SEAT LICENSE RENEWALS It's almost spring
when a young man's thoughts turn to... those expensive
seat licenses. An online cash advance can help relieve the anxiety.
It's been a busy and exhilarating couple of weeks promoting Baseball Prospectus 2010. After a wave of some two dozen radio hits, last weekend my colleagues and I made appearances at the Yogi Berra Museum at Montclair State University in New Jersey and a Barnes and Noble in Manhattan. Sandwiched between those two appearances, I did an hour-long spot on the Fox Strategy Room's "Clubhouse Report" streaming videocast, on a panel with New York Post deputy sports editor Tim Sullivan and Sports Illustrated writer Pablo Torre, hosted by Duke Castiglione.
While we spent a bit of time at the top of the hour talking about the just-completed Olympics and in particular about the USA-Canada gold medal hockey match, baseball was the bigger topic. Duke's curiosity about BP 2010 led him to feed me a generous number of questions about the book and the way we use statistics to measure defense and reliever value. He was so taken with the discussion that a couple of days later he invited me to appear on his television show, Sports Extra, which airs every Sunday night at 10:30 PM here in New York on the local Fox affiliate, WNYW.
The spot, which taped a couple of hours earlier (I got to meet former NBA superstar and basketball Hall of Famer Dominique Wilkins while waiting my turn) and ran up against the Oscars, was just over three minutes long, and the topic of Derek Jeter's defense was the hook:
Overall, I wasn't terribly smooth — adrenaline, thanks — but I wasn't incoherent, and Duke certainly seemed enthusiastic enough that there's hope I'll get to do another spot down the road. I'm very grateful to him for having me on, and for giving BP 2010 such prime promotion.
Meanwhile, I'm back from a couple nights in Washington, DC, where yesterday Steven Goldman and I made an appearance on Sirius-XM's Home Plate "Power Alley" show with hosts Jim Duquette (he of the infamous Scott Kazmir trade and last year's self-deprecating introduction) and Seth Everett.
In the evening we joined colleagues Clay Davenport, Kevin Goldstein and Matt Swartz for our annual appearance at the fantastic Politics and Prose Bookstore. This marked, I believe, our seventh appearance there, and my fifth, four for the annual and one for It Ain't Over. Thanks to a bit of a push from the Washington Post's website, we set personal bests for attendance and sell-through, with something like 130 people present to hear us answer questions about Stephen Strasburg (who looked like something special — as advertised — in his spring debut, which we'd watched earlier), Derek Jeter, David Wright, Ryan Zimmerman, Bud Selig, competitive balance, Walter Johnson, Willie Mays and a whole lot more. I wish I had the energy to do justice to the discussion, but hopefully we'll have an MP3 clip or two to share. In the meantime, I'd just like to give a shout-out to the folks at XM and Politics and Prose for welcoming us and helping to give BP such a big push.
Update: Some pics of the Politics and Prose event from Matt's lovely wife Laura, and a fine writeup from another attendee. Thanks to both!
SI.com’s Jimmy Traina cites a source as reporting “The Who will take the stage” during the Super Bowl XLIV halftime show. An NFL spokesperson declined to confirm the report, only saying, “When we have something to announce, we’ll announce it” (SI.com, 11/12). The L.A. Times’ Sam Farmer writes, “SI.com reporting the Super Bowl halftime show is.... The Who. Excellent.” But FoxSports.com’s John Halpin writes, “A band full of guys in their 60s? NO WAY!” Baseball Prospectus writer Jay Jaffe: “Because nothing says NFL like half a band of Brit Invasion senior citizens” (TWITTER.com, 11/12).
ZING! I had a better one about the surviving members trying for one last cash grab before reuniting with their deceased rhythm section, but it was longer than 140 characters, hence. Who says my expertise doesn't cross genres?
