Fifth Outfielder

Raiders musings

2009-12-29T14:35:00.000-08:00

Good chance I'll look back on this in shame, but I like the Raiders' chances to take out the Ravens this week. Oakland's taken down two division leaders this year, and they are the reason why Denver and Pittsburgh need help to make the playoffs. Then again, they're also the reason why Houston and the Jets have a shot at the playoffs, why SD has a bye locked up, and why an ultimately mediocre Giants team would still have a shot if they could have handled Carolina. Since they have been bad since Barret Robbins' incident, most folk won't analyze the Raiders play beyond just stating that the team is bad.

The Raiders might have the best two kickers in football, with Shane Lechler about to shatter the record (which he already holds) for best net punting yards in a season. Janikowski is 1-for-3 on FG's over 55 yards, but other than that has only missed one FG attempt (a 45 yarder, though in possibly the worst game to do so, because if he had made that kick the Raiders likely would not have thrown an interception in FG range at the end of the game since another Janikowski FG would have tied the game; instead they lost 16-10 to KC). Janikowski is also a monster on kickoffs, but the team regularly has coverage issues so some of his good kicks are wasted and often he is asked to squib kicks.

When it comes to returning kicks, though, Oakland is a disaster. Johnnie Lee Higgins has a lower return average than any PR except Reggie Bush. The kick returns have been awful: Jonathan Holland has the third worst KR avg this season and Gary Russell the worst. It's hard to listen to jokes about JaMarcus being too fat for his position when Gary Russell may be the fatter of the two, and he is the kick returner!

On offense, the Raiders problems earlier in the year started with their receivers. Zach Miller (TE) was the established, returning threat with a legit shot at earning a pro bowl trip. He's had some big games and has nice numbers overall, but he has missed time to injury and teams have keyed on him, particularly in those rare instances where Oakland is in the red zone. Chaz Schilens was the WR who had worked the best with JaMarcus in 2008 and he looked surprisingly good in camp, but was injured in the latter half of camp and did not return until midseason. He has since made an impact, but his first game back was the last game that JaMarcus started, so he had no real chance to help out. Javon Walker, who Al gave a ton of money to last offseason, was hoping to return from his injury string and help improve the team's young receivers, but that has not happened. That left four receivers, two youngsters with scarce potential (Johnnie Lee Higgins and Todd Watkins) and two rookies with big upside (DHB and Louis Murphy). Watkins has been adequate. Higgins makes some big plays but gives up on routes and drops passes; his yards per catch embarassingly matches his awful punt return average of 5.3 yards per. DHB, to no one's surprise, has vindicated the Al haters with only 9 catches despite starting about half of the games. Whatever coaching Oakland needed to do to realize his potential mostly has not happened. That leaves Louis Murphy, who might be one of the best rookie wideouts in the league. He has had a few tough drops and typical rookie route-running issues, but on the whole has been the biggest positive (outside of Zach Miller or maybe Michael Bush) in the Oakland offense.

Without any top receivers with experience, I think Russell just has not been put in opportunities to grow his abilities. Without good downfield threats, his big arm hasn't been given the chance to hone its accuracy. I think there has been a vicious cycle where JaMarcus hasn't had leaders around to get him working hard, and Kiffin didn't seem focused at all on developing JaMarcus. With JaMarcus not in a habit of working hard to learn the offense, as the new receivers have trickled in he has not been in the habit of getting his receivers to work hard and work with him. The offense didn't gel because the QB and the WR's were working off of minimal work and minimal experience. As a result, opposing defenses have often been able to stack the box and dare the Raiders to throw, a large part of the reason why McFadden hasn't been effective running the ball, and also part of the reason why Cable cuts Michael Bush out of the game plan too often. The offensive line play has been somewhat inconsistent, and they are not overall a good unit, but they were noticeably better when their best player, Robert Gallery (famously a busted LT who has played well since being moved to guard), was able to stay in the lineup (their worst offensive stretch of games came after he was injured in the opener).

Once JaMarcus was benched, Bruce Gradkowski took over and to some extent got the offense studying and working more than they had been (Louis Murphy perhaps especially so). They were improved, though they couldn't manage much against the good Dallas D on three days rest, and Gradkowski had the team looking like they might actually be playoff caliber. When Gradkowski went down, JaMarcus was seemingly ill-prepared and the Raiders got crushed in the second half of the WAS game. Since then, Frye has played generally better than Russell played earlier in the season, but against Cleveland he threw three huge INT's (one set up an easy Browns TD, two ended Raiders drives in the red zone) and on top of that threw two INT's in the end zone that were called back (one where there was a legit PI call but the ball was sailed over Miller so far that he could not have broken up the INT, the other was thrown to the one spot in the corner of the end zone where Murphy had no chance to catch it and the defender landed with one foot out of bounds).

So, when a kickoff or a punt by the opposing team almost invariably leave the Raiders with lousy field position (field position that, for long stretches of the season, would only be advanced by a 3-and-out followed by Lechler), the Raiders' defense has had to play aggressively all season, trying to force turnovers and sacks. Ellis, Seymour, Warren, and Kelly have all played about as well as was expected: Warren and Kelly have had some big plays stuffing runners but often overpursue and aren't big factors in the pass rush. Seymour has been dominant for stretches but sometimes just occupies blockers and sometimes just shows he has lost a half step. Ellis is old but pretty productive. Trevor Scott has continued to improve and make an impact, but he still shows inexperience and is inconsistent against the run. Morrison and Howard are both solid contributors and Shaughnessy thus far looks like a great draft pick, but all in all the LB corps has had an inconsistent impact on games because of the desperation that comes with every defensive snap for this team. Huff and Branch have both played well at safety and Nnamdi is still a monster in every facet of the game. Chris Johnson is, as one would expect from a middling CB playing across from a great one, inconsistent; his success correlates highly with the Raiders' d as a whole.

The big problem with this unit has been the big play, particularly in the running game. The Broncos, Texans, Giants, and Jets laid a bunch of big plays on the Raiders, each team pounding the Raiders with a combination of power and speed in the running game, taking early leads that essentially shut down an Oakland offense that could not conceive of topping 20 points. Outside of those games, the Raiders have been 5-6, or 3-5 since the Jets game. They have been in each of their last 9 games in the fourth quarter, going 1-2 against playoff teams (SD, Cin, Dal), 2-0 against playoff hopefuls (Den, Pit), and 0-3 against teams that were already eliminated (KC, Was, Cle). It is hard to argue with the defensive performance of this unit since the Jets game, but their two worst stretches happened in inopportune times against teams with lousy records (the two touchdown drives allowed in the 4th Quarter against Washington that were sandwiched around an intercepted deep ball from Russell, turning a 17-13 lead into 31-13; the 2-minute drill where Cleveland had 3rd and 11 inside its own 10 but kept getting just enough and goading the Raiders into penalties, the result being a TD that contributed to Frye throwing awful picks in the end zone instead of playing more conservatively since the field goal was off the table).

I think the Raiders will win on Sunday because I think they will not abandon Michael Bush (as they did in the four Gradkowski-started game) and I think they will come out to win the game and keep a team out of the playoffs, just like they did last year against Tampa Bay to add an emphatic ending to the Gruden and Kiffen dramas. Flacco and the Baltimore receiving corps are not more than the Raiders can handle. Ray Rice might be, and the Raiders' recent success has come against teams that are struggling in the run game. But my suspicion is that Rice won't be able to carry the load, coming off of the most heavy usage of his career last week. On offense, Oakland will have their hands full, no doubt, and the only team that has beaten Baltimore this season that hasn't qualified for the postseason already is Pittsburgh. But if Oakland can mix up its running game and have regular success with both McFadden and Bush, I think the speed of the Oakland receivers, and the skills of Miller, Schilens, and Murphy, will be enough to give the Ravens problems, regardless of whether it's Frye or Russell throwing to them. I think the Raiders D, receivers, and running backs will make enough big plays in this game that the Ravens will need to pull down 2-3 interceptions to make the playoffs.

2009-12-23T09:12:00.000-08:00

Dodgers President Hugh Mannion:

"It's strange to me to see teams operate in a way where they bid against themselves for unknown talent, and at the same time, you have this plethora of guys in the system that maybe are not developing appropriately, i.e. a [Ronald] Belisario. That's interesting stuff to me. I think it's really fascinating. It's probably the upside of having very tough economic times."

How is this at all coherent for a franchise that gave away Tony Abreu a few months ago so it wouldn't be tempted to keep Charlie Haeger in its rotation? This cat wants to tout any ol' success as evidence of a brilliant process.

"So to take a guy and say, we're going to offer him arbitration, and put yourself in a position where you may have been able to acquire a similar pitcher for less money later on, isn't a prudent use of a civic asset. It doesn't make sense to do that, if you're a good steward for your franchise."

So it does not make sense to attempt to acquire draft picks to invest in future talent and/or future trade needs because the risk is overpaying a veteran pitcher for one season. Yet it does make sense to overpay for a veteran pitcher if that pitcher's salary is being paid for by Arizona and LA only has to overpay in talent? It is felicitous that Mannion does not talk about "prudent use of a civic asset" in terms of value or good to the franchise but rather simply says money. The "good steward for your franchise" is not the cat who offers arbitration figuring that Wolf is very likely to receive a larger offer and take it. This is because doing so requires spending on the part of the franchise. Money will be spent on the arbitrated salary or money must be spent to scout extra players and money will likely be spent to sign the draft picks. Your stewardship depends upon recognizing that the crucial respect of a fluid system is that committing to spending money at any points quickly becomes a commitment to spend more money to protect that investment. As such, a good steward refuses the possible benefits of investing in the future because such an investment will often require focus - "appropriate development," and, hence, resources. It is better for the Mannionian steward to wait out the discarded and inappropriately developed, devote meager resources to their reclamation, and ideally limit their role and play up their limitations in the press so they will not cost the franchise much money. From Belisario to Padilla, it is the new Dodger Way, talent cheaply acquired so it can be treated cheaply by management. The type of mobile labor required by the fluidity of these trying economic times. Players whose arbitration clock we have started are to be resented and trashed unless they are producing results, and they will be discarded for Experienced Veterans when someone else will foot the bill.

Because They've Planning To Trade Abreu For Years

2009-10-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

... "I think that some of the decisions that we made that didn't work out particularly well were out of impatience on our own part, and trying to turn something around," Colletti said. "But I think the last year or so our deliberation and our thought process were keener, more fine tuned, and less impatient."

Jayson Werth Reacts to Ned Colletti Extension

2009-10-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

here.

Stanford Education

2009-10-08T14:44:00.000-07:00

"The grass was as open as the American frontier in the 19th century."

Harang clears waivers

2009-08-10T19:57:00.000-07:00

Reports are that Aaron Harang cleared waivers. I would have to say that the argument for the Dodgers acquiring him now is better than the argument for acquiring Loaiza was at the time.

A vs. Z

2009-08-06T16:22:00.000-07:00

Willy Aybar:
26 years old
954 career PA
.274/.358/.430
.357 wOBA
.294 BABIP
.156 ISO
.128 K/PA
.103 BB/PA
.803 BB/K
Traded in July 2006 with (word corrected, see comments) Danys Baez who left after the season to sign a three-year, $19 million contract with the Orioles
Last 200 PA: .277/.357/.491, .380 wOBA

Ben Zobrist
910 career PA
.250/.333/.447
.349 wOBA
.268 BABIP
.196 ISO
.170 K/PA
.101 BB/PA
.591 BB/K
Traded in July 2006 for Aubrey Huff who left after the season to sign a three-year, $20 million contract with the Orioles
Last 200 PA: .275/.387/.455, .379 wOBA

Seriously, lay off of Milton Bradley

2009-07-30T09:32:00.000-07:00

Bradley is a magnet for haters. Trade rumors, the baseball media industry's cash cow, are notorious for needing little basis in reality, and they've of late been a means to continue the tired and silly narrative that Milton Bradley is awful and undeserving of his contract.

Milton Bradley's career numbers prior to his signing were .278/.370/.457 with a .359 wOBA, .322 BABIP, and a .177 ISO. In 2008 he led the AL in OBP. In 2009, he has hit .250/.385/.381 with a .346 wOBA, .298 BABIP and a .131 ISO in 299 PA. He leads the Cubs in OBP.

He was put upon before the season for making remarks that he has not, in the past, tended to play through injuries because doing so would hurt his numbers and make it harder for him to be paid for his actual value. Given that he's played all over the outfield in his career and that it is well known to all of his employers that he is injury prone, I don't see what the hubbub is about; his teams should be able to field a pretty good 4th outfielder. If performance above replacement is our standard and he's sitting out games where he doesn't think he'll out-perform his replacement, he is not hurting anyone. Bradley, I feel, was being quite fair to his employer by saying, look, go ahead and play me hurt if you want to because you've actually signed me long term.

The criticism of Bradley that ensued was along the lines of 'he should ALWAYS be a team player willing to play hurt, and part of the reason he's never gotten a long term contract is that he hasn't been a team player!' Such criticism largely overlooked the actual statements by his teammates about what kind of team player he is, and devolved into de facto support for the owners for the simple reason that they own baseball teams, but with the perspective of the owners being projected onto the fans. As I saw it, the criticism was unwarranted because Bradley is precisely the type of player (can handle all the OF spots, switch-hitter) who can withstand being in and out the lineup, and a team acquiring Bradley knows it will need a decent 4th OF and can plan accordingly. When he's been in the lineup, he's been one of the better players in baseball.

So, sure enough, Bradley played hurt in April (and also evidently had at least a handful of extra balls low and away called strikes), was not good at doing so, and Piniella announced he would stop putting an ailing Bradley into the lineup. Through his first 20 games, he hit .143/.294/.250 in 68 PA, and his season narrative would set in stone unless he could duplicate his 2008 numbers over the balance of the year. Instead, he has been merely what the Cubs paid for.

Games 1-20: 68 PA, .143/.294/.250, .258 wOBA, .154 BABIP, .107 ISO
Games 21-40: 72 PA, .286/.375/.508, .382 wOBA, .300 BABIP, .222 ISO
Games 41-61: 78 PA, .277/.397/.354, .362 wOBA, .375 BABIP, .077 ISO
Games 62-82: 81 PA, .283/.457/.400, .385 wOBA, .341 BABIP, .117 ISO

In his last 62 games played (53 started) he has hit .282/.411/.420 in 231 PA, good for a .376 wOBA on .338 BABIP and .138 ISO. I'm fine with those who wish to point out that Bradley's power has been down this season, but aren't all the other critiques (aside from bullying him with small sample UZR's) pretty highly unwarranted at this point?

So why does Milton Bradley - who was signed after he led the AL in OBP and who leads his team in OBP - get flack for not slugging much (again, career ISO prior to signing was .177, which ain't huge) when he's getting on base just fine? Shouldn't Piniella be the target of rage for not batting his OBP threat in the 1 or 2 hole instead of Soriano and/or Theriot?

Put away the small sample UZR numbers (Bradley's range was + 4.2 runs over 645.2 innings in 2007-8 and is -3.6 in 580.1 2009 innings) and stop acting like his lousy April is still news. Bradley is worth his contract.

The Pot Calls The Water Black Again: On Shysterball and Cherry-picking

2009-06-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

I've leveled a number of criticisms at Mr. Calcaterra, and yesterday he responded to ... well, not any of them, but he demonstrated a remarkable amount of hypocrisy in his reply:

Fifth -- I realize you can't stand me and I'm fine with that, mostly because the basis you cite for not standing me are comprised of the most egregious forms of cherry picking and overreaction. Hey, it's your blog, and when you comment on mine, it's your comment, so you can say what you want.

Now, let's recap my "cherry picking and overreaction."

I've criticized the Shyster for his practice of attempting to warrantlessly discredit Dave Zirin's writing, which he has done every time he has linked to Zirin. In "A Complete Lack of Evidence: The Surest Sign a Conspiracy is Afoot," Calcaterra compared Zirin to UFO conspiracy theorists for his article, "Boss's Boycott: The Bonds Vanishes." Zirin's central argument in the piece is that in the wake of Bonds surpassing Aaron's career HR record and the expiration of his contract with San Francisco, Bonds - despite still being a quite valuable player - appears to have been de facto boycotted en masse by MLB owners, and many significant reminders of his presence were quickly erased by the San Francisco Giants.

Calcaterra's response effectively only replies to this portion of Zirin's argument:

But it’s not just Magowan trying to “disappear” Barry Bonds. He has been blackballed in a blatant and illegal act of Major League collusion, a bosses’ boycott. Yes, Bonds’ fielding has become painful to watch in recent years, as the seven time gold glover limped around the outfield on knees grinding together without cartilage. But despite the agony of movement most of us take for granted, Bonds still hit 28 home runs in 340 at bats, led the NL in walks, and had an on base percentage of .480. Since 1950, only Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Norm Cash, and Bonds himself have recorded higher OBP’s. ...

Maybe Bonds can no longer roam the outfield, but there are at least a dozen AL teams that could use a designated hitter with a .480 OBP, not to mention a player whose every game would sell tickets and every at-bat would provoke baited breaths and empty bathrooms.

Calcaterra's response centers around his assertion that "Bonds can't play defense anymore. He really can't, which eliminates more than half of the teams in baseball as potential suitors." As a LF, Bonds was an all around +84 run player from 2005-7 according to Rally's numbers, being -10 runs defensively versus an average LF in 1812 innings, over 200 games worth. According to Fangraphs, he was also +84 runs from 2005-2007, including being -12.6 in bUZR. In 2008, Carlos Lee, Adam Dunn, and Manny Ramirez all played LF in the NL with considerably worse defensive numbers from 2005-2007. Calcaterra further dismisses the need for AL teams to upgrade at DH; AL designated hitters batted .256/.339/. .435 in 2008; the AL as a whole batted .268/.336/.420. Can't blame Texas for going with Milton Bradley, but any other team in the AL would have benefited on the field from signing Bonds, period.

The rest of Calcaterra's argument hinges on interpreting Zirin's article as a claim that a 1980's style collusion memo was circulated warning teams not to sign Bonds. Calcaterra cites Bonds' status as a pariah and the fears of general managers that the ensuing controversy would cost them their jobs as the reasons why no such collusion exists. This is a gross misreading of Zirin, and demonstrates Calcaterra's resort to the perpetrator perspective. Calcaterra thinks if the intent to collude cannot be established, then there is no collusion, and anybody who uses the word is a wacko conspiracy theorist:

Bonds was unable to negotiate for a contract that would pay him his fair market value, and the reason appears to be that all of the major league teams chose not to offer him one. Calcaterra excuses their behavior precisely by pointing out that the GM's don't have guts (or that the GM's with guts are vetoed by ownership). That's exactly what collusion is - a group deciding to pursue a reality (Bonds shall not play for my team) collectively for business reasons that harm the customers. Calcaterra entirely neglects Zirin's discussion of the media's role in ensuring the owners can get away with it by fanning the flames, perhaps because that is the role that Calcaterra himself is playing.

There is a boatload of circumstantial evidence that Bonds took PED's, just as there is a boatload of circumstantial evidence that all sorts of other players still employed by the league. As a Dodgers fan, I was wronged by Ned Colletti giving $36m to Andruw Jones instead of signing Bonds. I do not care whether the source of the collusion was Bonds' status as a pariah derived from media coverage that has been outlandishly biased for at least the past decade. Bonds is a good baseball player, and if guilty, he is guilty of lesser crimes than Rafael Furcal and guilty of an equal crime to Guillermo Mota, who was actually caught as opposed to indicted in the public eye by a massive media investment in a take down that hinged on illegally leaked grand jury testimony.

If Calcaterra wants to nitpick and argue that Zirin's arguments do not necessarily warrant the terms "collusion" or "illegal," then I have no problem with that - let the discussion flow. Instead, Calcaterra made Zirin out to be a tin-hat fool. Zirin's point was this:

The idea that baseball owners would ruin their own team’s chances because they have collectively agreed to “turn the page” is a violation of Bonds’ rights and the unwritten social contract they have with fans. And when one considers the absence of saints on Major League Baseball teams, even on the God Squad in Colorado, it is all the more drenched in hypocrisy.

...The overriding ethos of the sports world is that of the meritocracy. If you are good enough, then you get to play. Yet a man who can get on base 48% of the time, has been told to go home and a new generation of fans will never see the Mozart of the batting cage. This is about more than a baseball player. It’s about people in power deciding on utterly unjust grounds, who gets to take the field, who gets to be heard, and even who gets to be remembered.

It is simply unjust that Bonds was denied the opportunity to continue his career, and cowardly GM's, his antagonism of a white-owned media full of blowhards, and assertions that he could not play the field do not constitute just reasons to end his career. The reasons Bonds was kept out are indistinct from the reasons black players were kept out of baseball in the segregation era. White owners and GM's were not willing to break the unwritten rule, and they were able to cite bogus claims that the players were simply not good enough to defend their actual position, which was that. The commisioner then, like the commisioner now, refused to step in to rectify the situation and instead added fuel to the fires of de facto collusion. Segregation did not begin to end until a team said it didn't give a damn about a player being treated as a pariah since it could gain a competitive edge - that's how the collusion to segregate baseball stopped. No such faux courage to act in the interests of the team could be found in the 2007-8 offseason, 2008 season, or 2008-9 offseason.

If you step outside the perpetrator perspective and consider reality from the perspective of those harmed by it, you open yourself to truth, instead of cherry picking excuses for the cowards in MLB who won't stand up to the media's stoking of racist flames. MLB kowtows to the media that kowtows to it because they collude - no conspiracy necessary - to profit off of the wrongful monopoly that was a 14th amendment violation to start with. Social contract to provide top-quality baseball - the very basis of the antitrust exemption - be damned.

A complete lack of intelligent consideration for other perspectives is the surest sign that no conspiracy need be afoot for people with great power to have their way at the expense of people with lesser power.

The second time Shysterball referenced Zirin, it was to laud Murray Chass (!!!), of all people, for adding perspective to the story of the MLBPA's statement that it found evidence of collusion against Bonds but was abiding by an agreement with the Commisioner's office regarding the timing of a filing. Yes, it is Chass, and not Zirin, who adds perspective to this story, by pointing out that the union generally does not wait to file complaints of collusion. Calcaterra writes, "This is all smoke right now. Let's see the fire." So if the Union alleges what Calcaterra perceives as a conspiracy, Calcaterra demands that it file its case before collecting further evidence. The point of a conspiracy, of course, being to suppress the evidence of its existence for as long as possible to evade culpability.

The third time Calcaterra referenced Zirin, he applauded his "takedown of the Bonds prosecution" to validate his own previous writings on the DOJ's case. I'm not sure whether I've made clear my disdain for Calcaterra's careerism, but this is certainly another example. He goes from making Zirin out to be a nut on this topic to citing him when it validates his own writing. He doesn't want "to feel alone," so he'll cherry-pick those authors that agree with him, even as he disagrees with them.

In the comments to that post, Calcaterra wrote "Zirin’s line about 'African American athlete' is a non-seequitor and is irrelevant to this analysis." He then proceeds to argue that Bonds should have been prosecuted, and that his arguments about the prosecution are premised on the idea that the prosecutors simply screwed up and didn't do a good job and went forward in an embarrassing and appalling fashion. The failure to connect these two strands of thought is what is truly embarrassing and appalling. The DOJ, embroiled as it has been in a myriad of scandals, did not have a hell of a lot to lose by going after Bonds with malice. The idea that the justice system does not have a long and continuous history of going after African-Americans with disregard to the 4th Amendment and with the political motivation to marginalize and disenfranchise African-Americans is laughable. For example, the manufactured myth of the crack baby - in part a historical product of the death of a prominent African-American athlete from powder cocaine - led to myriad practical suspensions of the 4th Amendment and a further explosion of the prison population, disproportionately imprisoning people of color and African-Americans in particular. The promulgation of this myth by a largely non-conspiratorial alignment of academic publishing bias, media absurdity and ratings pushes, policy driven by pandering to white voters, and the profiteering of the linked prison industry and the law enforcement and judiciary industries. The careerists inside these white-created and white-sustained industries all colluded to promote a myth of the social death of the black masses, generating enormous political and economic profits.

How, exactly, can we analyze the Bonds prosecution only in terms of the alleged failure of the prosecutors to carry it out successfully, especially from an outsider's perspective that has no access to the evidence the DOJ actually has at hand? How are we supposed to blame the prosecution for letting Bonds "ramble" in illegally leaked Grand Jury testimony, when the evidence that the DOJ had a stronger case to make and hence a stronger ability to corner Bonds and limit his responses is lacking? The whole purpose of Bonds' grand jury testimony was to entrap him; he refused to testify on 5th amendment grounds, and was forced to testify with the understanding he could only be prosecuted for perjury. Is it not realistic to assume that the DOJ let him ramble in hopes that he would perjure himself, knowing they didn't have the goods to make him perjure himself?

When people act in appalling and embarrassing fashion, we need to consider the sociogenic component of their actions. Prosecutors who are predisposed to see a Black man as a pariah - both through the specific media coverage of Bonds and through the general functioning of racist sociogeny in the white-dominated US media, political system, legal system, education system, and so forth - are likely to enact that sociogenic code with their actions. The failures of the DOJ - and IRS agent Novitzky's characterization of Bonds, rather than the ring leaders of BALCO, as their "Al Capone" - can be attributed to a heck of a lot more than their sloppiness. What motivates their sloppiness, and why did they pursue this player as opposed to the others who were alleged to take steroids? Why did they feel that their BALCO case rested on his testimony? Isn't a more likely reading that they were going after Bonds all along, given the "pariah" status that Calcaterra not only admits but bases his arguments upon? And how, in the white-dominated US with a centuries long history of making black people not just pariahs but the very embodiment of what it is to be a pariah, can we describe a reference to Bonds being an African-American as a non-sequitor?

There is no cherry-picking here. This is a serial failure on the part of Calcaterra to consider a highly salient issue. He does not devote his time to reading the relevant literature on race, the criminal justice system, and social death. Rather, he asserts that race is not an issue. My point all along is that his readers - and, specifically, the readers of a website like THT with a well-deserved reputation - deserve much, much better. This is precisely why Shysterball is inappropriate for THC - it has already taken the perspective of the legal system in analyzing the complex cultural, economic, and political elements of baseball. And the discussions of Bonds, which are certainly among the things that Calcaterra is most known for and that have driven his traffic time and again, have been deprived of reality and truth by his perspective.

Consider Edgardo Lander's critique of the Social Sciences and their origins in the colonial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries (from Nepantla, Views from the South, volume 1 no. 3, 2000, pp. 526-7):

The problem with Eurocentrism in the social sciences is not only that its fundamental categories were created for a particular time and place and later used in a more or less creative or rigid manner to study other realities. The problem lies in the colonial imaginary from which Western social sciences constructed its interpretation of the world. This imaginary has permeated the social sciences of the whole world, making a great part of the social knowledge of the peripheral world equally Eurocentric.7 In those disciplines, the experience of European societies is naturalized: Its economic organization—the capitalist market—is the “natural form of organizing production. It corresponds to an individual universal psychology” (Wallerstein 1996, 20). Its political organization—the modern European nation-state—is the “natural” form of political existence. The different peoples of the planet are organized according to a notion of progress: on one hand the more advanced, superior, modern societies; on the other, backward, traditional, nonmodern societies. In this sense, sociology, political theory, and economics have not been any less colonial or less liberal than anthropology or orientalism, disciplines where these assumptions have been more readily acknowledged. This is the basis of the cognitive and institutional network of development and of structural adjustment politics promoted by the Washington consensus.8

It is a colonial system of knowledge that expresses and legitimizes the modern colonial world-system. Europe’s dominating position in the world structure of colonialism established a monopoly of the locus of enunciation of “objective,” scientific knowledge about the modern world (Mignolo 1995, 329). It is a perspective with only one subject (white, European, with the exclusion of every other subject and every other form or style of knowledge). This leads to the naturalization of this power structure, which comes to be explained as resulting from hierarchical differences in race, culture, or other classifying systems, which always envision the modern West as the maximum expression of human development. Any difference between the cultural patterns of the hegemonic powers and the rest of the world is seen as the expression of the intrinsic inferiority of all others, or as hindrances to be supplanted (forcefully if necessary) through the European-led civilizing or modernizing process. This system of knowledge has proved to be long-lasting and has outlived colonialism as a foundation of today’s worldwide hegemonic structure of power (Quijano 2000).

It is not the same to assume that the historical patrimony of the social sciences is merely parochial as to conclude that it is also colonial. The implications are drastically different. If our social-science heritage were just parochial, knowledge related to Western societies would not need any questioning. It would be enough to expand the reach of the experiences and realities to be studied in other parts of the world. We could complete theories and methods of knowledge which thus far have been adequate for some determined places and times, but less adequate for others. The problem is a different one when we conclude that our knowledge has a colonial character and is based upon assumptions that imply and “naturalize” a systematic process of exclusion and subordination of people based on criteria of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and culture. This perspective introduces crude distortions not only in knowing others, but also in the self-understanding of European and northern societies. (Emphasis added.)

The same problems are endemic in American legal discourse, and the Critical Race Theory movement has examined these in great detail and with remarkable patience in dealing with their critics. If we are to analyze how Barry Bonds has been prosecuted - much less treated in the media and by fans - it simply will not do to use the paradigms elaborated by white racists with the minor alteration of retroactively declaring these to be colorblind.

Instead of attempting to engage those who discuss the Bonds case in the context of racial or colonial dynamics, Shysterball merely asserts that they are wrong to raise these issues at the same time that he cherry picks those parts of their writing.

I read every Shysterball post from the time it began running at THT until May 13th. I did not begin reading it with the intent of smearing the author. I restrained myself from commenting on his "non-sequitor" non-sequitor in those comments, despite seeing it as obviously faulty, because I was decidedly not looking to pick a fight. Furthermore, I myself had had only a passing interest in the Bonds prosecution, and had not really gone out of my way to consider it in its full context. When a white writer, particularly one trained and employed by the legal system, starts asserting that things have nothing to do with race, however, I see a clear obligation to investigate.

When Calcaterra brought Zirin up for a fourth time in Zirin on Bonds and the DOJ, I thought it more than appropriate to remark on the non-sequitor he devoted one of his three paragraphs to:

I don't buy Zirin's frequently-repeated charge that the Bonds prosecution is a racial thing. That's mostly because I haven't seen a shred of evidence -- or a shred of convincing argument from Zirin or anyone else -- that race is, in fact, a factor as opposed to Bonds' sheer stature and his general unlikeability, neither of which are traits on which any one race has a monopoly.

There is a severe lack of thought in Calcaterra's comment. Firstly, he attributes a "frequently-repeated charge" to Zirin on only the vaguest of terms without citing any examples. Zirin has never, so far as I can tell, written that the intent of the prosecutors was first and foremost to go after a prominent black man. Zirin's writing on the subject simply attempts to put the prosecution in its political and social context. In doing so, he's pointed out time and again that the context of the prosecution is enmeshed in a media that has gone after a player who is perceived in a manner that is markedly different in white and black communities. The idea that these subjects should only be broached and discussed if it can be demonstrated beyond doubt that race is "in fact a factor" is ridiculous. In the context of a justice system hell-bent on incarceration as a cure to social ills that locks up black people in severe disproportion to their percentage of the population, talking about the racial dynamics at play in a case that is being pursued almost entirely for publicity reasons is frankly essential. That the prosecutors have gone after an alleged individual user demands such consideration, in light of the shift in the 1980's toward an irrational and racially-motivated focus on "user accountability" in US drug policy. While the evidence that people of color use drugs in disproportion to white people in the US is non-existent, their colonial situation in this country makes them more vulnerable to police searches, prosecution, and incarceration. Is this the sort of thing that Calcaterra has not seen a shred of evidence for? If it is, then one wonders what sort of cave this lawyer lives in. Or whether he reads his own state's statistics.

Calcaterra does not specify what sort of "shred" could convince him that it is a "racial thing." He does not specify what he means by a "racial thing." He only pats the back of the white readers who want to rule out these questions from the discussion. In the context of the legal system and in the context of baseball and its media coverage, to rule out these discussions is to ignore wholesale the implications of the racist histories of their formations.

To stipulate that there is no racial monopoly on having Bonds' stature or "unlikeability" is to once again adopt the perpetrator perspective to distort one's view of reality. Indeed, Bonds' stature as perhaps the best baseball position player of all time can only realistically be shared by other African-American players - Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, or Rickey Henderson. According to Rally’s WAR figures, Barry Bonds had amassed more career value through 1999 than all but three players in the Retrosheet era, with 109 WAR. More than Mike Schmidt or Frank Robinson amassed in a career. Only Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Rickey Henderson had exceeded what Bonds had done through his first 14 seasons. The only white player of similar merit post-1947 was Mickey Mantle, and to conclude that the difference in regard for Mantle and Bonds stems from the likeability of the former is to be profoundly blind to racial dynamics in the US.

What makes a player unlikeable, in this case, is not his skill as a ballplayer but his demeanor toward a white-dominated (and, in terms of ownership of mass media, a white monopoly) media. How can one posit that race ought to be more or less ignored until The Smoking Gun court document that everyone was out to get Bonds because he was black? Simply by having a perspective cultivated by the coloniality of sociogeny, by miseducation. Calcaterra sees no need to rebut the analysis of those who raise the issue - he sees need only to assert that they are without a shred of evidence without stipulating what a shred of evidence would constitute. This is simply decadent thinking.

What has Zirin actually said about Bonds and the question of the "racial thing"?

I don't think that everyone against Bonds is a racist. I don't think every sportswriter who wants Bonds punished is a racist. And I certainly don't think anyone who believes in harsh penalties for steroid use is a racist. One can hate Barry Bonds and also spend Sundays singing "We Shall Overcome" with the Harlem Boys Choir before reading select passages from Go Tell it On The Mountain. But to argue that race has nothing to do with the saga of Barry Bonds is to practice ignorance frightening in its Rocker-ian grandiosity.

...There is no question that Bonds has spent his career treating the press the way a baby treats a diaper. But Bonds is not the first athlete to sneer at a reporter or two. In fact Mark McGwire was a notoriously surly personality who was presented to us like a grinning Paul Bunyon. It's not who you are, but who the media tells us you are. When it comes to Bonds, the press has called for everything but a big scarlet S on his chest, all of which has the appearance of a hellacious double standard. When a prominent ESPN talk show host says, "If [Bonds] did it, hang him", the perception is that this is little more than a railroad job of a prominent and outspoken African-American superstar on the precipice of Ruth and Aaron's records.

...Is this racially motivated? The question is too simplistic. The fact is that Bud Selig is deflecting criticism off the owners by putting the heat on the most prominent player in the game who happens to be Black. Whether this is conjured up in some back room or not is beside the point. MLB owners seem willing to sacrifice Bonds if it keeps Congress and the public off their backs. This is why some prominent baseball people are loudly speaking a word rarely said in the world of sports: race.

...Matt Lawton, who unlike Bonds has tested positive for steroids, said, "If (Bonds) were white, he'd be a poster boy in baseball, not an outcast."

...A couple years ago, Bonds said, "This is something we, as African American athletes, live with every day. I don't need a headline that says, 'Bonds says there's racism in the game of baseball.' We all know it. It's just that some people don't want to admit it. They're going to play dumb like they don't know what the hell is going on."

That is absolutely right. It's not defenders of Bonds who are putting race on the table, but whether you are a Bonds supporter or not, all anti-racists need to take it off.

Then consider the Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, that Zirin has called out. Mukasey thought it right to go after Bonds for allegedly perjuring himself in Grand Jury testimony that seemingly had the purpose of incriminating Bonds on perjury charges. Yet, when it comes to corruption in his own ranks - corruption to support the white-dominated GOP - here is what he had to say:

Former Justice Department officials will not face prosecution for letting improper political considerations drive hirings of prosecutors, immigration judges and other career government lawyers, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Tuesday.
Mukasey used his sharpest words yet to criticize the senior leaders who took part in or failed to stop illegal hiring practices during the tenure of his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales.
But, he told delegates to the American Bar Association annual meeting, "not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws."

Here is what Hilary O. Shelton of the NAACP had to say about Mukasey's attempts to rile up opposition to fixing the racist crack-powder disparity in sentencing:

Attorney General Mukasey’s characterization of people currently in prison for crack cocaine convictions, and of the impact that a potential reduction in their sentences could have on our communities, is not only inaccurate and disingenuous, but it is alarmist and plays on the worst fears and stereotypes many Americans had of crack cocaine users in the 1980s.

What kind of person insists upon seeing some smoking gun showing that the government specifically wanted to target a black athlete? What kind of person shouts down those who try to explore the issue, all the while generating traffic for his blog by linking to it without substantive discussion - traffic that helped him land a gig with the media giants at NBC?

The treatment of Bonds has been riddled with double standards, but allusions to his race in a country with a continuous history of racial double standards are unwarranted? The treatment has hinged heavily on a white dominated sports media - as Norman Chad wrote,

We're whiter than Newt Gingrich's Fourth of July barbecue. ... [Four black editors] out of 305? That sounds like Gilbert Gottfried's hit rate at a singles bar.

... I've heard the arguments over the years -- "we can't find qualified minority candidates blah blah blah." Oh, really? Well I've read your sports pages and you're certainly finding unqualified non -minority candidates. So how hard is it to find unqualified minority candidates?

