career road numbers (.281/.351/.450), confirming the much-held suspicion that his power was the product of Coors Field's high altitude. - Jay Jaffe
TRADES: STILL LOTS OF INTEREST IN PENNY Baseball Prospectus: No team should break the bank for Penny
Brad Penny is not really the same type of pitcher he was during his Dodgers heyday. He's getting grounders on just 40 percent of balls in play, compared to about 49 percent in 2007, and he's lucky he hasn't allowed even more home runs, as his home runs-to-foul balls rate of 7.9 percent is well below league average. He'd benefit from a move to a friendlier park in the easier league, but he's nobody the Brewers should break the bank for. - Jay Jaffe
You say Halladay, I say Holliday, let's call the whole deal off...
Enough with the first-half navel-gazing. Over the course of the past two days, Baseball Prospectus colleagues Steven Goldman, Christina Kahrl and I have offered second-half prescriptions for each of the thirty teams -- one or two suggestions that could improve their outlook in the short or long term, depending upon their chances of making the playoffs. In the AL version (BP or ESPN Insider flavor), Steve takes the AL East, Christina the AL West, and yours truly the AL Central. Here's what I had to say about the two teams in my Toledo jurisdiction (yesterday's radio hit is here, btw):
The Tigers have the right idea by benching Magglio Ordoñez who's 163 plate appearances from vesting an $18 million option for next year, and hitting an unacceptable .243/.319/.292 against righties. He can still hit lefties (.300/.356/.463), but in order to limit him to a platoon role and turn the position into an offensive plus—something the Tigers, with a .250 EqA, sorely need—manager Jim Leyland needs a better lefty-swinging corner outfielder than Clete Thomas. The Royals' Mark Teahen and the Orioles' Luke Scott are among the available, affordable corner outfielders who would fit the bill.
One reason the Indians are last in the league in runs prevented is that their pitchers don't miss many bats; they're 12th in strikeout rate and 13th in Defensive Efficiency. As they play out the string, they should move Kerry Wood back to the rotation. He's been lousy enough as a closer (5.28 ERA, -0.2 WXRL, 12 saves in 16 opportunities) not to be missed, and while his fragility might necessitate a short leash, he'd provide the rotation with at least one pitcher with a strikeout rate above league average. For $20.5 million over two years, is that too much to ask?
The Wood one was greeted with plenty of skepticism over at BP, which isn't terribly surprising. It's an outside-the-box modest proposal, something that's not likely to happen. My point is that the Indians, who have only one starter with an ERA below 5.00 (Cliff Lee) have absolutely nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Wood's contract is short enough that it's likely covered by insurance. It's also got a vesting option for 2011 if he finishes 55 games in either year (he's at 29 now), an extra $11 million commitment that makes absolutely no sense. The Tribe is more likely to be able to offload him elsewhere if he can demonstrate that he can start, at least for a short stretch. And not to sound callous, but if he breaks, so what? He's not helping at all at his current level of performance, and he's never going to live up to that contract.
For the NL piece (BP and ESPN Insider), Steve again takes the East, Christina takes the Central, and I've got the West. Here's what I had to say about the Dodgers and Padres:
Snubbed via the All-Star selection process, Matt Kemp can't even get respect from his own manager despite a .320/.384/.495 first-half performance. Joe Torre has batted him seventh or eighth in 45 of 87 games, and in the top five in just 11 games, this despite the fact that his OBP is third on the team behind Manny Ramirez and — wait for it — Juan Pierre. Oh, and he's also stolen 19 bases (second to Pierre) in 23 attempts. Even with Rafael Furcal heating up after a frigid three-month slump, moving Kemp to the leadoff spot would give one of the team's most effective hitters at least another 50 PA over the course of the second half, adding runs to the Dodgers' ledger ["...particularly with Ramirez batting behind him," I should have added.]
Adrian Gonzalez is the poor man's Mark Teixeira, minus the switch-hitting part — an excellent all-around player with power, plate discipline, and a good glove. And the Padres, with a depleted team that's nowhere near contention, should strive to get a Teixeira-like return for their star slugger, the kind of multi-prospect raid on another team's system that can provide several cogs for a future contender. Gonzalez is ridiculously affordable ($3 million this year, just $4.75 million for 2010 and a $5.5 million club option for 2011 that apparently has no buyout), and losing him will make for an extremely bland major league product in San Diego in the near term, though the sight of 275-pound behemoth Kyle Blanks playing first base on a daily basis might offer some amusement. The point is that since the Padres have the leverage here, they don't actually need to deal him yet, and they shouldn't unless they're offered a package that changes their future.