Speaking of crossing genres, artist James Blagden has set Dock Ellis' tale of his infamous no-hitter to a four-and-a-half minute Flash animation at a site called No Mas. It's also on YouTube, for those afraid to venture out onto the scarier parts of the information superhighway.
Sigh. Only 94 days until pitchers and catchers report. We now return you to your regularly scheduled offseason...
Last October, the Phillies weren't the only World Series competitor with the best bullpen in their league — the Rays' pen paced the AL.
That's not a coincidence.
In today's game, filthy with one-out specialists, one-inning closers and six-inning aces, bullpens matter. Jay Jaffe, one of the authors of Baseball Prospectus, explains that not only do good bullpens improve teams beyond the numbers (he equates a good bullpen to clutch hitting) but they matter more in the post season. "There is," he says, "a significant correlation between having an elite closer and having postseason success." It makes sense. Throughout the regular season last year, Lidge pitched about an inning every three games. In the playoffs, that jumped to two out of three. Pitching like he did in 2008, that gave the Phils a huge lift. Pitching like he has in 2009 would drag them down.
Back in April, I spoke to the article's author, James Beale, about the Phillies' chances of repeating, particularly as it pertained to the pitching staff:
Speaking of dangerous trends, the Phillies' bullpen is also unlikely to have the type of season it pulled together in 2008. Behind closer Brad Lidge and his perfect 48-48 in save opportunities, the Phillies not only won every game they were leading after eight innings, but were also ranked by BP as having statistically the best bullpen in baseball. Part of that was skill, but a bigger part was good timing. Lidge, Ryan Madson, J.C. Romero, Chad Durbin and Clay Condrey, the Phillies' first five arms out of the bullpen, all had ERAs well below their career averages. Out of the group, Madson (3.94 to 3.05) was the only one within a full run of his career mark. Regression is likely. "Historically," Jaffe warns, "relievers just haven't held up."
Ahem. Lidge has blown nine saves in 34 attempts and is carrying a 7.33 ERA while ranking as the worst reliever in baseball.
I've watched the segment enough times to be hypercritical about my bit: the camera caught me looking at the monitor at the beginning... I stumbled over an answer or two, though I worked my way out of those jams... my body language could have been better, though the arrangement of the chairs didn't help... humidity emphasizes the fact that I need a damn haircut, and while wearing contacts eliminates the glare my glasses produce, you can see every missing hour of sleep in my eyes ("The eyes, Chico, they never lie...").
At least I had the presence to keep smiling and was smart enough to wear a suit; I didn't know whether or not I'd be behind a desk, as in some other TV appearances. And while I'm patting myself on the back, my decision to start the Tivo recording at 6:55 AM instead of 7:00 was prophetic, as they actually chose to squeeze us in just before the top of the hour. Anyway, as a friend reminded me, I probably never expected that when I started this site nearly eight years ago that some day I'd be calling a New York manager out for bullshit busywork on a local network TV show. He's right, of course. Pretty cool.
• If you live within earshot of my Wednesday afternoon radio hit on "The Front Row" on 1470 WLQR in Toledo, please note that my time slot has shifted from 4:10 Eastern (3:10 Central) to 5:35 Eastern (4:35 Central). The segment, which alas isn't streamed, now runs for about 20 minutes instead of 15 so that we can ramble a bit more. Doing this hit with host Norm Wamer is one of the high points of my week, and I'm delighted to have an opportunity to expand just a bit more.
• The Philadelphia CityPaper interviewed me for their Phillies preview:
Another structural change could be more subtle. In 2008, Cole Hamels materialized as a true Major League ace, but stressed his body far past its previous limits in doing so. Last year, including the playoffs, Hamels pitched 72 more innings than he ever had in any previous season. The central question surrounding the Boy Wonder is whether the heavy load sustained during last season's joyride to championship glory will take its toll this season. This is less a question of motivation — Hamels' work ethic is lauded throughout the organization — and more of health. Still. Last season Hamels predicted that if he could get through just one season injury-free, all the questions about his fragility would expire. Well, he did and they haven't. Already this spring, questions have arisen about whether Hamels' increased workload will lead to increased time on the sideline, decreased effectiveness or worse.