In his fifth reference to Zirin, Calcaterra links to a Zirin piece that had this as its central point:

From the juvenile to the pious, President Obama's press flack Robert Gibbs took time out from explaining why torturers are above the law to tell us, "It's a tragedy, it's a shame." There is a tragedy and a shame afoot, but it is not rooted in the choices of one player. It's in a baseball culture that continues to think embarrassing individual players and feeding on the resentment of fans is the best path to cleaning up the sport. Manny has now joined Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and many others as permanently stained with a scarlet S. No Hall of Fame, no old timers' games and a life as a cautionary tale.

Meanwhile we all get taken to the cleaners. We have billionaire owners making scapegoats of millionaire players to soothe our anxieties about the game and our lives. Meanwhile these same owners sit like pashas in a baseball palace that could be called the House That Steroids Built.

...As baseball writer Adrian Burgos (Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line) said, "What continues to fascinate me is how MLB leadership is willing to allow individual players to take the full brunt of the collective failure of leadership. Today, pundits have ranted in at times rabid tones about the players who make millions for their role while those who make the hundred of millions (and even have billion- dollar stadiums constructed for them on the public dole) continue to profit. How many stadiums have been built since then and at what cost? All the wealth that has been accumulated at that level is in my mind just as, if not more, offensive, since the owners act as if they were not enablers and co-dependents as their players shot up, ingested and otherwise partook in performance-enhancing drugs."

I would gladly compare this reasonable approach to Calcaterra's rush piece saying the Ramirez suspension was good for the game, if only it hadn't apparently been scrubbed from the web.

Calcaterra's blog post linking to this piece read:

I'm not a big fan of Dave Zirin -- I think he's going on his 50th straight column in which race, class, Bush and Nixon are prominently mentioned, and that's overkill even for me -- but you can't say the guy isn't passionate about his subjects.

Since Zirin was not, in fact, even remotely close to 50 straight columns that mentions these topics (let alone prominently), one wonders why Calcaterra would say it was "overkill even for me" - even for you, Craig? You show next to no tolerance for columns on these subjects; it seems strange that you would imply that it was only their repetition ad nauseam (though not the actual case) that raised your ire. One wonders why Calcaterra attempts to paint Zirin as some sort of anti-GOP partisan for a column in which he goes after Robert Gibbs and the Obama administration. And one wonders what Calcaterra means by saying that "race, class, Bush and Nixon are prominently mentioned" when the column does not use the words race or class.

Calcaterra could have simply taken issue with Zirin's statement that, "The sports radio and comment boards have been cesspools of racism. It's always easy to hate, especially someone who plays a game for a living and makes millions of dollars." It is fair to argue that Zirin did not flesh out what was meant by this statement, and I'm not particularly interested in going through the hundreds of thousands of message board comments that had been made about the suspension when Zirin wrote the piece. However, of the ones I have reviewed, Ramirez has been regularly described as "stupid," "dumb," "idiot," and "scumbag." It was repeated ad nauseam in these boards that Ramirez had tested positive for steroids, which he had not. Perhaps from Craig's vantage point it is easy to see these comments as above the ground and having nothing to do with racist perceptions of Ramirez. I would respectfully disagree with such a perspective.

Zirin does discuss "class" in the context of players vs. owners vs. fans. I'm not clear on why anyone would omit such a discussion, especially since the owners have yet to state authoritatively why Ramirez was suspended and could count on the over-reaction of fans who chose to "hate" without all the facts.

Zirin references Bush and Nixon in his second-to-last paragraph:

We should always remember that former Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush made steroid persecution a recurring theme of his time in office, as long as owners were spared the spotlight. The hypocrisy should shame owners toward contrition--but they will happily crack some golden eggs, as long as it means that the goose that laid them lives. Even though come contract time, it's all about the numbers on your stat page, and not the number of clean tests. As baseball fan and poet Martin Espada told me, "Baseball is the Main Street of sports. (Think Cooperstown.) It's full of history and nostalgia, and paved with the bricks of hypocrisy. Now it's the rhetoric of the 'Drug War,' handed down from the Nixon White House forty years ago to MLB and ESPN today."

Exactly why should the continuity of drug war rhetoric from the COINTELPro Nixon administration to former MLB owner Bush's administration be ignored in making the point that it is the steroid policy itself that is the problem, and not the players suspended under it? Are we to ignore that Nixon's southern strategy, taken up by Reagan and the Bushes, was an appeal to white voters that demonized and disenfranchised black people in order to retain political power? Are we to ignore that the owners have profited from player PED use while pursuing a remedy to it that punishes players alone? Are we to ignore that the GOP's political strategy of cutting the government programs that emerged out of black struggle in the 1960's and criminalizing a gigantic portion of the population with drug laws that have racially skewed enforcement and prosecution amounts to a divestment in black communities and an investment in white profiteers? Are we to ignore that MLB may have an interest in taking down the "problem players" in the eyes of many in management and the media, and are we to ignore that MLB may have gotten away with writing a policy that will forever taint these players without evidence of PED use? If the powerful people in MLB can suspend a player for being prescribed a banned substance - without evidently taking that substance, and without clear evidence that it was taken to mask PED's or to counteract PED side effects - why should we not consider that such a policy is stupid and unduly influenced by the politics and symbolism of a racist drug war?

Perhaps it would be cherry-picking of me to only discuss Calcaterra's blind spot for Zirin. But I have seen no Calcaterra posts that intelligently addressed the points that Zirin raises. Where are the Shysterball posts that critically analyze the idea behind the steroid policies, as opposed to the technical points of their enforcement in a lay-ified legalese? As tacitly acknowledged, Calcaterra has never linked to dwil.

I have also "cherry-picked" Calcaterra's misreading of Milton Bradley's comments and biased reading of the pitch f/x article. Calcaterra responded to none of my arguments. Allow me to restate: Calcaterra warrantlessly characterized Bradley as a person addicted to proclaiming his own victimization; he suggested that pitch f/x could be used to prove that Bradley had not been victimized by umpires thus far this season. The comments that Bradley made, however, did not state that he attributed his relative lack of success in the 100 or so PA to date to unfair umpires. He was blunt about acknowledging that umpires could indeed "try to ruin Milton Bradley," although he was of course prompted to speak on the subject. Allen's piece did not investigate what Bradley said in terms of the pitch f/x data, but rather what Calcaterra said. Allen did not look at which calls came with 2 strikes, the specific statement Bradley had made. Nor did Allen look at the location of pitches that Bradley had put in play, which is a major red flag because Allen concluded by blaming Bradley's poor numbers on hitting too many groundballs and not enough line drives. If umpires are causing him to chase pitches he would otherwise lay off, then this is an obvious thing to investigate. Further, Allen fit his analysis into Craig's hypothesis by claiming that Bradley's strike zone overall had not increased in size. Such a claim is highly problematic because it rests on the assumption that there is a significance to the top of Bradley's zone shrinking. The basis for believing his zone had shrunk in this manner, looking at the graphs, are TWO individual pitches that were in the high and away portion of the zone. The context and type of pitches are not examined; rather, the lack of pitches in that area of the strike zone lead Allen to conclude the zone had not expanded. The number of low pitches outside the strike zone called strikes on Bradley outnumber these two pitches considerably, and in realistic terms a couple of favorable called balls up in the zone do nothing to compensate Bradley for having more called strikes low and away; the umpires did not inform Bradley that his strike zone had simply moved. Dissenting commenters at both Baseball Analysts and Hardball Times were ignored by Allen and Calcaterra, respectively. To recap: the hypothesis tested was mostly unrelated to Bradley's comments, and the vetting of the evidence centered around the faulty spatial reasoning of Allen's regression, ignoring common sense interpretations of the data at hand.

Further, I've taken exception to one of Craig's favorite recurring themes, Chief Wahoo. Craig's position is that Chief Wahoo is racist and that he should therefore slide slowly into obsolescence and erasure. I find such a position offensive. What is the point in asserting that Chief Wahoo is a racist caricature, without broadening the discussion? Calcaterra gets to take the high ground without engaging the implications. The significance of Wahoo should be crystal clear - the majority white fans and supermajority white owners of MLB are ok with supporting MLB even as it continues to lean on and glorify its racist past. This is a broad cultural indictment. Why are we, as baseball fans, still supporting the MLB monopoly, even if its roots are in segregation and those roots contribute to a setup today where a small group of very wealthy white men make money off of simply owning the teams? Why should it suffice to relegate this racist history to a column 20 years from now on those wacky old-timey uniforms? Why don't we acknowledge that baseball is still largely determined by its racial/colonial context?

The troubling implications of Chief Wahoo need to be discussed, not ignored in the search for a logo that can be deemed inoffensive. To suggest that the place for symbols of racism is the dustbin of history is to deprive present and future generations of agency and cultural memory; why are discussions of the symbolic functioning of racism relegated to films like Ethnic Notions that are unwatched by the vast majority of white people? My point is not that I am calling for the Indians to leave Chief Wahoo in place so we all have an ever-present reminder of its racism. My point is that independent sources of baseball analysis need to push further, need to consider these questions in a deeper and broader context, and need to issue demands for action beyond "Hey guys, I know this is controversial, so try to keep phasing it out."

I think a better historical memory is imperative for cultural growth and the overcoming of racist ideologies. Calcaterra - who treats the Mennonites stripped of their land by the railroad industry as the tricksters, rather than the railroad industry that pledged to return the land - seems to have this as a significant weakness.

As alluded to above, I also think it is questionable for Craig to use his THT blog as a platform to link daily to his pieces for NBC. I would not object to Craig doing this on his old blogspot page. There is no precedent at THT for a writer to use his THT gig to get a major media gig and continue to use THT to generate traffic for his gig with the major. That the writer in question makes the sort of questionable statements I have discussed above without responding substantively and adequately to criticisms, something I have long considered a hallmark of THT, compounds this dynamic considerably. I've loved THT and its community since it began, and it is their decision to give Craig this forum that has made me step away and take a self-imposed sabbatical from the site that I had read compulsively since its inception.

Now that I have gone through the egregious cherry-picking and overreaction that Craig has accused me of, let us return to Craig's comment to the previous post:

But please don't claim the mantle of objectivity for yourself or those you admire.

Before continuing, let's pause on this request. I have not raised any mantle of objectivity. Objectivity is not a characteristic of human being. I do not claim to be more objective than anyone else. Objectivity is a standard for study, evidence, and criticism. Frankly, my original intent was to write a very long and very restrained evidence on the problems with Shysterball's approach, something I have been considering for months. I continued to put off the writing of such a piece because, without doubt, Craig's arrogance in responding to me on his site has angered me. Whether he perceives me as arrogant or angering is a fair question, as well. I did not want to write from a place of anger.

That changed on May 31 when I began my Sunday morning with an old ritual, checking out Rich's Weekend Baseball Beat. (OK, Rich's site is called Baseball Analysts and updated primarily during the week, but for whatever reason, I still just read the past week of posts on the weekends for the most part.) I simply could not believe how faulty was the logic in Allen's post, and I was enraged that such an ill-conceived and poorly executed study was done to test a hypothesis by Craig that was a fundamental misreading of statements by one of my favorite players. I chose to write from that anger. I chose to write from my perspective. I chose to turn off the damned filter. Whether Craig is too much of a self-proclaimed "pitch f/x moron" to understand my criticism, my points were quite valid. Objectivity had flown out the window in Craig's Bradley cycle. Or rather, objectivity had been redefined so as to not reflect the real world: the spatial correlation argument stood in place of actual analysis of the expansion of the strike zone, and the validity of Bradley's comments was made to hinge on whether his lackluster early season numbers were exclusively the result of umpires' calls, a claim he never approached making.

Objectives are used to evaluate evidence. They are used to determine how to collect evidence. Objectives are themselves all socially produced, and as such cannot represent eternal standards for knowledge but rather contextual demands for rigor. Craig and I are equally objective as human beings. I find his criticisms to lack objectivity for the reasons described above; he finds mind to be lacking in objectivity for... well, in this case, not repeating comments and criticisms that were made on dwil's blog that I saw no need to comment upon because they did not diminish his argument. We will return to this point below.

My site here began because I decided I wanted to return to baseball writing without indulging in publicity . I told about 10 writers that knew me and that I respected about it; I specified from the start that it was recreational. A few of them have linked to me (including Studes at Craig's own site earlier this year), and a couple put me on their sidebars though I stated I was uninterested in that. My brief experience with a foray into the semi-commercial baseball writing world led me to want nothing to do with it. I am not interested in a career as a baseball writer, part time or otherwise, though last year while my father was dying and I had quit my job out of exhaustion, I considered doing it again for a while.

As such, this blog has been written under a pen name - one that makes it quite easy to discover my actual name, but one that I prefer because baseball writing is a minor part of my life and is something that I would like to do in the context of my fandom and not something I would like to have stand as a summation of my intellectual interests. This blog has also never had any sort of traffic meter; if someone links to me or reads me I only know if I happen to see the link or if the reader leaves a comment. This blog has been written with only cursory editing, and no post on it has been anything but impulsive, including this one.

Throughout the history of the blog, I have been content to write my reactions and my oppositions. I have been uninterested in conforming the blogs to any conventions designed to garner more readers. I have taken aim at the decadence and low standards at Baseball Prospectus, and, for a brief time, Fangraphs (Fangraphs in the months following upped its efforts considerably and addressed my criticisms, and I have since used this blog to laud them as the best baseball site around.), but above all else, I have taken aim at Ned Colletti. I have not seen my job to be to report on everything they do but rather to voice my opposition as situations arose.

After writing the Bradley post, I realized that there was no reason to wait out my anger and write something white washed to appeal to as many people as I could. I have no delusions of grandeur. I told myself to just write my reactions. When I read that dwil piece, knowing that Calcaterra had never linked to him, I figured it appropriate to raise the issue on this blog and put it in the context of what I think baseball blogs can do and where I think they should be headed.

Use objectivity to consider what I wrote. Do not castigate me for failing to meet your arbitrary standards for what constitutes objectivity. My previous post was about the need to consider radically different perspectives; that is an important objective, and I thought it only fitting to be upfront, to write with a tone that would indicate that I was attempting to offer a radically different perspective.

Continuing with Craig's comment:

Contrary to your assumption, I did read Dwil's piece.

Fine. You certainly can't fault me for doubting you would read it, considering you've never linked to him or mentioned him before. And it's not clear whether you read it independently or in response to me writing about it; if you only read dwil because I prompt you to, that's some evidence that I have a point, no?

And while I agree with him wholeheartedly about Greenberg being an idiot for what he said (and I'd argue on general principles too, but that's another topic) Dwill is dead wrong to take Greenberg's statement about a "special wing" for Negro League players at face value. There is no "special wing." Indeed, in a special bit of poetic justice, Satchel Paige's plaque is right next to Tom Yawkey's -- the man who worked his ass off to keep the Red Sox white -- in the room which honors inductees.

Even inductees who, unlike Paige, spent their entire careers in the Negro Leagues are honored along with everyone else. There is no asterisk. There is no qualification. While their inductions may have been, as a general matter and in the first instance, inspired by some white guilt rather than a genuine appreciation of their skills, the Hall of Fame and many, many baseball scholars have worked very hard to assess, evaluate and honor their on-the-field accomplishments as accurately as possible. There people who have full time jobs combing old news reports, compiling stats databases, and doing hard work to make sure that the men who played in the Negro Leagues are given the same due as those who were allowed to play in the majors.

But Dwil isn't interested in that. He's more interested in jumping at an easy, erroneous target (Greenberg's ridiculous "wing") and using it to beat a drum I'm guessing he's beaten before. And it may very well be worth beating. But I would hope that someone who, like you demands such exacting standards of accuracy from guys with whom you disagree likewise demand it from guys with whom you agree.

Dwill tars the Hall of Fame baed on a lie that is conevenient to his politics. Is that not a problem for you?

There are an awful lot of assumptions that Craig makes here that he does not come close to examining. It should go without saying that Craig here is guilty of cherry-picking in response to a fairly long piece of criticism. Instead of responding to the substance of dwil's post, he calls dwil out for not investigating whether such a wing existed as Greenberg had stipulated. Dwil "isn't interested" in following up on the claim of one of the most heard sports broadcasters in the country, a claim that neither his cohost nor whatever fact checkers ESPN employs for the show disputed - agreed; he's interested in discussing what Greenberg's logic means.

Why does Craig assume I linked to the article without knowledge that dwil had jumped the gun in taking Greenberg at his word? The fact that no such wing exists was mentioned in the comments on his post hours before I read it. I was well aware that no such physical wing to display Negro League plaques existed. Why was it my responsibility to level this criticism at dwil when it was already in the comments on his post - comments to which dwil responded at length? Perhaps you see the claim the the HOF is racist as another drum to bang, but using such a wing as evidence of the hall's racism was quite clearly not the point of his post. The point is quite clear:

Now, I have railed against racism in the media since the beginning of Sports On My Mind. And really, I am sick of doing it. Just as I am sick of pointing out the effects of gambling on sports and how easy it is to fix games, and how various people in a and around sports have, over the decades, intimated that many games are, in fact, fixed.

But with racism, the matter obviously transcends anything else in sports because it is a reflection of the United States, just as it is a reflection of Western culture.

Why is racism so damn important?

Racism is one of the foundational aspects of Western culture. Racism is the “automatic” every person in the world must deal with each day. Either you are a beneficiary of racism or you are a victim of it. Either you fight against racism or you are a progenitor of the foundational aspects of racism. Every day of your life. No questions asked, no way around it.

And by dismissing racism in baseball’s Hall of Fame, Greenberg is a progenitor of the Western tradition of racism.

Note the massive difference between dwil's point about Greenberg and Calcaterra's restatement of it that Greenberg is being an idiot. Calcaterra's version completely ignores dwil's arguments about Greenberg and instead makes things into a question of intelligence instead of participation in "the Western tradition of racism." Dwil criticizes Greenberg's racist logic - and all Craig wants to talk about is Greenberg's factual inaccuracy.

The statement Craig likely most objects to is this: "So why is there a special wing for the victims of racism in baseball? Because baseball, like the rest of our society, like Greenberg specifically, is inherently racist." The point clearly still stands as an argument about the racist logic employed. Calcaterra prefers to call Greenberg an idiot, as if that somehow does anything constructive to deal with the permeation of racist logic.

Reread the post. Dwil's point was clearly not that the baseball Hall of Fame was racist because of the new development that it has a special wing. He asserts that such a special wing would be evidence of the HoF's racism, but as even Calcaterra quasi-admits Dwil has argued that the hall is racist for a long time, and not because of the physical layout of the plaques. Calcaterra is much more interested in criticizing dwil for not honoring the works of the Negro League historians (and more interested in implying things like that dwil thinks there are asterisks on the Negro League plaques) than in taking the argument and, most importantly, dwil's perspective seriously. I fail to see how I could prove my argument better than Calcaterra ignoring the substance of both my points and dwil's points to criticize both of us for not noting Greenberg's factual inaccuracy. My previous post was a call for all of us to take seriously the liminal perspectives on baseball; Calcaterra responds by arguing, in essence, that they are not worth taking seriously because at times they don't check all the facts.

Calcaterra's limited perspective allows him to refer to the fact that Paige's plaque is next to Yawkey's as some sort of validation that the Hall is not racist. From my perspective, I am absolutely flummoxed as to how a Hall of Fame that celebrates Yawkey can evade the charge of racism. Yawkey was elected into the Hall of Fame in 1980 with a considerable legacy of racism that long outlasted the integration of some players into the NL and then AL, and people today are arguing about whether PED users are too tainted to belong in the Hall?

Paul Molitor is in and Tim Raines is out. Yawkey, Kuhn, and Landis are in; Marvin Miller, Buck O'Neill and Curt Flood are out.

There is no special wing in the physical building. But there are 35 Negro Leaguers represented, whereas 38 players were elected to the hall in the first 11 years of its existence (i.e., pre-1947). Though I haven't gone through to get the exact count, the number of veteran's committee selections from the segregated era appears to trump the number of selections from the Negro League committees.

I don't understand why any discussion of dwil's post should turn on whether he took Greenberg at his word. The plaques of Negro League players all say Negro Leagues at the top, and most of them say Negro Leagues in the text. None of the plaques for players from the segregated "Major Leagues" identify them as players in White or Whites-only leagues, nor do any of them refer to this advantage (correct me if I'm wrong, I have not looked at all of them). Sure, there is no asterisk - they leave that for the Ecko ball. The idea that Tom Yawkey's plaque should be in the same room as Satchel Paige's is laughable; is it really your contention that a body that treats these figures as evil should be presumed non-racist?

Dwil did not tar the HOF with Greenberg's accusation. His position, and mine, on whether the HoF is tainted by racism was unchanged. As such, no, I am not bothered, especially since this oversight was acknowledged before I posted my piece. His arguments, however, were simply ignored by Craig. That is an oversight of much greater significance as far as I am concerned.

***

A day after commenting on my blog (a comment I saw for the first time early this morning), Craig (nearly?) declared me his enemy on his blog.

It just kind of goes on and on like that, as does his previous post, albeit with far more colorful language. Obsessive ShysterBall readers will also recall that the blog's author, Fifth Outfielder, has shown up in the comments to take me to task for being a tool of the racist establishment from time to time. More recently he has disappeared altogether, apparently boycotting the blog. I suppose it goes with with territory. If anything, I'm actually surprised that I don't have more people angry at me.

Sorry that I don't aspire to your pithiness. I didn't just boycott the blog, I boycotted THT (where I was a subscriber to the Batted Ball Reports), and informed Craig as such in an email with my actual name. The boycott was not to cloister myself off. The idea that I was seeking to evade dialogue is confusing, since it was Craig himself who suggested, at the conclusion of our last exchange, that I should not seek dialogue with him:

Know, however, that ultimately we’re disagreeing on tone and approach, and I doubt seriously that any number of words we throw back and forth at each other is going to convince us that the other is right on this.

The other comments on his blog certainly gave me the impression that my comments were unwelcome, with one saying "Hopefully somebody takes the time to read this dissertation above and make snarky comments about it." For Craig to turn around and act as if he played no part in alienating me from his comment sections is disingenuous.

His "it just kind goes on and on like that" comment is itself quite misleading, as only the first part of my post was focused on my dislike for his blog. He responds to none of the substantive points I made about his site and gives the readers the impression I wrote one long hit piece about him, when I had rather made a fairly broad call for a new approach to writing about the intersection of baseball, politics, law, and culture. Shysterball was a jumping off point, but Craig would only portray my post as vitriol.

But just because someone hates you doesn't mean you have to hate them back. Batman once tried to redeem the Joker, and Luke did the same for Vader (the Smurfs, on the other hand, never showed an ounce of empathy for Gargamel because they're callous, hateful little beasts). And to be clear: I have no ill feelings towards Fifth Outfielder. He's obviously smart and committed to what he believes in, and I respect that, even if one of the things he believes is that I have my head in the sand about racism in baseball and America at large.

Let's be clear. I hate certain elements of your blog, not you. It does get a bit personal in that it would be fair to say I hate lawyers who work for governments with substantively racist policies who spend their free time denying that racism is a relevant issue in discussions of law. I did not start reading Shysterball with anything but the intention to enjoy it; I figured it would be quite good since I love THT and Dave does an excellent job of finding writers. As it turned out, the blog made a continually worse impression on me as I read it daily at work. When I raised the issue that Bonds' prosecution could fairly be seen as a "racial thing" and that Craig's unstated standards of evidence effectively precluded Zirin's perspective (as well as my responses to the Chief Wahoo post), Craig did not respond with a thirst for dialogue but rather a thirst to justify what he had already written. My previous opinion that the blog was ok but had some issues began to sour after these exchanges. After the exchange on the Manny/Zirin post, I felt it was time to move on. I felt I needed to boycott THT to stay true to my personal code of ethics, knowing that this was a tough decision. The only THT posts I have accessed since have been Craig's when I have been writing about him. I don't hate him. I think his blog and prominence (has anyone been linked to more by Neyer since Calcaterra was invited to THT?) are detrimental in that he covers topics where race is highly salient while denying that it should be discussed. As such, I see a responsibility to respond, and when the climate will not take these responses, I see pragmatic reasons to move my comments to another location.

I'm not quite sure what the sand comment was about, but I certainly do not excuse my consciousness from having been sociogenically produced by US racism. The point of my previous post is that all of us in the US (and most of us on Earth) have had our consciousnesses sociogenically produced by coloniality. Sociogeny is the term coined by Frantz Fanon in his seminal Black Skin White Masks, where he argues for a new humanism that requires a new decolonized understanding of human being. His point is not merely that racists are taught to be racists but moreso that coloniality is strong enough to sociogenically produce a myriad of subjectivities that are all rooted in coloniality's misanthropic skepticism. Fanon's work has been elaborated upon at length by numerous scholars and organic intellectuals; excellent studies expanding on his work include Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon And The Psychology Of Oppression, (1985); Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (1995), and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (2008). Carter G. Woodson's The Miseducation of the Negro is an earlier work that elaborates many of Fanon's theme in the US context. Sylvia Wynter has drawn from Fanon and Woodson to produce a large body of outstanding and provocative scholarship that takes these themes to elaborate perhaps the most rigorous and thoroughgoing transdisciplinary model for a human sciences ever conceived. The linked wikipedia page has a nearly complete bibliography of her writings; a strong introduction by Karen Gagne can be found online.

Craig and I both have consciousnesses awash in the sands. I cannot speak to his biography in any length, knowing only snippets from his blog. As for me, my experiences living in the country, in the city, in almost entirely white communities and white minority communities, and being a product of the scholarship class has led me to always seek out new perspectives on racism. Here is an excerpt from Prof. Wynter's essay in Not Only the Master's Tools edited by Gordon & Gordon that elaborates the necessity of considering radically different perspectives:

Here Ricoeur's parallely redefined concept of "utopia" in terms of its dialectic functioning with "ideology" identifies it as being, in all human orders, the liminal site or perspective that must be systemically excluded from the normal functioning of each specific order, as the condition of that order's stable production and reproduction. As such, therefore, the only perspective that carries within it the possibility of an escape from the prescriptive categories of each order's "general horizon of understanding" as well as of its legitimated system of authority.' Hence, Ricoeur continues, each order's mode of public knowledge or Ideology—whose function is to enable the subject of the order to know the order in terms that are adaptively advantageous to its own reproduction, and thereby to behave in ways oriented by that knowledge, and as a function that therefore calls for its intellectuals, religious or secular, to ensure the rigorous production of such knowledge—must, given its order-integrating, in¬deed order-producing and reproducing function, remain "impervious to philosophical attack"; it is everywhere the "systemic function of utopian modes of thought to challenge these modes of public and order-integrating thought from a place outside the order's mode of rationality—from utopia, that is nowhere" (Ricoeur 1979). From the perspective, therefore, of those whose exclusion—or systemic subordination as in the case of the laity and lay intellectuals of late medieval Europe—is the indispensable condition of the order's truth, and therefore of its existence. Or as in the case of our own "imposed wrongness of being," or desetre, as experienced through the Fanonian type of black self-alienation, W E. B. Du Bois's "double consciousness," or, in George Lamming's terms, our systemically in¬duced self-amputation (Lamming 1984), as the ultimate Human Other to Man over-represented as if it were the human.

I understand full well that Wynter's prose can only be processed with considerable focus, and it took me quite a long time to read her ouvre and understand it. The point is that social orders, rather than biology, are the mechanism for human adaptation and evolution. Humans do not evolve slowly through breeding and genetic mutation, but rather evolve quickly through their capacity for language, narrative, and symbolic understanding that allow intra-generational reformulations of what must be done to survive. In the same law-like fashion that biogenetic evolution occurs to protect the species from extinction, culture/sociogeny functions to propel a social order into the future. The diversity of human cultures and social orders reflects the diversity of global contexts into which humans have been able to adapt. If humans exercise autonomy over their cultural modes of sociogenic reproduction, the culture will adapt to human circumstances. The "dialectic" that is consistently faced, however, is whether the modes of sociogenic reproduction are too strong to allow substantial revision and adaptation. A social order that becomes too effective in reproducing itself may soon collapse, as can be seen throughout the history of human empires. As such, a social order must listen to precisely those people who it casts outside of itself, the liminal or threshold figures of the order (for discussion of these anthropological terms, see Victor Turner and Asmaron Legesse). It is only from the vantage point of those excluded or partially excluded from the social orders that the flaws in the social order are evident, because the human beings sociogenically produced as good humans of their kind are tasked not with criticism of the social order but with its reproduction.

In the context of a world after 500 plus years of Western European colonialism that has reached every part of the globe, we are faced with a globalized Eurocentric culture/sociogeny, one that has Africans and the African diaspora as its most radical Other and symbol of social death. Its modes of sociogeny places limits on all human beings, who are inundated with Eurocentric cultural, economic, and political institutions that work as a hegemonic coalition. Such a social order may produce brazenly misanthropic systems of human organization, like a dependence on industrial military and incarceration to police the world, or the control of human production and economies by investor classes, or systems for democratic representation that systemically produce unrepresentative politics. The fidelity to the US constitution as if it were the embodiment of how any society ought to be governed in spite of the vast differences in knowledge and experience possessed by its drafters and the people who are now subjugated to it, is one example of a social order reproducing itself sociogenically so that its very premises are not subjected to widespread critical scrutiny but are rather performed piecemeal and generally long after the damage has been done. We can look at it as a system for democracy, or we can look at it as a document written by settler-colonists to preserve their power that has functioned to do so for 220 years. We can look at the US states as random geographic groupings, or we can acknowledge that with the exception of Hawaii each state was admitted to the Union only after it had become a white majority, at least in terms of those with the franchise.

To go beyond racism it is not even remotely enough to simply examine our privileges, acknowledge that racism exists, and hope to identify it when present. We must see how racism shapes our very being, how are being is not biological body + rational/independent mind but rather a life form in which sociogeny functions as law-likely as do ontogeny and phylogeny.

The analogy to the Smurfs, Batman, and Star Wars is here completely inappropriate. (And, I cannot help but add, is evidence of the ethnocentrism of Craig's response.) I do not hate what you represent and seek to destroy you with violence. I am not seeking antagonism. I am seeking a change in human life, and I am identifying baseball and its legal, political, economic and cultural facets as a crucial site for the sociogenic reproduction of our order. How we as fans develop loyalty, conceive of the individual and the group, comprehend the passage of time and opportunity and the promise of the future, are all hugely significant in our lives. We cannot let the systems devised by Landis, Rickey, Kuhn, and Selig suffice. We must seek a new epistemology and a new understanding of our existence, because the ones we have received and been taught (and, it should be clear, this teaching requires active learning - we as human beings participate in and can at all times alter our sociogenic production) are simply not adequate to create a world where our modes of sociogeny affirm the entire human species and not just the subjects considered its ideal. The disproportionate power of the breadwinner, the investor, the politician, the owner - this power is culturally produced, and at every level, and with the aid of baseball constructs like the manager and the scout. This disproportionate power puts us all at risk because these actors are produced to act primarily in the interest of their Ethnoclasses and not the interests of the human species as a whole.

My ill feelings are not to Craig, the human being, who simply struggles with the same issues as I from a different perspective. My ill feelings are toward the modes of cultural production that he has taken on and reproduced, and my anger stems from his heretofore inability to respond to criticism with self-reflexiveness instead of reactive defense. Despite the contentions of Craig's commenters, I have not called Craig "racist" or "a racist." I have sought to put his arguments in their sociogenic context, just as I seek to put every moment of my reality in its sociogenic context. I see us as in this together, but I don't think that our samenesses mean I should avoid antagonistic forms of argument. Antagonism can be highly productive. Whether my own antagonistic arguments have been productive is a question I cannot adequately answer, and I cannot remove this tendency from its sociogenic context; I have indeed been raised by an antagonistic culture.

I have not gobbled up Greenberg's assertion like candy. I have thought about it in its context, and it is telling that Craig has decided it appropriate to cherry-pick my silence on the tertiary issue of Wilson's acceptance of Greenberg at face value as a reason to discard the bulk of my contentions at the same time that he criticizes me for cherry-picking. I have called for a new approach, and Shysterball has responded by labeling me an enemy, with a slight and unenthusiastic backtrack. The exchange began with Craig disregarding fair criticisms, and he continues to stay out of their substance to focus on characterizing me, dwil, and Zirin as fundamentally lacking. It is my contention that no progress against racism can be made unless we start from the perspective of finding the value in radical criticisms of the social order; we must consider these critiques in context and not disregard them at the first sign of a comforting reason to find them lacking. Otherwise, we will never be able to see what is lacking in ourselves.

When Will the Shyster Write About DK Wilson?

2009-06-08T10:28:00.000-07:00

One of my many, many problems with Craig Calcaterra's Shysterball Blog is that, though he defends his BS claims about Dave Zirin with the old "Hey, at least I link to him!" ('I want his voice to be heard, honest! I just want my readers to know going in that he is wrong to raise the issues he raises, though I will offer no explanation or analysis as to why that is'), in searching his archives I have found ZERO instances of him linking to D.K. Wilson, aka dwil, who has written for many online and print outlets over the years and who presently writes at Sports on My Mind. Now, there are two obvious causes for this, as a) Calcaterra almost certainly does not seek out or regularly read either writers who discuss the interplay of racism and sports or black sports writers and b) dwil almost certainly does not meet Calcaterra's strict scrutiny of a writer's "tone" (which, judging from the way that Calcaterra writes and from many of the blogs and columnists he links to, is like the pot calling the water black).

For Mr. Calcaterra, the job of the white writer evidently is not to convince everyone of his arguments, but to convince only the majority of his overwhelmingly white audience (myself included until I stopped reading his site after his latest refusal to offer any criticism to back up his anti-Zirin one-liners [sorry, "snark"] other than to point out that Zirin offered no evidence to substantiate his claim that the message boards on sports websites had racist comments about Manny Ramirez) that he is right. For the writer who writes about racism, however, the burden of proof is to fully convince the white racist reader *with every single article that is written.* The burden is not on the reader to consider the article in the context of the author's body of work (like, in the case of Zirin, TWO full-length books written to establish his case and flesh out the connections that cannot be fleshed out in the short pieces that Calcaterra links to, short pieces that scarcely even make the allegations Calcaterra objects to), but rather on the author to repeat his claims over and over again in some crystalline yet completist fashion so that every new development elicits an entire restatement.

(In the Manny Ramirez piece, Zirin was quite simply clowning everybody for going along and making a big deal out of Ramirez when it was baseball's drug policy itself that was "stupid" and since the evidence that Ramirez himself acted "stupidly", as at least dozens of commenters I saw wrote, has yet to be established - here's dwil with a piece that the Shyster neglected to generously link to that sure seems a compelling reason to me to suspend any discussion of what Manny Ramirez did or is responsible for until MLB acts responsibly in informing the public about what actually happened instead of merely helping the media chase its own tail. [I would also think it appropriate to wait for the details to emerge before writing an article saying Ramirez's suspension was good for baseball that apparently has been pulled from the site.] Here's an idea, Shyster: instead of reading a book that you KNOW is tabloid junk [Selena Roberts] to boost your traffic, why don't you read one of Zirin's books and tell us why he's as wrong as you claim and why you cannot "endorse" him to your audience? It's not as if, say, Jim Bouton ["Finally, the long awaited prequel to all the sports books you’ve ever read…. Dave Zirin’s writing is the opening shot in the battle to reclaim sports."] isn't willing to endorse Zirin, but hey, why not take some lawyer's word for it that Zirin is a mere incorrigible? Calcaterra is not, it seems, interested in taking seriously Jack McCallum's praise for Zirin's latest book: "You have to read Dave Zirin to believe him, and if you read him, you will believe him." Because Calcaterra doesn't want to read much Zirin or encourage his readers to read or believe him.)

Today dwil writes another solid piece that Calcaterra will, if I am not mistaken, ignore. In ignoring it, the Shyster will miss out on another opportunity to see why his "burden of proof" in discussions of racism is not merely illogical but misanthropic and disastrous. I mean, this cat went to law school, right? Alan Freeman already won this goddamn debate 30 years ago with his article on the perpetrator perspective in US law (Alan D. Freeman, Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Decisions, 62 Minn. L. Rev. 1049, 1052, 1978.). The notion that humanists who are trying to improve the conditions of oppressed peoples need to "prove" racism exists is a specter that white people have allowed to haunt all discussions of racism (and nearly all discussions of reality) in this country for the past 40 years. Instead of just admitting that racism, by virtue of being a structural component in the creation of our institutions and cultures, is something that must be systemically and honestly addressed and studied at all turns, those who recite the gospel of American law written by white racists insist on omitting racism from nearly all discussions, confining it only to those cases where data has been collected and vetted by white males and racist intent is established, so that villains can be slapped on their wrists. Because we know Clarence Thomas is on the Supreme Court, we simply know that the burden of proof is on white people to demonstrate that things as they are now are desirable to all human beings and do not have demographic borders or tendencies in their benefactors. And in the case of baseball and PED's, no sane person could evaluate the totality of the evidence and conclude that racism has not shaped the giant mess we are faced with; no sane person would think that the problems could be solved without a broader and thoroughgoing praxis (by which I mean unified study, theory, and action) to address systemic racism.