Until the past few days, I've actually been against the idea that the Padres needed to trade Gonzalez, a move that's bound to be a tough sell to Padres fans. But seeing the way opposing pitchers walked the slugger more than 20 percent of the time last month, I don't think there's a lot of excitement to be had by keeping him around amid such a barren lineup. The suspense of whether Kevin Kouzmanoff (.244/.280/.405), Chase Headley (.232/.308/.366) or the undead Brian Giles (.191/.277/.271) — three players who've batted behind Gonzalez frequently this year — doesn't exactly make for scintillating baseball. But that's just me. Padres' fans mileage may vary.
As for the centerpiece, who ever heard of an All-Star Game played in less than three hours? It was downright old-school, a competitive affair that turned on a spectacular defensive play (Carl Crawford's catch of Brad Hawpe's drive) and a triple by speedster Curtis Granderson, and kept the suspense right up to the final out. But all of the early-count swinging -- 15 at-bats ended after a single pitch, another 14 after two pitches -- kept the contest feeling like an exhibition. Swing at this, because I've got a plane to catch.
Anyway, between the actual midpoint of the season (which was a week ago Sunday) and the All-Star break, it's a convenient time to look back at the first half, and at Baseball Prospectus we've been using the time to examine how our PECOTA projections have fared thus far. In Tuesday's piece I gave an undignified burial to three teams whom PECOTA saw as potentially playoff bound, the Diamondbacks (88-win Wild Card favorites), the A's (84-win AL West favorites) and the Indians (86-win AL Central favorites. All three are well below .500, with the latter two in last place in their divisions, and all have seen their Playoff Odds approach zero. Hence, "The Flatliners."
In today's piece, mirrored at ESPN Insider, I expand upon that piece to show which teams have seen their Playoff Odds change the most since our preseason projections:
The three-day All-Star break is a convenient time to begin the grieving process, and so yesterday made for a timely opportunity to shovel dirt on three teams whom PECOTA tabbed as potentially playoff-bound back in April. The Diamondbacks, A's and Indians may not be mathematically eliminated from postseason contention yet, but with their odds of joining the dance falling below 0.5 percent, a burial seemed in order.
As the BP staff has taken the past several days to examine how our preseason PECOTA forecasts have fared with regards to teams, hitters, starters and relievers, it's worth remembering that such projections don't equal destiny. They're simply a shorthand for a wider range of probabilities centered around the weighted mean forecasts we publicize, and all kinds of real-world factors — injuries, bad luck, mismanagement, imperfect information, and so on — can affect their accuracy.
Bearing that in mind, today we'll examine which teams have helped or harmed their postseason chances the most relative to our initial forecasts using our plain vanilla version of the Playoff Odds report, thus isolating the effect of our projections from our expectations for these teams going forward. In that report, each team's current record and third-order Pythagorean record — their record after adjusting for scoring environment, run elements, and quality of opposition — are factored into a Monte Carlo simulation of the rest of the season, with their records regressing not to .500 but to their third-order winning percentages. Run differentials play a big part here; a team that's above .500 but being outscored won't see favorable odds.
Surprisingly enough, none of the freshly buried teams rates as the biggest disappointment from this perspective:
...From this vantage, it's the Cubs who have disappointed the most, though at least they maintain about a one-in-six shot at October. Expected to pace the circuit with 95 wins and an MLB-high 11-game cushion, they're instead tied for third in the NL Central, 3 1/2 games back. Injuries to Milton Bradley and Aramis Ramirez, disappointment from Alfonso Soriano, and a hole in the lineup where Mark DeRosa used to be (their second basemen have hit a combined .224/.280/.294) have limited the Cubs to just 4.1 runs per game and the league's third-lowest EqA.
The Diamondbacks' offense ranks directly above them, a problem compounded by the loss of Brandon Webb, who hasn't pitched since Opening Day, and a wretched bullpen. The A's main problem has been a lack of offense, some of which is attributable to bad luck on balls in play>. The Indians merely have a staff that's been the league's worst in terms of run prevention because they don't miss enough bats; they're 12th in strikeout rate and 13th in Defensive Efficiency. The Mets have been without offensive stalwarts Jose Reyes, Carlos Delgado and Carlos Beltran for weeks now, and their pitching depth has been compromised by injuries as well; their playoff hopes aren't dead yet, but please excuse their weak pulse, clammy skin and stiffening limbs.