The fears aren't unfounded: The extra work is catching up with the young ace. Two weeks ago, Hamels felt tightness in his pitching elbow and was examined by the team physician. The tightness turned out to be simple inflammation, likely the result of normal wear and tear. This sounds reassuring until you remember that normal wear and tear usually develops toward the end of a long season, not at the beginning of one. Jay Jaffe, one of the authors of the annual Baseball Prospectus tome, explains, "Over a three-year period any given pitcher has something like a 50 percent chance of getting hurt." According to him, for Hamels, a stint or two on the DL would be "pretty par for the course." If he's right, the Phillies, compared to last year, just got quite a bit worse.
Speaking of dangerous trends, the Phillies' bullpen is also unlikely to have the type of season it pulled together in 2008. Behind closer Brad Lidge and his perfect 48-48 in save opportunities, the Phillies not only won every game they were leading after eight innings, but were also ranked by BP as having statistically the best bullpen in baseball. Part of that was skill, but a bigger part was good timing. Lidge, Ryan Madson, J.C. Romero, Chad Durbin and Clay Condrey, the Phillies' first five arms out of the bullpen, all had ERAs well below their career averages. Out of the group, Madson (3.94 to 3.05) was the only one within a full run of his career mark. Regression is likely. "Historically," Jaffe warns, "relievers just haven't held up."
• Proving that I'm nothing if not consistent, I make similar points about the defending World Champions in today's ESPN Insider/BP stroll through the National League version of the PECOTA Projected Standings:
One real pleasure that we get in working with the PECOTA projection system comes when we move beyond the individual player forecasts to the team level. Every year, once we release the first batch of projections, our staff compiles depth charts and calibrates the playing time at each position for each team. Our system adjusts for strength of schedule, team defense, and reliever leverage, and we update these on a daily basis throughout the exhibition season based upon camp reports, expert injury analysis, our own intuition, and input from readers who keep a close eye on their hometown nine.
The result is our Projected Standings, and it's often where we generate the most controversy. Two years ago, we drew fire for forecasting just 72 wins for the White Sox, who wound up winning exactly that many. Last year, we raised eyebrows with our assertion that the Rays would finish well above .500 for the first time in history. While we don't always hit the bull's-eye so directly, the standings are an area where we stand tall.
Our projections for this year's National League standings aren't likely to receive much brotherly love from Philadelphia, the home of the defending World Champions. That's because PECOTA sees the Phillies finishing with 87 wins, second to the Mets in the NL East and a game short of the Wild Card. Their offense is slated to match last year's number three ranking in scoring, but the pitching is poised for a major drop, from third in runs allowed to 10th. It's not that the staff hasn't seen upgrades; a full year of Joe Blanton and a more or less league-average expectation from fifth-starter candidates Chan Ho Park and J.A. Happ make for a stronger back end of the rotation. Their problems begin with the improbability of Cole Hamels matching last year's 3.09 ERA over a career-high 227 innings (plus another 35 in the postseason); we've got him down for 3.65 and 180, and note that he's already paid a visit to the doctor. The system also sees considerable regression for bullpen studs Brad Lidge and Ryan Madson. If there's room for optimism, it's that 46-year-old freak of nature Jamie Moyer practically broke PECOTA, and our 5.16 ERA forecast is based upon a dearth of comparable players.
As PECOTA sees it, the NL East race should see the twice-brokenhearted Mets christen their new ballpark with a 92-win season and a long-awaited division flag. While they could have done more to patch their rotation and their outfield corners, the bullpen makeover — starring Francisco Rodriguez and J.J. Putz — squarely addresses last year's biggest flaw, and David Wright, Jose Reyes, and Carlos Beltran forecast as the league's third-, fourth-, and fifth-most valuable hitters according to WARP. Also in the hunt for October are the Braves, who not only feature three players who forecast as the league's best or second-best at their positions (Chipper Jones, Brian McCann, and Kelly Johnson), but can boast adding the Derek Lowe-Javier Vazquez tandem to their rotation, the strongest duo of pitchers added by a team last winter this side of the Yankees' CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett.