Shyster's blog is known for covering media, law, and politics. The undeniable fact is that in the US all of these fields are not merely run and financed and the majority by white people and middle- or upper-class people, but are DOMINATED by these people. Major League Baseball has a monopoly in this country that was granted to it by an all-white supreme court when MLB was all-white. A 99%-100% white US senate has, in the 87 years since, not even revoked the antitrust exemption. Tell me, Craig, why it is not incumbent upon this body - which is elected because the US has a constitutional system of democracy that subdivides the country geographically in such a way that an involuntary minority population remains a minority in any mass political body it can gain citizenship in - to invoke the Morgan Powers under the 14th amendment to not just obliterate the antitrust exemption for MLB but to repair the situation by ensuring that there is black community control and ownership over a sports league that is owned almost entirely by the same white male demographic that earned the antitrust exemption for its white male players only game in the first place?

Baseball's owners and its media allies have turned the question of PED into an utter running joke on the people of the US, baiting us again and again to blame the players, individually or collectively, for their own "cheating," even though the cheating in question evidently has more to do with careerism and competition for salary than stealing games from the other team (the conventional understanding of cheating); PED users who have spoken to the media have more or less admitted that coming back from injury to regain playing time from teammates who would otherwise gain from their absence is a strong motivating factor. Does not this mutation of the meaning of "cheating" from competitive advantage in a team sport to competitive advantage in a labor market demand that we consider why baseball has a system that encourages players to cheat against each other, as opposed to encouraging teams to cheat to beat teams? The owners have held on to an utterly corrupt labor structure premised on the owners owning not merely the operations of the teams but the entire careers of players. With the rise of the union in the 1960's and 1970's and the strikes of the 1980's and 1990's, reforms have been made to make it such that after either six years of Major League service time or being released (ie, two requirements that are dependent on the teams to further the player's career in the first place), these players have freedom of movement within MLB, but we are still left with the problem that professional baseball players have scant realistic options outside of MLB. And MLB still has a significant problem of being white-run and white-owned and catering to a mostly white demographic, leading to media fools castigating a team for signing a player because racists will try to rile that player up.

A racist white government builds a racist white monopoly. Over the next quarter century the monopoly becomes all encompassing by developing a minor league affiliate system that ensures the AL and NL can crush other independent leagues - including, oh, I don't know, the Negro Leagues. It then decides to start profiting off of the talent and skill of black players by incorporating them into MLB, historically using the rhetoric of integrationism that emerged out of the demand from black US citizens to be included in anti-fascist fighting forces in the 1940's. Concurrent with the ascent of integrationism from 1947-1965, MLB teams start integrating black players into their teams, though they do so piecemeal and demand that the players remain silent in the face of rampant fan racism (not to mention coach/management/ownership racism).
While writers like Calcaterra are likely unfamiliar with the bulk of scholarship and organic intellectual theorization of the numerous pitfalls of integrating into economies and institutions that have become dominant precisely through their own racism, this literature is highly salient to any discussion of baseball history and baseball present.

The reforms of the post-Flood era have, no doubt, put more money into the coffers of black and mestiza players from the US, Central America, and the Caribbean. (Then again, they have undeniably yielded much more profit for baseball's white owners, not to mention its management, media complex, or the white players whose boats have floated on the rising tides.) But the evidence of material reforms and incremental improvements is a universally-functioning mechanism for white/Eurocentric institutions to cut off criticism and offer facile counter evidence that does not address the root criticism. Tokenism is utterly useless in the struggle for humanity, as no less an integrationist than Martin Luther King explained in his must-read Why We Can't Wait. As long as MLB policy is determined by a confluence of white-dominated ownership, management, political and legal oversight, and media oversight, alongside white-majority fandom, racism is an obvious issue that is always on the table in discussing the historical causes of the status quo, the range of alternatives being realistically considered and the range of alternatives that ought to be considered.

White males shaped this game in such a way that the need for testosterone has kept out female players, and the chickens came home to roost when the '90's evidently saw the need for testosterone bloom into an outbreak of anabolic steroid usage. Baseball fields need not have the dimensions they have, and rosters need not have the compositions they have. Baseball teams need not be arranged in an absolute hierarchy with MLB on top such that the biggest class in baseball is the fan who does not play at all and can only follow the game, gaining none of the physical or emotional benefits of playing while being saddled with a consumptive drive for white-owned productions and an existential imprisonment in following their teams year in and year out (and, for so many, day in and day out).

White males riled up the fans about steroid use once the leaks became too big to contain, and they all acted as if they hadn't been responsible for the epidemic. As if they were not responsible for instilling careerism in the mind of every young player, as if they were not responsible for developing these people as players in a possessive-development scheme. As if they had fought hard for drug testing. Or, for the sanctimonious in the media who blame ownership for not imposing testing, as if the players did not have hugely valid concerns about letting MLB control the tests and the policy. It does not take much imagination to see that a bipartite solution could have been broached whereby MLB mandated that the MLBPA have its own drug testing system in exchange for a greater share of revenues. Instead, MLB held out until it could impose drug testing on a panicking MLBPA. I simply don't have patience for those who would like to "blame" the MLBPA. The MLBPA's very development was prevented for decades by baseball's racist monopoly. MLB is responsible for the corruption its union, since the union's task has, for the duration of its existence, been to try to fight against a system that continues decades of corruption within the confines of a pro-capitalist legal system; MLB is responsible for the failings of the MLBPA since the union depends on the leadership of players whose very notion of what it means to be a baseball player and what it means to be on a team have been shaped by many years being developed by MLB teams as well as a culture enchanted by the MLB monopoly.

White racism is a constitutive element of the baseball world that all of us have inherited. All of us constitute the present and future of this baseball world, and as such, it is our responsibility to study, theorize, and destroy the world of racism in order to make baseball a game for all humans and not a game mired in misanthropy. That means it is incumbent upon white baseball fans to read and study the works of those who challenge racism in baseball - and those who challenge it in general. Relying on the fictitious depictions of racism created by white people simply will not do; racism is not a mere illness of ignorance that wells up in the Cartesian minds of a few, a "thing" to be eradicated by having a couple of black friends and rooting for Hank Aaron or Ken Griffey Jr.

Critics of racism throughout history have challenged the definition of humanity proposed by racists, from Bartolome de las Casas and Waman Puma de Ayala to Ottobah Cuguano and Anton Wilhemlm Amo to Carter G. Woodson and Frantz Fanon. The concepts of "miseducation" and "sociogeny" that emerge in the latter two of these theorists, concepts that were only made possible by seeing the problems of humanity from the vantage points of those dehumanized by them, are central to how any believer in human life must proceed in improving the world. What it means to be a baseball fan - to be a fan of MLB teams that are as they are because of a history of racism - can only be answered by honestly addressing the question of how racism has shaped our pedagogy and culture, our ways of knowing the world and accepting realities. We cannot look at the development system and baseball and conclude that the baseball player is a mere biological organism put out in the world to fulfill its genetic destiny. Baseball players are produced through culture, a culture whose autonomy is overwhelmingly determined by people and institutions whose historical development has been structured by the imperative of maintenance in light of racist pasts, presents, and futures.

No reader of the Harball Times needs to be told that baseball and the baseball media have developed a culture of miseducation, of batting average, win-loss record, RBI, scouts who look for the "good face." And no sabermetrician can deny that, for all the objectivity they aspire to, the limits of sabermetrics as presently constituted are defined by the institution of MLB and its affiliate system. Sabermetricians thus far have, for the most part, sought objective knowledge on the relationship of players to teams and other players, to the study of how players perform over the course of games, seasons, and careers. The largely unexamined aspect of this objective sabermetric wisdom is how teams select players for inclusion on teams or in franchises; sabermetrics as simply the study of MLB and MiLB statistics (it is not my suggestion that all of sabermetrics meets this definition) lapses into a study of baseball that is epistemically dependent on MLB itself, and hence becomes the internal study of MLB as opposed to the objective study of baseball proper. In the discussion of the next wave of baseball analysis, as Sal Baxamusa wrote, "[Bill] James responded that the future of sabermetrics is to stop looking at how clubs are run and start looking at how the league is run." Will the role of the sabermetrician be to make the league more efficient, to help it maximize its profit, to help spread it globally? Or will the role of the sabermetrician be to denaturalize the monopoly, to integrate the data and debunking with an objective study of why baseball is as it is now and an opening of possibilities for what baseball can become?

Looking at the world from the threshold of its social orders - from the perspective of the poor fan who follows the box scores compulsively, from the perspective of the MLB player who is brought down in the faux-court of public opinion that has learned how to form its opinions from a racist criminal justice system and racist drug laws, from the perspective of the players who give up on baseball before they have a chance to be scouted - is the only way to learn the contents of those social orders, since their pedagogies and cultures determine how we see the world. To free ourselves from miseducation we need to start presuming the worth of those who are unafraid to brazenly call out racism when they perceive it; we need to start presuming that racism as a historical factor effects us and the world we perceive in ways that we cannot possibly perceive; we need to go beyond ShysterBall to analyze law, politics, media, and sports as they are, instead of how the snarkerati and the white legal system with its oft-abandoned integrationist reforms tells us that they are. These tasks are urgent, and they demand that baseball fans start reading Carter G. Woodson and the Willie Mays of Sportswriting.

Hey, Why Be Fair to Milton Bradley?

2009-05-31T09:10:00.000-07:00

Sequence of events: Hardball Times' Ballshit blog links to Milton Bradley's comments on getting squeezed by umpires:

"Bradley believes his strike zone is being widened, forcing him to chase pitches he normally doesn't swing at or risk being called out on strikes. ... 'As soon as he gets two strikes, we're going to call whatever and see what he does.'"

Ballshit decides to draw from the rhetorical cannon of the white racist opponents of affirmative action:

"This seems like something that could easily be checked via PITCHf/x data... Probably doesn't matter, though. Bradley seems like the kind of guy who's going to cast himself as a victim no matter where the pitches are."

Dave Allen at Baseball Analysts takes the bait by comparing Bradley's called strikes to balls. His data shows, quite clearly, that Bradley is getting more called strikes that are low and away. Allen then runs a regression for no apparent reason and decides that the small sample of pitches up in the zone that Bradley didn't swing at counterbalances the increase in the zone low and away. He concludes:

"I can understand Bradley was frustrated on Sunday. The Cubs had just lost seven straight games, and in five of those games they scored either zero or one run. He is hitting a meager .196/.322/.373 this season, but he has his decreased BABIP and LD% and increased GB% to blame for it, not the umpires."

So, let me get this straight. Bradley says his zone has been widened; Allen's evidence confirms this. The specific question of whether Bradley's getting a worse zone with two strikes is NOT investigated. And Allen essentially takes two called balls that were up in the zone to mean that Bradley's zone has shrunk in the top, as if from Bradley's perspective those two calls would serve as evidence he didn't need to cover the top of the zone and could merely shift his focus to getting those balls low and away. Allen says that Bradley's meager batting line is the fault of his not hitting the ball well, and not the umpires, but Allen doesn't examine even one pitch that Bradley actually swung at! One of his commenters, dk, points out the obvious:

"I only skimmed the article, but perhaps he has more GB's and fewer LD's because they're calling a lower zone on him?"

Allen then responds to other comments on the thread but not to this one. While Allen worked on his post, the Ballshitter repackaged his story for General Electric to emphasize that no matter what happens, he can always denigrate Milton Bradley (which, to his credit, he did in half of his posts that day):

"Unless of course last night's offensive outburst means that Bradley has turned the corner. Er, I'm sorry, I mean if last night's outburst means that the umpires decided, in light of his comments, to stop being so mean to him. "

Allen posts his analysis, which Tangotiger dignifies by calling it a "tracer" but makes no comments otherwise, and no comments accrue on his post. Ballshit then links to Allen's piece with an authoritative, "Milton Bradley is NOT getting boned:"

"Last week I suggested that someone who know something about Pitchf/x to analyze Milton Bradley's claims that he's being squeezed. Dave Allen stepped up and knocked it out of the park. Thanks, Dave. You rock.

"I'm a Pitchf/x moron, but it strikes me that while its highest and best use is probably inside a baseball's front office to analyze players and stuff, this kind of snooping is its best use for fans. Maybe it's me, but I tend to glaze over when I read a general 'Let's look at Player X's outing via Pitchf/x' article. When there's a very specific question directing things, however, even my feeble mind closely follows and greatly appreciates the analysis."

In other words, the best use of Pitch f/x is to throw up a couple of graphs that nurture the jerks who love to attack a player, to leave out any critical discussion so that the jerk/self-proclaimed-moron-in-your-discipline can say you knocked it out of the park? Yes, the best use of pitch f/x for fans must be to validate their pre-conceived biases.

RTFA. Bradley did not attribute his lack of success this season to being squeezed by umpires. At all, anywhere. Ballshit, of course, linked to the part that out of context could be taken to imply this:

"'What am I supposed to do?' he said. 'You lead the American League in OPS (in 2008), and two years in the top three in the league in on-base percentage. All of a sudden now, I come to Chicago and I can't see the ball no more? I don't know a strike from a ball?'"

This was preceded, however, by this: "Bradley vowed not to change his approach at the plate, no matter how he feels about the allegedly widened strike zone." In other words, Bradley's saying he knows the strike zone, and it's absurd for a baseball player to have to guess what the new zone will be if he's being called differently. Which is exactly the point that refutes Allen's analysis - who cares if the overall size of the strike zone appears the same (because of TWO called balls up in the zone), if what matters to a hitter is consistency in calling the zone?

So, to recap:

-Bradley says that he's not getting favorable calls, that this forces him to swing at pitches out of the zone, and that it happens with two strikes. He makes no comments in the article that attribute any particular or general amount of his 'struggles' this season to these calls. Calcaterra, not accounting for, among other things, the fact that Bradley was prompted to comment on if there have been repercussions from umpires, decides to portray Bradley as a victimhood-obsessed whiner.

-Allen investigates ONLY Bradley's called balls and strikes without looking at swinging strikes or balls put into play. He concludes that the strike zone has nothing to do with Bradley's struggles by using a tiny sample size of pitches up in the zone to posit a reduction in that area and that Bradley's weak (LD/GB) hitting is to blame.

-Calcaterra lauds Allen's study with no critical comments whatsoever, and with no comparison of the original quotations to the contents of the study. Despite admitting he is a "moron" when it comes to this type of analysis, he feels well-qualified to say that Allen "knocked it out of the park" and does not respond to the first comment on his post: "I don’t know, it’s looks to me like they are calling more low-and-away strikes on him than last year. Just from looking at the graph, that could be a legitimate complaint."

This is decadence, pure and simple. Calcaterra gets what he wants, Allen gets recognition, and Bradley gets "boned" by an internet baseball community that pretends its job is to independently investigate claims without bias.

It reminds me of the recycling commercials when I was a kid. Recycle the schtick about how the outspoken black player is an insane narcissist victim. Reduce the amount of evidence needed to verify your position. Reuse your accusations as half-assed punchlines throughout your blogging empire. Close the loop by linking to the study you essentially commisioned and writing up a biased and uncritical abstract for it. What is the point of evidence but to cherry-pick?

Of course, Calcaterra will likely have no problem dismissing this post (not that I expect it to be read by him) because in his mind I am probably just out to ruin Craig Calcaterra.

Amusing Buck/McCarver Error

2009-05-30T14:45:00.000-07:00

I've already forgotten which one was talking, but they've been talking about whether Manny Ramirez should get to play in the All-Star game, and one mentioned that Rafael Palmeiro was voted into the ASG after having only played 16 games in the first half. Well, Rafael Palmeiro never missed more than ten games in a season. What Buck/McCarver/genericvoice was actually referring to was Palmeiro's 1999 Gold Glove, which he won for playing 28 games at 1B while principally DH'ing for Texas. It might be beyond them to remember any piece of information that would discredit the Gold Glove voting.

What does 33 PA of .355/.394/.387 mean?

2009-05-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

The most well-reasoned transaction ever: "The team called up catcher A.J. Ellis, moving back to a 12-man pitching staff and freeing Brad Ausmus to pinch-hit more frequently."

What does 6923 PA of .251/.325/.344 mean?

I Will Pay Attention to "The Verducci Effect" When He Uses Workload to Compare Pitchers' Workloads

2009-04-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

How much does a contemporary baseball pitcher work? I understand the desire to express this in terms of games pitched, games relieved, games started, batters faced, and pitches thrown. I don't understand the desire to measure it in terms of outs produced.

I don't see how Verducci makes an argument about increasing workload. Perhaps his assessment is accurate, but he is essentially drawing twice from the same barrel: pitchers who record many more outs in year x will tend to record fewer outs in year x + 1 and will tend to allow more runs per out in year x + 1. In other words, Mr. Verducci is alerting us to the phenomenon known as regression.

Here is my suggestion. Mr. Verducci has been trying to isolate the effects of increasing a pitcher's workload. Perhaps he should start by measuring a pitchers' workload instead of offering a stand-alone method for cherry-picking.

This is not, it should be noted, a criticism of his results - perhaps he's right that pitchers with a sharp increase in workload are worse and/or more injured in the following season than a rigorous projection would figure. But Verducci is essentially cheating in his presentation of the argument, using outs to select pitchers instead of workloads. Do pitchers whose batters faced totals go up by more than 100 tend to break down? Isn't this the first question you would ask if you were "tracking" this?

EXCUSE ME?

2009-03-31T14:12:00.000-07:00

Ramona Shelburne of the LA Daily News writes an astoundingly absurd paean to financial genius Ned Colletti.

Last year the Dodgers took a $119million payroll into the season. This season, it will be approximately $90 million.

If you're doing the math, that's about a 24 percent reduction in labor costs to produce a product that looks - at least on paper - as good or better than the team that ended the season in the NLCS last October.

Shelburne suggests that Colletti should be running the show in Congress for his magnificent foresight. I don't see how it's even appropriate to joke about that. It seems unreasonable to give Colletti credit for reading the tea leaves when much of the dead money off the books comes from his own poor moves. The difference between the 2008 payroll and the 2009 payroll is essentially the same as how much the Dodgers are saving from not having Nomar, Esteban Loaiza, Jeff Kent, and Andruw Jones on the team.

The article doesn't even clarify what Colletti's "reading the market" accomplishment was. Not grossly overpaying for Orlando Hudson or Manny Ramirez in November? All credit to Colletti for not bidding against the Phillies on Raul Ibanez, I guess. It's not like Colletti has a string of bargain basement acquisitions this year. The deals for Hudson and Ramirez are short, but not inexpensive in terms of pay per 2009 value. Orlando Hudson came cheaper than perhaps would be expected, but the Dodgers weren't about to run out a replacement-level player at 2B - they paid Hudson to bolster their depth and improve their lineup by not more than a win. Is there supposed to be any value in Randy Wolf's contract, or Will Ohman's contract, or Ramirez's? I see a bunch of players who got contracts they would have gotten most years. Just because you wait them out - knowing you have pretty similar caliber players already in the organization - does not mean you're a predictive financial genius, certainly not with the Schmidt or Pierre contracts still in full force.

I agree that Colletti has done a good job this offseason. He basically did exactly what I thought he should do - leverage the Dodgers financial advantage into free agent signings and ignore the trade market. But it is also the first stretch of his career as GM where he has been successful, in my studied opinion. He didn't make any earth-shattering moves, and he did nothing even remotely brilliant. He just calmly paid reasonable amounts for reasonable players in an offseason where even some pretty well-run teams simply abstained from doing so.

Wait a minute - years of less-than-competent management for questionable bosses followed by a few months of prudence when the competition was going through too much turmoil to compete? Wow, Colletti sounds exactly like a newly-elected Congressperson!

Samson sucks

2009-03-27T13:46:00.001-07:00

I've long had disdain for the Yankees' absurd grooming policies and other ones like them. But at least the Yankees generally have rosters full of the well-paid. Now the Marlins, with a roster full of players years of toil away from that magical sixth year of service time, get into the act, at the same time that they are stealing from their fan base to build a new stadium (in their defense, the stadium will make additional profits for other rich people, some small fraction of which will surely trickle slowly down)? As long as there is any one owner like this EVERY major league owner is a crook and a scumbag.

We miss you John.

More random WAR tidbits

2009-03-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

Picking cherries:

Julio Lugo's stint with Tampa Bay: 2114 PA, 14.1 WAR. Elsewhere: 2527 PA, -0.2 WAR. Travis Lee's first stint with Tampa Bay: 606 PA, 3.9 WAR. Rest of career: 3600 PA, 1.7 WAR.

2001 Paul Lo Duca: 502 PA, 5.2 WAR. 2002-7/31/04 Lo Duca: 1623 PA, 6.2 WAR. Post-LA Lo Duca: 1896 PA, 4.5 WAR

1983-4 Jeffrey Leonard: 1113 PA, 7.0 WAR. Rest of career: 4297 PA, 2.0 WAR.

Mike Lansing in Montreal: 2788 PA, 9.5 WAR. After the Expos: 1698 PA, -1.9 WAR.

Jason Lane's one season (2005) with regular playing time: 556 PA, 2.1 WAR. Rest of major league career: 788 PA, 1.1 WAR.

Eric Karros's ROY season: 584 PA, 0.0 WAR. Eric Karros' 2 above average seasons, 1995 & 1999: 1249 PA, 7.7 WAR. Rest of career: 5191 PA, 2.1 WAR.

Yankee Roberto Kelly: 2464 PA, 11.3 WAR. Rest of career: 2699 PA, 4.4 WAR.

Jason Kendall should be elected on the first ballot to the mythical "Hall of Very Good." Chuck Knoblauch too.

Since, among other things, the 2004 Dodgers are always sort of on my mind

2009-03-24T17:51:00.000-07:00

Using Rally's WAR numbers, in 2004 Alex Cora and Cesar Izturis, the Dodgers' double play combo, propelled them to the division title by contributing 4.7 wins above replacement. Exclude 2004 from their career totals, and between the two of them you get 0.4 wins above replacement.

Of course, Adrian Beltre had 10.1 WAR that season; his next highest seasonal total, accomplished in 2006, was 4.4 WAR. And LHP-destroying Jose Hernandez contributed 2.0 WAR despite only getting 238 PA; in the rest of his career, he logged 11.7 WAR in 4788 PA. (Counterposed to these outstanding seasons in the infield were the play at 1B where Shawn Green's last season in blue demonstrated that he was not going to return to his pre-shoulder-injury peak and where Hee Seop Choi dug a whole so deep that Jim Tracy wouldn't give him much of a shot to dig his way out, leading to his surprise US career flameout). While then-GM Paul DePodesta deserves credit for solid moves to acquire oft-injured stars Milton Bradley and Jayson Werth, and his predecessor Dan Evans deserves credit for, uh, not trading Beltre or Gagne (or trading high-salaried stars for middle of the pack starters Odalis Perez and Jeff Weaver, who of course benefited greatly from the stellar infield defense), it was the outstanding and anomalous performance of its infielders that should go down in history as the essence of the 2004 Dodgers' playoff run.

Best Regards, John

2009-03-24T17:36:00.000-07:00

Rest in peace.

Frivolous Question

2009-03-03T20:24:00.000-08:00

All things considered, what was more impressive: Babe Ruth leading the AL in walks 11 times in 14 years or Barry Bonds leading the NL in walks 12 times in 16 years?

Bowden's Resignation

2009-03-02T18:51:00.000-08:00

I've long thought of Jim Bowden as a below average GM with above average entertainment value. His statement about his resignation does nothing to alter that assessment. Bowden sets himself up to take credit for his successor's success and sells himself as a steward of the game who's stepping down for all the right reasons. And heck, he may very well be. (Or he might be in A-Rod with Katie Couric mode.) Bowden is an unimpressive GM who has done many impressive things as a GM, and his final statement impresses in many moments at the same time that I am, on the whole, unimpressed.

For personal reasons, my mental image of Bowden comes from seeing him as ESPNews' studio analyst in July 2004, saying that Milton Bradley better accept a move to RF because Steve Finley is a better center fielder. I turn to baseball again and again because of its rich ironies, and on that level Bowden rarely failed to deliver; thank goodness there's a former ESPNews talking head who will say this:

I will also carry with me the cold hard realization that my life has been turned upside down by a news media that prints entire stories attributed solely to anonymous sources who refuse to be identified and who are free to allege anything they choose for any purpose without fear of retribution.

Jeter Admits to Tarnishing the Record Books by Having Lousy Range

2009-02-19T14:28:00.000-08:00

It's not that I mean to imply any particular reason to doubt that Derek Jeter was "clean." He insists he never used PED's, and I see no reason to assume that he, like Rodriguez, is lying; I just see plenty of reasons to assume he could be lying, which is the whole point.

“One thing that’s irritating and really upsets me a lot is when you hear people say that everybody did it,” Jeter said. “Everybody wasn’t doing it.”

I mean, fine, I certainly have never thought that "Everybody did it." But a lot of people had reasons to assume Rodriguez was steroid-free, and I don't know that there is some obvious reason why Jeter is more clear of suspicion than Rodriguez. Sure, Jeter was not a power hitter, but it's not as if we've been given a clear enough view of the scope of PED use to lead us to believe that they were only used by the homer-hungry.

The point is, while "Everybody did it" is obviously wrong, "Anybody could have done it" is obviously right. Not that Jeter isn't entitled to blow off some steam or whatever, but I hope he can just STFU and move on.

Because really, if you are talking about how players are remembered in the long-term, then loafing it on defense has probably been a substantial taint on the record books (since evidently "record books" has come to mean not the actual records kept of play on the field but rather some hodgepodge of conventionally well-known numbers devoid of context) for at least a few major stars in baseball history. And while PED use is bad in that it artificially raises the bar for everyone else in the league, bad fielding hurts the team's chances of winning, which, it can certainly be argued, is the bigger baseball sin.

I am not saying that Jeter loafed it on defense at any point in his career; the title of this post is for amusement purposes solely. But he certainly could have done so. Whether it was a calculated effort to help his team by keeping himself healthy or a calculated effort to help himself by cheating the team is like asking whether or not a steroid user took 'em to help himself or the team: sure, we can always use our opinion of the player to guide our own opinion, but we're just speculating.

I guess what I am really trying to get at here is that Jeter's argument - "Trust me, it was not everyone!" - reads like just another way of saying, "I am better than (some of) my fellow players," which is what PED use is all about in the first place. I just don't like any system that is based on the players jockeying for recognition among themselves. And Jeter is still playing the media/MLB game, hyping any star that has not fallen.

“I understand people have questions,” Jeter said. “I understand there are a lot of big names coming out. But that’s not everybody. You know what I mean? That’s the point I’m trying to make.”

Right, but there were a lot of clean players who weren't very good in the majors or who couldn't crack them; though it could be because we're getting the media filter, it sure as heck seems like Jeter is arguing that there were HOF-level STARS who were clean. Sure reads a lot more like Jeter's capitalizing on the scandal than that he is legitimately upset about it.

I don't want to make Jeter out to be a villain - he's just the other side of the coin. Sluggers and power aces are vilified in the mainstream for varying degrees of apparent culpability in PED use, and Jeter is vilified in the saberstream for not measuring up defensively. If Jeter wants credit for not taking PED's, when we know that anyone COULD have taken them and subsequently lied about it, why should I believe him when his assessments of his own fielding skills lead me to believe that he is less than honest about his performance?

Hell, maybe all the other SS WERE taking PED's and that's why Jeter's defense has fared so poorly over the years in contrast. (Hey, we already know that the best and worst hitters in the "better defensive SS than Jeter" group tested positive.) The point is, Jeter's not basing the credibility of his "I never did PED's and no one ever even suggested it because it's just that obvious they wouldn't help ME of all people" line on establishing honesty in his assessments. He is skating a fine line where he is trying to get credit for being too good (of a person) to take steroids on the basis of being too good (of a player) to need them. And that - well, how credible was the same defense from Alex Rodriguez?

The evidence available to me that Derek Jeter has been a poor defensive SS over the course of his career - and one certainly not deserving of any Gold Glove recognition - is stronger than the evidence available to me that he didn't take PED use. For me personally, we'll need him to comment honestly and intelligently about the reality that "he gets far more girls than his fielding talents should allow" before I choose to assume any degree of honesty or intelligence in his claims not to have used PED's.

While in all earnestness I do not think it likely that Jeter used PED's, all he's doing now is lounging in his stone house throwing glass bottles out the window. Put down the bottles and come outside if you want me to take you seriously (though you very likely do not).

Brief History of A Fraud

2009-02-11T13:39:00.000-08:00

1. Major League Baseball owners profit considerably off of a monopoly. Over time this monopoly is exacerbated by a coalescence of government and media interventions; the cash cow is protected because it lets enough wealthy entities grab its teats.

2. Major League Baseball further develops its monopoly with the invention and growth of the minor league affiliate system, which entrenches the position of Major League Baseball (i.e., NL + AL) as the top of a hierarchical order of baseball.

3. Major League Baseball players, noticing that the monopoly leaves them with no professional option other than the indefinite servitude of an MLB contract, challenge the reserve clause.

4. Because of MLB's monopoly, free agency for all would likely exacerbate wage depression by flooding the market, as Finley hoped for. They instead fight for a more limited type of free agency and develop a system based on service time - essentially carrying over the previous system but allowing for the most successful class of players to earn bargaining rights.

5. The union spends decades basing its strategy for increasing the players' share of the pie on getting a greater amount of money for its stars; the portion of revenues paid to the lower classes of players continue to shrink. Pay for minor leaguers stuck in the affiliate system is not many people's idea of a living wage, and almost no one in baseball even seems to think that this is a problem.

6. Technological advances make a variety performance enhancement methods more effective, more readily available, and in some cases safer. Many come with long-term negative effects that often are undisclosed, and at least some players take treatments without informed consent, often from suppliers with little or no medical/scientific background.

7. A large, though debated, proportion of baseball players, presumably at all levels, use performance enhancing methods in order to gain an advantage on their fellows. The economic incentive to do so is immense at every level: a player drafted in the first round makes much more than a player drafted in the second round; a player in the high minors makes more than a player in the low minors; a player on the 40-man roster is paid more than other AA and AAA players; a player on the 25-man roster is paid much more than any minor-league player; a player with 3+ years of service time and talent beyond the margins is paid much more than a player with 0-2.5 years of service time; players with 6+ years of service time, provided they're within striking distance of average, are without exception multi-millionaires.

8. Some unclear changes in the game around 1993-1994 shift MLB to a more home run and strikeout oriented game. Performance enhancers that increase musculature, such as anabolic steroids, likely experience a surge in consumption among baseball players because they ostensibly can be better leveraged into high salaries than other performance enhancers. MLB teams appear to overvalue sluggers during the ensuing period and undervalue defensive contributors to some extent, though it is not clear that this was especially more pronounced than during other epochs.

9. The non-MLB entities in the baseball industry leverage the offensive explosion of the 90's into more profit, be it in media, merchandising, equipment, etc. Despite considerable ill-will among fans and bystanders alike stemming from labor strife that coincided with the offensive surge, the co-conspirators in the MLB monopoly work hard to turn a series of hunts for MLB records into renewed interest in the game, benefiting MLB, MLB players, and the rest of the industry alike. Furthermore, the baseball industrial complex works hard to spin the successes of new ballparks like Jacobs Field and Camden Yards into a wave of new stadiums receiving absurd levels of public funding.

10. MLB and the MLBPA agree overwhelmingly on labor peace, because it is clear that in the aggregate the present arrangement will yield the players a ****-ton of money. Not just in salaries from the MLB teams, of course, but also in compensation from other parts of the baseball industry.

11. The evidence that players employ performance enhancement methods in violation of federal law begins to amass, causing consternation for the entire baseball industry. Most afflicted and conflicted is baseball's fourth estate, who are charged with maintaining interest in the game among present and future generations but who also have journalistic ethics to consider. Of little help is the media landscape that privileges self-righteous opinion and sensationalist accounts as ways to hold audiences. More evidence begins to trickle out through the media, though there is an obvious phenomenon whereby many are keeping their mouths shut.

12. The Federal Government involves itself with all the resolve of a loose coalition of government officials seeking to justify their own positions or departmental fundings. Predictably, the government is more interested in going after individual perpetrators than going after the baseball industrial complex it has routinely aided and abetted, though some token references to MLB's anti-trust exemption are made here and there.

13. As evidence mounts of widespread use of dangerous and/or illegal performance enhancement methods, the baseball industry largely diverts its attention to allegations made against three of its biggest stars, capitalizing on pre-existing disdain for Clemens and Bonds and the overwhelmingly negative view of McGwire's testimony.

14. MLB, the media, and the federal government come together to release the Mitchell Report, hyping it as its generation's Valley of the Dolls. The joint venture appears to be a commercial success despite mediocre reviews from critics.

15. Capitalizing on pre-existing disdain for the game's biggest current star, the media co-conspires with several industry sources to violate federal law by reporting a result from an avowedly anonymous drug test - a result that contradicts the star's previous point blank denial. The media arm of the industry has a field day, once again attempting to advance a generalized pro-baseball spin coupled with anti-player vitriol.

16. The big star responds by apologizing for the indiscretion he has belatedly been caught in; his story is catered to protecting his own legal and financial interests, casting aspersion on only a brief part of his career and circumventing discussion of any of the technical details that could, theoretically, land him in legal trouble. He casts blame on the media (too much pressure), fellow players (too much culture), and the Texas heat, three things all parties involved have no trouble occasionally converting into scapegoats.

* * *

The reserve clause per se is long dead, but MLB is still in the aggregate treating baseball players with contempt and disrespect. The affirmative action program for the game's best players has not advanced the economic interests of lower classes of players; instead, a class of wealthy baseball players seems more or less content to keep collecting checks from the industry (during and after their playing careers), typically staying loyal to the industry and maintaining a willingness to sell out fellow players.

Minor league players work for a pittance, which no one in the industry bats an eye over because that sector doesn't bring in much at the gates. The contribution of the players in the minor leagues to the overall baseball industry is almost entirely overlooked for one simple reason: they are all deemed replaceable. It is quite clearly the case the players are able to become MLB players by facing superior competition in the minor leagues and that as such the minor leagues play an integral role in enabling MLB's star system. They also pump profits throughout the secondary and tertiary baseball industries (increasingly owned by MLB itself, as in MLBAM). The only reward offered to minor league players, however, is to make it at the top and to become part of the most privileged class of players.

Players even thinking about a baseball career are quite frequently put off by the economic realities of the situation. Players unable to garner financing from the very small pool of available lucrative signing bonuses and college scholarship have little incentive to continue in the game, even as these decisions are made at ages where the evidence of a player's future abilities is quite scant. Furthermore, there is a major edge for players coming from socioeconomically-privileged backgrounds, as technological solutions for building a better baseball player are increasingly available to consumers, and consumers with more room in their pockets are increasingly emboldened to see their children's baseball talents as potentially worthy financial investments. And in the international baseball economy, the system encourages less-well-off communities to invest heavily in trickle-down from individual players who can get large signing bonuses and, eventually, contracts; given the long odds of such investments, many community investments in baseball careers go unrewarded and many are not pursued in the first place.

Whether the status quo should be considered a systemic failure on the part of the players' labor organization or a systemic success of the multipolar baseball industry is certainly debatable, but the results are clear. Baseball can ultimately deem any of its players dispensable, from the rookie leagues to Bonds. It can render its players' rights dispensable, from urinalysis to endemic media leaks to control of players' off-field activities; despite the game's tendency toward panopticism, though, the strategic trickle of information about the players ensures that consumers are unaware of so much information that the information they do receive is bound to be misleading or deceiving with considerable frequency. The only right that seems to be consistently guarded by the Player's Association is the right to collect on a guaranteed contract. In fact, the protection of this right is so thorough that it ties into the backstory on Rodriguez's excuses for taking PED's: MLBPA vetoed his attempts to lessen his guaranteed salary when he sought to escape the Texas skillet and the pressure and heat that went with it; subsequently, his only option was to jump right into the fire, accepting a trade to the Yankees where MLB's financial obligations to Rodriguez would be fully honored but where the media, manager, teammates, and financially powerful fan base were, in the aggregate, quite content to take away everything Rodriguez possessed that couldn't be bought.

In the end, it seems the only reason that you would want to be a baseball player is the belief that you may eventually make millions, a belief tempered by the sheer bulk of ethical dilemmas and unencumbered attacks that most baseball stars will have to weather.

Who benefits from MLB's star system? The people already making a lot of money, plain and simple. Ultimately, the star system is about projecting the image that MLB always, and without exception, has the best players and therefore is the highest level of play. This functioning is tautological: MLB's business model is to prevent the best players from having any choice but to play in MLB other than quitting the sport. And players with sufficient physical attributes to develop into MLB players do quit the sport, and in droves. MLB is a system for eliminating the competition, not a system for delivering the best baseball possible to fans/consumers.

I don't think the immense profits of the baseball industry are generated because there is a great deal of value in the way that MLB is conducting itself; there is value in the game, and MLB just knows how to convert it to capital without adding any social benefit in the process.

The fans and the players are both always dispensable and frequently dispensed with in the status quo. The love of the game itself keeps the entire ship afloat between continued fan interest and the exploitative salaries of the bulk of the game's willing players (and even the bulk of the teams' staffs and the media establishment, many of whom simply want to work in baseball).

Do you want to fix baseball? Stop reducing it to its stars; stop trying to copy the Hollywood model, which has now been copied in a variety of US industries and been exported globally. Start trying to build a model that protects and honors its players and its fans. Start by assuming everyone in the game is entitled to fair pay. Give the players incentives to co-operate with their teammates at all levels instead of incentives to compete with them. Give players incentive to pursue a career in baseball even if it might not work out. Develop the entire pool of talent instead of creating a self-sustaining system where whoever is at the top is by definition the best (and where, by definition, the players at the top carry the burden of legitimating baseball even as its legitimacy is most threatened .

