On the Road Again

Having worked hard over the past two days to make this site's transition to a new host as seamless as possible, I'll now be giving things a rest for a few days as I head to Milwaukee for the weekend. I'll be paying a visit to the brand-new Miller Park, for a game between the Brewers and the Dodgers. This will be the first time I've been to Milwaukee, and the first time I've ever been to a regular-season Dodgers game (my ultimate goal being to hang with Brewers manager Davey Lopes, a favorite of my youthful Dodger-fan days). I may get a chance to post something this weekend if I get access to a computer. In any case, I'll have a full report when I return...

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 10:32 PM Link

Helping the Rookie

Thanks to the patient instruction of Baseball-reference.com's Sean Forman, I've added a handy little feature to this web log. Each entry (such as this one) now has its own unique URL (visible by clicking the blue "Link" at the end of each entry), allowing anybody to link directly to that entry, rather than just the page on which the entry appears. So when I reference some article I wrote two weeks ago about Izzy Alcantara, I can send you there with a link like this. Cool! I've republished the archives so that they all include this feature. Thanks once again, Sean!

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 7:52 PM Link

Don't Panic!

The domain www.futilityinfielder.com has been transferred to its new hosting service. I believe all of the links should be working at the new site; please let me know if you find any which are not. Please note that this web log is now at a new address: http://www.futilityinfielder.com/blog/blog.html.

I am very excited to begin the next phase of The Futility Infielder. Thanks for stopping by...

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 5:50 PM Link

McGriff Redux

I wanted to revisit the Fred McGriff situation (see below, July 11). But I've been too busy, and the fires have died down with the Crime Dog's refusal to waive his no-trade clause. With enough bytes already spilled (somewhat heatedly) on the Web about this, I decided to put a sock in it. I'm not a Cubs fan, but I'm disappointed that the trade didn't go through, as it seemed like a good opportunity for the Cubs to shore up a weakness and for the Dog to find a loving home. But the deal's off, for now.

I admit it, I get a charge out of these kinds of trades, no matter who I'm rooting for. They interesting to watch, because they're like a double-or-nothing challenge set to a dramatic arc. The cast is familiar: the savvy veteran looking for one more shot at a ring; the contending team still a piece away from completing the puzzle; the prospect, tantalizing in his promise, not ready to help the big club this year but prepared to haunt them for the rest of his career. Here are a few memorable ones, right off the top of my head, not all of them fitting the mold above, but most having an impact on at least one pennant race, if not several:

1982: Houston sends P Don Sutton to Milwaukee for P Frank DiPino, P Mike Madden, and OF Kevin Bass. Sutton goes 4-1 down the stretch, beating Jim Palmer on the final day of the season and leading the Brew Crew to their only World Series. Bass is the best of the bunch on the other end, a key player on the 'Stros oh-so-close 1986 team, thoguh DiPino develops into a solid closer, for awhile at least.
1987: Detroit sends P John Smoltz to Atlanta for P Doyle Alexander. Alexander goes 9-0 down the stretch as the Tigers win the AL East; Smoltz wins a Cy Young Award and becomes a member of the best trio of starters in recent memory.
1988: Los Angeles sends 3B Pedro Guerrero to St. Louis for P John Tudor. The Dodgers win an unlikely World Series without my favorite player; Tudor was adequate at best, and wasn't effective until returning to St. Louis.
1989: New York Yankees send OF Rickey Henderson to Oakland for P Eric Plunk, P Greg Cadaret, and OF Luis Polonia. The A's win a World Series and reach another with the game's greatest leadoff man, who has an unreal postseason (.441 AVG, .448 OBP, .941 SLG, 11 SB). The other three enjoy undistinguished but lengthy careers.
1990: Boston sends 1B Jeff Bagwell to Houston for P Larry Andersen. Boston wins the AL East., though Andersen's impact is minimal (0-0, 1 Save); Bagwell becomes one of the best players in the game, hitting 300+ HR and leading Houston to 3 consecutive playoff appearances.
1992: New York Mets send P David Cone to Toronto for 2B Jeff Kent and OF Ryan Thompson. Cone wins his first ring as a Blue Jay and starts his odyssey as a mercenary; the Mets fumble future MVP Kent along to Cleveland for a fat Carlos Baerga, and Thompson starts his tour of oblivion.
1993: Oakland sends OF Rickey Henderson to Toronto for P Steve Karsay and OF Jose Herrera. Henderson wins another ring, though he only hits .215. Karsay battles arm injuries for years before emerging as a first-rate reliever in Cleveland.
1995: Toronto Blue Jays send P David Cone to the Yankees for P Marty Janzen and two other pitchers. Janzen wins six games over the next two years; Cone wins six postseason games and four World Series rings with the Yankees.
1998: Seattle sends P Randy Johnson to Houston for P Freddy Garcia and P John Halama. Johnson reels off a 10-1 record and becomes the ace of the NL Central champs; Garcia and Halama combine for 51 victories over the next two seasons, bolstering the Seattle rotation. Garcia is 11-1 for the runaway Mariners this season and was the winning pitcher of this year's All-Star Game.
1999: San Diego sends C Jim Leyritz to Ney York Yankees for P Geraldo Padua. Leyritz struggles for the Yanks (.227, 0 HR, 5 RBI) but hits the last home run of the 1900s in Game 4 of the World Series, proving that he's still the King of the postseason; Padua has yet to surface.
2000: New York Yankees send OF Rickey Ledee & P Jake Westbrook to Cleveland for David Justice. Justice revives the struggling Yankee offense, leading them to their third straight championship. Ledee is traded to Texas where he continues to rot, Westbrook only now is emerging as a solid pitcher.