Bitch if you must about the way the PECOTA projections see your favorite team, but the system is the clear leader of the pack at this sort of thing.
• Perhaps as karmic payback for all my squawking, a friend bestowed upon me a pair of tickets for Friday night's Yankees-Cubs exhibition, technically the first game in the new ballpark. I'll be in the bleachers beholding the dawn of this brave new world, no doubt missing the ballpark we've left behind, bemoaning the outrageous prices for piss-quality beer and reveling in the grief the Yankees are catching as they continue their efforts at social stratification.
• Speaking of the new ballpark, the photos from the Sliding Into Home blog show a new Monument Park that's completely soulless. I'm not much of a Joni Mitchell fan, but her opening line from "Big Yellow Taxi" sums up the situation perfectly: "They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot."
Jay Jaffe and a group of friends shared Yankees tickets for 11 years, but they won't be making the move to the new stadium. The 20-game packages of $25-a-game grandstand seats they hoped to get were sold out. Instead, the Yankees suggested $85 seats deep in right field.
"Literally, my words were, 'Are you f- kidding me?'" Mr. Jaffe recalls.
If you're gonna be reduced to a soundbite, might as well go out with guns blazing. Somewhere George Carlin is getting a good laugh.
Back in December, O'Neill consulted me for a JAWS comparison of Pirate rightfielders Roberto Clemente and Paul "Big Poison" Waner, the latter of whom will have his uniform number retired by the club on Saturday. Not to be confused with his brother, teammate, and fellow Hall of Famer Lloyd "Little Poison" Waner -- nicknames derived from a Brooklynese lament, "Them Waners. It's always the little poison on thoid and the big poison on foist!" -- Paul Waner was the superior of the two; as legend goes, Lloyd was elected by the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee in a case of mistaken identity. Da Big Poison is also a a very good comp for Clemente:
Baseball historians say Waner and Clemente are near equals. Both could run, hit and field like almost nobody else. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract ranks Clemente eighth and Waner ninth among all right fielders.
Jay Jaffe has developed a rating system for Baseball Prospectus to discuss the merits for the Hall of Fame, and he ranks both even higher. Jaffe puts right fielders in this order: 1) Babe Ruth 2) Hank Aaron 3) Mel Ott 4) Frank Robinson 5) Al Kaline 6) Clemente 7) Waner 8) Dave Winfield 9) Reggie Jackson 10) Sam Crawford. (That possibly unfamiliar name is the all-time triples leader who played alongside Ty Cobb in Detroit).
"If Clemente had lived," Jaffe wrote in an e-mail in December, "he'd have probably emerged from the pack for sole possession of fifth."
I haven't space to outline Jaffe's methodology, but he uses peak years and career record to come up with the overall rating. You don't hear arguments about Clemente and Waner the way you do, say, Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, but no players who played the same position for the same team are more closely matched among baseball's all-time greats, according to Jaffe's system.