In short, cut out the industry profiteers. Give fans a stake in determining salaries that goes beyond merchandising and marketing. Give players at all levels a chance to make the game better by playing their hardest. The value in the game is generated by the dedication of the players and fans alike, something that the present arrangement further jeopardizes at every hour of every day. The role of MLB is to demand an obscene cut for their managerial skills, which themselves are calculated in self-interest and not general interest.

The MLBPA, like most unions in the US, is a sad caricature of collective labor organization. Until the players call for a truly radical change, the baseball industry will continue to perpetuate A Fraud like this one, recurringly and systemically. And until the fans develop a substantial and widespread interest in supporting such a radical change, the players will be largely powerless to move forward. To "save" baseball, we do not need fewer needles but rather a revolutionary ethic among the fan base that can build the coalition between the only two parts of the game that are worth a damn, the fans and the players.

"But that's why it's the hall of FAME"

2009-02-06T11:56:00.000-08:00

What a lousy argument: a good player whose credentials are in order is deemed by many to be unworthy of the hall of fame because that player was not sufficiently famous during their playing career.

What does fame mean? Reputation, renown, report, rumor. Fame concerns public/popular discourse.

Why is there a Hall of Fame for baseball (or any number of things)? What is suggested by the argument "It's the Hall of FAME, not the hall of (excellence/outstanding achievements/value/etc.)" is that the HOF commemorates fame that has already been accrued. If you were famous enough, then a decade or two later, you will get a plaque!

This seems a transparently poor interpretation of the meaning of fame. Fame is not merely an arbitrary social phenomenon. Fame has to do with a universal characteristic of human language and hence social communication: famous people are used to demonstrate desirable and undesirable traits, and famous people permeate the discourse on human possibility. Fame is one of the many tools human societies use to invent members of their societies. That fame may typically go hand in hand with exaggeration as well as omission is telling, in that the general discourse of fame is not used to define the famous people in question but rather to assist in defining the society and the possibilities it offers for its people. Famous people are stories that we tell to develop people (some of whom attain fame and most of whom do not).

So, while some commentators explicitly or implicitly call for the Hall of Fame to catalogue which players were at one time famous, the Hall's criteria and patient selection process would seem to indicate that the Hall is designed to institutionally create and propagate fame, rather than to record it. The under-defined purpose of the Hall of Fame, to me, appears to be to have a way to remember those players that serve as a model for what players should strive for.

The Hall of Fame tells stories, and induction into it is about story-telling. The writers tell all sorts of stories that indicate that some players' contribution to their teams' victories are overlooked because other players exemplified different characteristics. It is fine that the writers want to
valorize milestones and want to valorize players who earned acclaim during their own time. But what stat-heads who are trying to evaluate players in terms of their value toward team winning are showing is that the writers are advancing stories that are less exemplary of what it takes to be a good ballplayer than the stories of Tim Raines, Bert Blyleven, et cetera.

Some people would prefer to have a baseball Hall of Fame that commemorates individual achievements in the form of particular types of acclaim or accomplishments in particular statistics. If the Hall of Fame is ultimately about encouraging players to win awards during their careers, or rack up a lot of singles, or to get good run support, then it seems quite logical that the writers/HOF voters would honor these accomplishments.

When these writers honor players who rack up singles or BBWAA awards but exclude players whose contribution to team wins is far superior, they are ultimately telling a story about the game of baseball and how it is played (and, crucially, how it should be played) that people such as myself find to be, at best, lacking. What is at stake is that the HOF truly does, as I see it, serve as an institution for creating and propagating fame and not merely as an institution for recording it. Like it or not, the Hall of Fame has been a major institution in baseball history, and I think it is strikingly naive to argue that it merely reflects the vagaries of the times when it seems to shape so much of it.

Roberto Petagine never got a real shot at the majors while Jeff Francoeur got gifted not just a cup of coffee but several caffeinated gallons (and the support of a delirious hackademic). Some would say that the HOF has no role in these realities, but I find that argument largely untenable. The HOF has played a major role in shaping what people expect from a baseball career; it is a substantial part of the episteme, and its influence on thought doesn't wash off once a player's career is over and they go into management or scouting.

But the point I am trying to make is not that the HOF has done baseball history a disservice by honoring the players it has and excluding other worthy players whose contributions were not better understood by selectors. We need not worry about what the Hall has wrought, and we need not criticize it for not having the technological blessings bestowed upon contemporary baseball analysts. All we need to worry about is what knowledge about the past and present we want to pass on in order to shape the future, as well as how to pass it on. And the question is, if we can show that Bert Blyleven and Tim Raines were flat out better ballplayers than Jim Rice or whomever, don't we want to use our institution for fame-making to honor these ballplayers? Don't we want to use an institution whose judgments are seen as relatively timeless to decide on whether players met the timeless standard of helping their team's win? Why should we use such an institution to confer timeless honor on players whose acclaim and fame stemmed more from the viewpoints of their time than from their contributions in that time?

We don't need a Hall of Fame to tell us who the most feared hitter of the 70's was. Nor do we need it to know who should have been the most feared hitter of the 70's. We need it to tell us who the great players of baseball history have been so we can build the great players of tomorrow.

Top Baseball Sites these days

2009-01-16T13:34:00.000-08:00

1. Fangraphs. I slagged them last April after 3-4 weeks of fairly pointless, small-sample-sized-based writing to kick off their era of having regular articles. Since then they have improved the statistics available on the site (at the time, already arguably the best) as well as their accessibility in countless ways. David Appelman has built a juggernaut.
2. Hardball Times. This site started a few months after I discovered serious internet baseball writing, and over the course of its five years of operation it has, to my mind, been the best source for baseball writing and statistics. It has blown Baseball Prospectus out of the water without really trying to (whereas I sense that Fangraphs is *trying* to blow Prospectus out of the water now, and is wildly successful in doing so).
3. Inside THE BOOK. I will admit I have only read a few threads on here in recent months because my time devoted to following baseball has almost entirely been from behind my uncluttered desk at work. But that's because this is a blog that requires focus and careful thought, and is the only baseball blog I have ever spend days/weeks going back to catch up on after a non-baseball period in my life. While I've got it down here at #3, the threads at Tango/MGL/AED's site are the engine that drive each of the others in my top four.
4. Statistically Speaking. The cast has changed a lot, as this blog may not have the resources to keep its talent beyond its pre-arb years. But the new additions are always very good, and this is a very consistent site to get saber-heavy analysis and research that offers something I hadn't thought about in every post.
5. Baseball Toaster. All-Baseball is a distant memory to many and simply unknown to most, but it once housed the best collection of baseball blogging talent ever seen. In the 2004-5 offseason, (aka the period when I was a bona fide baseball blogger and not a mere jotter of occasional anti-Collettisms) Wait til Next Year and Rich's Weekend Baseball Beat took off to become The Baseball Analysts (which continues going on strong, but the WTNY side has been taken up by others as Bryan Smith has gone on to gigs with Baseballs America and Prospectus). Bronx Banter, the Will Carroll Weblog, Dodger Thoughts, 2/3 of the Cub Reporter, Mike's Baseball Rants, and whatever the A's blog was called at the time moved to the Baseball Toaster. The fall-out for A-B was that it was sold to MVN a week before the Toaster debuted, and Ruzich's Cub Reporter and Transaction Guy were joined by the final month of the original Fourth Outfielder (some replacements were taken on after the proprieter left) and for a while housed Ducksnorts and some other good team blogs, including MVN owner Evan Brunell's Firebrand of the AL blog. The Baseball Toaster landscape has been altered pretty radically since then, with Ciepley out, Smart and Carminati rarely posting, Will Carroll and Scott Long at various times quitting and starting other blogs, and Bronx Banter seceding. However, Dodger Thoughts and Catfish Stew have soldiered on, and still remain essential baseball reading for me because of their amazing ability to capture the psychological, emotional side of being a fan at the same time that they offer objective baseball analysis that rarely suffers any significant flaws. I always find myself only slightly disagreeing with Jon or Ken, whereas most baseball blogs are full of analysis that is either merely obvious or obviously flawed/lacking. Catfish Stew is rarely updated, but that's part of the argument it makes about the organization it follows. Dodger Thoughts is always updated, without any doubt whatsoever, and always brings that edge of what it feels like to have this ridiculous organization in our lives, written in modestly outstanding prose. With totally different gross outputs, these blogs are both masters of economy. They are buttressed by three surprisingly similar blogs: the Catfish Stew-esque Bad Altitude; the very well-written Cardboard Gods, which mirrors the clear and resonant writing of Jon Weisman and always reminds me a bit of the great Repoz of Baseball Primer; and The Griddle, which combines the quirky pop culture touches, hyper-literate wordplay, and historical baseball whimsy leanings of the Toaster with the stupendously-researched touch of a librarian. The Toaster is, I suppose, more of a niche site now, but it is the perfect site for a devotee to keep going back to.

Honorable mention: Baseball Analysts, Walk Like a Sabermetrician, ESPN Blogs (Neyer and Law), Beyond the Box Score, MLB Trade Rumors (it has reached the critical mass where it seemingly covers everything, and it is more a comparative study of the rumors than a site for spreading them; just a solid place to keep track of transactions), On Baseball and the Reds.

UPDATE: Inexplicably omitted from the HM was Sean Smith (aka Rally aka Chone)'s www.baseballprojection.com and his blog, which are great!

Sorry y'all, I can't take your outlook anymore: Baseball Prospectus, Sabernomics. I read 538, though.

ADAM DUNN PLATOON

2009-01-08T13:20:00.000-08:00

I advocated LA re-signing Manny Ramirez when asked to write something about the Dodgers offseason for DT, but I didn't offer any thoughts on the possibility of Adam Dunn. I have long liked Adam Dunn as a player but his defensive shortcomings are such that he's not a particularly good value. However, if Dunn were willing to accept a "platoon role," (which, by default, ALL left-handed batters should be willing to accept), his value increases greatly for any team capable of pairing him with a replacement-level right-handed-batting LF. Mr. Colletti, of course, has some bizarre anathema to RHB in the OF, which I have documented at this blog time and again. But while it *should have* been obvious to NC that starting Juan Pierre and Luis Gonzalez against LHP is a bad move, I suspect it will be even less obvious that using Adam Dunn against LHP is a bad move: you can look right at his statistics and say, "Hey, he's actually still a good hitter against southpaws - no need for a platoon!" BAD THINKING!!! The whole point about taking defense into account is not to add or subtract a player's defensive contributions from their entire value, but to use it contextually throughout the process of roster construction. Adam Dunn starting in LF against RHP is about as good as Manny Ramirez starting in LF against RHP; they are among the best hitters in baseball against RHP. But Manny is an elite hitter against LHP (being right-handed and all), whereas Dunn against LHP is merely around league average for LF's. Dunn's fielding means that he's essentially a replacement-level player on days with a southpaw on the mound, though few have the courage to make this claim (they'd rather throw out BS about Dunn hating baseball or striking out too much). If you take a RHB with an overall batting performance of .330 OBP and .410 SLG with average fielding in the corner, he will outperform Dunn if he's your starter on those days (and you still get to have Dunn on the bench).

My initial reaction to the Juan Pierre signing was that Colletti wasn't too far off but that he absolutely would not make the requisite moves to construct a roster where Pierre would be used in a way that would make him as valuable as his contract; I fear that an Adam Dunn signing would elicit the same response from me.

Los Angeles Payroll

2009-01-01T22:57:00.000-08:00

The Dodgers owe it to their fans to have a high payroll in 2009 to accommodate the addition of star players (by projected performance, not reputation) through free agency. Last season LA donated a large chunk of their supply of quality up-and-coming players to franchises willing to pay the salaries of the players they were giving up. This was an effort to make a playoff run with a team in no particular position to think it would be successful in the playoffs (which is not to say they were in a particular position to be unsuccessful in the playoffs). The move amounted to a coalition of a win-now-or-likely-get-fired GM with a make-more-money-in-the-immediate-future ownership, neither caring particularly about how to account for the future value being given up. I hated the moves, although of course they looked much worse because of the myriad of failed Colletti-McCourt moves that they followed.

The Dodgers simply must fund a top-caliber team. McCourt is trading the franchise's capital for gains in the balance sheet (in essence, gains for his personal supply of capital); the burden is on him to return what has been taken from the fans by emptying those coffers.

2008 World Series: Colletti -4, DePodesta 1 (-1 + 2)

2008-10-19T22:45:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Domingo, Edwin, Willy, Jayson, and Shane. Wish you were here!

I don't keep up with Cubs blogs, so...

2008-10-02T22:01:00.000-07:00

... can someone tell me if they've been pointing out the colossally poor choice to only let Rich Harden pitch once in this series? How in the world did Piniella decide to save him for game three? I'll give some props to the (redacted)dumpster on his great season as a starter, but it certainly didn't qualify him as a better pitcher to win a single game than Rich Harden. As a quasi-Dodgers fan at this point, I have to say that I am more angry at Lou Piniella for making such a bad decision than I am happy that the Dodgers have benefited.

I've been having a World Series daydream since Longoria's second HR today. It's Game 7, and Billingsley and Edwin Jackson pitched seven scoreless frames each before giving way to the bullpen. Loney hits a solo home run in the top of the 9th. In the bottom of the 9th, Saito yields a lead-off walk followed by a Willy Aybar double that doesn't score the runner from first. Saito gets a pair of strikeouts sandwiched around a walk. Dioner Navarro comes to the plate, trailing 1-0, 2 outs, B9, game 7. Let's see what happens

The + is a minus

2008-09-17T17:23:00.000-07:00

I've got plenty of reasons to not use ERA+ or OPS+. In a game so full of numerators and denominators, they're pretty quick ways to take already-flawed (and I mean merely flawed, not terminal) metrics and turn them into junk. It doesn't mean I don't understand why Sean Forman's babies are so beloved, and I've got no problem taking a gander.

There is one area of the ERA+ and OPS+ problem that I haven't seen anybody discuss lately, which is that BB-Ref used to not be an in-season resource. Now fans regularly peruse the current season's numbers, complete with ERA+ and OPS+ numbers. The park adjustments used for those are only current through 2007, and BB-Ref's park adjustments are pretty far from the state of the art at this point.

The 2008 Texas Rangers are treated as if they play in a neutral park. The 2008 Los Angeles Dodgers are treated as if they play in a fairly strong hitter's park. How have these teams and their opponents done offensively in these parks as opposed to away from them?

At The Ballpark: .290/.363/.477
Away: .277/.351/.436

At Dodgers Stadium: .243/.305/.359
Away: .268/.336/.409

No pseudo-record is being set this year by the Dodgers' relievers, because those park adjustments are eventually going to eat up the +'s when the 2008 numbers enter the bloodstream. The way I see it, James Loney has had a nice first full season, Kevin Millwood has been just as good as (if not better than) Hiroki Kuroda, and it is insane that Baseball Tonight was trying to hype up Angel Berroa this week (okay, that has nothing to do with this).

I'm not arguing for any particular approach to park factors, but at the very least there are several propagated on BB-Ref that simply don't reflect reality, and I'd rather leave them out of things.

Sweet, Sweet Veteran Leadership

2008-08-18T20:14:00.000-07:00

I can think of no better example of the necessity of veteran leadership:

Tamba Bay Starting 3rd Basemen
April 11-August 7: .278/.352/.533
March 31-April 9, August 8-18: .328/.403/.625

I stand by my 2004/5 offseason argument for Aybar over Young.

***

Oh, another veteran making news is Greg Maddux. I'm guessing the Dodgers will give up two players whose loss will be mildly agitating, but I won't entirely rule out that this will turn out to be a really horrible move when the names shake out. I sort of implied in the THT article that I thought Gammons got gamed on his Baseball Tonight report; I think San Diego was trying to get Gammons to spill and oversell the story, since people seem ready to believe a lot of things about LA's front office. That way, they'd have more leverage when... I'm sorry, did I say when rather than if? How silly of me.

But I guess Greg Maddux is still a better option than Stults or Jason Johnson. And Tanyon Sturtze is on the roster. (I want Colletti to trade him for Myrow.) So Maddux makes three starts in August and gives the Dodgers a little more flexibility in September, maybe? He'll save like 2 runs over Stults and hopefully will turn it over to the bullpen quickly; with Johnson and Stults in the stable, especially with September call-ups coming, the Dodgers have enough bullpen options that that figures to work out fine.

In the playoffs, Maddux is more an insurance policy. He could end up helping a bit and he probably won't take playing time away from better options, though that could happen.

So were I the Dodgers owner, I'd be fine adding $1 million and a far-away prospect with a bench-player upside to acquire Maddux, provided that such a decision didn't impact the future dealings of the GM.

With San Diego having no leverage whatsoever - can they really even try to get picks for Maddux? - then I would think the Dodgers would be able to close this with some pocket change and linty PTBNL. But if McCourt has simply extracted every last stray coin from the sofa, then we're in for pain.

***

To Paul in the comments: I'll do a full post on Logan White some time, hopefully soon. I've studied White, and I'm not one to parrot hype. I've certainly never said he was the best, but the Dodgers' amateur scouting since he took over has easily yielded among the top 10 in results among Major League teams and, depending on how you assess the resources available, have arguably been among the top five. The statements in the THT article are pretty clear and aren't attempting to differentiate between what component is luck and what component is skill, precisely because that is NOT something I have studied at great length.

Open Thread/Further events

2008-08-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

My examination of the "Remains of the Season" for the Los Angeles Dodgers is up over at the Hardball Times. Since it was filed on Tuesday morning, several things have happened that would change the piece a bit were it written now; the intro was updated by the editors but not the body (besides them splitting up my absurdly long paragraphs).

-Jones to the DL, Garciaparra off of it
-Penny got lit up, although by a good offense
-Falkenborg was claimed by San Diego

If you want to leave some comments on it feel free to do so here or at Ballhype.

UPDATE: In case anyone wondered what I meant, I have Dunn being worth about 1-1.2 wins better than a Romero/Burke platoon in RF for the D'Backs over the rest of the regular season - that is what I meant by "that much." (Dunn improving the D'Backs in October doesn't figure to impact LA.)

NL Intraleague Standings

2008-08-13T22:48:00.000-07:00

CHC 67-38
MIL 63-43
PHI 60-45
STL 60-48
FLA 58-48
LAD 56-49
HOU 54-48
NYM 55-50
ARI 55-50
PIT 49-56
ATL 47-58
COL 47-60
SFG 44-57
SDP 43-59
CIN 44-62
WSN 36-67

BriFal Update

2008-08-13T17:22:00.000-07:00

DePodesta on his current team picking up Falkenborg. DePo doesn't mention that it was his 2004 Dodgers that finally gave Falkenborg his second call up five years later, and I find it noteworthy that DePodesta was able to reacquire him (he was signed when Evans was still the buck receiver and DePo and the Dodgers let him go after 2004 as a minor league free agent rather than protect him on the 40-man roster) only after the Dodgers had to make room for Brad Penny of all people.

I'll put the over/under on Falkenborg's ERA with San Diego at 3.90. I think MSTI would ramp that up to 5.50 or something ;)

For the sake of completeness

2008-08-13T14:07:00.000-07:00

If you pay very close attention in the next few days, you will see why I am posting this. From 2005-2008, NL Position Players outside of Juan Pierre posted a .345 wOBA using the full formula from The Book. For various reasons, I am accustomed to using a simplified version that doesn't give credit for bases reached on error and that treats the HBP the same as an unintentional walk (wOBA gives a weight of .92 to ROE and .75 to HBP, meaning the simplification devalues the former by .539 runs and the latter by .026 runs if you assume an out value of -.3). Juan Pierre draws more HBP and ROE than the average hitter, so my simplification devalues him. By how much? From 2005-8, Pierre's wOBA is .3073 with the simplified formula against a league of .3359; with the full formula, it is .3195 against a league of .3451. So my simplified version makes him -16.1 per 650 PA instead of -14.5.

However, by "full formula" I am still referring to a formula that removes all IBB and SH. For a player with as many bunt attempts as Juan Pierre, that obviously works in his favor. If I include the SH in the PA term in the full formula, Pierre goes to -16.55. If I include IBB as walks, Pierre (who has only 2 in the period and 5 for his career) is -18.2 per 650 PA.

This isn't an anti-Pierre post, by the way, it's just a preemptive footnote. But I guess since I'm on the subject and Pierre started against Cole Hamels last night, I'll take a look at the idea that Pierre should be subbing for Andre Ethier. For his career, Ethier has a .318 wOBA (simplified as above) against LHP (299 PA) and .356 wOBA against RHP (1072 PA, and at this point, he's had extremely similar numbers against RHP in each season in case you were curious). Pierre is .314 (1462) against LHP and .324 against RHP (4117). But using the unsimplified formula, Pierre's gap shrinks to only 5 points of wOBA when including ROE, whether or not any of the SH and IBB are added. So there is something to the idea that Pierre is about as good against LHP as against RHP, and interestingly it is in part because Pierre has a higher ROE rate against LHP and a much higher HBP rate (30 of his 59 career HBP came against southpaws). Of more significance is that Pierre has struck out slightly less against LHP; from 2005-8, LHB have struck out in 21.9% of PA against LHP and only in 16.1% of PA against RHP. Meanwhile, if you include everything including the IBB, Ethier has a .365 to .332 gap, which is pretty similar to the league-wide (05-08) gap of .348 against .311. Now, the league-wide number has sample bias issues so let us not confuse it with the notion of a typical split for an individual player. In any event, though, Ethier's splits thus far indicate he's about typical in his split (despite having a higher BABIP in his 299 PA against LHP). In a league of a .331 wOBA, we would expect Ethier to be about .320-.325 against LHP and .350-.355 against RHP. Pierre is perhaps more like .310 against RHP and .300-.305 against LHP. So if you believe the gap between the two in Fielding+Baserunning is about 12 runs in favor of Pierre (say, +14 runs in range for Pierre, +7 in arm for Ethier, and +5 in baserunning for Pierre) then it would indeed mean Pierre has a one run advantage against LHP and a 13 run disadvantage against RHP (over a full season, that is).

(Obviously, you don't do it based just on the relatively small sample of their actual platoon splits, since you need to regress. But we have no reason to believe Pierre's split will be the typical because he is far from a typical player. We'd want to regress to a mean for left-handed hitters with a similar offensive game, not LHB in general. It's something I've wanted to study for a while but have not yet done, so hopefully the approximation above is close enough.)

So if Torre wants to start Pierre against LHP instead of Ethier - which saves the much better hitter for PH duty against RHP relievers, just as was done last night - then I don't mind.

Now, you may be asking how I could make that argument when this very blog has several times argued that Pierre shouldn't be starting against LHP. I still believe that Pierre the player is not somebody you want starting against LHP, and it all comes back to opportunity cost. Simply put, it is easy to get a good RHB outfielder to cover the days that LHP are starting. Mr. Colletti seems to either entirely not grasp this concept or to be vehemently opposed to it, as in his first year he jettisoned three of the four candidates in the Dodgers' system (Jayson Werth, Cody Ross, and Justin Ruggiano), even though the former two are arguably good enough to play everyday and the one he kept, Jason Repko, has never been much of a hitter. The Dodgers' outfield starters in Colletti's tenure have included lefties Drew, Lofton, Ethier, Pierre, and Gonzalez with no RHB getting serious time on the bench other than Kemp, Repko, and Brady Clark's 66 PA (switch-hitters Delwyn Young and Jose Cruz have also been 4th/5th OF for parts of a season). This season, Colletti signed RHB Jones and then replaced him with Ramirez, but that didn't address the issue since it has still fundamentally been Pierre and Ethier that are alternating playing time as the two RHB have been the better overall players (or, in the case of Jones, treated as if they were the better overall player). The Dodgers don't have a LHB who is truly above average on a day an LHP starts, and they haven't had one in Colletti's tenure other than perhaps Drew. But given the poorly-constructed roster, with Jones on the DL it is sensible to be starting Pierre against LHP.

Parisi?

2008-08-13T10:33:00.001-07:00

"So for the second time this year, Andre Ethier gets a walk-off base hit - against a very tough lefthanded reliever."

- Vin Scully

Missing the nuance of the punctuation, I thought this was implying that Mike Parisi was a very tough lefthanded reliever. (It is implying that J.C. Romero is a very tough lefthanded reliever, which I'm not so sure I agree with but is certainly reasonable.)

Prospect Face-Off!

2008-08-01T15:16:00.001-07:00

Up until now, it was merely necessary to argue that LaRoche was, at this point in time, the superior player. Now, we have a Dodgers' franchise apparently claiming it would rather have DeWitt in the future. DeWitt was born 23 months and 7 days after LaRoche.

At 20, DeWitt hit .268/.339/.442 in 478 FSL PA (league: .255/.326/.375) and .183/.241/.221 in 112 Southern League PA (.249/.322/.368). LaRoche hit .283/.359/.525 in ~280 SAL PA (.261/.329/.400) and .233/.288/.429 in ~240 FSL PA (.256/.323/.374). Overall, that makes each about average hitters for the high A level at that age.

At 21, DeWitt hit .298/.338/.466 in 361 California League PA (league: .271/.344/.426) and .281/.306/.466 in 187 Southern League PA (.259/.334/.392). LaRoche hit .333/.380/.651 in 274 FSL PA (.261/.329/.386) and .273/.367/.445 in 266 Southern League PA (.266/.339/.394). LaRoche shows himself to be ahead of the curve in high A and well above average in AA; DeWitt shows himself to be well above average in high A and perhaps average in AA.

At 22, DeWitt has hit .257/.324/.364 in 309 NL PA (.260/.330/.413) and .5/.6/1 in 25 PCL PA. LaRoche hit .309/.419/.483 in 277 Southern League PA (.249/.322/.368) and .322/.400/.550 in 230 PCL PA (.271/.341/.416). DeWitt looks like he's a solid AAA player as of now, whereas LaRoche looked like a top AAA hitter or an average major league hitter.

In LaRoche's injury-impacted 2007-8, he has hit .304/.417/.541 in 477 PCL PA (league of about .278/.346/.439) and .217/.348/.316 in 184 NL PA (league of about .264/.332/.420). So, his numbers suggest his hitting has been above average relative to major leaguers.

So, I am interested in what DeWitt will eventually do, but the gap between the performance of the two is still substantial. DeWitt may have a defensive edge, but let's not go jumping to any such conclusions yet.

From DeWitt, assuming he is able to claim the 3B job next season, the Dodgers will get 2009 and 2010 for the minimum and then a super-2 year and three arbitration years through 2014. LaRoche will be with the Pirates for the minimum from now through 2010 and then for arbitration money in 2011-2013. It seems improbable that DeWitt will end up the better value, but I suppose time will provide an answer.

Logan White's Cult of Personality

2008-08-01T14:43:00.000-07:00

Logan White has been an excellent scouting director. The Dodgers have drafted very well. It is foolish to think that White is nothing special. He is special.

However, he is special at finding amateur players who will eventually succeed in the majors and seems to be pretty good at helping them get there. That specialty is distinct, however, from the ability to structure a roster or the ability to assign the proper value to major league players. It would be of little surprise to find out that White is really on the ball in understanding how valuable major league players are in relation to their peers and how much they should be paid, but personally it would be of little surprise to find out he is not on the ball in this regard. White seems a likely candidate to eventually be a GM, so perhaps we will get a good sense at that time. For now, though, I haven't seen the evidence that he can distinguish quality among successful players, which is distinct from his well-evidenced ability to distinguish quality among amateur players.

So, Logan White has established his reputation as someone I would want to draft the next Andy LaRoche, but he hasn't done anything to establish his reputation as someone I would want to decide how much value the rights to LaRoche have vis-a-vis Ramirez, Ethier, Blake, DeWitt, etc. He may be miscast in an Assistant GM role, and he may not be. In any event, I feel he was taken for the proverbial ride yesterday by seemingly giving his assent to Colletti/McCourt's disappointing charade.

Most of the significant decisions made by the Dodgers in Colletti's tenure have shown an inability to precisely and accurately evaluate talent in the major leagues and upper minor leagues. What amount of responsibility Mr. White holds in this regard is, of course, unclear to me. I just feel as if those who make remarks about trusting White's judgments of major league players or even AA and AAA players are falling victim to a faulty syllogism: White is good at drafting talent, major league players are talented, therefore White is good at discerning among major league players. It is simply the case that baseball performance data for physically mature players with years of professional training (generally, any player older than 23 or 24 or so) can be projected successfully into the future, and that this projection offers a much greater degree of precision than a scouting-only assessment.

I'll continue to give White props for his outstanding drafts for years to come. I've never had any reason to trust his acumen for gauging the relative strengths of major leaguers. Then again, Colletti has done nothing but establish distrust, so White is looking pretty good next to him.

For the record

2008-08-01T09:40:00.001-07:00

I've discarded about nine potential posts so far. Suffice it to say that I believe these things:

-Manny Ramirez is not exactly a major upgrade, and he's only a significant upgrade because the Dodgers have Pierre in LF instead of an average LF. Ramirez is a ~5 win/season offensive upgrade, a ~3 win downgrade in range, about a full win upgrade in arm and a full win downgrade in baserunning. Ok, so 2 wins/season, and we'll give some extra credit for improving the bench if Monsieur Sweeney ends up cut. So, 1 win this season and a .015 or so improvement in their expected win percentage for the playoffs.
-Casey Blake is a slight upgrade over LaRoche, I guess. I'm not going to give a shred of credit for being an upgrade over DeWitt.

And for that, they give up the entire careers of LaRoche (major league regular already and has a very good chance to be a 3-4 WAR player), Santana (has enough with the bat that it would be a surprise if he doesn't eventually achieve competence as a major league backup, and could certainly end up a 2-3 WAR player), Meloan (probably a solid #2/#3 reliever, potentially a bullpen ace or #4 starter), and Morris (he's pretty far away but seems to have the potential to be a major league starter). Personally, I wouldn't have traded LaRoche straight up for a salary-less Ramirez and Blake, although I guess the draft picks would make it closer to consideration.

The big spin is that the Dodgers get the Winners now and get a draft pick to replace each of the prospects traded. The problem there is that they have traded successful draft picks (Morris excepted, perhaps) whose bonuses have already been paid. It is true that they may end up with 4 players of equal caliber, but it is not likely, they have to shell out signing bonuses, and there's about 4 years of depreciation. Plus, it's not like the Dodgers wouldn't eventually get compensation picks in six plus years if LaRoche and company are successful major leaguers.

I know few Dodger fans would likely agree, but LaRoche is way more valuable than Andre Ethier; if the Dodgers could have traded Ethier instead of LaRoche to complete this deal, they absolutely should have. Blake could have played RF and LaRoche could have played 3B. Ethier's hitting is below average for his position, he'll probably be a super-2 at the end of the year, and while his defense may be a plus I haven't seen compelling evidence that he's any whiz out there. Blake could have been his equal in RF, and LaRoche could have been Blake's equal at 3B. Maybe LaRoche was key to getting the deal done, in which case we have to wonder about why the Dodgers would neglect the simple fact of LaRoche's superiority and build a strategy around his jettisoning.

So yeah, if the Dodgers win the World Series, LaRoche is no more than an average 3B, and one or two of the comp picks ends up being a legit major league regular then I guess I'll apologize to Ned. But this is clearly a wrongheaded trade and seals the wrongheadedness of its predecessor, the Blake deal. Unfortunately, the gasbags on parade have lavished enough praise on Colletti for this trade that even its likely disastrous outcome will be downplayed because of the obvious Need for the trade. Well, you can't spell Need without Ned.

Isn't the point of free articles on a pay site to make people want to read more?

2008-07-30T12:05:00.000-07:00

Christina Kahrl asserts:

I know, sabermetric orthodoxy insists that lineup order doesn't matter; I guess I keep forgetting to drink all of my Kool-Aid, especially when lineup-related research depends on so many lazy assumptions and/or involves redoing some of the same Markov Chain analysis that's been done for decades, all of which ends up suggesting that... well, that Joe McCarthy or Earl Weaver or Casey Stengel or Bobby Cox are smarter than the models (or the modelers). Consider me a firm believer in the proposition that much of sabermetrics is about the documentation of already-observed phenomenon, and that the best-placed observers did not and do not need sabermetric re-educations, they need to be learned from to create historically-informed sabermetrics.

Yes, anyone who actually conducts research must surely be too arrogant and empty-headed to tell us anything meaningful. I'm sorry, but "sabermetric orthodoxy"? I can think of only one outfit capable of creating orthodoxy in the sabermetric community, and it is Baseball Prospectus. Actually, it was BP; nowadays they probably don't have nearly enough influence. Coming from any other site, "sabermetric orthodoxy" is in the realm of oxymoron; coming from BP, it is an absurd joke. Yes, the sabrheads who argue that lineup construction does not make MUCH difference, given that the spread in OBP talent in almost any lineup is less than 100 points, are that rarest of breeds, creating an orthodoxy that incorporates contemporary cult tactics. But though Pete Palmer's blood is indeed flavored like Kool-Aid, it kills not the person but the person's capacity to use sound judgment in studying baseball; thank goodness for renegades like Kahrl who won't submit to the theocentric order of knowledge and its attendant hierarchies and who can uncover the sage wisdom of the ignored white male prophets of baseball's elites. Those who dare question the wisdom of baseball's marginalized managerial elite will pay, and Ms. Kahrl will be their collection agency.

From Ms. Kahrl's enlightened perspective, she is enabled to do brilliant things, such as referring to Kotchman as a "Slick-fielding moderate-powered first basemen who hit[s] .269/.307/.414 against right-handed pitching." I'm waiting for the column where she rails against the sabermetric orthodoxy that you shouldn't artificially limit the size of your sample, given that she rebels against its oppressive ubiquity in nearly every column she writes.

The more I realize that baseball really is about what its old school defenders say it is about, the more I realize how much I, like Adam Dunn, hate baseball.

Why is Ricciardi such an ***hole?

2008-07-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

Via mlb.com:

"We're aware that Zaunie is unhappy," Ricciardi told MLB.com. "We wish he wouldn't go through the media with it. We wish he would come to us, especially knowing we have a good relationship. Unfortunately, right now, there are no takers for him. If there are, we'll definitely oblige him.

"I think we've been a little bit more proactive than maybe Zaunie thinks. "Part of making a trade is someone has to want you. Right now, there's no one that has expressed an interest in him. That's where we're at." (I must say I don't know where to insert a 'sic' for that extraneous quotation mark before "Part.")

Are there seriously no takers for Zaun, who has been an above average catcher offensively throughout his Toronto tenure? Maybe his D ain't so good, but he'd be a reasonable upgrade for several contending teams. He's not worse than Barajas, so there's no real reason for his lack of playing time in Toronto. And Ricciardi only mentions KC and Florida as teams he has talked to, without addressing the obvious matter that NYY and BOS are seemingly the major players in the market looking for a catcher. If you want to say that you haven't elected to talk to teams in your division about dealing him, that's okay, but the notion that the Yankees wouldn't be interested in Zaun sounds, you know, ridiculous to me, with the caveat that the Yankees are capable of any number of ridiculous things. Ricciardi is trying to give quotes that let him have it both ways, like he has done for years; the only problem is that he has not proven especially good at this skill.

It could be true that Ricciardi is correct in that other teams don't want Zaun, but were that the case, shouldn't he be pointing out how foolish they are being? He's about an average catcher with a ~$3.6mm salary and if I'm not mistaken the club can pick up a $3.75mm 2009 option, which is way cheap for a player of his caliber. His comments come across as basically saying that Zaun isn't good enough to trade for, and I'll wager you an Adam Dunn rookie card that Ricciardi ain't so great at knowing which MLB players are worth trading for. I actually think that Toronto isn't quite as clueless as many have made them out to be, but Ricciardi continues to do very clueless things in public that betray not just a lack of understanding of baseball value but also a disturbing streak of misanthropy. I find it particularly galling since Zaun was one of the strongest arguments around for Ricciardi's competence: he was a pretty bad player before Ricciardi signed him in April 2004 and has been among the best scrap heap finds in baseball over the last five years. Off the top of my head, he is the only unmitigated success Ricciardi has had in acquiring major league players for Toronto, although I could be mistaken (I did a JP Ricciardi study a few months ago but it is on a currently downed computer).

Do the Dodgers really love semi-stars who don't hit well and are in their thirties?

2008-07-29T14:35:00.001-07:00

Apparently the answer is, "If the player is underrated in general, then no, they don't."

La Velle and I have spoken to different Dodgers people who say they have no interest in Adam Everett. At least not in a trade. Team had a meeting this month to discuss shortstop options, and listed Cristian Guzman (before he signed his latest deal), Jack Wilson and Ronny Cedeno. Everett’s name didn’t come up.

Rosenthal offers:

The Dodgers' addition of third baseman Casey Blake reduced their need for offense at shortstop. Nomar Garciaparra could be headed to the disabled list with a sprained ligament in his left knee, but Angel Berroa offers solid defense, if not much offense.

The team, sources say, does not have interest in the Twins' Adam Everett, another light-hitting shortstop who is nearing the end of a rehabilitation assignment, and has all but ended its pursuit of the Pirates' Jack Wilson.