The Yankees wind up in the middle of the pack; their overall preseason odds of 66.6 percent have fallen slightly, to 58.9 percent, but they're still very much alive. The Dodgers wind up second from the top of the final list, those teams whose odds have improved the most; they went from heavy pre-season favorites (57.2 percent) to near-certainties (99.3 percent) despite Manny Ramirez's 50-game suspension.
Anyway, I've also got another piece up today on BP and ESPN that looks forward to the second half; I'll save that for another post.
In Tuesday's chat, a flurry of Baseball Prospectus readers wanted to know my thoughts on the possiblility of Blue Jays' ace Roy Halladay being dealt:
Roopan (toronto): If the jays put a Halladay/Wells combo on the market - would [there] be any take[r]s. I don't believe a mid-market team like the jays can afford to pay 2 players 20+ mil.
JJ: I don't think there's any team out there who could afford the blood and treasure it would take to land both at the same time. And I don't think there's any reason to trade Halladay given that he's got another year on his contract. Pitching is what's keeping the Jays relevant right now, and while I'm not really a believer that they can elbow their way into the postseason this year, there's zero chance it happens without the Doctor.
The topic was still a hot one when I did Wednesday's Toledo and Boston (no MP3 love) radio hits. Today I've got a BP/ESPN Insider piece examining the teams most in need of Halladay's services, a short list which assumes that he won't be dealt within the AL East, that he'll be dealt to a team that can add payroll, and one whose minor league system isn't devoid of blue-chip prospects:
Our Support-Neutral pitching stats tell us he's been worth 3.9 wins above replacement level over a half-season of work -- that's a lot -- and it's no stretch to think he'd be worth three additional wins to nearly any team that bumps aside their fifth starter. It's a truly massive upgrade.
The Jays' ace won't come cheap with regards to blood or treasure, however. Not only will he take multiple top prospects to acquire, he's owed the balance of a $14.25 million contract this year and then $15.75 million next year, a price that will scare away some teams operating in a tight economy. That's also before considering that waiving his no-trade clause might require a Johan Santana-style extension, though Ricciardi says he won't open a negotiating window for a potential suitor.
Those obstacles suggest a trade isn't imminent, but from the standpoint of these five teams, it should be. An extra three starts between now and the July 31 deadline would be worth three-quarters of a win beyond a replacement-level fifth starter. Ask the Brewers what that was worth to them last year.
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1. Phillies: 5.02 rotation ERA (15th in NL), 6.0 SNLVAR (13th in NL) No other team combines the resources and the motivation to deal for Doc better than the defending champs, who lead the NL East mainly because their offense is pummeling opponents into submission, scoring one-third of a run more per game than any other NL team. With Cole Hamels battling a post-championship hangover and Brett Myers probably done for the year due to hip surgery, rookie J.A. Happ is the only Phils starter who's beating the park-adjusted league-average ERA. His arrival has coincided with an improved performance from the starting five (a 3.98 ERA since May 23), but they remain vulnerable to the long ball, allowing 1.3 HR/9, and 1.6 HR/9 overall. The staff as a whole is the league's most fly ball-oriented, a bad match for Citizens Bank Park. Halladay's ability to generate ground balls (doing so on 56.4 percent of balls in play, the fifth-best mark in the majors) would be an ideal tonic. Pairing him with Hamels as 1-2 punch should give potential postseason opponents night sweats.
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3. Brewers: 5.01 rotation ERA (14th in NL), 5.5 SNLVAR (14th in NL) Even with Ryan Braun pressing the case that the Brewers need better starting pitching to survive the NL Central race, general manager Doug Melvin has continually cautioned that he won't trade his top prospects in another CC Sabathia-sized deal. Braun has a point, however. Yovani Gallardo is the only Brew Crew starter with an ERA better than the park-adjusted league average, and with David Bush injured and Manny Parra banished to the minors, the team has been forced to call upon journeyman Mike Burns, who earned his first major league win just two weeks shy of his 31st birthday. Like Sabathia last year, Halladay could dominate in the Central, which features four offenses scoring at rates below the league average.
Personally, I'd be surprised if a deal gets done before the deadline. The Phillies will be likely reluctant to give up the prospects Toronto wants, such as Kyle Drabek -- good thing, as far as the Dodgers' pursuit of the pennant is concerned -- and the Rangers (#2 here) won't be willing to take on the extra $20+ million.