O'Neill had simply asked how the duo compared with other famous franchise mates, with an eye towards the aforementioned Joe D. and the Mick. In running the numbers, I discovered that Clemente and Waner were actually the closest call, JAWS-wise, among Hall of Famers from the same team. Since O'Neill didn't run down the others, and since this is likely too unwieldy for BP Unfiltered, I'll show the work here:
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Babe Ruth 9 234.2 107.0 170.6 Hank Aaron 9 209.9 85.0 147.5 Mel Ott 9 175.8 84.8 130.3 Frank Robinson 9 165.1 76.2 120.7 Al Kaline 9 129.9 64.6 97.3 Roberto Clemente 9 126.3 67.7 97.0 Paul Waner 9 124.7 68.2 96.5 Dave Winfield 9 131.6 61.0 96.3 Reggie Jackson 9 126.3 64.6 95.5 Sam Crawford 9 112.3 57.3 84.8
Clemente put up 6.3 WARP during his final season at age 37. Even two seasons totaling that would have been enough to distinguish him from the other four players with whom he's clustered here. Going around the horn and then some for other team-specific battles in the rankings among HOFers:
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Johnny Bench 2 122.2 73.7 98.0 Gary Carter 2 117.8 68.9 93.4 Yogi Berra 2 116.2 66.0 91.1 Carlton Fisk 2 118.3 59.5 88.9 Bill Dickey 2 107.0 62.8 84.9
Among the two pinstripers wearing #8, Berra has a solid edge, though the latter is no shame.
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Lou Gehrig 3 147.1 84.7 115.9 Cap Anson 3 159.3 64.0 111.7 Eddie Murray 3 140.3 69.2 104.8 Jimmie Foxx 3 129.9 73.9 101.9 Roger Connor 3 133.0 68.7 100.9 Dan Brouthers 3 116.1 70.1 93.1 Tony Perez 3 109.4 61.2 85.3 Johnny Mize 3 102.9 67.4 85.2 Willie McCovey 3 107.0 62.1 84.6
Connor, Mize, and McCovey all had stints with the Giants, though the latter's was by far the biggest chunk of his career, whereas O'Connor and Mize would see significant time elsewhere.
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Eddie Collins 4 178.0 84.9 131.5 Rogers Hornsby 4 163.7 96.0 129.9 Joe Morgan 4 168.0 86.1 127.1 Nap Lajoie 4 167.1 83.7 125.4 Ch. Gehringer 4 132.3 77.0 104.7 Rod Carew 4 128.7 70.4 99.6 Frankie Frisch 4 119.8 66.2 93.0 Ryne Sandberg 4 112.8 72.0 92.4 Bobby Doerr 4 112.5 69.3 90.9 Billy Herman 4 106.8 69.6 88.2
Hornsby and Herman both spent significant portions of their careers as Cubs, though not as much as Sandberg.
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Honus Wagner 6 194.4 86.8 140.6 Cal Ripken 6 169.2 89.1 129.2 Arky Vaughan 6 131.4 90.0 110.7
Another one for the Pittsburghers, as two of the top three Hall of Fame shortstops were at their best as Pirates. The underrated Vaughan even bests Wagner in peak score.
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Stan Musial 7 197.3 90.8 144.1 Ted Williams 7 172.0 93.3 132.7 C. Yaztrzemski 7 144.3 67.2 105.8 Ed Delahanty 7 111.9 73.1 92.5 Jim O'Rourke 7 129.0 55.7 92.4 Billy Williams 7 117.2 66.3 91.8 Willie Stargell 7 105.8 60.3 83.1 Al Simmons 7 104.7 60.6 82.7 Joe Medwick 7 98.2 64.1 81.2
A pair of Red Sox at #2 and #3 here make for the highest ranking of "teammates," though the gap is considerably wider than between Clemente and Waner, or Berra and Dickey. Medwick played significantly in St Louis, though it's not really close with Musial, who actually played more of his games in leftfield but accumulated more WARP in rightfield).
Player POS Career PEAK JAWS Willie Mays 8 206.1 91.9 149.0 Ty Cobb 8 190.0 81.8 135.9 Tris Speaker 8 173.2 77.8 125.5 Mickey Mantle 8 155.1 85.3 120.2 Joe DiMaggio 8 120.2 77.3 98.8
The most famous intra-team positional battle isn't really all that close on either peak or career values, even with Joe D. holding about an eight-win edge on defense.
Anyway, it's always fun to see my name spelled correctly and my system in the paper. Thanks to Brian O'Neill for casting JAWS in a more flattering light than his colleague.