So, does this seriously mean they don't think Adam Everett is not way better than Angel Berroa? The two are about equally bad as hitters (relative to major league shortstops, they are a little better than Juan Pierre is relative to major league left fielders), whereas Berroa is easily one of the worst defensive SS in the game (grow up, Ken) and Everett has probably been the best fielder in baseball this decade. Everett is, in my mind, a clear 2-3 win improvement over Berroa over the course of a full season. Why the Dodgers would be willing to part with Meloan and Santana for the minuscule and possibly negative differential between Andy LaRoche and Casey Blake and not be willing to part with whatever C+ arm the Twins would want for Everett should be a complete mystery. Sadly, I think two stats probably answer that question:

Berroa: 0 GG, 1 ROY
Everett: 0 GG, 0 ROY

Adam Everett has everything the Dodgers love except the fame.

Colletti Doesn't Agree with Mickey

2008-07-28T22:38:00.000-07:00

About scouting veteran pitchers. Prove him wrong, Ned; prove him wrong! I hate the Dodgers.

Someone else has probably pointed this out by now

2008-07-28T03:41:00.001-07:00

Mr. Colletti's oft-repeated rationale for the Meloan trade is that in return he has received a "gamer" in Casey Blake. I will concede that this is a fair point on some level, as Blake was a bad player until he was 29 and has been a consistently good hitter since then, and that sort of sticktoitiveness is of non-zero value. However, I am registering some mild disturbance in seeing that the GM of the Dodgers, in making a win-right-this-very-instant deal (in theory, if not in practice), has co-opted the euphemistic marketing strategy of his former employer and now chief rival San Francisco Giants. With a team that collectively wasn't capable of great success, the Giants chose to valorize their best players* as Gamers in a series of ads that seemed to concede that the team's talents were unremarkable when compared to the other major league clubs. There is much more room for comment here, but I'd rather not dwell on any of it.

*Caution: this sentence may refer to Omar Vizquel.

I really wish that we could have some challenge trade where all the SF/LA veterans end up on one team and all the SF/LA pre-arb players end up on the other; I'm pretty sure we all know which team would be better, and I think even Torre would know it.

Meloan by month in the 2008 starter experiment season

2008-07-13T23:15:00.000-07:00

With these stats (calculated from the numbers here): BFP, szERA (ERA estimator using K, BB, BFP), siERA (same as szERA but also with GB and FB thrown in), and LD/BIP:

April: 112, 4.01, 3.94, .267
May: 143, 5.06, 4.70, .131
June: 136, 4.52, 4.52, .223
July: 48, 3.90, 3.57, .143
2008 total: 439, 4.50, 4.32, .196

I guess some people think that sucks for a pitcher who turned 24 on Friday in his first season since being converted to starting, and other people (me) think those numbers, while not exactly encouraging, are what we would expect based on his track record as a reliever (good, but not other-worldly), the move to starting, and the run environment (especially given the import of Meloan's curveball). If he were a run better as a reliever, would people consider it a disappointment? I guess if they were simply using ERA, but by the peripherals I have my doubts. Meloan isn't a good, major league quality starter yet. It would be pretty amazing if he was. He was converted in hopes he could become one, and I don't think those hopes have been dispelled by his performance so far.

Of course, maybe the argument is that Meloan is ultimately responsible for his .351 BABIP allowed, but I'm not so much of that persuasion.

UPDATE: Let me show some more comparison.

Jax, 2007: 176 BFP, .398 K/PA, 1.85 szERA
Lvg, 2007: 87 BFP, .241 K/PA, 3.74 szERA
Lvg, 2008: 439 BFP, .200 K/PA, 4.49 szERA

The difference between starting and relieving is worth about a run a game. The difference in R/G between the Southern League and the PCL is about .6-.7 runs, and the adjustment for competition level is about the same. So, if we do a rough and ragged translation of his szERA at each stop to his 2008 context we get 4.05, 4.74, 4.49. I agree Meloan has not taken a step forward this season, but in converting to a starter the odds of doing that are not high, especially after a season of such a high quality that regression toward the mean is absolutely to be expected. I don't know nearly enough to seriously weigh in on whether Meloan ought to stick to starting, but I don't seriously see the evidence against it in the numbers.

UPDATE2: I should also point out that the True Blue LA post linked above succumbs to the Billy Ashley fallacy.

Non-Argumentative Beimel vs. Falkenborg List

2008-07-13T21:24:00.000-07:00

(All numbers are through Saturday's game.)

1. These two pitchers were born within 9 months of each other.
2. They were decent but indistinguished performers as starters early in their major league career.
3. Their performance from 2006 to present has been at a fairly consistent (for a reliever) rate and has been a notch above their previous history.
4. Since 2006, Beimel has faced 794 hitters at the major league level and 49 in the PCL. Falkenborg has faced 135 hitters at the major league level and 594 in the PCL.
5. Since 2006, major league RHB have hit .228/.299/.354 (.262 BABIP) against Falkenborg and .284/.339/.400 (.300 BABIP) against Beimel.
6. The same numbers for LHB: .302/.348/.488 against Falkenborg (.355 BABIP) and .227/.265/.302 (.283 BABIP) against Beimel.
7. CHONE projects Falkenborg for a 3.95 ERA and 3.96 FIP; Beimel a 4.04 ERA and 4.27 FIP.
8. ZiPs projects Falkenborg for a 4.50 ERA and 4.17 FIP; Beimel 3.95 ERA and 3.97 FIP.
9. In 2006-7, the bulk of the playing time in their respective projections, Falkenborg had the platoon advantage against 65% of batters faced at the major league level and 58% of batters in the PCL in 2006 (I'm not going to try to track down the 2007 xml data right now, sorry); Beimel had it 36% of the time at the major league level and 43% of his 49 PA in the PCL.
10. In 2008, Falkenborg has faced 26 batters at the major league level with the platoon advantage in 65% of them, yielding a .167/.200/.417 line (.118 BABIP, .251 wOBA). In the PCL, he's faced 145 batters with a platoon advantage in 52% of them and an opponents line of .244/.285/.385 (.330 BABIP, .291 wOBA). Beimel has faced 118 batters with the platoon advantage 46% of the time, yielding a .283/.339/.311 (.341 BABIP, .297 wOBA).

So, I just think it's fairly clear that, given the choice between these two pitchers to face one batter, you choose the one with the platoon advantage. When deciding who to put in the game, the most important consideration should be who will get the platoon advantage more often or rather which usage will maximize the player's value in terms of handedness.

That's not to say that, overall, Beimel is not a somewhat better pitcher. We are talking about a couple relievers here; it's unremarkable that the handedness advantage is greater than the difference in overall talent, as one of them has to be considerably better than the other for this not to be the case. To denigrate players like Falkenborg to make a point that is already obvious (that Torre makes many questionable decisions and has made several very irritating decisions) seems like a poor strategy for criticizing the administration.

So yeah, because Baker and Hermida were due up first and fourth in that inning, it would have been acceptable to go to Beimel, but in my initial post I established why going to Falkenborg until you hit Jacobs again is strategically sound. But if the argument is, as Vin's seemed to partially be, that you'd rather have Beimel facing Hanley Ramirez than Falkenborg, I think that's a lousy argument that shows a lack of study and rests on a superficial analysis of the players' respective performances.

Everybody hates Falkenborg

2008-07-12T17:11:00.000-07:00

What's the deal, here? Vin of Mike Scioscia's Tragic Illness seems to want Mr. Brian Falkenborg to die from roadside blackberries. And why, exactly? Falkenborg is a perfectly serviceable middle reliever, and he's above replacement level. Falkenborg is a fourth or fifth arm out of the bullpen for an average team, and him being the fourth arm out of the bullpen for the Dodgers is not unreasonable. His CHONE projection is a 3.95 ERA, which means there are about 90 or 100 better relievers in baseball than him, not hundreds. His ZiPS projection is 4.50, which is puts another chunk ahead of him but keeps him a bit above RL. His minor league numbers are quite solid, and it's not like he's been atrocious in the 273 major league plate appearances he has pitched. Yeah, 273. He was pitching well in Vegas (41:8 K/BB, 3 HR, 35 IP, 145 BFP, 3.60 ERA). In 2006-2007 he pitched 104.2 innings in Memphis (PCL) with 111 K, 32 BB, 8 HR, and a 3.70 ERA in 449 BFP; at the big league level, he threw 25 IP, 21 K, 8 BB, 2 HR, 109 BFP, and a 4.32 ERA. He's a decent RHP reliever, no more, no less.

The other options in this game were the lefty Joe Beimel and two quintessential replacement RHP relievers, although that is not to say (yet) that they are merely at replacement-level. Troncoso is a GB artist whose greatest height was dominating 100 batters in the California League last year at age 24. His performance at Jacksonville last year wasn't discouraging, but doesn't exactly say major league arm. He has been decent in 54 major league PA this season but has not pitched well in Vegas. There's no question to me that Falkenborg is a better choice than Troncoso. (Then again, maybe Vin truly believes that this year's major league ERA is the only valid index of talent, since it is the only one he uses. Sorry Vin, not trying to pick on you, just trying to encourage a little more responsibility for how we use stats to evaluate talent.)

Corey Wade has an argument that he should have been the choice, and I'll confess to being pleasantly surprised by his performance thus far in 2008. Like Troncoso, Wade is a 25-year-old RHP who didn't achieve A-ball success until 2006. Wade's numbers compare favorably to Troncoso's, though, as he was regularly putting up a K an inning with the bulk of his innings as a starter. His numbers in the Southern League since being called up to AA in the second half last season have been pretty good, but it's not especially impressive for a 24/25 year-old to be posting a ~9 K/9 in the Southern League pitching entirely out of the bullpen, although to his credit he has been used as a long reliever in both seasons at Jax, getting about 2 1/3 IP per appearance. With the big club, he's got a 2.63 ERA, 3.58 RA, 4.24 FIP, and 4.08 szERA over 152 BFP. So, there's an argument that Wade is the better pitcher now, but I don't see how it's any more reasonable than the argument that Falkenborg is the better pitcher now, and in any event the margin of victory figures to be small either way.

The other option would have been Joe Beimel, and there's a decent argument that this would have been the ideal time to use him. The argument would be that the Marlins had Baker due up first and Hermida due up fourth, so if you put Beimel in he will face two lefties and, if he can get two outs against Ramirez and the pitcher's spot (Helms pinch hit), then that will stretch into a second inning. The problem with this plan is that the worst stretch of the Marlins lineup for Beimel is the 3-5 of RHB Cantu, Willingham, and Uggla. If anyone thinks that those are the batters they would want Beimel facing in succsession, they've got some things to think through. So if you put in Beimel, you will probably have to take him out after four batters or, like, lose (seriously, is Beimel's 1.xx ERA supposed to mean a darned thing when we're talking about how good he is, let alone against RHB?). Given that this is an extra innings game in which the Dodgers have used all three of their good relievers and have only Ardoin and Repko left on the bench, it seems a bad time to put in a reliever that will have to be pulled after one inning or 1 1/3 innings since the Dodgers' pitcher's spot had made the second to last out in the previous half inning. Plus, a better time to use Beimel is to face Mike Jacobs later on in the game. If you use him against Jacobs, then he gets the platoon advantage against Jacobs, doesn't get it against Cody Ross, will get to face a much worse PH than Helms (Andino, Amezaga, or Hoover; you'd much rather have Falkenborg or Wade take care of Helms than give him to Beimel), hopefully can do some good against Ramirez, faces Hermida, and then can be pulled. Much better, strategically, to save Beimel for later.

So, if the criticism is that Wade was a better choice than Falkenborg, I'm ready to hear why exactly we should believe that outside of a playful distaste for Falkenborg (let's just say I don't think Torre has a BFF bracelet for Falkenborg; my Brian Falkenborg Forever bracelet store at CafePress didn't make me one bronze cent). If the criticism is that Beimel (or Troncoso) was a better pick, I'm gunna need a full on rebuttal.

This is not your father's Big Unit

2008-07-12T13:11:00.000-07:00

Because, you see, your father's Big Unit threw 9 innings with 15 or 16 strikeouts just about every time out. Mark Grace would know, having been there. Or was it your father's Mark Grace who was there?

Bonds...

2008-07-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

Look, I'm not going to try to weigh in on almost anything about Bonds. The headache is not worth it. Which is exactly why I'm sympathetic to GM's deciding that it's not worth it to sign Bonds.

However, I have no sympathy for those who lie about it or those who just state that they are not interested. That is some weak s***. I will respect any GM who says, "Signing Barry Bonds at the minimum would absolutely help our team win games, even with his defense as bad as it is. However, we are simply not willing to work with Mr. Bonds; we have our reasons, and we are not willing to comment on them."

Hey, I understand not wanting to work with someone. I would never work with JP Ricciardi if I had my choice, so it's hard to criticize his refusal to work out a deal with Bonds. (Of course, I would much rather work with Shawn Chacon than his a****** boss Ed Wade, so take that for what you will.) Which is precisely why Mr. Ricciardi needs to openly admit that Bonds would make his team better, and take responsibility for not being a strong enough GM to either a) deal with the fallout of getting Bonds or b) assemble a roster where making hard decisions like not signing Bonds won't have much impact since the team is good enough already. I mean, it is obvious that Ricciardi would be horrible at dealing with the fallout of signing Bonds. I hope Toronto fans are as dunn with any hope for Ricciardi to grow as I am.

Front office dysfunction

2008-07-10T19:58:00.000-07:00

Jon is definitely right here. The media criticisms about the Dodgers not being able to get a deal done are asinine and uninformed. I'm not going to disparage the news collecting techniques of Rosenthal, Carroll, or whoever else is spinning these yarns, but let's just say I haven't seen this criticism coming from anybody whose opinions about how to put together a major league roster are opinions I hold in high regard.

However, I will say that I see some relation between the apparent phenomenon of the Dodgers front office not being united in what it wants and the criticisms of Colletti that I actually have. I mean, I would be surprised if there is all that much agreement about how to evaluate players between Colletti and his assistant GM's, Ng, Watson, and White. With them presumably doing the legwork in some trade talks, it's easy to see how the Dodgers' desires might appear a moving target.

I would not at all hammer the Dodgers for not being able to get a trade done, especially since any trade in which the Dodgers are "buyers" probably won't be very good for the organization. However, I think that it ultimately stems from Colletti not having a coherent approach to evaluating and valuing talent. If you use ad hoc, subjective input as your basis for deciding whether you like a player or your team's roster, to identify Problems, and to choose Solutions, then it is hard to be very resolute. If instead you try to put hard values on everything using a comprehensive system that can put all of the complicating factors (How much is a compensatory draft pick worth? How much more valuable is a Dodger win in 2008 than a win in 2010? and so on) into clear focus where the moving parts can be compared directly to each other, then you are probably only going to waver on whether to do something when it's close. If you just think in terms of which problems you are looking to address, then you will have a lot of problems to consider and will have problems deciding whether a trade creates problems. This is how Colletti appears to approach these things, and if he were to instead try to build up a systematic approach, then not only would he be less of a moving target, but his subordinates would be more on the same page.

Again, I have no direct knowledge of the Dodgers front office, and I'm only offering my speculation as a criticism of other speculation. I think, though, from the history of decisions made by the Colletti front office and also by Colletti's own statements (obligatory self-referential link), that my speculation has something to it.

Simple Reasons to be Excited If You Are a Dodgers Fan

2008-07-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

Top relief pitching by FIP, past 3 calendar years, minimum 40 IP:
1. Saito 1.94
2. Chamberlain 1.98
3. Nathan 2.02
4. Papelbon 2.22
5. Rivera 2.29
6. Ryan 2.39
7. Wood 2.45
8. Billingsley 2.45
9. Putz 2.50
10. Soria 2.55
11. Bale 2.57
12. Wagner 2.59
13. Myers 2.63
14. Broxton 2.69
15. Jenks 2.73
16. Bell 2.74
17. Kuo 2.77
18. Otsuka 2.78
19. Rodriguez 2.80
20. Balfour 2.81

Top starting pitching by FIP, past 3 calendar years, minimum 40 IP:
1. Liriano 2.96
2. Peavy 3.02
3. Kuo 3.02
4. Buchholz 3.02
5. Sheets 3.09
6. Lincecum 3.12
7. Webb 3.13
8. Sabathia 3.13
9. Smoltz 3.14
10. Harden 3.14
36. Lowe 3.70
39. Stults 3.72
48. Penny 3.78
68. Kuroda 3.97
80.Billingsley 4.08
89.* Kershaw 4.15
*Okay, Kershaw only has 38.2 IP, not 40.

Still Hardened

2008-07-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

Craig Calcaterra says this about the trade:

Look, I don't like the trade on paper, but remember back when Beane traded Jeremy Giambi -- who believe it or not, people thought was gonna be real good, myself included -- for John Mabry? I'm pretty sure they're still rebuilding after the post-trade riots for that one. The point is that Beane was right. He knew something -- that Giambi was an overrated, drug-addled, head case of a player who had already reached his ceiling. Obviously Harden is a different deal, but one has to think that Beane again knows something we don't -- likely to do with Harden's health, which may make the Mulder trade the better analog -- that will make this trade look good for Oakland eventually.

Okay, here is what I don't get. Isn't it the other way around? Isn't it more that "We" have to "know something" about these players the Cubs are trading for this to be a bad trade? Among Gallagher, Murton, and Patterson, the numbers are clearly there; we have to believe that their major league performance will not be as good as their performance seems to indicate to assume that they aren't that valuable. The talk about Gallagher is that he's just a 3rd or 4th starter, but to dismiss Gallagher's chances of being a #1 or #2 we are basically saying that the scouts know something the stats don't. And while Murton may be just a bench player, I don't see anybody else pointing out (I assume it's because I haven't looked hard enough) that the A's desperately needed a good RHB because they are loaded with lefty OF/DH's. Mark Ellis is the best RHB on their roster, though Thomas is better than Murton if he can manage a return. Murton may be a minor piece, but that's a piece with a particularly high ability to be leveraged by the A's. And Patterson is a second baseman who has had above average hitting at each minor league stop; if the glove is substantially bad, then yes, he's not of much value, but otherwise he looks like a nice pickup; it's up to whether we actually "know" he can't cut it with the glove. I don't think Billy Beane (in actuality, we are probably talking about David Forst and not Beane) has to "know" anything for this to work out; we have to "know" something about the players to think it won't work out.

Hardening further

2008-07-09T02:03:00.000-07:00

Two things I am pretty sure are true:

1. No hitter currently on the A's 25-man roster and, outside of Frank Thomas, no one in the A's organization is a better hitter against left handed pitching right now than Matt Murton. Perhaps Mark Ellis warrants mention, but I have Murton ahead projection-wise. Teams that acquire big left-handed bats at the deadline get to benefit from those about twice as often as the A's will from Murton, but Murton closes some of that gap by being a PH option, and the A's will certainly see some southpaws in high-leverage situations. Maybe not in the abstract sense, but in the tangible and immediate sense, Murton is an impact bat. That impact isn't enough to offset the loss of a healthy Harden, but given how plausible the scenarios where Gallagher ends up not being a significant drop off from Harden are (though I'm not arguing that is probable), there's a lot of ways the trade can end up as a net improvement for the 2008 A's.

2. No pitcher now in the A's organization has a more impressive minor league track record than Sean Gallagher. Can you name any? His numbers are ahead of Blanton, Duchshcerer, Smith, and Braden, and his numbers have about matched Meyer and Eveland except he's been about a year ahead of them age-wise, and he's sporting a better than average ERA with a 3.98 FIP for his major league stint this season. Perhaps Anderson or Cahill or, with a dominant rest of 2008, Gio Gonzalez (or Inoa) could overtake him in this regard, but none are slam dunks to do so. Looking back further, Gallagher's certainly more impressive at this age than were Mulder, Hudson, or Haren. He might be third behind Harden and then Zito, but certainly there's an argument to be made that Gallagher's done as well as either had by this age. Harden is four years older than Gallagher, and at this point four years ago, Harden had put up eerily similar numbers to Gallagher's: proven success in AA by 20, excellence in a half season in the PCL, and some league average pitching at the big league level. I can't tell you much about how projectable Gallagher is, but the performance has been there.

Completely uninfluenced evaluation of the A's-Cubs Trade

2008-07-08T17:58:00.000-07:00

I just saw the new on the Harden deal, and I was pretty instantly impressed. I haven't checked out any reactions around baseball or any scouting reports, so let me just give you what I see based on the data.

The Cubs seem to believe they have no use for Murton or Patterson, and I understand that from their perspective. They have moved into all out "Let's approximate an all-star at every position" mode. Donaldson, similarly, is the sandwich pick answer to LaPorta, someone who is blocked by an outstanding young player (or players) at the major league level and whose value to the organization always figured to be as much in trade value as in potential. For the Cubs, these three were assets to use to get something done, rather than assets to some day appreciate at the major league level.

From the A's perspective, though, I definitely like the three. Murton is a dead on great fit for the A's. The A's have a bunch of lefty bats in the outfield (Gonzalez, Sweeney, Buck, Cust) and Murton has quite a future there as the LHP smasher and a rotation / injury fill-in against RHP. Plus, Murton is a clear (in my mind) upgrade over Emil Brown, and he'll help the team this season. Murton is probably slightly below average as an everyday corner outfielder, but the A's are set up just right to maximize his value.

I don't know if people are generally up or down on Eric Patterson. I am certainly impressed with his minor league hitting. Drafted out of college, he dominated in the Midwest League at age 22, was above average in the Southern League at age 23, above average in the PCL at 24 (and even better so far in 2008). If he has an average glove, then he figures to be a pretty nice 1.5 WAR player playing at the minimum for a few years who, if he improves a bit, will be a solid regular. Patterson gives the A's a lot of flexibility in terms of what they end up doing with Mark Ellis, as well. And if the glove ends up being a plus, then the A's are going to have an above average regular for a couple of years at the minimum.

Donaldson showed a killer bat in low A last season, but his hitting in Peoria this season has disappointed. He seems like a decent enough young prospect who could work out great but who obviously isn't the centerpiece of the trade.

The Cubs, meanwhile, get someone the A's didn't care too much about in Gaudin. Gaudin is only under club control through 2010 (the A's get Murton through 2011 or possibly 2012 and Gallagher and Patterson through at least 2013) and has fairly unimpressive peripherals; his ERA probably ensures his contract in arbitration will not be particularly inexpensive relative to his expected production. He's also not particularly better than the A's other options for sixth starter (and, with Harden gone, the A's may well have less need for a sixth starter). In the bullpen, the A's don't seem to have any need for Gaudin with Street, Casilla, Brown, and Ziegler all being as good as or better than Gaudin with less service time, and Joey Devine fits that bill when he gets off the DL. Not surprisingly, each of these pitchers has a higher leverage index out of the Oakland bullpen in 2008 than Gaudin does. Gaudin is just as expendable to Oakland as Murton to the Cubs, and arguably much more so. That being said, the Cubs are not as full of quality young pitching as the A's, so he's definitely worthwhile to them.

So that leaves Harden for Gallagher. Harden has a cheap contract and is perhaps the best pitcher in baseball per plate appearance. Gallagher, though, is only 22 and is already an above average major league pitcher and his minor league numbers indicate that he could definitely emerge as an "ace." Harden obviously has more value to the Cubs because their goals are so short-term, and I don't see how it could be argued that Harden is truly more valuable to the A's, all things considered, than Harden.

The A's have made a move for the future that hurts their chances this year a bit, but not by much. The upgrade to Murton from Brown is pretty nice, and it cancels out a chunk of the difference between Harden and Gallagher. With Harden probably more likely to go down to injury, it's certainly debatable that in the end this trade has little or no negative impact on the A's ability to reach the playoffs, although I'd agree that it's fair to say that it downgrades their ability to win a postseason series.

All in all, this seems to be a mutually beneficial trade with the Cubs assuming more risk to add a championship.

This Ned Colletti Interview from Friday is Hysterically Funny

2008-07-07T12:43:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the rambling and likely serial failures in grammar and syntax. This needed to flow out of me rapidly, because my standards of patience and calmness have just been worn down by the Dodgers' GM. Here is Diamond Leung's Q & A with Ned Colletti and my comments.

His boss, owner Frank McCourt, sidestepped questions regarding his job status in an interview with The Press-Enterprise, only saying "Injuries cloud everything. It's a waste of time to be pointing fingers."

We all know McCourt would never use a string of injuries as a reason to fire a GM who otherwise was doing good work!

Tony Lama snakeskin boot-wearing Colletti...

Wonderful!

...addressed his own thought process as well last week

Kudos to Colletti, this is evidently a daunting task.

Q: Compare your vision for how you saw this team during the winter to what it is now. A: In some ways, it couldn't be more different than what the thought process was at the beginning. I think when you have as many players who have never been able to play for whatever reason as we've asked, it's tough to measure.

One of the many things about the game is that there's a domino effect. When you take a couple of key performers out of the lineup, it changes it. When you have a very important performer playing well under expectations and then get hurt, you have another part of it. That's where we're at.

Who exactly are the Dodgers that have been on the DL this season?
Schmidt - He could not seriously have been in Colletti's vision, could he have? In any event, replacing him has not been much of an issue.
Garciaparra - If he was part of the vision, then it was a poor vision.
Furcal - Yes, why would we expect the player who played through injury (poorly) all through 2007 to miss time to injury? The Dodgers seem to want to get extra credit for Furcal's injury, as if his absurd production prior to injury is not an offsetting factor and as if he were a person of iron.
Pierre - See Garciaparra.
Jones - Obviously I think it is fair for NC to be disappointed in Jones, but the time lost to injury really has not been the issue.
Abreu - It would have been great to have him, but I'm having my doubts that he was a major part of NC's plan.
Hu - Fair enough that they could have expected him to be a decent enough hitter without the eye, but his role is secondary to Furcal (or tertiary to Furcal and Abreu).
Loaiza - Actually, I don't even remember if he was injured.
Kuroda - 15 day stint. Any complaints here are unfounded.
Penny -

So, Furcal, Jones, Schmidt?, Penny, and some okay bench players. What is the domino effect here, outside of shortstop? That Repko started one game and Delwyn Young some? That Stults and Kershaw have been used, contributing a combined 4.00 run average, exactly what we could have expected from Penny/Kuroda? That the Chan Ho Park renaissance has partially occurred in the rotation rather than simply as a lights out reliever (Colletti, like the rest of us, surely had that vision)? That Sweeney was on the roster? The Dodgers just have not had any harmful injuries outside of the SS morass.

Oh no, wait, something is starting to come back. It seems that a projected starter was injured in spring training, I just can't think of wh-

ANDY LAROCHE!

And when he returned, instead of listening to people who suggested that waiting for DeWitt to earn his demotion was a fool's game and that LaRoche should simply be given his shot, they have instead steadfastly chosen to let DeWitt earn a demotion and LaRoche earn some splinters. The injury to Andy LaRoche has had a huge effect on this team, but through sheer luck management was in a position for it not to have been (because of DeWitt's brief success) - and they chose to continue to let the injury drag them down after it was over.

Dodgers SS have, on the whole, hit nearly as well as the league average shortstop. While the defense lately has been awful, it was pretty high earlier in the season. They've gotten something a little under expectations, but not by much. The challenge will obviously be how they handle the position moving forward. At 3B, on the other hand, they have had horrible production when they could have expected production significantly above average from LaRoche. And in large part, this discrepancy is because they have largely chosen to keep DeWitt in the lineup since LaRoche's recovery. LaRoche's injury has had the biggest impact, and yet by chance it did not have to be that way.

We've got to get healthy. We've got to play better. We've certainly got to have better approaches at the plate. We've got some nice batting averages, but it doesn't translate all the time into runs. While the averages are nice -- .280, .290, .300, .310 .315, whatever it is, it doesn't translate. As I told the club at the beginning of the season, the most important statistic is how many games we win. Everything else is superfluous stuff.

And this is coming the next paragraph after de facto praise for Pierre and Garciaparra? Again, the Dodger whose hitting skills beyond batting average most translate into runs is LaRoche, who the Dodgers have blocked with someone whose game is (at this point) just BA in DeWitt. And it's not as if you didn't know going into the season that Martin, Loney, and Kent have games that are mostly dependant on batting average with decent secondary skills (and that, relative to their position, the same is true of Ethier and Kemp). Is the idea that these players, who aside from Kemp and Kent have definitely met any reasonable expectations, are supposed to now change their approach to some nebulous concept of a "better approach"? Beyond that, what kind of argument is this to be making when the team as a whole has a below average batting average? The problem with the Dodgers hitting has been Pierre/Jones, DeWitt, and Hu. No point in blaming DeWitt or Hu's approach (unless this eye business is fiction), and Pierre/Jones are using their established approach.

As much as I hate to cherry pick, the team outside of those four hitters has hit .276/.344/.424, while that group has hit .232/.296/.309. That's the reason the batting average is not translating into runs, and since we can diagnose those four easily, why pick on the others, who are essentially meeting expectations?

Q: These past few weeks with the team not going well, how much self-evaluation have you done for you and your staff? Do you think, "What could we have done better?"

A: I'm critical of myself every single day. You can always do things better. I've been far from perfect. There's no question. What we've tried to do is wait on the development of younger players to the point where they can compete every day at the big league level and figure out how to win a game and support (them) around the edges with veterans that have a history of winning. That's how we've drawn it up. To date, it hasn't turned out that way.

Well there we go. If this is an honest answer, hasn't he just demonstrated his fatal flaw? Instead of surrounding the younger players with the veterans that are most likely to help the team win, he has surrounded them with "veterans that have a history of winning," and this has been an explicit plan. When the negatives associated with each of the players Colletti has brought in (or, as with Kent, extended) have in each case only been manifestations of legitimate concerns at the time of acquisition, shouldn't Colletti see it as a negative that he has chosen to err on the side of proven winners, when that history of victory has not meaningfully carried over? Heck, he arguably even followed this strategy when trading for a Kansas City Royal - Berroa may never have been a good player, but the one good season he had happened to be for a team that, for a brief moment, just knew how to win, which propelled him to winning ROY honors by a narrow margin. OK, I'm not trying to win that argument, I am just venting. The point is, Colletti seems to be announcing that he has openly prioritized players who have shown a correlation with winning in the past and evidently at the expense of acquiring players who will causally contribute more to winning in the future or an equal amount at a lesser price than the proven winners.

Apparently, it is not good enough for Colletti to be critical of himself every day, because, like most of us, he is not especially good at seeing his flaws. NC needs to expose himself to other people's criticisms daily, not to his own.

Q: With Andruw Jones, it's difficult to predict an injury, but at the same time, could you have seen the kind of year he's had coming at all?

A: Not really. He hit 26 (home runs) last year and drove in almost 100. Was there a decline from the year before that? Yeah, there was a decline.

In essence with him being out for however long he's been out and with him being ineffective for however long he's been ineffective, we lacked that presence in the lineup. So the thought process was that we needed that type of player.

There's no question we needed that type of player because we've seen where we're at without that type of player. Now, was it the right player? Well, that can certainly be debated. Who was the better player? You're saying "You shouldn't have gotten Andruw Jones." So then I say to you, "OK, then who should it have been?"

If it shouldn't have been Andruw Jones, you tell me who it should have been. We could have maybe gotten another player for a lot longer term and a lot more money with really less of a track record.

The problem here is not, to me, that he expected Jones to improve on his 2007 numbers, which is quite reasonable (though Rob McMillin seems to disagree). The problem is that he speaks of Jones in terms of presence instead of tangible contribution to winning. He wanted that presence last season, so instead of hoping for the best on Jayson Werth's health and looking forward to having a solid rotation of Werth, Ethier, Kemp, and Pierre, he cut Werth to load up the lineup with lefties with below average positional bats. So a year later, he had to replace Gonzalez with a nominal upgrade, hence Jones. All along, we could have had a pretty good CF platoon of Pierre/Werth, which would not be much worse than Jones, and certainly not worse enough to suggest taking on the $16mm payroll difference between Jones and Pierre. Colletti has sought presence when it has meant only a marginal upgrade in substance. I'm not going to rip on Colletti for ostensibly being wrong about Jones' talent level, but the point is that he set himself up for taking a high-priced risk because he didn't think he could be patient enough with the low-priced risk. And he has made that same mistake with a degree of regularity.

Q: You've always given background into what your thought process was in getting a player, but how frustrating is it that guy after guy after guy for whatever reason -- due to injury, due to underperforming -- just hasn't worked out and to see them one by one fall like dominos?

A: It's excruciatingly frustrating. I can't put into words how frustrating it is. I certainly don't do anything to have it turn out this way. ... I have scouts in the field, amateur scouts, and player development people. Nobody sets out there to have players get hurt, players underachieve.

Honestly, this is getting ridiculous. You don't get to be frustrated with your results when you have frustrated everyone else with your decisions. Who are the guys that have "disappointed" in Colletti's regime?

Young players Colletti did not acquire: Martin, Navarro, Loney, Aybar, Kemp, Ross, Ethier, Billingsley, Broxton, Kuo - absolutely no disappointments outside of Aybar's 2007 problems.
Veterans Colletti did not acquire: Drew, Kent '06, Izturis, Saenz, Ledee, Cruz, Penny, Lowe, Perez, Gagne - no disappointments but Izturis, Gagne, and Perez, and they sure didn't keep the '06 team from the playoffs. Incidentally, those are the three signings DePo made that at the time I saw as poor choices that were made to be pragmatic and appeasing. Hmm...

Young players acquired by Colletti:
Seo, Betemit - Seo was a disappointment, Betemit was not.

Veterans acquired by Colletti:
Pleasant surprises: Saito, Beimel, Anderson, Alomar, Hall, Park
Met reasonable expectations: Sele, Tomko, Hendrickson, Baez, Carter, Hamulack, Garciaparra, Kent '07-'08, Lofton, Martinez, Furcal, Gonzalez, Pierre, Clark/Dessens, Wolf, Wells, Proctor, Seanez, Bennett, Ardoin, Kuroda
Disappointed: Lugo, Mueller, Hillenbrand, Sweeney, Lieberthal, Schmidt, Loaiza, Jones, Berroa

The only players Colletti has acquired who have exceeded expectations have been cheap veterans, and none have been in the rotation or the starting lineup. If Colletti honestly expected much more from anyone in my "Met reasonable expectations" group, then he just doesn't understand the significance of baseball performance statistics. To split it up, Sele, Tomko, Hendrickson, Dessens and Wells were mediocre pitchers a notch above replacement level who came through with lousy contributions a notch above replacement level. Wolf and Kuroda both pitched about as well as could have been expected, with Kuroda adding a brief DL stint and Wolf a long one, but the latter was no surprise. Baez, Seanez, and Proctor were all decent relievers who have pitched decently and no better, but Baez and Proctor were both given roles out of whack with their capabilities. Carter and Hamulack were replacement level pitchers who were ditched before their numbers could stabilize at RL. Martinez, Ardoin and Bennett have been what they've always been, and Clark didn't get much chance. That leaves Colletti's string of veteran position players who he'd be happy to say have been unfortunate disappointments but who have been exactly as one would have expected. Kent's 07-08 has given us good hitting and fielding lousy enough to call into question whether his extension was decent enough value-wise. Furcal had a season a bit above expectations, a season below expectations because of playing through injuries, a partial season well above expectations, and then a season-ending injury. All told, he's given 2.5 seasons of playing time with hitting slightly above his projection. No cause to claim disappointment on his three year deal at all. Lofton and Gonzalez were both below average players at below average money for free agents, and hit and fielded exactly to their projections. The only thing different about Pierre since he's been signed is that Dodger Stadium has predictably kept his doubles and triples down and he finally has missed time to injury, and it's not as if that's been a negative for the Dodgers. Finally, Garciaparra has been an average hitter over 1019 PA (in other words, at 2/3 playing time) at ages 32-34 after being a +2 win hitter over 1315 PA (again, 2/3 playing time) at ages 29-31. If he's a disappointment, getcha head checked.

So, the actual disappointments? First, role players acquired via trade who have never been good enough to be average major league regulars and who are many years removed from their greatest successes: Hillenbrand, Sweeney, Berroa. Sure, they collapsed, but they did so over little playing time and with an aura of karmic fulfillment. Lieberthal could have been a decent bench player and hit poorly, but he had extremely limited playing time. Lugo and Loaiza were arguably average players taken on to increase payroll late in the season, and neither did much damage. That leaves Schmidt, Mueller, and Jones. Is that who Diamond was asking about? Let's see, each were arguably late bloomers (Jones, in reality, was not, but his expectations were always high and his 2005 was interpreted by many as his finally living up to promise) who at one point became legitimate stars, each was over 30 and being signed to a short-term deal after not having had a big season (and, for Mueller and Schmidt, not having had a big season in the previous two seasons), and each was signed to a short-term deal that could get Colletti the same plaudits that he earned with the Furcal deal. Colletti got praise in each case (okay, ignore Mueller on this point if it's not applicable) for limiting his financial risk to a short term, but the only way you can get that kind of praise is if you're getting players with acknowledged risks that aren't good enough to get an albatross-length contract . And in each case, he has piled on the cash. When your strategy is to acknowledge the risk in your aggressive moves which explicitly carry high risk with a moderately high return that is balanced out by a guaranteed high cost, why are you bemoaning their failure? The failure is clearly in the strategy, and that it has worked out even worse than could have been expected is not really something to dwell on. Forget about the players, I'd rather hear about whether you intend to continue the strategy that has thus far failed, and hear about why you think it can fail or succeed in the next offseason.