In case you hadn't noticed, it's been a rollercoaster season for Alex Rodriguez. Steroid revelations, hip surgery, a .219 batting average balls in play, an inflated walk rate, a recent eight-game, five-homer tear — he's done plenty to confound expectations, both good and bad. Yet the ever-controversial 33-year-old slugger's .313 Equivalent Average through the first 81 games is just two points off his PECOTA weighted mean projection of .311.
Rodriguez's is hardly the only on-the-nose projection our projection system has had halfway into the season. Of the 227 players with at least 200 plate appearances through Sunday, the schedule's official midpoint, 97 are within 15 points of their PECOTA weighted mean EqAs. The variations are normally distributed, with 154 players within 29 points — one standard deviation — of their projections, and 213 within two standard deviations. Here's a non-random selection of players within 15 points either way:
Player Tm PA Act Proj Dif Justin Upton ARI 325 .302 .287 .015 Matt Kemp LAN 336 .302 .290 .012 Robinson Cano NYA 347 .271 .264 .007 Jacoby Ellsbury BOS 338 .275 .270 .005 Jason Bay BOS 348 .299 .295 .004 David Wright NYN 353 .325 .323 .002 Hanley Ramirez FLO 336 .326 .324 .002 Alex Rodriguez NYA 221 .313 .311 .002 Mark Teixeira NYA 356 .309 .308 .001 Miguel Cabrera DET 330 .306 .308 -.002 Ken Griffey SEA 250 .265 .272 -.007 Emilio Bonifacio FLO 347 .223 .233 -.010 Dustin Pedroia BOS 365 .270 .284 -.014
This list is simply a baker's dozen of players, mostly from the East coast, who have been surrounded by lofty — and in some cases unreasonable — expectations. We've got three of the game's six highest-paid hitters (Rodriguez, Teixeira, and Cabrera), the reigning AL MVP (Pedroia), the whipping boy of Queens (Wright), a prodigal son returned (Griffey), a 21-year-old phenom (Upton), arguably the game's best all-around player (Ramirez), a horrible idea for a leadoff man (Bonifacio), and a few others who frequent conversations in the Northeast corridor. Despite the varying shapes of performance hidden by EqA, they're all about as productive as PECOTA — if not the chattering classes — expects.
Recall that EqA basically is an expression of runs created per plate appearance, adjusted for park and normalized so as to be expressed on a scale of batting average, with .260 defined as league average, .230 as replacement level and .300 a mark of excellence. None of the Yankees or Dodgers make the leaderboards at either extreme. The Brewers' Prince Fielder (.305 projected, .355 actual) is eighth among the overachievers, and the Mets' Gary Sheffield (.271 projected, .318 actual) is 12th, one of just three over-30 players (along with Ichiro Suzuki and Raul Ibañez) among that group. That's after his 43-point shortfall ranked second-to-last in 2008, and after he was released earlier this spring by the Tigers.
As for the trailers, the Brew Crew's Bill Hall (.270 projected, .204 actual) is third. Former Yankee Alfonso Soriano (.294 projected, .241 actual) is eighth, and Boston's David Ortiz (.297 projected, .248 actual) is ninth even after a scorching June performance. The Dodgers' Russell Martin and Rafael Furcal, both 40 points below projected, just missed joining that party.
Anyway, there was a lot of fascinating stuff to be found within the numbers, more than I could get to on a word count, and enough that I may spin that into another piece soon. Stay tuned.
By midnight tonight, the All-Star balloting will have ended, and on Sunday the starting lineups will be announced. Inevitably, deserving players will be left out in the cold (even after managers Joe Maddon and Charlie Manuel have stocked their benches and bullpens), whether they be unheralded veterans amid career years, youngsters whose stars haven't fully risen, or players nudged aside to ensure that every team is represented. What follows is a mixed-league lineup of players who might not get that trip to St. Louis, though they should. Space considerations prevent me from showing the entirety of my mental math for both leagues at each position, so I've spotlighted what I felt was the more interesting decision of the two.