By all accounts they Cubs' package to the Devil Rays was less than stellar; one report included middling middle reliever Manny Aybar and a AAA shortstop hitting .236 with a 630 OPS. If that's the case, GM Chuck Lamar, a man whom I wouldn't hire to manage my sock drawer, got off lucky. He'd be well served to do his homework and find some bodies that can help him in the event McGriff does agree to waive his no-trade before the deadline.

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 11:20 PM Link

The Decline of Derek

Only a shrieking teenybopper in a navy blue number 2 T-shirt could be oblivious to the decline in Derek Jeter's offensive and defensive abilities over the past two seasons. With four World Series rings in five years, and with a nine-year, $189 million contract under his belt, he's set to be a Yankee for life, complete with a plaque in Monument Park. But at the ripe old age of 27, an age when most ballplayers are reaching their prime, the evidence shows that Jeter has fallen way off his peak. By some standards, he's dropped like a tech stock.

Two articles in recent days explore this disturbing trend. The Village Voice's Allen St. John, a staple of the alt-weekly's fine Jockbeat section, finds Jeter "marooned on a plateau, a promise of greatness leveled off to a guarantee of solidly-above-averageness." Of Jeter's high-water mark, the 1999 season (an awesome .349/24/102, 989 OPS), St. John writes, "I can only imagine what it was like watching DiMaggio in 1941, and I imagine it was like watching Derek Jeter in 1999." Indeed Jeter was a thing of beauty that season, reaching base in the first 53 games and keeping his average around .350 almost wire-to-wire. At that time, he was arguably the equal of Alex Rodriguez and Nomar Garciaparra, the other two members of his heralded peer group at shortstop.

But while A-Rod and No-Mah have continued to advance toward the stratosphere, offensively speaking, Jeter has tailed off. His .339 average last year concealed steeper declines in both his On Base and Slugging Percentages, making him a significantly less productive hitter. As discussed in this column awhile back (June 20), SLG*OBP is a much better yardstick to measure the combination of the two statistics than OPS; it correlates, roughly, to runs created per at bat. Based on this, Jeter's run-producing abilities have fallen off by about one-third since '99:

       AVG    OBP    SLG   SL*OB
1996  .314   .370   .430    .159
1997  .291  . 370   .405    .150
1998  .324   .384   .481    .185
1999  .349   .437   .552    .241
2000  .339   .416   .481    .200
2001  .295   .376   .431    .162

Over at Baseball Prospectus, Gary Huckaby weighs in on Jeter's declining defense, a sore spot about which Jeter's most ardent boosters have been, well, defensive. The highlight films of Jeter making those long, suspended-in-the-air throws from deep in the hole continue to resonate, but the fact is, Jeter isn't making those plays, nor many others, like he used to. In a 14-team league, he ranks 15th among shortstops in Range Factor (total chances per game), Fielding Percentage, and Zone Rating (percentage of balls successfully fielded when hit in his "zone"), and he's second in Errors. Huckaby, using a more complicated metric called Adjusted Fielding Range, illustrates how Jeter has declined relative to his earlier abilities and to league averages, placing him in the bottom tenth percentile of all major league shortstops defensively. In all, not a pretty picture.

The reasons for Jeter's decline are unclear. Nagging injuries to his shoulder and quadriceps may be a factor this season, as may the lack of success of Jeter's neighbors in the batting order, Chuck Knoblauch and Paul O'Neill (since dropped from the #3 spot in favor of Bernie Williams). The weight of expectations that comes with his huge contract, and his sister's bout with Hodgkins Disease may also have affected him. Jeter's not one to make excuses, but something clearly isn't quite right.

Jeter is still an excellent ballplayer who can play on my team every day, and given his standing with the Yankee brass and their fans, he figures to for most of the next decade. But his ability to fulfill the promise of his 1999 season is now squarely in doubt. Still, with only five seasons under his belt, there's a pretty strong chance that, as somebody posting under the handle "dzop" pointed out over on Baseball Primer, his 1999 and 2001 seasons represent the good and bad fluctuations of a high peak offensively. He may never bring DiMaggio to mind again, but a career somewhere between Cal Ripken and Barry Larkin is hardly out of the question.

I'm going to go out on a limb (can you hear me, Joe Torre?) and suggest that the Yankees start adjusting to the new Derek Jeter while shoring up a weakness of their own. The anticipated 30-homer power spike predicted by his '99 numbers hasn't materialized yet (though it may well come around eventually), but Jeter's high On-Base Percentage, speed, and baserunning smarts make him an ideal leadoff man. He's fared amazingly well there in limited duty (.372 AVG/.465 OBP/.471 SLG in 146 plate appearances from 1998-2001). Move him to #1, put Scott Brosius in his old #2 slot, and the Yankees will start to look like championship material again. Trust me, Joe.

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 10:14 PM Link