So if Ned is frustrated, TS, you are frustrated because your moves have had the impact that many of us had expected (which is why we experienced that frustration at the time of the moves rather than upon seeing their results).

Q: How does it affect you emotionally? Every day there's a public opinion poll placed out there with fan reactions.

A: That's how it works. It's professional sports. There's good performances and bad performances. And every day in baseball, there's performances that are judged by cheers or boos. That's the nature of the game.

One of the faults in my personality is I don't ever want to let anybody down. I don't want to let anybody down, and in the profession I've chosen, people's opinions are based upon people who I have really no control over on how to think, prioritize or live their lives. And that's frustrating because I know what I do day in, day out, every single day I've been here, and, frankly, every hour I've been a part of this organization.

I know what I'm about, and I know what goes into it, and I know what the thought process is. But we're in the business of predicting human behavior, human health, human reaction. And you know what? At the end of the day, the only thing anybody's got any control over is what they do and their own effort.

There you go. What I - and many of his other detractors - have been criticizing all along is that he seems to use absolutely the wrong tools to predict human behavior, health, and reaction. If his expectations have not been met, then it is utterly confounding that he could think it is because his players have let him down. And if it's the scouts or the staff that has let him down, then obviously he's still accountable to some extent beyond their failings, but beyond that it's his fault for not being capable at measuring and projecting player value. The people on the sidelines have been able to do that, and he has not. Maybe it is the fault of the scouts, but that's something you need to understand going in: your scouts will miss on players sometimes, as will the stats alone. That's why you want to use the stats to get a good projection and then use the scouts to verify your projections and break ties. When you overwhelmingly go after players with unremarkable projections, you don't get to blame the scouts for being high on all of them. You will always have scouts who are high on players with poor projections, because a scout is just a sample. Even if you expand the sample to a lot of scouts, you still need to account for the actual value of the player instead of using NC's apparent thought process of "Player is good, I want to put him on the team, hence, work hard to sign him to a contract." My criticism of Colletti has always hinged on his not seeming to know how valuable players are and what that means in terms of what talent to exchange . He's relied on subjective assessments with a hermeneutic that is ever optimistic about veterans. Simply put, he does not seem qualified to be entrusted with executive authority over how to construct a roster, acquire talent, and determine how much to pay players. It may be generous to call him a Peter Principle hiring since I haven't seen the evidence that he ever should have been a front office executive to start with. Which is not to say that he does not have many of the skills of a successful GM. It's just that he does not have the combination of skills that will lend itself to success.

And when I lose sleep, I don't lose sleep because I cheated the game, because I cheated the effort or I was delinquent in my solutions. I lose sleep because I want it to be as good as it can be. And I take pride in being here. And I take pride in the people that support this organization. I'm honored to be here, and I'm honored that this franchise has the fans it has, that they're as passionate as they are and they're as upset as they are. I wouldn't want them not upset.

But at the end of the day, I can't control what people do. I can't control anything that they do. And you know what? Show me who can control everybody else.

'I am proud of all the hard-working, great people around me. It is unfortunate that they let me down so regularly. Perhaps we should try some role reversal where I make the mistakes, and then you will see what it is like to wear my shoes, having to deal with the failure of others.' I really don't like hammering on Colletti like this, but how can I not when he is essentially making the argument that he is not accountable for the advice he has acted upon when it has been clear to third party observers why the advice (if it ever existed) was faulty?

"Show me who can control everybody else"? In this context, he has to be talking about being disappointed with the scouting (and front office analysis) he's gotten, right? Otherwise, he is talking about the manager he bought with a giant wad or the players, and I think the players' "disappointment" has been sufficiently dispelled. So, why don't you just learn the lesson that you have good amateur scouting and development under Logan White, let it do its thing, and rely on quantitative analysis at the major league level? It seems that such an approach would have paid dividends. So doesn't this all in the end come back to you having too much faith in scouting reports on veterans that have been belied by those veterans' statistical records? (Or, perhaps more likely, misinterpreting the significance of those scouting reports?)

The point is, if you choose to surround yourself with qualitative/subjective assessments and find them disappointing, then you should offer $200K to Tangotiger to be your right hand man. You don't get to say that their suggestions haven't worked out, when what we are talking about are veterans living up to quantitatively-derived expectations but not your interpretation of the scouting reports you've gotten. The best organizations in baseball are thriving because they have made efforts to use scouting and stats to cross-validate and cross-critique; Colletti is stuck on blaming his scouts. Well, if everyone else knows quantitatively how to value players, then the ones that you think are worth the extra money that others aren't willing to pay figure to be the ones that your scouts are high on, and that is likely to be because they are a bit mistaken. It's not a reason to ditch the scouts, it's a reason to buttress them with a quantitative analytic framework. Instead, Colletti just vaguely criticizes the scouts in public.

Q: What, if anything, would you change if you could?

A: Looking back on the last two seasons, I've learned a lot. One of the things that I would, in hindsight, would tried to have done differently is I would have tried to have been more patient. The world is impatient by nature. It's one of the toughest traits for anybody to learn from infancy on.

OK, I'm with him so far...

When I came in here, I really wanted to get the organization to be as good as it could be as fast as it could be. It's certainly the right way to approach it, but I also should have been a little more cognizant of being patient with it. I'm not going to give you a bunch of examples because I really don't have a bunch of examples. I have one example that sticks out in my mind that is easy for me to tell you.

And what did Colletti do to improve the organization? His strategy was to fill up the major league roster; he doesn't seem to have done anything to improve the organization itself. It's becoming clear that by "patience" he means using reasonable sample sizes, which is a fine thing to improve upon but is something that any decent GM hire would not have had a problem with. Instead, he created that problem.

A year ago in August, we were hanging in there. We had yet to play as well as I thought we were capable of playing. I was trying to keep the air in the balloon and trying to keep the team going in the right direction and give it some support because when you do make a move, sometimes it can help those guys know that you're trying to help them out.

OK, no disagreement that you would want to do something to show support for your players. It seems to me, though, that morale isn't something that you should throw money at; bringing in an extensive veteran stopgap might boost morale, but not in the same way that bringing in a good player will. Plus, as their kind of boss, you would think a GM would come up with some other ways to boost morale. That morale was low may have had to do with the GM, you know, having a record of kind of bad mouthing his players and blaming others for his failures, and another GM might be in a position where their exceptional people skills (Colletti's supposed strength, right? If that's not it, I don't know what it is supposed to be.) could address the problem rather than the team's payroll.

I had at least one of our scouts tell me that Esteban Loaiza was healthy and would help. I had somebody else tell me that they had a pretty good feel that he was going to get claimed by somebody ahead of us in the standings in the league and after us in the process. Knowing that you never have enough pitching, we did it. That is an example of me being impatient. I should have been more patient and just let it play itself out and see where we were going be.

But as we try to make it as good as we can as soon as we can, sometimes you'll have that mistake. I think I'm accountable for it, but I've never done nothing here on my own. I've never just gone out and everybody said, "Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it," and I go do it. I trust scouts. I trust people who watch the game and understand it.

I mean, what is there to say here? "I had at least one of our scouts..." ONE!!! Honestly, ONE!?!?!? If you are willing to base an $8mm+ decision on just the scouting (and not, you know, a quantitative assessment of how good he could be, how good he's most likely to be, how bad he can be, and where else the dollars could go to), how in the hell can you say something like "at least one"? Were there eight advanced scouts in agreement that

Your employees will make mistakes, which you yourself have admitted that you make. Instead of working on a framework to vet this work, you seem to have "impatiently" chosen among your ad hoc advice for whatever would salve your then-current beliefs about what was wrong with the major league team. Which leaves you defending sinking more money than your entire staff makes combined (probably, I obviously don't have the data) into a player whose contribution would clearly be marginal at best. Or, as your 1+ scout(s) put it, "would help."

Plus, the reason why you "never have enough pitching" is often because teams focus on their major league pitchers. Billy Beane believes in flipping his good pitchers for more pitchers, so that he typically has "enough pitching" at the expense of holding onto established greatness. Pitchers have a high injury risk, so if the aim is to have enough, you would want to spend on a lot of inexpensive pitchers who have yet to reach the majors and weed them out in the minors. Colletti has instead focused on dumping money into established arms that carry the same risk as young arms but a price tag much higher. Yours truly suggested that Colletti trade Garciaparra for some prospects in 2006. That team would have made the playoffs just as well with Loney at first, and yet Colletti stuck with his "all-star" instead of stealing a few prospects from a more naive club. When has Colletti added non-veteran pitching to the organization? He swapped it in the Seo/Hamulack/Sanchez/Schmoll trade but otherwise has not acquired any. The way to fight against the "never have enough pitching" phenomenon is to take advantage of GM's who are looking for a quick veteran fix, not to be one.

Q: Given how you've encountered unpredictability when it comes to acquiring players through free agency, how might you change going into the future?

A: I think with each passing year we want to spend less on free agency. I can't tell you how much we're going to depend on it and how much we're not going to depend on it, but the plan is to depend less and less on it. Sometimes you have to fill a hole that way. But in '06 we had many holes to fill, in '07 we had somewhat as many holes to fill, and in '08 we went into it thinking we had fewer holes to fill. Hopefully next year, we'll feel the same way. It's a precarious route to go.

See, he's saying something accurate (you don't want to depend on free agency) but accompanying it with an outlook that essentially demands depending on free agency. If you see your roster as full of holes, you will constantly be enmeshed in free agency. Free agency is for making upgrades, not filling holes. That's not to say that you don't sometimes have basically no one at a position. It's just that you need to view the free agent in terms of their contribution relative to the awful replacement, not relative to nothing (a hole). Willy Aybar becomes a hole instead of someone who was not far behind Mueller. Choi, evidently, must have been seen as a hole by Colletti instead of a player who was not less sufficient than Garciaparra figured to be. Certainly, the Dodgers needed another outfielder and shortstop because of injuries to Izturis and Werth, but the point is that Colletti chose to see the roster he inherited as one full of holes rather than as one with some strengths, some weaknesses, and a great deal of payroll to work with. So he signed a bunch of mediocre free agents to fill holes instead of leveraging the payroll to get a couple major upgrades. At the end of the day, Colletti has not added a single elite talent to the roster, and he has spent tons in free agency.

But coupled with that -- and this is important -- is if you're of a mind to build from within, to give young players the opportunity to play, to mature, to make mistakes, to learn from their mistakes and to get better ... if that's the path that you hitch your wagon to, which we have, the only other way you're going to be able to fill that hole is to disband some of that group. And that's where we always think twice and say, "You know what? Let's be patient."

I guess this argument is correct, but the Dodgers' problems under Colletti have been the lack of value from the veterans. They are the holes to be filled, and Colletti hasn't once (apparently) seriously tried to get value for a veteran he had on hand. Those are the ones to trade, and those are the ones who have resembled "holes". Or, I guess DeWitt is hole-y, but is considered to holy to fully replace with LaRoche.

Let's be patient with the younger players and grow through it and make sure our manager is keen into coaching and heeding into the instructions because it's going to take time. It's going to take a player forgetting how many outs there are, a player not having sunglasses on on a sunny day, a player not being able to hang on to the slider, a player not being able to hit the ball to the right side if it calls for that. That takes some time to develop.

OK, these things take time. The problem is that you seem to be evaluating your players with a list of attributes and two checkboxes. Waiting for your players to be a "Yes" for each of the little things will indeed take time. But finding young players who contribute to your team's success is an entirely different proposition. The young players have been contributing to the Dodgers' success throughout Colletti's tenure, and viewed in the context of the full sample and their respective opportunities, I don't see any that have disappointed. Having a high payroll is about getting good young players to be average at their positions and using the payroll to get some elite players. Colletti is criticizing his young players for not being elite while spending heavily on average or below veterans. And the reason is that NC seems unwilling to evaluate players in terms of the causal contribution to winning and instead insists on using benchmarks that have sporadic relevance to overall player quality.

There's no question. You have to be patient. You have to see results. You have to see improvement. That's a subjective measure because some people never want to have the patience. Some people have more patience. Some people would like to see steady improvement and don't want to see it from Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday to Thursday. Improvement, improvement, improvement, improvement. That doesn't always happen that way. There might be April to June, I see improvement. May to September, I see improvement. We're dealing with human beings. There's nothing mechanical about it. There's nothing programmed about it. It's all real life.

Yes, and if you insist on evaluating players by looking for improvement, AND you have acknowledged that your scouts have let you down by being a little off on players... I mean, why not just evaluate the players on how good they've been, rather than in terms of checklist improvements? It feels like Matt Kemp keeps getting told he needs to do something else, and the Dodgers aren't investing much in just improving those elements of his performance that if unleashed would make him an outstanding player (total speculation on my part). You want the checklist, also, but in the end the decisions need to be about the bottom line. Yes, all the things in the checklist contribute to the bottom line, and the contents of the checklist tell us a good deal about how we can expect the bottom line to improve over time, but the eventual point is to assess player value in the context of their contribution to winning, rather than to assess players in terms of binaries (Are you a winner - Y/N?).

And come on, there is so much variability in baseball that looking for trends in a player's performance over a couple of years is essentially pointless. Take how they're doing as a sample of their performance, which fluctuates over time for non-predictable reasons. That will get you a lot further than betting on the trend. You're not making money in Vegas by betting on every streak to continue; baseball players are a different animal, but that does not mean that the evidence supports betting on the ones on a good streak.

Young players need to improve to be stars, but if they're already pretty good, focus on replacing the lousy players without futures. Of course, in signing Jones a year after Pierre, it's certainly arguable that Colletti already has figured this part out.

As far as free agency goes, the more we can stay out of that arena, the better we may be. But at the same time, we have to measure that with how patient are we going to be. How much advancement do we see the players making? It's a tough juggle.

No, it's not a juggle. You don't need some particular sort of balance in the roster. Work on getting a good roster out there using the proper tools of assessment and valuation. The young players need to improve for you to continue seeing them as valuable assets in the future, not to prove they are deserving of a roster spot (although some, like DeWitt, obviously do need to improve before being worth a roster spot). Use your players improvement or lack thereof to update your projection, not to determine whether or not the player is worth keeping.

Q: How difficult is it for you in a win-now business in a win-now job to be patient?

This is going to be good.

A: You can't just snap your fingers and be winning. You can't just wish it. And you can't just have it happen because you want it. That doesn't work. With 30 teams in Major League Baseball trying to win, everybody is trying to do the same thing. We have to figure out the best way of doing it. We have to find out certainly the quickest way of doing it. And we also have to think about the smartest way of doing it.

Great! Now in the paragraphs to follow, he will certainly lay out this "smartest way of doing it" (as I type this, I sincerely have not looked at the paragraphs that follow). Let's see it.

If I wanted to be selfish about it, yeah, I could have two big-name players here right now. But I'd have six or seven of the young players that we really have a lot of faith in, they're gone. And in a few years, one or two of those big league players we acquired could be gone. So suddenly you're sitting there with what?

Uh, sure. But let me ask - how come you haven't acquired veterans that could be traded for a big-name player? Or that could be traded for prospects who could be flipped for a big-name player? You've squeezed out the payroll, so you haven't been in a position to just take on more salary instead of giving up more prospects. You haven't converted any veterans into prospects, even as your tenure has been full of debates that a younger player should supplant a veteran in the lineup. Yes, the answer to all these questions could fairly be simply that none of your veterans have been good enough, but then...

The direction we're taking is the right direction. I believe it's the right direction, but it takes patience in a world that's not patient and a society that's not patient. So we always have to measure that.

I don't know what he means by measure here.

But I will always do what I feel is best for the organization ahead of what might be selfish and best for me. I don't worry about that stuff. I don't have any control over that stuff.

I'm honestly willing to believe him on this point. It's just that if this is true, it makes clear that he has been making moves out of incompetence rather than selfishness.

I have control over one thing -- what I do. I really don't have control over you (the media), the players, the manager, the coaches. No matter how much anybody wants to control or make things happen, wish things would happen, hope things can happen, demand things have happen, it doesn't work. It doesn't work.

This last paragraph, in which Colletti tries to steal the title of that Ian Curtis biopic for his own tale, is pretty damning. I mean, the GM has no control in an absolute sense over the people that work for him, but the GM has a good deal of control over whether they work for him and how they work for him. Colletti is essentially saying that his success is entirely dependent on others, which strictly speaking is certainly true. But it's of no consequence since ultimately it is your job to get the most out of them. And if your idea of getting the most out of scouts is asking at least one of them whether Loaiza could be helpful in an abstract sense, then it's obviously on you when they fail. The GM needs to develop processes and hermeneutics, and Colletti, unable to do these things, resorts to blaming the excesses of his staff. Your job, sir, is to harness your staff's strengths while mitigating the impact of their weaknesses, and you seem to abrogate that responsibility. This Q&A is chock full of damning evidence that Colletti has failed in his basic tasks, and offers only rudimentary reasons to believe that he will improve.

Let's Compete with BP

2008-07-06T17:37:00.000-07:00

Arguably continuing the theme from my previous post, the Baseball Prospectus home page proudly displays a photo of Michael Young along with the caption, "Texas shortstop Michael Young is just one of many Rangers who've earned an All-Star selection." This is but one of the many reasons I have no plans to sink another dime into their operation, Silver's fine work notwithstanding. I will concede that there simply aren't any AL shortstops that have earned an All-Star selection this season, but Young has had his worst hitting season so far, is no longer a very good hitter (he is still good relative to his position), and at least by UZR continues to flash some relatively awful range. Why would BP showcase one of the least accomplished and least deserving players on the All-Star team? He's clearly less deserving than the other of the "many Rangers" (Bradley, Kinsler, Hamilton). I'm sure the article has some specious argument for him, probably related to DT fielding runs. BP is a news gathering outlet now, but as far as I can tell they aren't doing that particularly well (I guess I wouldn't really know, but among other things Kevin Goldstein published a mock draft the day before the draft where he successfully predicted only two of the first round picks), they are no longer anywhere near the cutting edge in statistical analysis and don't have an especially good setup for stats presentation, and their prestige pieces are utter garbage.

And yet, none of the major outlets have tried to bankroll something to truly compete with Baseball Prospectus. They've all done it piecemeal by hiring one or two proven sabermetrically-oriented writers. Meanwhile, THT and, as the great and universally-affiliated Eric Seidman calls it, "The Blog" blow BP out of the water. But because of its chosen path of institutionalization, BP wields much greater influence in the industry. It very obviously doesn't have to be this way.

So here is my idea, which obviously suffers from me not having any business background or caring about such things. BP has learned that news gathering is an essential part of their financial framework, and that makes perfect sense. BP's major problem (as far as people like me are concerned) is that they try to get all of their writers to cram BP numbers into their articles (or they have been hiring writers that are simply inclined to do so).

So I propose a website that develops its own framework for baseball research. That is, the researchers are trained to use the same toolbox and basic presentation. Uniformity in numbers and presentation across writers is good, and BP doesn't coordinate its writing or research enough to make thier site even come close on this measure. Moreover, BP (IMO) hurts itself by keeping their formulae proprietary; nobody at home wants to follow up on their claims since we can't replicate the studies. Hence, I propose a flip - this new site would not attempt to publish stats (this is a money saver) but would make all of the methods open source. That way, the individual articles do not need to dwell so much on methodology. In addition, the history of methodological changes will be well-maintained and people can keep track of the changes in rationale over time.

So my idea is to get a team of a handful of outstanding baseball researchers to establish two frameworks. The first is a framework for projecting minor leaguers based on minor league numbers, and the idea would be, in addition to finding the best way to project near-term performance, peak performance, and player value, you would want to find the best metrics to concisely convey information about a player's numbers (think of Pizza Cutter's work on Speed Scores and Power Scores, for instance) - that is, to find the best ways to slice the numbers to make a variety of points and then allow the readership to be familiarized with them. FIP and other stats have eventually taken off because of THT, but the market is still limited by using numbers that are easily compatible with well known formulae (that is, they replicate ERA or batting average, etc.). I would want a site that has the freedom to design new ways to conceptualize and interpret baseball statistics without being beholden to the old forms, but one that works hard to clarify the scales and the hermeneutics - BP most certainly does not do this.

The second framework is to study the correspondence of scouting reports and statistical performance. Ideally, it can be established what the normative correspondence between qualitative scouting assessments and quantitative performance is, although obviously the error bars are unlikely to ever shrink much. In other words, we'd like to be able to get a scouting report (and we want a framework that can interpret a detailed scouting report from an actual scout in addition to a throwaway Baseball America comment) and show what players with similar scouting reports have actually done. I'm tired of junk like this where player comparisons are bandied about based on the eventual results rather than the skills that are observed. What we want is to be able to say, "In general, when scouts say x about a player, the player is this good, and the better players broke out because of x, y, and z, the lesser players failed because of o, p, and q, and typical players like G, H, J, and K were assessed quite accurately."

This would be a daunting task, and the obvious counter-argument is that this is what the teams themselves are trying to do and anyone able to do it well should get a job with a team. However, teams compensate their researchers more through prestige than cash, and if such a site were successful it could well be much more lucrative and would very likely put its research team in a position to get better jobs from MLB than they could otherwise manage.

With these frameworks in place, the site itself can function with a team of 3-4 research directors leading some assistant researchers, writers, and editors, and could seriously pump out the content. Any time a minor leaguer gets called up a level, demoted, traded, moved to a different position, gets a PR blast, etc., the site would be on top of it and ready to go. A player report could be relatively easily compiled showing a quantitative projection, the player's implied quantitative projection based on qualitative assessments, interesting data from players with similar numbers and from players with similar scouting reports, and a comparison to peers or other relevant players. So such a site could combine top-notch and intensive research with an RSS-friendly approach and frequency. At present, baseball sites go for volume in available statistics and quality in articles; I think a site that keeps the article quality while providing a volume of articles can become a pretty big phenomenon.

Furthermore, such a site would do well in maintaining broad interest since there would be features on prospects from each organization, so it would be relatively easy for fans to subscribe to posts on just their teams prospects (and rumored trade targets, etc.). Additionally, the level of fan/reader involvement should be high, since the method is open source but not all of the numbers are: enterprising readers can conduct the research on their own and post it in the comments, and in the process a farm system for bringing in new researchers can emerge; conversely, average readers will always want to know more about the players they are interested in and will frequently be suggesting posts (see Sickels, John).

Because of the focus of the site, I think it would have the crucial angle of appealing to baseball writers and to the major league teams (and minor league teams, for that matter), so its inside influence could expand rapidly. A new site about major leaguers would need to be exceptionally good to gain traction. A new scouting site about minor leaguers would similarly need to be outstanding to compete. But while the site I'm proposing would have to be outstanding, the distance from outstanding work to recognition and influence seems fairly short in comparison. And this means that journalistic access would develop very quickly, leading to a positive feedback loop (for a while, anyway).

I can't say I know that the site is doable, but I think it is. The major obstacle is simply the start-up cost, as getting enough data together to do it right is cost-prohibitive and getting enough research work together is time/cost-prohibitive. Simply put, the payoff is too far away for it to work out without someone to bankroll it; the key is to establish the frameworks before going live so that after that you just need to put in the work/grind. But I do believe that such a site could quickly become a juggernaut. It would require patience and money. Does Google want to own a baseball site?

I am certainly not sure that I would want to spend my time on this endeavor, but I believe it is a well-considered framework and would be interested to hear from you if you're interested in it.

Does Josh Hamilton thank the Lord that he's White?

2008-07-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

Because an African-American player with his same story would never a) get 3.7mm All-Star votes or b) get a ten-minute showcase for his religion on national TV.

I'm not trying to criticize Hamilton here. But Orlando Hudson is right. It's not as if Hamilton is any more deserving of a vote than Milton Bradley (also on the OF ballot). I don't know, if I were doing a ten-minute interview with a player who answers questions by rote, I would want to get him to comment on why he was chosen over a better-qualified teammate, but that's me.

UPDATE: Tito comes through and names Bradley the starter at DH with Ortiz out. Hurray.

Junk's Tats

2008-06-30T12:37:00.000-07:00

My friend Junk has a problem. At the end of every season, he tattoos the names of 3-4 players from the two teams he follows onto his abdomen. Below each name, he has the year, the team's record in games that he played, and the team's record in games that he did not play. Junk goes through the whole roster, of course, and finds the players for whom the disparity is greatest, and unless it's close and there's a more notable player to go with, he chooses the player whose presence ostensibly was of the greatest benefit or detriment.

Anyway, Junk got me trashed last night and I blacked out early. I awoke this morning to a pounding headache. When I got up to use the restroom, I saw my reflection in the mirror and screeched in terror at what I had done. There it was, in blue block letters encircling my belly button:

MARK SWEENEY
DODGERS, 8/10/07 to 6/29/07
WHEN HE PLAYED: 35-51
WHEN HE SAT: 25-17

Joe Torre: Proctology

2008-06-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

New feature at Fangraphs yields this list of most relief innings pitched, 6/24/05 to 6/23/08:

Heilman: 261.2 IP, 3.34 ERA, 3.34 FIP, 0.96 WPA
Proctor: 257.2 IP, 4.37 ERA, 4.74 FIP, -0.35 WPA
Qualls: 254 IP, 3.19 ERA, 3.90 FIP, 2.61 WPA
Torres: 251.1 IP, 3.37 ERA, 3.70 FIP, 4.41 WPA
Shields: 243.2 IP, 3.10 ERA, 3.32 FIP, 6.23 WPA
Guerrier: 240.1 IP, 2.92 ERA, 4.14 FIP, 2.27 WPA
Howry: 238 IP, 3.21 ERA, 3.45 FIP, 4.00 WPA
Rivera: 232.1 IP, 2.01 ERA, 2.31 FIP, 11.69 WPA
Rauch: 225.1 IP, 3.32 ERA, 3.66 FIP, 3.53 WPA
Gregg: 224.2 IP, 3.36 ERA, 3.69 FIP, 2.28 WPA

Proctor is the only reliever with an ERA over 4 or a negative WPA in the top ten. Among the top thirty, only two pitchers have ERA's that are not at least a half run better than Proctor's, and there are only three pitchers with FIP's that are not at least a half run better than Proctor's. Of the pitchers in the top 30 in innings in relief since 6/24/2008, ONE has an ERA worse than Proctor (Joel Peralta, 4.44) and NONE have a worse FIP or a worse WPA total. Despite this, Proctor is second in relief innings pitched.

Now, fortunately Proctor has pitched in average leverage contexts, with an LI of 0.99. Here are the relievers with an LI between 0.85 and 1.05, a FIP of 4.40 or greater and at least 120 IP over the past three years, in order of innings pitched:

Proctor, 257.2
Grabow, 189.2
Romero, 161.2
Jamie Walker, 154.1
Kline, 132.1
Pinto, 131
Tavarez, 130
Dohmann, 120

Only Proctor and Grabow (4.8) have FIPs over 4.63, and only Proctor and Tavarez (-2.58) have negative WPA totals. It is just baffling that Proctor has been used so much. Maybe Torre was trying to get back at Cashman for dealing Ventura? In fairness, Proctor's LI in 2008 is 0.60. But in fairness, Hong-Chih Kuo's is 0.57.

I didn't go further than the above because Sharpfang for some reason does not include BFP (or TBF or PA, whatever you call it) for pitchers! David should add that; exporting to Excel is exciting, but doing so and then finding it doesn't have the key unit for analysis is rather disappointing.

Checking in

2008-06-13T03:10:00.000-07:00

I had a completely neglected (since I basically make no attempt to generate visitors ... whatever) contest challenge last year at the end of this post:

Contest time: Guess the 2008 Salaries
I'll buy a 2008 THT Annual for anyone who is within $903,074 for all five.

Randy Wolf
Brett Tomko
Odalis Perez
Mark Hendrickson (arb eligible)
Aaron Sele

I think one of those is pretty easy. Guess which one, if you so please. Entries must be in the comments section by 10:38 a.m. PST on December 30th, 2006.

Wolf: $4.75 mm, up to $9m with incentives (a full $9mm would entail 30 GS and 200 IP, and he's on his way)
Tomko: $3mm, up to $4.5mm with incentives (or more if he wins awards, but that's not going to happen)
Perez: $850,000, plus more with 20+ GS
Hendrickson: (arb declined) $1.5mm, up to $2.5mm with incentives ($2.5mm at 30 GS)
Sele: $0, so far as I can tell (he was the one that I deemed "pretty easy" to guess)

Penny f/x (originally posted in comments at Dodger Thoughts)

2008-06-12T21:15:00.000-07:00

I remember there was a discussion on Penny's pitches in a recent DT thread, and Josh Kalk has just released the 2008 version of his pitch f/x tool (http://tinyurl.com/4ul6sr). So I checked Penny's numbers. The average NL pitcher this season has 3.79 pitches per batter faced, with 18.7% of pitches batted, 43.4% of pitches strikes (non-batted), and 37.9% of pitches balls. Penny overall has had 1453 pitches, 1293 of which were tracked. Penny's pitches have been 19.1% batted, 43.3% strikes, and 37.6% balls.

On batted balls, the league has a .347 wOBA against with .207 singles per batted ball and a .187 ISO; Penny's batted balls have had a .351 wOBA, .255 singles/batted ball, and a .137 ISO.

Of the charted pitches, Penny has 67% fastballs, 17% curves, and 16% change-ups.
FB: 37.6% balls, 19.1% batted, .376 battedballwOBA, .259 1b/batted, .162 ISO
CV: 40.6% balls, 16.6% batted, .344 battedballwOBA, .306 1b/batted, .056 ISO
CH: 37.5% balls, 22.6% batted, .267 battedballwOBA, .191 1b/batted, .106 ISO

So the fastball has been hit hard when put into play and the changeup has been pretty effective in generating outs. The [Eric] Enders hypothesis [from a previous DT thread] seems to hold - hitters are either sitting on the fastball or getting very lucky on it (actually, some combination thereof).

Here are the uncharted pitches (11% of his total):
33.8% balls, 18.1% batted, .358 battedballwOBA, .276 1b/batted, .138 ISO

While the fastball has been hit hard, Penny has still been only one run below average on batted balls. What is really concerning is that he's thrown basically a league average split of balls/strikes/batted balls, but has a szERA (strike zone ERA, an ERA estimator using only K, BB, and BFP, although Tango seems to have renamed it kwERA (for K and Walks)) of 4.97 against the league's 4.39. Maybe he just hasn't had the right sequencing, or maybe he just doesn't have the right stuff to put hitters away.

* * *

2007 data is available at the same link. Penny's fastball worked WAY better last season. I had actually already run the 2007 numbers for Penny a few months back.

Total: 35.4% balls, 20.2% batted, .315 battedballwOBA, .218 1b/batted, .117 ISO

Charted pitches: 71.9% fastball, 12.0% curve, 16.1% changeup. 36.9% of pitches were uncharted.

FB: 34.3%, 19.4%, .273, .207, .085
CV: 35.5%, 18.4%, .385, .267, .133
CH: 39.3%, 23.5%, .425, .273, .182
Charted (tot): 35.3%, 19.9%, .314, .227, .108
Uncharted: 35.8%, 20.7%, .315, .203, .130

That's a .102 difference in wOBA on batted fastballs (that were charted)! And the (charted) curves and changes that were put into play were hit harder than his (charted) fastballs have been this season. The difference in the results of his batted pitches has been pretty night and day.

His szERA was 4.54, and part of the dropoff in that can (in addition to variance etc.) be explained by the 2% increase in balls per pitch. And in case anyone was wondering whether his lack of K this season stems from an inordinate number of foul balls, he's actually had a smaller percentage of foul balls in 2008 overall, including a smaller percentage of fastballs.

* * *

A split finger FB should be included among the fastballs. I could be wrong, though. Josh's tool lets you break them down by velocity, and I see that Penny has 69 pitches listed as fastballs that are under 90 mph, so I'm assuming that that includes the splitters. The "uncharted" pitches are ones that weren't captured by the f/x, not ones that don't fit into the classification system. If you're really interested in the splitter and its classification, I think Mike Fast is the guy to talk to since he works with the spin data (and I bet if you asked he'd probably do the research). As I understand it, unless you are looking at spin (the Kalk tool does not) you can't differentiate different types of FB.

* * *

I broke Penny's fastballs in 2008 down by velocity:

<88 6
88 27
89 36
90 45
91 68
92 108
93 128
94 160
95 151
96 91
97 42
98 6

I then broke them down into four groups: a) less than 92 (182 pitches), b) 92+ and less than 94 (236), c) 94+ and less than 96 (311), and 96+ (139).

The six numbers below are average velocity, %balls, %batted, wOBA on batted balls, singles per batted ball, and isolated power.
a) 90.33, 38.5%, 17.0%, .225, .161, .065
b) 93.09, 39.4%, 15.7%, .414, .243, .216
c) 94.99, 34.4%, 21.9%, .343, .309, .074
d) 96.81, 40.3%, 21.6%, .559, .267, .400

Sample size caveats should be peppered throughout any analysis like this, obviously. It would seem that his slowest fastballs (presumably these are mostly split finger) have been very effective. This feeds the "hitters are sitting on (non-splitter) fastballs" hypothesis. The fastballs that have been have been slower have been hammered and also have missed the zone more. The fastballs in his typical range (94-95) appear to have the best command (by ball%) and have not been hit hard power-wise (.074 ISO) but have been slapped for a ton of singles. The fastest fastballs have been hammered when hit (both in terms of power and singles) and have missed the zone quite a bit. If you check out the plot (http://tinyurl.com/3tefym), he just does not seem to have good command on the fastest fastballs (though a) sample size and b) I don't know the general spread): the hits have all been out over the middle of the plate and, except for two that were kept down, have been in the upper half of the zone without being in the upper sixth or so of the strike zone.

Taking a look at the strikes that weren't put into play, here are the percentages of called strikes, swinging strikes, and fouls in that order:
a) 51.9, 9.9, 38.3
b) 45.3, 9.4, 45.3
c) 25.7, 15.4, 58.8
d) 30.2, 13.2, 56.6

Including ALL pitches (not just strikes), the swings per pitch are a) .385, b) .403, c) .543, d) .482. So it seems that hitters have laid off of or have been deceived by the slower fastballs (again, hitters that can differentiate them seem to be laying off the splitter, bolstering its success) and batters are not having too much difficulty getting the bat on the higher velocity FB's. Balls in play per strike shows a) .306, b) .279, c) .362, and d) .311, so it really does seem that hitters are waiting for a typical Penny fastball and slapping them for singles.

So the data seems to back up Eric's hypothesis very well - well done!

UPDATE: I've been trying to learn more about Penny's repertoire and whether it's as simple as FB/CU/CH or if there are (as I have seen suggested from various sources in this search) splitters, sinkers, sliders, or 2-seamers (or, as some state, no true change-ups). I really don't think I'm any closer. I've looked at a lot of this. And this and this. I wonder if we could get Aaron Hintz and Harry Pavlidis to come to a consensus.

Billy Ashley was not a bad major league hitter

2008-06-09T13:18:00.000-07:00

Andrew Grant, you have been warned.

I'm really tired of people repeating that conventional wisdom as if it were truth. Ashley hit .233/.307/.409 in 683 PA, implying that he was -5 runs per full season's playing time. Ashley didn't see regular playing time, faced a lot of relievers, and managed to hit .275/.333/.520 in his 331 PA against lefties. So we have a hitter who was only slightly below average with just one season's worth of PA.

BUT THERE'S MORE!

Ashley's career numbers include some pretty awful hitting in 1992 and 1993, Ashley's age 21 and 22 season. Ashley didn't have a monster year in the minors until 1994, when he turned 24 a month before the strike. (In fact, while Ashley may have been very hyped at some point, Ashley really did not show much power in the minors until he hit AA at age 21. He was again fairly impressive the next season in Albuquerque, but he didn't really learn how to take a walk until his 1994 season at Albuquerque).

His numbers with the Dodgers from 1994 on are .227/.312/.411 (-1 run) in 518 PA. Throw in his scorching call-up for Boston (24 AB, 3 HR, 3 2B) and you get a post-93 total of .230/.313/.430 in 544 PA, which league/park adjusted is +2 runs. Perhaps he should be debited for poor situational hitting or something? Well, Fangraphs has him at -1.09 WPA, -.52 REW, and +.45 WPA/LI. That's obviously not a compelling case given the size of the sample and his usage. Further, beyond the sample being small, we *KNOW* that it was a qualitatively poor sample - lots of pinch hitting, irregular playing time, etc., and each of these carries a pretty considerable penalty. His breakdown of PA was 27.2% 1st time against SP, 23.9% 2nd time, 15.8% 3rd plus time, and 34.0% against relievers. What if he had been given Eric Karros' playing time? As the cleanup hitter from 1995-1997, Karros faced 23.0%, 22.5%, 22.7%, and 31.8%, respectively. If Ashley had been given Karros' PA, he would have put up much better numbers. Karros faced a pitcher for the first time in a game less than 54% of the time, but Ashley did it over 61% - what if that extra 7% had been PA against pitchers for the third plus time, when he hit .299/.372/.545 from 1994-8?