...Outfield: Adam Dunn, Nationals; Adam Jones, Orioles; Matt Kemp, Dodgers In the NL, Raul Ibañez, Ryan Braun, and Carlos Beltran lead the voting. With the latter out of commission due to injury, Mike Cameron or Shane Victorino (who rank fifth and sixth in the voting) are likely to replace him as starter, but Kemp is even more deserving. He's hitting .302/.363/.474 with the second-best EqA (.302) among NL starting center fielders. The fact that Joe Torre has mainly hit him sixth, seventh, or eighth in the lineup suggests that his accomplishments, which include outstanding defense (+12 FRAA, +11.5 UZR), could be overlooked; he's just 13th in the voting. Also likely to be overlooked is Dunn, who's batting .260/.396/.528 while ranking second in walks and fifth with 20 homers. A polarizing figure, he hasn't been invited to the midsummer party since 2002, but only Pujols and Alex Rodriguez have bashed more homers since then. From the AL ranks, I'll channel Joe Sheehan and put in a plug for 23-year-old Adam Jones, who has tacked superb defense onto his .305/.359/.509 performance while ensuring that the name "Bavasi" will be cursed in Seattle for years to come.
Starting Pitcher: Edwin Jackson, Tigers Figuring out who's in or out on the All-Star pitching staffs is a trickier game than it is for the hitters due to starters' schedules and teams' understandable reluctance to part with their aces. Rather than pull my hair out overthinking this, I'll simply stump for a less-obvious choice: Jackson, who's finally living up to the promise shown when he beat Randy Johnson on his 20th birthday. He's second in the league with a 2.49 ERA, fifth in SNLVAR (ahead of his more heralded teammate, Justin Verlander), and ninth in strikeouts.
Yeah, as a Dodgers fan, that Jackson one still stings.
The Baseball Prospectus/ESPN Insider soup du jour is a roundtable devoted to dissecting the performances of a few unlikely first-half heroes. ESPN editor Matt Meyers, columnist Buster Olney, BP colleagues Kevin Goldstein and John Perrotto and I discussed whether the work of Red Sox shotstop Nick Green, Mets pitcher Fernando Nieve, and Rays utilityman Ben Zobrist are sustainable. My job was to throw around the big numbers, and I wound up in the middle of the fray in this exchange regarding Green:
Buster Olney: Green may not be a .290 kind of hitter, but guys, I'd say he's not a fluke: he's a decent player who is taking advantage of his surroundings. He is playing as part of a deep lineup, in Fenway Park, and hitting .310 at home. One scout mentioned this week that Fenway has a knack for making average hitters into above-average hitters. He has always been able to hit a high fastball, and he's playing in a park where there's some payoff for that (12 extra-base hits in 87 at-bats).
John Perrotto: Green has always been a guy with some tools, decent pop, and a strong arm, so I don't think it's totally unexpected that he has put together a pretty good stretch for the Red Sox. He was always the kind of guy who was awfully hard on himself, and perhaps now that he is getting older he has learned to relax. Like Buster said, he is in the right ballpark with the right lineup to succeed. He is a one-year wonder? Perhaps. At the very least, he is a viable major league player.
Jay Jaffe: Coming into the year, Green had done nothing to distinguish himself from among dozens of Quadruple-A futility infielder types. He was a 30-year-old who owned a career line of .240/.309/.347 in nearly 800 PA, he'd gotten just seven at-bats in the majors since 2006, and his 2008 minor league numbers at Scranton were horrible, with a .191 EqA. On that basis alone, for him to be where he is right now is a total fluke.
Which isn't to say he hasn't learned a trick or two (the Chipper Jones tap) or gotten some breaks in his favor (a starting job in a great hitters' park? Yes, please!), but I'm not terribly optimistic it can continue. Would you be, if you were Theo Epstein or Terry Francona?
Green's numbers look to be the product of Fenway, where he's hitting .310/.348/.517 in 92 PA, compared to .256/.326/.354 in 92 PA on the road, which is the Nick Green we know and love. His overall line is being driven by a .344 batting average on balls in play, and his batted-ball types say he should be around .290. That 5-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio doesn't suggest he's got the control of the strike zone for all of this to continue, and that pitchers will figure out how to exploit him.
Matt Meyers: Some dissension, I like it! But even conceding some "realness" to Green's performance, wouldn't it be foolish for the Red Sox to have any faith in him beyond this year? Didn't we just see this last year with Mike Aviles? I am not sure Jed Lowrie is any sort of long-term answer, so the Sox might actually have a hole at short. Is there a world in which Green is more than just a stopgap for them?
Jay Jaffe: In the context of Lowrie's slated return in July, Green's a perfectly suitable stopgap. I just don't think the Sox should let themselves get overly attached to the guy based on a park-driven 92 PA sample that's well out of context of the other ~900 PA for his career.
Green kind of reminds me of Miguel Cairo circa 2004, the year he hit .292/.346/.417 for the Yankees. You knew it couldn't last, but you had to appreciate a guy like that coming out of nowhere to give the team a major boost.