Why in the world would you give up on someone who was a strong minor league hitter because of this major league performance? He did not establish himself as a *good* major league hitter, but he clearly was not horribly overmatched or "eaten alive." Simply put, his hitting skills were not appreciated because of the way he made his outs and his ratio of hits to at bats, and that forced him out of the major leagues before he could prove that he was a qualified major league hitter. In terms of his actual results, they are disappointing but the sample has severe problems both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Billy Ashley may have been overhyped, but that is of significance only to those with an interest in hype. Maybe he was not truly good enough to be an average every day player, but that all depends on his defense. As a hitter, I think he was clearly good enough to be at least a fringe regular, and he was DEFINITELY good enough that he should have been a platoon partner ("lefty-masher") in the big leagues for a pretty long time. Teams were foolish on Ashley, and I'm gonna stick to my Roger Daltrey not-getting-fooled-again guns on any player who gets compared to Ashley.

I don't have the research on college players who strike out a lot, so I'm not really going to weigh in on Russell. I don't know much about him, so anything here is speculation based off the 4 videos I've seen and his college stats. It is really annoying to me that a) he is being compared to a lot of players who are just cherry-picked as high HR, high K failures instead of being compared to players without a selection bias and b) he is being compared to players whose value was diminished by poor defense as if it is a given that his defensive skills are on the same level. He gets a lot of comparisons to Branyan and (from Dodgers fans exclusively, as far as I can tell) Billy Ashley. Sure, as a hitter, he has a similar approach based on the results. But those hitters both were drafted out of high school (Ashley a 3rd round pick, Branyan in the 7th). Is this really a reasonable comparison? No, it's people drawing up the scenario of what it will look like when Russell fails. And the reason why players like Branyan and Ashley had a hard time getting past the K-stigma (and the BA-stigma variant) and SSS-stigma (small sample size) was because they had little defensive value. Well, Andrew compares him to Ashley even as he had just linked to a scouting report that implies Russell will be about an average defender in right field. Plus, Andrew derisively suggests that his ceiling is Jack Cust - WTF? A player's ceiling is hitting like Cust and being an average RF defender, and you're not excited about that? I simply do not get it. That is a high ceiling for anybody, and you have to get lucky to get that kind of play out of the average tenth pick in the draft, much less a third rounder. That's not to say that Russell will reach that ceiling, but how can anybody consider it less than a really high and exciting ceiling? Was there any corner outfielder in the draft with a higher ceiling than Russell if his ceiling is indeed Cust + average defense?

Kyle Russell obviously hasn't shown that he can make the transition to professional baseball, let alone the major leagues. His approach is based on waiting for the ball to get pretty deep in the zone, so obviously if he does not improve he won't cut it against major league players. Well, that is the point of player development - to develop a player with talent into a major leaguer. I don't know if Russell has what it takes or not, but his performance record at college simply does not lend itself to disparaging his abilities. Russell has been a dominant hitter at the college level. That dominance is being disparaged because it was a certain kind of dominance, a high-K kind of dominance. It is ridiculous to mix arguments about how projectable his particular skills are to the major league with an assessment that TTO college hitters cannot progress upwardly. Some can and some can't. A strikeout is not a scathing indictment that proves hitter failure. To be a good power hitter, you must strike out more often because a) you should generally be more selective and b) it is harder to make contact as you are swinging hard. Someone who is struck out by a lot of college pitchers is, with no other info available, not impressive. But someone who is willing to get some strike outs here and there in order to be able to draw a lot of walks and hit a lot of home runs? That is a different story, and we should read the whole book before we put a picture of Billy Ashley on its cover. And even if Billy Ashley is on the cover, it's still a book that demands rapt attention, because Ashley was not who Dodger fans decided he was.

If you tell me a player's hitting will be 70% Ashley and 30% Cust, then I'm salivating at the mouth. If he can play a solid RF, then I'm sold.

Heck, Russell himself seems to know a lot more about the value of these sorts of comparisons:

PING!: As a tall, thin and strong left-handed outfielder, you’ve grown comparisons to Shawn Green. Additionally your game has been compared to Adam Dunn with better defense. Do you feel those comparisons are accurate or would you say a different resemblance is more fitting?

RUSSELL: Those comparisons are flattering to hear considering both those players have been very successful at the major league level. I feel though that I am just trying to be like Kyle Russell. I have had many players that I have looked up to my whole life, but I can’t say I am totally identical like Shawn Green or Adam Dun. Every individual has their own ‘style’.

Now, I'm going to go ahead and say I'd be pretty excited about getting Russell regardless of who drafted him. But if you tell me he was drafted in the 3rd round by Logan White? I mean, if Logan White signs off on giving him a 3rd round pick... that is not merely pretty exciting. I am stunned that Dodgers fans who worship at White's altar are acting as if this was a disappointing pick.

The Base Run Angels of Runs

2008-06-08T15:03:00.000-07:00

Via a Rob McMillin link to his own archives I came across an old post by Jeff Angus at his Management by Baseball website about the Angels' emphasis on doing well in RISP and RISP/2out situations. Angus used a pretty small sample to make his point, so it got me wondering about how much the Angels' organization strategy has helped them.

So, I compared the Angels' offense from 2002 up through June 7, 2008 to the rest of the AL over the same span. The Angels compiled a .326 wOBA against the league's .330, which suggests a -141 run differential. By linear weights (including stolen bases and CS), I have them at -105. By Base Runs (using the most detailed formula), I have them as -77. In actual runs scored, however, they are +26 runs. So between baserunning and timeliness, they've managed an extra 103 runs over the 6.389 seasons in the sample. In other words, Base Runs tells us that their Pythagorean record should be .544 instead of the .553 it has been (their actual winning percentage has also been .553). So the Angels have won an extra ten games because of their baserunning (excluding SB and CS) and the timeliness of their hitting, or 1.5 wins per season.

So, that is the equivalent of each hitter being about +1.6 in baserunning+timeliness. So, if you want to give the franchise credit for its strategy, then give them 1.5 wins a year. However, there are two obvious reasons to discount that figure:

1. It could just be luck, or rather, we don't know how much to attribute to luck and how much to skill.
2. It doesn't account for the trade-offs of the strategy. If the Angels have picked players who are otherwise less valuable overall, then all else being equal that value needs to be subtracted from the 1.5 wins. Further, if the Angels are developing their hitters to be good in these areas (timeliness and baserunning), then the credit for the success of that strategy needs to be offset by whatever developmental losses it has incurred. If they make a player +1.6 runs in these areas, then the benefit would be swamped if that teaching results in the player getting three fewer walks and three more outs.

Three True Outcomes

2008-06-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

My three favorite baseball players are Milton Bradley, Jayson Werth, and Russell Branyan. They're favorites of mine for roughly the same reasons - they have under-appreciated ups and over-frustrating downs, but I learned to love their approaches enough not to be frustrated by the downs even as they continue to keep them down. And this year, they are all having amazing years with the same caveats as always.

Both Bradley and Werth are good fielders with good power and good plate discipline who have been valuable when on the field. Bradley is the better player, but Werth isn't a slouch. Both were acquired by newly-hired Dodgers' GM Paul DePodesta in the week before the 2004 season began, and they were both key contributors in getting that team to the playoffs.* In 2005, they were slotted to be the starters alongside JD Drew with the Shawn Green trade. Werth was hit in the wrist by a pitch and missed the first two months and didn't hit very well in 395 PA after his return (.234/.338/.374, although he faced southpaws in only 20% of his PA's as opposed to 35% over the rest of his major league career.) Bradley missed two months with a finger injury as soon as Werth had returned, came back for one month, and then missed the final 38 games with a torn Patella tendon. After these setbacks and DePodesta's ousting, neither would play a regular season game as a Dodger again. Werth was out for all of 2006 and Bradley was shipped away, along with Antonio Perez, for Andre Ethier. Werth was non-tendered prior to the 2007 season and signed with the Phillies.

*It is often said that DePodesta inherited Dan Evans' team, but of the position players Dan Evans had only acquired Izturis, Encarnacion, Roberts, and Ventura, as well as giving NRI's to Hernandez and Saenz. Izturis, Encarnacion and Roberts were decent players with defense factored in, but they didn't do much offensively in 2004 (although it was Izturis' best year) and the latter two were traded at the deadline. Ventura was passable as a role player. The major contributions of Saenz and Hernandez, I am guessing, would not have come about without DePodesta purchasing their contracts. Maybe Evans really had them in his plans, but I doubt it. On the pitching side, Evans acquired the starting rotation of Weaver, Perez, Ishii, Nomo, and Lima, which combined for 842.2 IP and a 4.41ERA - and it would have been a lot worse if they didn't have an amazing defense behind them. To Evans' credit, he picked up valuable swing-man Wilson Alvarez and some decent relievers in Sanchez and Mota (he also acquired LOOGY Tom Martin who was traded at the deadline and Yhency Brazoban who was promoted at the deadline). DePodesta may have inherited Evans' team, but he pretty obviously improved it, and while DePo shouldn't get credit for Beltre's break out, Evans had nothing to do with it either. (Wanted to try out the Pozterisk.)

2006 and 2007 were more of the same for Bradley - outstanding play but only 50% playing time. San Diego, worried about his season-ending injury, chose not to offer him arbitration, and he signed with Texas for only $5.25 million. To reduce his injury risk, Texas said it would put him at DH to start the season. Werth had a great season in Philadelphia, avoiding injury for the most part (he had one month-long DL stint in July) and hitting .298/.404/.459 in 304 PA.

I didn't know much about Branyan until he was acquired by the Brewers in 2004. His back story is worth looking into if you're unfamiliar. While Branyan has never been good enough to be a star, teams have continued to be too wary of how he makes his outs (strikeouts) and his ratio of hits to at bats, and the Brewers were getting him after Cleveland gave up a second time (the first time, they at least got Ben Broussard; the second time, he was basically gratis). His glove isn't good enough to let him be a true underlooked gem, but he's been about an average major leaguer the whole decade and has been freely available time and time again. He hit .225/.307/.467 (.330 wOBA) in 805 PA for Cleveland before they dealt him at age 26, .232/.337/.481 (.350 wOBA) in 457 PA for Cincinnati before they non-tendered him, .247/.355/.506 (.360 wOBA) n 414 PA for Milwaukee before they DFA'd and released him after Toronto sent Corey Koskie packing in the wake of the Troy Glaus trade, .201/.283/.473 (.320 wOBA) in 193 PA for Tampa Bay (which was sort of overstocked on poor-fielding corner bats) before they swapped him for some half prospects from San Diego, where he hit .232/.357/.474 (.358 wOBA) in 233 PA before being released. (He had another 48 PA between St. Louis and Philly late in 2007, hitting .195/.313/.415 (.321 wOBA)). Thinking about the junk that teams like the Phillies and Twins have started at third in recent years, it legitimately angers me that Branyan never got a real shot and never had a salary over $1.25 million.

This season, each one has had great success tempered by the same old problems. Bradley leads the AL in OBP and SLG and hasn't missed more than the occasional game to injury. Werth has gotten decent playing time because of an injury to Shane Victorino and had a memorable 3 HR game to increase his national profile; in 148 PA, he's hit .260/.338/.519, putting his line since cast off by Colletti's Dodgers at .285/.382/.479 (.374 wOBA) in 451 PA. Branyan got his first extended taste of the Pacific Coast League, which is obviously a pretty good environment for him, and put up a .359/.453/.693 line in 176 PA. Milwaukee finally decided to bring him up and take RHP PA from Bill Hall, and he's hit .321/.441/.821 in 33 PA since being called up, bringing his major league line up to .230/.328/.483 (.344 wOBA) over 2183 PA.

I'm really happy for their successes, but each still must face the same issues they've dealt with all along. Bradley is killing the ball, but it could be that he'll only be able to keep doing so by staying at DH and staying away from the injury risks of playing the outfield. Werth is on the DL, and though he's begun his rehab assignment his ability to stay healthy for an extended period of time is in doubt. Branyan may finally stick with an organization that seems like it should like him, but his issue has always been when these organizations get capricious and managers see his trees and not his forest; with a dissatisfied sometime-hometown-favorite semi-star as his displaced platoon partner, he just doesn't have any job security.

Each of the three became familiar to me with their 2004 acquisition, played well with that franchise for two years, was discarded, and has played well since:

Milton Bradley:
2004-5: 908 PA, .275/.358/.446, .349 wOBA, 2.85 WPA, 1.98 WPA/LI
2006-8: 874 PA, .300/.400/.521, .395 wOBA, 5.50 WPA, 5.13 WPA/LI

Russell Branyan:
2004-5: 414 PA, .247/.355/.506, .360 wOBA, 0.51 WPA, 1.41 WPA/LI
2006-8: 507 PA, .222/.332/.491, .349 wOBA, -.16 WPA, 1.48 WPA/LI

Jayson Werth:
2004-5: 719 PA, .247/.338/.426, .334 wOBA, 0.92 WPA, 1.06 WPA/LI
2006-8: 451 PA, .285/.382/.479, .374 wOBA, 0.93 WPA, 2.14 WPA/LI

So here's to three great players whose great 2008's might finally get them the recognition and pay they've earned over the years. And here's to Kyle Russell, who, if he ends up as good as any of these three, will have been a steal.

Update: Werth was activated for today's game. - June 8

Fangraphs Audition

2008-04-28T11:07:00.000-07:00

{Note: This was written at a specific point in time, and is not eternal. Fangraphs, or Sharpfang as I call it, is one of the best baseball websites anywhere. To understand why I wrote this, you would have to read what they had published on 4/28/08. - May 29, 2008}

When I found out Fangraphs was looking for baseball writers, I had some initial interest but didn't get any reply. Now that I've seen who was hired and what gets published there, it is obvious I am not up to snuff! So here's my audition to be a true Fangraphs blogger:

It is time that the A's give up on the Chris Denorfia experiment. Once a promising hitter putting up excellent numbers, Denorfia has fallen off a cliff. He now has close to zero chance of ever being a useful major league player, unless he begins to hit well.

Denorfia was overrated on the basis of two excellent half seasons at Louisville, when he was much too old for the league and should not have had his statistics counted by the scorekeeper. Let's look at what he has done since:

As you can see in the graph above, Denorfia's RC/27 has plummeted in each season, from 5.7 to 4.9 to 4.1. At this rate, he will be at 3.3 in 2009 and 2.5 in 2010. How many major leaguers have an RC/27 of 2.5? Unless Denorfia has a hidden pitching talent, his career is over.

Now, let's take a look at his batted balls:

As you can see in the graph above that does not contain a legend, Denorfia can no longer hit a ball in the air to save his life. His GB/FB ratio has skyrocketed from 1.75 to 2.40 to 3.80. That's right, for every five fly balls, Denorfia has produced NINETEEN grounders this season.

But even Denorfia's meager production this season is completely unsustainable. He is presently hitting .273/.360/.318 despite a BABIP of .375. When your BABIP is higher than your on-base percentage AND your slugging percentage, it is probably time to hang up the cleats.

And being on the A's, you would expect Denorfia to know how to take a pitch. His career average coming into the season was 3.97 pitches per PA, but this season he's down to 3.69. That is not a huge deal in itself, but Denorfia has also increased his strikeout rate from 18% to 24%. That means his strikeouts per pitch have gone up from 4.6% to 6.4%. Ouch.

Oakland is getting many plaudits for its early season success, but with Denorfia around, that does not seem sustainable.

Fielding PEDs

2007-07-06T18:20:00.000-07:00

I try to ignore most PED-discussions, but I must express surprise about how the Neifi Perez scandal has played out thus far (at least in the outlets I've read). I understand, to some extent, why the PED debate has focused (in baseball) on the marriage of steroids and home runs, with scant attention cast toward Alex Sanchez types and pitchers only occasionally entering the conversation (normally when they're already unpopular in some respect, a la Clemens). So why, as far as I've seen, hasn't the discussion about Neifi Perez focused on the impact of PED's on fielding?

Most commenters have focused on snide jokes about Neifi's atrocious offense, which has been an object of derision for many years. For some reason, the reality that Neifi has been, throughout his career, one of the best defensive players in baseball tends to be overlooked simply because his offense so thoroughly counterbalances his defensive talent. If Neifi has built his entire major league career on great fielding that is only made possible because of amphetamine use, shouldn't that be a much bigger story than Bonds or whomever going from being merely a huge star to being a huge star who also challenges home run records?

Obviously, this is pure speculation; maybe Neifi just found Will Smith's pills and thought they were Vitamin E (obscure Alfonso Ribeiro reference!). However, if Perez would have been, say, a slightly below average fielder absent illegal PED's, it's hard to fathom that he would have reached the major leagues outside of a few years playing for the minimum. Perez's $2.5m salary this season puts him over $20 million in salary for his career; there's no doubt that you have to be an exceptional fielder to earn that much if you hit like Neifi Perez. If that's PED-based, that, to me, seems like much more significant thievery than anything Bonds allegedly did. And Bonds has to pay a pretty huge social penalty for his perceived transgressions; meanwhile, anybody who would hassle Perez about his PED use would already be hassling him about his terrible hitting.

Memo: Pierre still attempting to bat against LHP

2007-06-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

When Juan Pierre was signed, I suggested that it could have been an okay signing if Pierre were platooned. I said this because a) Pierre, though his split may be less pronounced since he's a contact hitter with almost zero power, still is a better hitter against RHP, b) Pierre might play better if he was getting a day or two of rest per week, and c) starting any LHB against a southpaw needs to be evaluated in light of the opportunity cost of letting a RHB play that day - even if you had a LHB with no true platoon split, starting a generally inferior RHB is often preferable because your RHB gets the platoon advantage.

As it turns out, Pierre has hit a semi-tolerable .291/.328/.352 against RHP and a miserable .217/.233/.229 against his fellow lefties. Is there a reason that this hasn't been considered a scandal? Now, you should know as well as I do that this is a small sample that doesn't fully represent his true platoon split, but the point is that Pierre isn't a good enough hitter that you'd ever want to start him against LHP unless you were painted into a corner by injuries and/or roster problems. Of course, were the Dodgers to defend themselves against this charge (of course, they aren't since as far as I know no one in the media is advancing the Platoon Pierre cause), they'd probably spout something about not having an RHB centerfielder. And yes, the Dodgers have three starting OF who are left-handed (Gonzalez and Ethier the others). But those other two are much better hitters than Pierre, and in Ethier's case we have reason to believe that he has an atypically small platoon split. So why haven't the Dodgers been sitting two of their southpaws against southpaws? For one, they've largely scorned having a fifth outfielder, which for reasons beyond merely the title of this blog I consider to be a lousy strategy, especially if you're going to couple it with the leftrinity. Why no fifth outfielder? We could chalk it up to the Repko injury, but he was replaced with Brady Clark, who was DFA'd for essentially no reason. Plus, the Dodgers have a fine righty platoonmate at Vegas already in Delwyn Young, who is not good enough that you can really argue they need to keep him there to play everyday. The real reason boils down to the Dodgers decision to resign Nomar Garciaparra, which gave them two right-handed first basemen; now that they've finally given Loney the job they should have given him to begin with, Garciaparra and Saenz are fully redundant as RHB pinch-hitters slash first base platoonmen. Of course, the Dodgers aren't using Nomar as such, which instead means that Betemit is relegated to a bench role, meaning the Dodgers have 40% of their bench dedicated to no-field corner infielders.

I call shenanigans on the whole thing; I was arguing that the Dodgers shouldn't re-sign Garciaparra back when he was having a great 2006, going so far as to argue that they should try trading him. That signing is looking downright albatrossic, which is pretty tought for a two year deal under $20 mil. But despite knowing that they had Loney waiting and major league ready, the Dodgers still shelled out the bucks to Nomar and gave him a no-trade clause. Yuck.

But in any event, even the fallout from Garciaparra isn't enough backdoor justification for the Dodgers to screw around on this Pierre affair. Put Kemp in center against the southpaws, already. They can't possibly want to continue to make the Pierre signing look this awful, can they? Might as well boost his rate stats ... and, you know, the team's ability to win.

Bizarre Stat Use of the Day

2007-06-29T19:52:00.000-07:00

Why should anyone take something on MLB.com seriously enough to write about it or even research it? No reason. I just did.

The site's frontpage promo for tonight's Diamondbacks-Giants game reads "Bonds faces one of his favorite opponents: Of his 749 career homers, Barry Bonds has hit 38 against the Diamondbacks." 38 out of 749 hardly seems impressive for a team in the Giants' division, but then again the D'backs were an expansion team, so maybe it's more significant than I thought. Here are Bonds career numbers against Arizona compared to everyone else:

Opponent        Avg  OBP  SLG  HR/AB  HR/(PA-IBB)
Arizona        .311 .493 .689 .100   .081
Everyone else  .298 .442 .605 .763   .063

Ahh, maybe MLB.com is onto something. Except that, you know, Bonds has been a much more productive hitter since Arizona entered the league. While only 40.3% of Bonds' PA have come since the D'backs entered the league in 1998, the majority of his home runs (375) have come during this period. Here's how Bonds' performance against the Arizona squadron stacks up against everybody else since 1998:

Opponent        Avg  OBP  SLG  HR/AB  HR/(PA-IBB)
Arizona        .311 .493 .689 .100   .081
Everyone else  .317 .498 .705 .103   .082

So if Arizona is in fact Bonds' favorite opponent, it is not because he has had more success against them; indeed, he has had less success against Arizona.

Hong-Chih Kuo

2007-06-13T01:59:00.000-07:00

I must say, Kuo is, to me, among the most enigmatic players in baseball. Kuo now has a total of 85 IP at the major league level and 169.2 in the minors. He's spent most of his career sidelined by injury, and while the backstory is very different, he's similar to Josh Hamilton in that it's very difficult to feel at all confident in projecting his performance. Kuo obviously has talent, as he's struck out more than a batter an inning at every stop in his career outside his present cup of coffee. At the same time, he's had very high BABIP's at every level. While I've generally known a lot about most players coming up the Dodgers' system, Kuo kind of slipped through the cracks because of his injuries, and so he wasn't on my radar, even after his September call-up in 2005. It wasn't until he showed up in the Dodgers bullpen in April 2006 that I really took notice, just kind of dawned on me in 2006 that and even then, he didn't seem all that noteworthy. He wasn't even doing all that well in Vegas, and while I probably should have noted the obscene number of strikeouts he was accruing, I didn't. Then all of a sudden he was converted to starting, which sure as heck didn't make a lot of sense - why convert him to a tougher role? But suddenly, Kuo's overall numbers improved, and he was back in LA, this time as a starter.

It has now become commonplace among LA fans to assert that Kuo can only start, not relieve. One does not often hear this said of pitchers, and normally when it is said the logic is off. In this case, though, it may be more accurate. Kuo's major league numbers as a starter are 47 IP, 2.68 ERA, 41 H, 50 K, 13 uBB, 1 HR, for a 2.18 FIP of and a szERA of 3.06 as well as a .317 BABIP. As a reliever, he's got 38 IP, 6.16 ERA, 37 H, 46 K, 27uBB, 3 HR, a 3.80 FIP, a szERA of 4.10, and a .347 BABIP. Obviously, the outcomes have been considerably better for him as a starter. And since his split has been the opposite of the typical - essentially, his split would be about normal if his starting numbers had instead come in relief and his relief numbers came as a starter - it's certainly fair to believe there's a good chance he's better as a starter.

However, I'd argue that Kuo probably is not somebody who's much better as a starter than as a reliever - his split would probably be smaller than typical, but I suspect that over a suitable sample he'd actually do better out of the bullpen. Others will surely protest that he's just better suited for the rotation, biorhythmically or in some such way. I think, however, that that's a post hoc quasi-scouting observation. I think it's more likely that Quo improved when he converted to starting because he was so inexperienced. Kuo obviously has quite a bit of talent, but was inexperienced enough that he had a tough time above AA and was walking more batters and perhaps setting up batters to hit the ball better. But maybe Kuo simply became a better pitcher when he started because it was the first time he was logging a considerable amount of innings, and he was learning much more than he had been as a reliever. His starting stint was all at the end of the season, and for someone with such a tiny amount of minor league work, we would expect the in-season experience to matter quite a bit. Or, rather, I think we would expect that. While some will point out that Kuo has pitched better as a starter this season than in relief, that kind of ignores that his relief stints were when he was just coming back from a shoulder injury and that the sample size is close to meaningless.

While we might possibly have sufficient data to conclude that Kuo is better as a starter, that's not the data that most are using to paint Kuo as starter-only material. That is, the very granular data might indicate that he doesn't gain the typical relief advantage and in addition gains other advantages by having a better approach while starting. Tentatively, I think that that's just over-reacting to a little bit of data. In reality, I think Kuo is probably a good starter who would be a good reliever also, and hence, like essentially any pitcher, Kuo probably in reality would put up better numbers in a full-time role than in the rotation.

That's not to say Kuo should be in the bullpen. I think it's probably best for all involved parties to have him in the LA rotation. He seems as if he's going to be (and is already) a very good pitcher, and he should be better than Tomko and Hendrickson. However, I caution against the Dodgers (and their fans) deciding that Kuo is only good as a starter. What if Kuo, pitching in the rotation, goes through a rough patch, and starts to look like he's more of a 4.00 ERA pitcher for the time being? And let's further assert that Billingsley continues to pitch brilliantly in relief. I fear that the Dodgers might stick with Kuo in the rotation while choosing to use Billingsley in a smaller role - and, given the strength of their bullpen, a relatively low-leverage role. I fear they would decide that Kuo only has value in the rotation, and conclude that Billingsley is as valuable in the pen as he would be in the rotation, when in reality both of these propositions are unlikely. It's obviously not a terrible problem to have, but there's no point in making rules for Kuo based on inadequate data, and I fear that the offshoot of such roles would be additional bizarre rules for Billingsley.

While I am curious to see whether Kuo really is much better as a starter, there's a good chance we'll never find out. Ideally, he will do so well as a starter that no one will ever think to try him in relief. Then again, he could flame out in the rotation this year, end up as a reliever and never being considered good enough to merit a starting chance again. He could also get tossed from the rotation for a poor stretch, catch fire when demoted to the bullpen, and we could end up with the rationalization that he was better in the pen all along - and, as with Gagne, we'll never find out if he could have made it as a great starter because people will be so attached to his relief performance. And unfortunately, given Kuo's history, we have to consider that a future injury will mean that we're about to learn even less about Kuo than the small record he has already accrued.

Boras

2007-05-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

I received an email from the LA Weekly telling me I should check out their recent feature on Scott Boras, "The Boras Factor" by Jeff Anderson. The general argument behind this piece, in my view, is that Boras is effective at his job not because he is an extraordinary businessperson but on the contrary because his knowledge of baseball outshines not only the competition but also that of most or all front offices. While I wouldn't necessarily argue that Boras' knowledge of baseball is flawed, it is my suspicion that the author is merely conflating and confusing Boras' ability to collect, hone, rehearse, and repeat data with Boras' allegedly keen baseball wisdom; essentially all of the examples used in the article seem to indicate only that Boras knows many baseball fact(oid)s and not that Boras has a profound understanding of baseball and/or market dynamics and how players ought to be valued.

For instance, the author, Jeff Anderson makes his case most explicitly

When San Francisco reliever Kevin Correia faces Dodger pinch hitter Olmedo Saenz with a runner on third and two out, Giants catcher Bengie Molina has Correia pitch around Saenz — who gets hit by a pitch. Boras notes that now there’s a possible force out at second. “Molina is a smart catcher. He knows that was a bad matchup. Saenz is hitting .400 off this pitcher.”

That Boras knows these sorts of things off the top of his head tells you just about everything you need to know about him ...

... One of the keys to his success has to be that players know his understanding of the game is as high as it can be. At the same time, many general managers and owners who understand the business side of baseball must be keenly aware that they have a fraction of Boras’ baseball knowledge. (emphasis added)

That's a large claim to stake, and I don't feel that the article can really justify it, although I would obviously entertain evidence for that argument - I certainly would suspect that Boras would have a better understanding of baseball than a few GM's and several owners. But this feature simply does not substantiate that claim. The Correia-Saenz matchup example certainly doesn't. Boras likely hasn't read chapter 3 of The Book, nor would I necessarily expect even someone with a great deal of baseball acumen to have done so, but I'm unaware of any study that confirms the general usefulness of batter-pitcher matchup numbers, much less whether 'pitching around' Saenz in that instance could be called a 'smart' move on the basis of his previous average against Correia. So to start with, it's clear to me that this instance of his 'baseball knowledge' would have much more to do with reciting data than 'understanding the game,' though it is my sense that Anderson is at least conflating data access and recitation with comprehension in speaking of Boras' "baseball knowledge." You would certainly hope that someone against whose baseball knowledge towers over many GM's would grasp that you'd want to actually project the matchup rather than use past data exclusively. However, there is one more obvious flaw here: prior to that plate appearance, Saenz had only faced Correia in one regulation game, getting a groundball single off Correia on the last day of the 2006 season. Given that, as far as I know, Saenz never would have faced Correia elsewhere (never in the minor leagues or, since LA and SF are in the Grapefruit and Cactus leagues, respectively, in spring training), either Boras was pulling a complete lie out of his nether regions or the quotation is errantly introduced by the author. I would be quite surprised if it was the latter, especially since the Saenz-Correia PA did indeed result in a Saenz HBP with Molina behind the plate.

This points to the more-likely reality of Boras: he knows enough about baseball to have enough factoids to drown out reasonable argumentation. Here's Boras on Jason Varitek:

“It says here Varitek is hitting .129 when the pitch count is no balls and two strikes,” he says, moving over to a conference table in his glass-enclosed office. In pre-Boras times, before statistics dominated the lexicon of baseball and became central to player deals, an agent or general manager would simply say, “Varitek struggles when he’s behind in the pitch count.” Here’s what Boras says: “With one ball and two strikes he’s hitting a little better, about .138. But then, with two balls and no strikes, or two balls and one strike, he’s up around .315. So even with health issues last year, he’s still a better than average hitter.”

It's certainly conceivable that there are GM's or other front office personnel who listen to this and think Boras is conveying something meaningful, but that would be evidence only of front office incompetence and not Boras supremacy. And perhaps Boras is able to deploy arguments along these lines in arbitration hearings, but that would only be a credit to his ability to manipulate the baseball knowledge of others, not evidence of his own baseball knowledge. It is laughable that Boras would actually consider any of the numbers above significant. All hitters 'struggle' when behind in the count, and of course when you compare their batting average on two-strike counts with their BA on counts with zero or one strike you will end up with very different numbers, both because it's more difficult to hit the ball well with two strikes and, much more crucially, because only batters with two strikes can strikeout. To establish that Varitek is "better than average," you'd need to do a lot better than point to his pedestrian 11-for-33 hitting on 2-0 and 2-1 counts. While indeed Varitek may still be an above average hitter, Boras is presenting no actual evidence to that effect. Boras doesn't consider the league averages in his argumentation here, nor does he discuss how often Varitek falls behind in the count. Amazingly, Boras doesn't even focus on Varitek's most obvious assets, namely that his past performance is much better than 2006 and he'd statistically be projected to rebound in '07, and that his hitting skills beyond batting average are still very good. If indeed Boras thinks his clients' contributions can be best understood through very small samples of obscure hitting splits, then his success is clearly in spite of a lack of a baseball understanding, rather than because of it.

Moreover, some of Boras' told-ya-so's ring pretty hollow. While he is right to call the Dodgers to task for choosing Juan Pierre over J.D. Drew, the issue is brought up not when he points to the shoddy hitting or throwing of the former but rather the inability to track down a flyball; if there's any talent where I would choose Pierre over Drew, it would certainly have to be centerfield range. When Boras rips into the Cardinals for not offering more for Jeff Weaver, its downright laughable:

Last year, another longtime Boras client, Jeff Weaver, was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals after a poor start with the Angels in Anaheim. Weaver was dominant in the postseason, and the Cardinals won the World Series, but St. Louis offered Weaver only a one-year, $5 million contract — which Boras found insulting. “That’s what you’d offer a relief pitcher,” he says.

Weaver eventually signed with the Seattle Mariners for $8.3 million. “You have to respect that teams have a right to make their own decisions,” Boras says, before turning around and passing judgment on Cardinals general manager Walt Jocketty. “Here’s a GM who never played the game saying, ‘We’re going to go with our young guys,’ and I go, ‘You can’t.’”

The Cardinals simply blew it, Boras concludes. “The Cardinals not signing Jeff Weaver is how you don’t win divisions, and my prediction is the St. Louis Cardinals won’t win their division this year.” (At press time, the Cardinals were at the bottom of the National League Central.)

If Weaver were dominating with Seattle, I would certainly object to the argument that that means the Cardinals should have offered more for him - Weaver really did not merit to be paid as much as the Mariners gave him - but given that he's been one of the worst pitchers in baseball this season, Boras comes across as plainly idiotic. More problematic, in reality, is the author inserting the note that the Cardinals are in the cellar; while the BS from Boras is to be expected, the Cardinals' lousy record has nothing to do with passing up Jeff Weaver. While the "young guys" in their rotation have had bad results thus far - that is, Reyes and Wainwright - both are great bets to rebound and have strong peripheral numbers. Moreover, the rotation spot that would have gone to Weaver, if I'm not mistaken, is the one now allocated to Looper, who was converted from relief and has had the best results of any St. Louis pitcher thus far. And more obviously, the Cardinals' ills have a lot more to do with scoring only 3.7 runs a game, losing their ace to injury, and having pretty bad defense in the outfield.

Indeed, "The Boras Factor" reads less as a contrarian "Hey, maybe Boras ain't so bad" piece and more as a rote recitation of his company-line. The author doesn't bother to evaluate Boras' claims on Johnny Damon but rather simply states that Damon's presence in New York "would haunt the Sox at the end of last season." Moreover, Anderson offers no criticism of this Boras howler:

Boras insists he honors the game even when his deals go sour. He points to former Dodgers pitcher Chan Ho Park, for whom he got a five-year, $65 million contract with the Texas Rangers in 2002, but who was injured five weeks into the 2003 season and couldn’t pitch for the next two and a half years. Boras’ response: “I invested millions of dollars of my company’s money and developed a sports-fitness institute, with five full-time trainers, so this never happens again.”

Of course, Boras could use a number of methods to prevent clubs from being on the hook for large contracts that go wrong due to injury. Hiring five trainers for his extensive list of clientele will do next to nothing to effect the likelihood and frequency of injury, and it certainly doesn't do anything about the financial impact that injuries have on teams. Now, I don't think Boras has any real obligation to the teams to stop his players from being injured, so it's no big deal, but what Boras has done has nothing to do with 'honoring the game' and everything to do with his investment - the healthier his players are, the better paid they will be.

This article certainly touches on some issues of interest. I enjoyed the details on the Boras complex and his relationship with former clientele like Stillwell. Moreover, the part about Boras' initial influence on the amateur market was compelling; I'd be interested in a feature that focused on his early days and actually evaluated and substantiated the claims about his influence. But while the dynamics of paying recently drafted talent is something worthy of investigation, this piece instead takes Boras' influence almost for granted, and seemingly inflates and distorts it: "As baseball revenues grow, so do salaries, thanks in large part to him," Anderson writes. Are we really to believe that Boras is the prime force behind the expansion of salaries and the belief that players should earn a large(r) proportion of MLB revenue? This claim is at best overblown, and more likely is simply wrong.

Each Stadium

2007-04-27T12:26:00.000-07:00

The phenomenon of people ostensibly being interested by the fact that Sosa has now set the record for homering in the most major league stadia is somewhat curious to me. Given that there are more major league baseball teams than ever, and that the bulk of them have switched stadia in the past 15 years, and that there is now interleague play, it should come as no surprise that league-switchin' sluggers of the current epoch (Sosa, Griffey, McGriff) top the leaderboard.

But what I'd really like to know is why only home runs are given the 'each stadium' record treatment (as far as I know). The lists I'd much prefer to see are who has committed an error in the most stadia, who has GIDP'd in the most stadia, balks, catcher interference, et cetera.

Forbes Is Really, Really Lame

2007-03-05T16:07:00.000-08:00

Nate Silver calls Forbes' GM rankings "bad science", but his response is way too forgiving. Forbes' franchise valuations are given an inordinate amount of credibility (check out John Beamer's current series at THT), and they thoroughly deserve to be ripped to shreds by a reputable org like BP for the amazingly stupid GM rankings. Nate's critique is definitely accurate, but not even a tenth of the very obvious problems with this quasi-study; it's getting ripped throughout the blogosphere, but I'll be very disappointed if BP doesn't extend its critique. I've certainly ragged on BP before, but they generally do a good job of being somewhat responsible in using their considerable influence in the industry to counter the most asinine mainstream arguments. Time to do the heavy lifting, in my opinion, or at least wait for Tango to do it on his blog and then link to it on Unfiltered.

Loney/Olerud/Lee

2007-03-02T12:16:00.000-08:00

Via Jon at Dodger Thoughts comes a link to Baseball America's "Risk Factor" profile on James Loney. BA posits Loney's "Best Case Scenario" as John Olerud and his "Worst Case" Travis Lee. Am I the only one who finds this gimmick grating?

"Oh, I've got a good idea. Let's compare Loney to similar players!"
"Similar how?"
"Okay, they've got to be first basemen, obviously, and they should be lefties. And fairly recent."
"Uhh, that narrows it down."
"Okay, okay, how 'bout this - none of them can be legit power hitters, but they had to have been considered major prospects anyway."
"Okay. So wait - players who were considered major prospects despite not showing any power in the minor leagues? Like, Sean Burroughs, et cetera?"
"Yeah, but he's not a third baseman - no one will buy it. We need a first baseman."
"That's a tall order, obviously. I think that-"
"- Wait, I've got it! Travis Lee. Perfect."
"Lee? I don't get it, Lee was a power prospect. Didn't he hit a ton of homers in the minors?"
"Travis Lee? No way. He was notorious for not having power."
"Lemme look it up. ... No, you're wrong. After they signed him with that loophole thingy, he split the year with 225 at bats each in the Cali and the PCL - 18 at the former, 14 in the latter. Had doubles to match, too. For a pro debut, there's no way you can argue he was lacking power."
"Yeah, but didn't it decline before he hit the majors?"
"No, dude, went straight to the BOB the next year. Had an ISO of .160, which was kind of lame, but not bad; his problem wasn't lack of power at 23, it was that he never improved as he got older."
"Yeah, but I think people will get what we're trying to say if we use Lee. Because, you know, he was a first baseman without much power."
"I mean, sure, but how similar are they? For one, should we really be comparing Loney, a high school kid with years of injury hell in the minors, to big money college guy like Lee? And also, Lee never had anything remotely resembling what Loney did last year."
"All right, so who would you compare him to?"
"I don't know, probably no one. What's the big deal? Why would you expect him to be like someone else?"
"Yeah, but it's like, I'm trying to say we don't know who he'll end up being like."
"What, unlike all the other prospects, whose future we see with the clarity of Tru Davies?"
"Fair enough, but it's like, will he be a borderline hallafamer like Olerud or will he just be a guy who couldn't cut it because he didn't have any power like Lee?"
"Wait, I don't get that. Nobody really disagrees that he's a great pure singles hitter, which is something Lee wasn't. Lee's thing was that he was just average across the board - didn't draw a lot of walks, hit for a lot of power, or hit for a high average. Why try to make the point that Loney could end up like that when it's not something we have any particular reason to suspect? Isn't the bigger risk with Loney that he'll keep trying to replicate what he did in Vegas even though other hitting environments won't let him get away with just hacking away at other pitches? You know, the ol' 'What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas' crap."
"Yeah, but there's no real reason to think that'll be the case, he's so young."
"Well, yeah, I agree - why are we trying to think up these specific risk scenarios? Why don't we just say he's got a sweet swing, hasn't managed to put much pop in it yet, won't ever be a pure power hitter, obviously, has a very good shot at being an above average player but is a little hard to project because the data on him is a lot more unique than a typical first base scrub?"
"Well, what do you think about the Olerud ref?"
"Come on, Olerud? I mean, yeah, Loney could end up being as good as him, but that's kind of a weird comparison. Olerud didn't play the minors, and his OBP was heavy on walks, not singles. I mean, yeah, Loney might roll some .400 OBPs with a .470 slug, but you'd think he'd have like a .330 BA to do that, not an Olerudian .290. I'd say someone like Garvey is more similar."
"You're being too harsh, man, and no one will even know how valuable we think he is if we compare him to Garvey; some people will legitimately take that to mean we think he sucks, and some will take it to mean he's MVP. I mean, I know in your heart what you want to write is 'read Curve Ball, but we can't put that for every player. We've got a deadline."
"Do we? I forget how this thing works."

Was the Piazza Trade Underrated?

2007-01-24T14:51:00.000-08:00

This one will be a bit numbers heavy. I'm not pulling any of these numbers out of my backside - any projections are legitimately based on the numbers. That being said, all the attempts at quantifying defense are just fudges, and I chose to round out a lot of stuff for simplicity's sake (and uncertainty's sake). This is intended as an illustration, not a study.

Forget about what happened after the Dodgers-Marlins' 1998 trade, for the time being. Just look at the available info at the time of the decision. Piazza looked like an obvious future hall of famer, no doubt. He was a catcher coming off of an almost unparalleled two-year stretch of offensive brilliance. That being said, there can also be no doubt that he had already peaked. The Dodgers attempted to sign him to a long-term deal. I've got no clue what the finances involved were, but for whatever reason, the Dodgers and Piazza hadn't come very close to an agreement. This made Piazza a free agent at the end of the season. So they swapped him and a veteran 3B for a star signed long-term, a slightly better veteran 3B, a rising star at catcher, a salary dump throw-in, and a pretty good relief prospect. When you trade one year of a player for a gaggle of good players, you generally have to screw up the finances to come out worse for it.

What could LA have expected in terms of net gain? Piazza was a historically great offensive catcher, but on the flip side was a lousy defensive catcher. I'm just going to use quick and dirty numbers here, so let's say that his defense is bad enough that it essentially cancels out. A reasonable offensive projection for him at the time tops out at 5.5 wins above average or so, so lets call him 7.5 wins above replacement. The Dodgers would be replacing him with Charles Johnson, who had been an average hitter so far in his career with outstanding defense. A conservative projection for Johnson would be about 3 wins above replacement. At third base, the Dodgers would replace Todd Zeile with Bobby Bonilla. Both were mediocre fielders, and Bonilla had been a very good hitter his entire career but was two years older. Zeile was coming off of a good season, but a reasonable projection would put Bonilla at about 2.5 wins above replacement with Zeile at +2. Eisenreich was a good hitter, but he was old enough that the Dodgers couldn't expect him to be much better than their bench guys (Luke, Hubbard, etc.), so let's say he has no net effect. Finally, Sheffield takes over for the junk the Dodgers were playing in the outfield beyond Hollandsworth and Mondesi; the best of these players was, I guess, Roger Cedeno. Sheffield would project as about 4 wins above average as a hitter, whereas Cedeno would be about -1. Even if it had been reasonable for the Dodgers to like Cedeno's fielding at that point (it probably wouldn't have been), he's not going to make up much more than 1 win that way. So the Dodgers get +4 in the OF, +.5 in the IF, and - 4.5 at Catcher. Looks pretty even on the field for 1998.

Looking at the player salaries, the Dodgers lose out in '98 because Sheffield had already been signed to a front-loaded extension while Piazza was in his final arbitration year. However, looking at it longer term, Sheffield was signed cheaper for the rest of his deal than Piazza would be earning. So if we consider the haul that the Dodgers were taking in, then the Dodgers give up one $8m year of Piazza and two $3.2m years from Zeile for three arbitration years of Johnson, one $1.4m year of Eisenreich, two $5.9m years from Bonilla, and 6 years of Sheffield at $11m per. For the $14.4m they were taking off the books, the Dodgers could have expected about 11 wins above replacement. In return, they'd be paying a combined $82.5m guaranteed plus about $9m for Charles Johnson's remaining arbitration years. So if we allocate 3 WAR/year to Johnson, 4.5 total for Bonilla's two seasons, and an average of 4 WAR over the life of Sheffield's deal, we get 38 wins above replacement for $91.5m. That's a essentially an extra $77m to get just 27 wins. Let's subtract the cost of replacement salaries and add in about 2 wins of net value from Barrios, who looked like a pretty good prospect at the time. That's 29 marginal wins at $75m, but we need to adjust for inflation; if we assume a constant 10% salary inflation rate, we can take $13m off of that. So in 1998 dollars, the Dodgers would be adding 29 wins at $62m, or $2.1m per win. That was a decent number, but not very good. Using the rule of 70, that would be $4.3m per win in 2005, for comparison's sake, so it's fair to say the Dodgers couldn't expect a great return.

However, the assumption above is that Sheffield was a star, but not particularly good. But let's say his 1997 performance should have been adjusted for injury, and let's not lay on the decline so thick as I did. Moreover, that 3 WAR for Johnson is pretty conservative. Between the two, it'd be fair to add another 6 wins to the projection above, netting a rate of about $1.75m per win. There's no way that this can be spun as a great deal. But it's obvious that the FOX-run Dodgers had set the value of a marginal win at much higher than that at the time. So it's certainly defensible.

But if they were willing to spend so much, why not just re-sign Piazza? The Mets inked Piazza for 7 years at $91m, or $61m in 1998 dollars. An optimistic projection at the time would peg Piazza at about 37 wins above replacement over that period. In other words, Piazza would be paid at about $1.6m per marginal win. So, it's fair to say that LA could have had Piazza at the same rate they would be playing his replacements, assuming he would have agreed to what the Mets paid him to stay in LA. Perhaps there would also have been a "hometown discount", but I doubt it would be too substantial.

Then again, Piazza was a heavily worked catcher who wasn't particularly athletic. It wouldn't have been unreasonable to figure that he'd decline at a quicker rate. If he were to merely average an all-star level of 4 WAR per year, a reasonable if unsympathetic projection for seven years of catching, he'd be at $2.1m per year. It's not hard to understand the rationale of the Dodgers; or, rather, it wouldn't be hard if this had been their rationale.

As it turned out, Sheffield was the better bet. In 1998 dollars, he earned $53.5m over the length of his contract while being good for about 32 wins above replacement. From 1998-2005, Piazza earned an adjusted $68.9m for about 36 WAR. Sheffield was paid about $220,000 fewer per win (or half a mil per win on today's market). Adjusted for inflation, Sheffield was paid a little more per year, but he was around .8 wins per year better.

Then again, though Sheffield turned out well and the Dodgers' later trade of him went well, the Dodgers ended up on the short end of the rest of these sticks. While Zeile did a bit better than would have been expected, Bonilla hit a wall; after having been considerably above average his entire career, Bonilla was below replacement level for the entirety of his post-trade career. Eisenreich performed awfully as a Dodger and his career was over. Barrios fell apart.

Most painfully to the Dodgers, Charles Johnson had a terrible year in LA. The Dodgers traded him, and he rebounded with an average season in Baltimore before tearing the cover off the ball in 2000. Since Johnson's performance after getting a big deal in free agency was so mediocre, it's often overlooked that in his arbitration years combined - the period the Dodgers acquired in the Piazza deal - Johnson was an above average hitter and still a good defender, although his numbers behind the plate were way down from his earlier Marlin dominance. The Dodgers received Todd Hundley for Johnson, but they had to give up Roger Cedeno's "peak" to do so and Hundley was making more money than Johnson. Hundley himself had a good 2000, but he was a bad defensive catcher and missed a lot of time to injury; on the whole, the Dodgers would have been a lot better off had they not traded Johnson.

All in all, I don't think the Dodgers made that bad of a deal. However, judged in context, it should be considered a lot worse because of opportunity cost. Dealing with the Marlins in the midst of a fire-sale should have yielded a much better return. Had they made a similar deal with another team, it would look better; as it happened, they ostensibly could have acquired a lot more value. On the flip side, though, the price the Mets paid for Piazza tends to be understated; they traded two pitchers with first-round talent and a pretty good young outfielder Preston Wilson), none of whom had clocked any service time; had Piazza suffered an extra injury here or there (or had the Mets been unable to re-sign him) and Ed Yarnall or Geoff Goetz developed into aces, history would have viewed that trade quite differently. While the Mets were obviously the victors along this trade route, and while the Dodgers likely acted rashly in order to spite Piazza, none of the sides of the Piazza trades were the slam dunks they're often thought to be.

BP's Masterful Hindsight

2007-01-23T13:19:00.000-08:00

Sorry, sorry... bashing Baseball Prospectus is probably overdone, and obviously not everyone at BP is of the same mind. My BP subscription ran out over the summer, so I had scarcely read the site until they started their unfiltered blog, which is pretty good but has yet to entice me back into the premium fold. But today's Unfiltered post by Neil deMause crossed the line from innocuous to clueless at the end. After having come across an old Christina Kahrl slam of the Pirates' ridiculous Kevin Young contract, Neil excerpted part of it and challenged his readers to identify the player in question.

Kahrl's criticism was that the Pirates were using past salary as a proxy for future talent. Of course, realistically, past salary IS a somewhat reliable guage of talent, but there's no reason for a major league team to use it since they have tons of much more reliable data. In the case of Derek Bell, the player named most by BP readers, I would think Kahrl's criticism appropriate; same goes for Jeromy Burnitz. (Curiously, though, many of the players the readers submitted had never been given multiyear contracts by the Bucs.) In the case of Kevin Young, however, I just don't get it; Young was still in his arbitration years and wasn't earning much; he had been a little overpaid the year previous, perhaps, but not much. The Pirates' extension was a lousy idea, but Young was obviously a decent player.

Where the wheels really fall off is in the suggestion that Jason Kendall fits these criteria. It's all well and good to say that the contract the Pirates gave Kendall didn't work out very well. But Kendall was clearly one of the best young players in baseball at the time he got his deal, and the primary reasons his contract looks poor now are that he was done in by a freak accident that made him below average for two seasons when he was at his peak age and also that salaries temporarily ceased growth shortly after his long extension. If you want to argue that the deal was too much risk for a catcher, etc., then fine (although, outside of his injury-plagued 2001-2, he's easily been the most durable catcher of his era). But there's no way that signing a legitimate five wins above replacement player like Kendall was at the time can be construed as throwing money at someone simply because they are famous/overpaid. (And I mean a real 5 WAR, not the 5 DT-WARP deMause refers to.) In the case of the others on deMause's list, the Pirates misevaluated talent and gave millions to get replacement level talent; that is not remotely the case with Kendall. And of course, to intimate that overspending on Kendall for six years is more egregious than paying Derek Bell $9m for just one year of Operation Shutdown is not exactly coherent under any useful definition of return on investment that I am aware of.

DirecTV Deal

2007-01-22T13:40:00.000-08:00

I sort of want to preemptively apologize for my ignorance on the subject, but for the past few days I've been somewhat baffled by arguments in the overwhelmingly negative reaction to DirecTV's exclusive deal for MLB Extra Innings.

Perhaps it's because I really don't have that much emotionally invested - I grew up following baseball by reading about it and playing it, not watching it, and that tendency has remained - but I think a lot of the comments about the business decisions behind the deal don't make much sense. Few people in online outlets seem to think the deal makes much sense for either side, although I could simply be reading the wrong sites. Many believe DirecTV is overpaying for something that won't really cause people to switch services, while MLB seems to have taken another step toward alienating its fanbase and potential exposure for a quick buck. I buy neither of these arguments.

I agree that DirecTV likely won't gain that much from cable users switching to DirecTV just to get MLB EI and the new MLB only channel. To focus on people who will make such a brazen consumer choice is very myopic, however. People move, especially young males 18-35, the coveted target demographic. While switching the service you already have installed seems ridiculous, to a person getting a new place, the appeal of getting the only package with NFL and MLB games would seem pretty strong. Moreover, it should be remembered that DirecTV does not only compete with cable; it has other satellite companies to compete with. While I'm far from an economist and have no idea what any of the relevant numbers involved are, $700m for exclusive rights to out-of-market MLB broadcasts seems pretty reasonable considering the amount spent on Howard Stern. And of course, there's a ton of free advertising built into this deal, just as was the case with Stern.

From the MLB perspective, there are two large mitigating factors here. First, I think MLB is betting heavy on MLBAM and the internet-based viewing options. The main constituency being cut out is digital cable subscribers, but the number of digital cable subscribers who don't have high-speed internet isn't exactly about to grow. And I would be pretty amazed if MLB's profit margin from mlb.com viewing isn't much, much larger than its profit margin from EI on cable. They're mostly robbing Peter to pay Paul, but Peter's cost of living is Manhattan-esque while Paul's staying in South Dakota. And, you know, they're getting cash to do so. If there are only 750K current subscribers to MLBEI, it seems like they should expect to at least break even on the $1oom vs. subscriber loss, with a big payoff coming from switches to online viewing.

Second, I don't really buy the argument that the MLB has much to lose from alienating its fans in this regard. For one, MLB already alienates its fans who have these packages with the bizarre blackout rules; nobody really already thought that MLB was fan-friendly when it came to letting you see its games. Moreover, while it certainly is a raw deal for plenty of people, the MLB is not geared toward its hardcore fans. Ticket sales continue to drive the MLB economy, and most teams have spent the last 15 years attempting to maximize their profits from attendance by upgrading stadiums, installing luxury boxes, and re-evaluating concessions and marketing. Hardcore fans don't pack the stadia, and MLB's interests have always been more in attracting the dollars of frivolous consumers than in maintaining a happy base of fans. The hardcore fans at stake who will walk away aren't exactly the game's biggest financial contributors, for one, and aren't exactly that likely to walk away from the game. As apparently has happened in the past, fans who get alienated by MLB's machinations tend to heal those wounds once their teams start winning again, and MLB is obviously stressing parity to the extent that it can be reasonably expected that it can salve over most of its missteps.

Moreover, the MLB just witnessed the strong arm that cable gave to the NFL Network. I'm sure this point has been made in the news reports, but I've yet to see it (i.e., I'm lazy and haven't looked for it). I don't know why MLB should bother negotiating with the cable companies, especially since they're so heavily integrated with most of the content providers and are ostensibly a lot more focused on how to shift to new entertainment and advertising models with the rise of internet programming, DVR, etc. MLB is already addressing those questions on its own with MLBAM, and it seems like MLB has already come to a satisfying preliminary set of answers to the questions raised by the present and future shifts in media. Given that, it only seems sound to grab a little more control of the supply/demand curve. Moreover, the NFL parallel is worth noting: if baseball fans claim MLB has screwed them over, at least baseball makes its games available online; the NFL has always been more exclusive in its viewability than MLB currently is, and local NFL games are blacked out when they don't sell out. It's hard to say that MLB has alienated its fans in many ways that the NFL has not already, and the NFL is obviously not doing too poorly.

The fans who are or will be upset are the ones who love baseball, and MLB simply has such a large monopoly as a provider of high-quality baseball game entertainment that MLB alienating lovers of the game with its marginal business decisions is unlikely to have long-lasting effects, in my opinion. For the most part, people alienated by the decrease in broadcast options are not the type who will be able to start regularly attending college, HS, or minor or independent league games; we can probably reasonably assume that this group of people wants mostly to stay home, and the cost of watching a game on a computer is still a lot less than the cost of a minor league game in most relevant circumstances. And since MLB will remain dominant in terms of game data available to the public, it sure is unlikely that many statheads will be able to forget about the big leagues.

I'm sorry for having this read like an unresearched, contrarian op-ed piece; I just really don't buy the "MLB is screwing its fans over; doom will ensue" leitmotif. I'm not a student of business or economics, so who knows what I could be getting completely wrong? The only real argument I'm interested in here is that MLB is a business and will continue to act as such. Objections to the MLB's plan that read along the lines of "This is a bad business decision for MLB..." (or DirecTV) are quite unlikely to be correct unless thoroughly researched. I think it's lousy that people's access to something they genuinely love is governed by competition for profits, and that relationship is unlikely to change absent an overthrow of the now globally-governing episteme that misrepresents humans as homo oeconomicus.

Rotation Slot

2006-12-28T23:00:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed reading Jeff Sackmann’s recent columns on the relative strength of rotation spots (here and here). Sackmann divides up each team’s 2006 starting pitching output into 5 slots and reports the results, which show that the prevailing concept of a #1 starter, #2 starter, and so forth is strongly distorted. While this probably doesn’t come as a surprise to many sabertypes (I am reminded of debate in the Rich Lederer-Kevin Goldstein thread over whether “#1 starter” refers to a Top 30 starter or only to a group of pitchers numbering not more than a dozen) or anybody who has noticed that “#4” is oft-used to refer to someone with a league average ERA (and thus an above-average starter), it was nice to see an attempt to quantify it.

However, I think that Jeff fails to note some of the problems with the way he presents his findings, even if I suspect he is well aware of them. First, there is a semantic question: while in practice injuries typically force replacement-level (or sometimes worse) pitchers into the rotation, I think it’s still somewhat fair to refer to a 1-5 schema for rotation slots that assumes total health. Jeff’s model necessarily is disconnected from the reality of rotation slot discourse because he only goes from 1 to 5, when in reality fans, managers, and front offices often refer to “sixth starters” and so forth. The rotation slot talk is linked to talent, not performance, and so the need of teams to fortify their rotations with sub-5’s should be accounted for. I think the rotation slots discourse would, if it weren’t so artificially inflated, refer to pitchers in the top 30, top 60, top 90, etc. *prior to the talent pool being diluted by injury*. Obviously, some degree of injury needs to be included in such a model, but it should not be all, as Sackmann uses, or even the majority, I would say.

Second, these ERA’s are selectively sampled, plain and simple. If you went by DIPS numbers, for instance, you would find true 3’s labeled as both 1’s and 5’s, for instance, in Jeff’s sample. That does not mean that what Jeff did was not worthwhile, but since the talk of a “#1 starter” is used, as far as I can tell, mostly as an index of talent rather than performance, it is misleading in this context. If you want to gauge the talent level of a #1, the best way to do so is probably to take the average projection of the top 30 starters, then repeat from 31-60 for #2, 61-90 for #3, and so forth. Alternately, you can label the top 160 pitchers as 1-5 based on their projection tier before the season and then follow up at the end with their actual numbers. The downside to doing it otherwise is that you end up being blown away by the wretched numbers put up by the back end, as Jeff does. Well, since Jeff is taking the worst starters on the team to compose that #5, that will occur by definition as long as ERA has a fairly wide distribution, especially since Jeff is taking blocks composed of different pitchers to make his sample. While a reminder here and there that lots of “bad” pitching occurs in any given season isn’t a bad thing, it’s only a revelation when fans and media have drenched their rhetoric in Lake Woebegone expectations (i.e., all the pitchers should be above average).

While I haven’t endeavored to do an alternate study, I would suspect that a model to match my concept of 1-5 would set the tiers closer to 3.90, 4.30, 4.70, and 5.10 than Jeff's 3.87, 4.36, 4.84, and 5.67, and there would also be a cap on #5's at 5.50. Those are rough guesses, obviously, but I hope it communicates the general point that there can be a happy medium between the inflated concept of what a #2 etc. is on the one hand and including injury replacements and Joe Mays in the definitions on the other.

L-uis Gonzalez?

2006-12-07T00:52:00.000-08:00

I realize that most of my posts tend to in some way refer to a mis-valuation or mis-use of a player on the basis of not understanding the concept of platooning, and I try not to repeat these criticisms too frequently.

But come on, Ned Colletti. Enough is enough.

Last season, the Dodgers' outfield for the bulk of the season was Drew, Lofton, Ethier. Three left-handed batters as the outfield starters is far from ideal roster construction, especially with Ledee often serving as one of the backups. I don't think I ever made a big deal about it, but it sure bugged me.

Now, the Dodgers apparently are about to sign Luis Gonzalez, and to a reasonable deal. However, their OF would then principally be Gonzalez-Pierre-Ethier, and they've already committed money to Marlon F. Anderson. With the possible but unlikely exception of Ethier, none of those are players whose production against southpaws cannot be bettered by a near-freely available RHB's. The Dodgers may have a pair in Repko and Werth, as is. But this roster will not be constructed in such a manner as to make that reality even relevant, and one suspects that if they do platoon one of those, it will be Ethier - the only one who stands to gain anything meaningful by *not* being platooned.

While it may have been unrealistic and/or foolhardy to expect Garciaparra to be shifted to the outfield, this pre-empts that possibility, save for a decision by LA that Ethier won't be a starter. So does that mean that Garciaparra will be pencilled in at third while Betemit serves as the main infield sub as he did in Atlanta? One can hope, certainly. Otherwise, Saenz' role is akin to irrelevance, and Loney probably gets dealt once Jamey Wright and Lance Niekro hit a hot streak.

Sorry, kids, just having a hard time giving Colletti the benefit of any doubts here. If I didn't know better, I'd expect that somehow Loney, Penny, and Betemit end up being dealt for Joe Crede and Rob Mackowiak. I kid, but seriously - is there any mildly plausible explanation for the rumored shopping of Brad Penny, whose salary is the same as R.F. Wolf's? The abyss stares back, but I don't recall having stared in the first place.

***

Contest time: Guess the 2008 Salaries
I'll buy a 2008 THT Annual for anyone who is within $903,074 for all five.

Randy Wolf
Brett Tomko
Odalis Perez
Mark Hendrickson (arb eligible)
Aaron Sele

I think one of those is pretty easy. Guess which one, if you so please. Entries must be in the comments section by 10:38 a.m. PST on December 30th, 2006.

Pierrot le fou

2006-11-22T14:56:00.000-08:00

Finally, Colletti proves his sabermetric worth. Other GM's looked at Pierre's numbers and decided that he just wasn't that good. However, Colletti looked beyond that and noticed that Pierre, a lefty, was playing an obscene amount. No doubt, Colletti realized that if Pierre were to sit against southpaws, you'd be looking at more of a .300/.350/.400 player with good baserunning and averagish fielding at centerfield. And likely, Pierre would get another bump in his performance from not being as frequently exhausted, and so he'd be better rested and maybe hit, oh, .310/.365/.415, and the effects of aging on his range in center would be subdued. A platooned Pierre is then about a win better than an average CF, and the Dodgers have Repko on hand who should be about average at CF starting only against southpaws. That's a combo that's about 3 wins * 3/4 + 2 wins * 1/4 better than replacement, or 2.75. Knock .25 off, say, for each season Pierre ages, and that's 11.25 wins above replacement for only about $42m above replacement. Free agent wins cost about $4m, so this is pretty reasonable.

Colletti looked at the free agent market, looked at his budget, realized they were both oversaturated, and decided to "overspend" on someone who would not be so obscene; with Drew out of the picture, the alternatives would be overpriced flukes (Matthews) or ludicrously misvalued corner OF's (Lee, Soriano). And given the general dearth of quality players, period, on this free agent market, Colletti can now leverage his young outfielders on the trade market.

And off in the distance, Thomas Kinkade painted a portrait of Norman Rockwell, and all was happy and good.

***

Do I honestly think that signing Pierre at this price would be a good idea for any team? Not really. I do actually think it's close; 4/30 could be pretty reasonable, considering the market, for a team that could cover the off days with a good enough young/cheap RHB centerfielder, and in reality that's something that any franchise should be able to swing at next to no cost.

But of course, Colletti probably is excited that Pierre can play every day! I understand the sentiment, and I'm not a huge fan of Repko or anything, but the Dodgers already have someone on their roster who will be a better CF against LHP than Pierre. Repkos aren't forever, for sure, but I'd take my chances on the proposition that the Dodgers could consistently have somebody on hand to play better against LHP than Pierre for at or near the league minimum. So why pay a premium for a proven 'everyday player' to decrease the performance of your team? That is not something I would do.

Like the bulk of baseball GM's, Colletti has, I think, stumbled upon a good idea by accident, overpaid for it, and been ignorant of the reason it was a good idea to start with. It's remarkable that this group of genuinely highly skilled and experienced individuals continues to make so many decisions on the basis of anecdotal evidence and the uninterrogated opinions of celebrity experts. As such, it's been remarked upon so many times that this post seems petulant.

How much of a shot did the Mets have when Beltran went to bat?

2006-10-20T13:26:00.000-07:00

My general feeling - or WAG, if you prefer - when Beltran came to the plate last night was that if you polled the people watching the game, or at least the ones I was watching it with, would have given the Mets a 50-50 shot of winning at that moment. Meanwhile, I was quickly trying to estimate the Mets win probability given the run/out situation, the pitcher, and the batter at the plate and those following him. Yeah, yeah, I'm a loser, whatever. I didn't get very far by the time Beltran watched strike 3, but I decided to run the numbers briefly today. There are many ways to go about this, and to do it with a methodology I would consider proper would take a long time and probably devolve into me creating a new PBP defensive metric. So to maintain sanity, in the exercise, I made the following flawed assumptions:

-'Chemistry', 'clutchiness', and the like are non-factors; Beltran's history of killing the Cards in the playoffs is a non-issue.
-The true talent of the Mets' hitters is equivalent to a 3-4-5 weighted average of 2004-6 regular season numbers. No regression. No sample error. No postseason numbers.
-The weather and time of year were non-factors. I have done absolutely no research on these, or postseason performances in general.
-The difference between the Cardinals' 9th inning defense (i.e., pitching + fielding) is exactly equal to the home-field advantage adjustment. That is to say, a thorough version would have a projection for Wainwright, would factor in the Cardinals' fielding, and would factor in the Mets' home-field advantage. This was not thorough. Wainwright had a good year, and the Cardinals have a pretty good defense. That having been said, Edmonds and Rolen were banged up, and Wainwright wasn't that good at Memphis and only threw 75 innings in 2006, so I'm arbitrarily pretending that a regressed projection for Wainwright + StL defense would magically be the same as the performance necessary to negate the homefield advantage of Shea. Off the top of my head, I can't say whether this is generous or not.
-Because of home-field advantage, the Mets will win 54% of the time if the game goes to the 10th. This completely ignores the question of the relative strength of the players still in the game and on the bench, as well as who would be coming up next, etc. Maybe they should win more because Wagner's still available, I don't know. I'm just calling them even for short.
-The only exception to the above is that any reached-on-errors we would expect will somehow disappear and simply become outs.
-Any single in the bottom of the 9th scores the runner at 2b, any double clears the bases, and there are no baserunner outs, pickoffs, SB or CS. And the Mets don't bunt.
-No adjustment need be made for situational hitting or pitching (other than excluding the possibility of an IBB or SH). The base-out situation is not considered germane in calculating the likelihood of a single, double, out, walk, etc. Everybody's approach is exactly equal to the average of the contexts in which the hitters involved have hit in 2004-2006.
-Fatigue is irrelevant.

In other words, what are the Mets' odds of winning if we take their hitters' basic stats from the past three seasons and pretend they exactly match what our expectations should be?

So under those conditions, you'd expect Beltran to make an out and immediately end the game 64% of the time. You'd expect him to win it (i.e., 2B, 3B, or HR) 11% of the time. He'll tie it up (1B) 12% of the time, and keep the Mets alive with a BB/HBP 13% of the time.

Next up is Delgado, and in a tie game he'd win it 38% and send it to the 10th the other 62%. If Beltran merely gets the Mets to 3-2, Delgado wins it 23%, ties it 14%, and makes the third out 62%. If Delgado ties it, Wright wins it 38% of the time and sends it to 10 the other 62%. And yes, the 38% for Delgado and Wright are, of course, simply their OBP's.

So, weighted, that means the Mets win it in the 9th 19.4% of the time, lose in the 9th 71.9% of the time, and send it to 10 8.7% of the time. With a .54 win% in extra innings, that means the Mets have a total win probability of 24.1%. If you go for the bizarre seasonal epistemology that's so predominant in baseball (i.e., use only 2006 regular season numbers), you can bump the Mets chances up to 25.0%. In any event, while the vast majority seemed surprised that it ended with a strikeout, that's nearly as likely an event as any, all things considered. Beltran and Wainwright both gets plenty of K's, and Beltran strikes out more often than he singles and more often than he walks. Beltran ending the game with a strikeout would have to be considered more likely than Beltran ending the game with an extra-base hit. A batted ball out would be a more likely event, but the chances of the Mets winning at all weren't much higher than the chances Beltran would strike out, at least if you assume a number of things that are likely but may not be accurate.

And if you think I only posted this so I could list the flawed assumptions that went into building such a model, you know my writing well.

Frank Thomas Receives A Dozen Grammy Nominations

2006-10-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

So I took about six weeks off from following baseball, as I've done from time to time, and came back to discover that Frank Thomas is being seriously considered by some as an MVP candidate. Will Leitch describes Thomas as "having one of the best years of his life."
Leitch is the best internet sports scribe not named Jon Weisman, but this is just like Santana sweeping the Grammies with Supernatural. Like Santana, Thomas is a 'first-ballot' Hall-of-Famer with an unimtigated string of brilliance to start his career, with each debuting brilliantly at age 22, coming right out of the gates as one of the greatest ever. Each had a marvelous and quite steady peak of just under a decade in duration, with the strike-shortened Love, Devotion, Surrender as the standout (er, strike-shortened 1994 season). Then they trailed off, Thomas fading with age and some injuries and Santana getting lost in the awful pop-rock aesthetics that bubbled to the fore with Van Halen and his former bandmates in Journey. They both clearly remained above the fray, with Thomas contributing a second decade of excellence relative to AL DH's and Santana contributing material over the ensuing two decades that clearly bested the bulk of his contemporaries, but they were nothing to be excited about. And while Thomas had been on playoff contenders before, and Santana had collaborated with major artists before, all of a sudden they both found themselves paired up with an all-new group and in the limelight. Santana released Supernatural, pairing him with all sorts of popular young artists, and it sold like hotcakes. Sure, the music wasn't really that good, and it looks like driftwood compared to his early catalog, but it got him in the news and got him the big Grammy night. Thomas found himself similarly surrounded by his own crew of youngsters with promise who didn't bring as much to the table as would be expected, and his mundane excellence was cast in a completeley different light. The A's were really only a mediocre team, and the players underachieved but had enough fortuitous timing to convert a negative Base Runs differential into a cruise to the division championship; Supernatural, while having the same problems with listenability that the 2006 A's had with watchability (brilliantly documented by the best non-Weisman baseball blogger, Ken Arnseon), ultimately lucked out by being given constant airtime and having inane competition (other 1999 album of the year nominees included the Backstreet Boys and Dixie Chicks).

Of course, Thomas ultimately will lose to a different hype archetype, the long-overrated veteran who was never good enough to justify the big award before but is now having a career year. They nearly always give the complementary award to this type, even though kids like Joe Mauer and Travis Hafner are having an objectively better year. Jeter, the Bruce Springsteen to Frank Thomas' Santana, will probably win with his The Rising while Mauer's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Hafner's One Beat aren't even nominated.

And in case you were wondering, I care as little about the Grammies as I do about who wins MVP awards.

The Gauss, the Gomes, the Blass

2006-08-16T23:20:00.000-07:00

I love this post, although Shawn Green remains a fresher example in my mind of the Gomes.

Swing Analysis

2006-08-11T16:33:00.000-07:00

Jeff Albert has posted guest articles on Andruw Jones and Alex Rodriguez over at Baseball Analysts comparing their swings in different seasons. I understand the appeal of this kind of analysis, but my guess is that it's dubious. Firstly, I'm not even clear on how representative the swing captures are - do all of A-Rod's swings in 2006 look like the pictured? Are we seeing relatively extreme examples? What is the standard season-to-season variance of the appearance of a player's swing? Perhaps these are readily answered questions, or even questions that people who watch more baseball than I could answer without much thought. But I don't know the answers, and I think that those questions are essential before launching into a side by side comparison of the video.

Second, I have a major problem with any analysis that attempts to posit an explanation for statistical variance by looking back at what differences can be seen in how the player played. Now, if intensive scouting data is kept on a player, and you use that scouting data in concert with a) an understanding of the scouting data for all hitters and b) an understanding of the empirical relation of scouting data to performance results, then you can probably learn a lot. But if you ad hoc notice a change in statistics and decide to get all Jake Gittes on a few minutes of video, I doubt your findings can have any degree of confidence.

Looking at their statistical records, it seems entirely reasonable to assume that the performance records in question are the result of variance, pure and simple. A-Rod is on the other side of 27 and is still an excellent hitter; he went from a 4- to 5-win hitter in Texas to a 3-win hitter in 2004 and 2006, with an outlying 2005. His strikeouts have increased a bit in each year in New York, which is to be expected at his age. His $HR came down when he left Texas, as one would expect, and has been the same in 2004 and 2006. The only big deal is that he hit an extra dozen home runs in 2005, right? Since 2005 was his career year, why would anyone expect him to repeat it at 30 in 2006? It's perfectly fair to say his true talent level is 40 HR per 600 AB, which he undershoots by a few in '04 and '06 and overshoots by 8 in 2005. It just seems like his 'slump' only amounts to not getting the extra HR every four weeks that he got last season.

Meanwhile, Jones' 2005 doesn't seem like much of a big deal either. It differed from his established performance levels in that he cut his K's down to a level he hadn't been at since '99-2000 and he hit 15 extra HR. But the difference in HR looks mostly like his doubles turning into homers for one season. From 2002-4, he hit 15.3 extra base hits per 100 batted balls, and has 15.8 in 2006. In 2005, he had 16.5, so we're not talking about a huge difference in power; the only difference is that he had a good year for getting them all the way into the seats. It also didn't hurt the breakout aura that his 2004 season was below his established levels. Now, is it possible that he played differently and his results reflect a different approach? Of course. Indeed, his hits per batted ball were down 25 points last season, so perhaps he was lofting balls more often, resulting in more hits in the stands but also more hits in OF gloves. But the explanation that the differences in numbers is just statistical variance has as much or more merit than the guess that he made mechanical changes to get more air under the ball.

I do not mean to imply that we should just accept 'statistical variance' as an acceptable answer for why player x is struggling/doing well and so forth. But it should be the default explanation.
A player who goes from 3 to 11 HR in successive seasons has not necessarily bulked up, and a player going from 35 to 50 has not necessarily made any changes. Moreover, I am willing to believe that a great deal of statistical variance *can* be explained by looking at changes in a hitter's mechanics (although clearly not all variance can be so explained). Heck, it's of course possible that, due to changes in his swing, A-Rod in 2005 was a true .350/.460/.680 hitter whose observed performance didn't live up to his talent, and that in 2004 and 2006 he's really a .270/.360/.460 hitter whose observed performance is better than his true talent. The point is just that taking the performance data and trying to clarify it by cherry-picking the scouting info that would explain the fluctuation in performance data is foolish. That may or may not be what Jeff Albert (or Don Mattingley, or Alex Rodriguez) does. What I am arguing is that the task should be to first come up with a useful and reliable method for cross-referencing scouting and performance data; since one will never have a perfect sample of either player performance or scouting info, picking and choosing just doesn't seem like a solid method of learning more about a player.