Mike Mussina got shelled against the Texas Rangers the other night, giving up 7 runs and 11 hits in only 3 innings. Most embarrassingly, Mussina tied a major-league record by allowing six doubles in one inning. A guy could get whiplash watching all of those balls fly over his head.
The Rangers appear to have Moose's number; he's allowed them 18 runs in 13 innings over three starts in pinstripes. In fact a year ago Friday, I ditched work to catch a day game, only to watch Mussina get rocked by Texas before I'd even broken a sweat.
The Rangers won't be around in October, but they're not Mussina's only problem. He hasn't been nearly the same pitcher this year as he was last season, when he outpitched teammate Roger Clemens, whose gaudy 20-3 record netted an unprecedented 6th Cy Young Award. Mussina's ERA was 0.36 runs lower (3.15 to Clemens' 3.51), he showed drastically better control (5.09 K/W ratio for Moose vs. 2.96 for Rocket) and he allowed significantly fewer baserunners per inning (1.07 vs 1.26). But Clemens got the better run support, and ended up with the better record and the hardware.
Run support anomalies tend to even out over time, and this year Moose has gotten his share, enabling him to a 13-5 record, compared to 17-11 last year. But Moose's ERA is 1.68 runs higher this season than last, and only 12 out of 22 starts have been Quality Starts (3 earned runs in 6 innings or better). Five of those non-Quality Starts qualify as Disaster Starts (a term coined by ESPN's Jim Baker meaning those in which the pitcher allows as many or more runs than innings pitched). Interestingly enough, in 34 starts last year, Moose posted the same totals of non-Quality and Disaster Starts, 10 and 5 respectively.
So his hits per inning are up (9.07 per 9 IP vs. 7.95 last year), his strikeouts are down (7.04 vs 8.42), and he's already allowed more homers than he did last year (1.37 per 9 IP vs. 0.79 per 9 last season. Just what the hell is going on?
Anyone who's watched Mussina pitch knows that he has one of the more, um, distinctive stretch moves in the game. At the beginning of his windup, he bows like an overly servile butler. Or as I'm prone to calling it after a couple of beers, a Goddamn Drinking Bird, after that novelty-store staple. Mussina's move looks ridiculous, and I don't see how he can generate any power with it. While he's obviously had success with it in the past, anybody examing his mechanics would surmise that he's wasting a lot of energy and losing his power there.
Actually, I think I'm onto something. Here are OPS (On Base Percentage + Slugging Percentage) breakdowns for the Yankee starters, with no runners on (0), runners on (1+), and runners in scoring position (RISP).
Moose's OPS with runners on or in scoring position are 117 points higher than any other splits here, and they're the only ones above 800. His splits last year aren't quite as drastic (590 OPS with none on, 707 with runners on, 767 with runners in scoring position), so maybe this is a just random blip.
Whatever the reason, Mussina hasn't pitched well with runners on base. If I were Yankee pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, I'd check video of his pitching from the stretch this season versus last. And I'd suggest Mussina kill that Goddamn Drinking Bird.
Nobody hates sharing their first name with a fundamentally unsound ballplayer toiling in the same city more than I do. So I let out a good whoop when the Mets finally, mercifully pulled the trigger on a deal which sent Jay Payton to Colorado on Wednesday.
I never understood why the Mets made so much fuss about Payton. Despite his minor-league hitting prowess (Payton tore up A, AA, and AAA pitching his first three years as a pro), he's been an extremely mediocre major-league hitter. And whatever skill he's shown as an above-average centerfielder is undone by his baserunning antics, which stand out on a team with two headless chickens in the outfield and on the basepaths in Roger Cedeno and Timo Perez. I may as well watch Little League.
Week after week, month after month, I read about how Jay Payton was the sticking point in some blockbuster deal the Mets had going for Junior Griffey or Gary Sheffield or Babe... well, maybe not Babe Ruth. Those deals never materialized, of course. If a reluctance to part with Payton really is what did them in, then Mets GM Steve Phillips should be sentenced to watch his overpaid, underwhelming ballclub for an eternity, or at least the length of Mo Vaughn's contract.
Injuries and a million elbow surgeries delayed Payton's big-league career until 27, an age when ballplayers tend to peak statistically. Three years down the road, Payton hasn't advanced very much; we've already seen his upside. A red-hot July did enough to camouflage his decline that it made sense to deal him. That he netted only a middle- to back-of-the-rotation starter in John Thomson (who's decent enough, but so fragile that he's apparently in the Under the Knife Hall of Fame next to Moises Alou and Ken Griffey, Jr.) shouldn't surprise anybody besides Phillips, Rockies GM Dan O'Dowd, and Jay Payton's mother, all of whom have higher opinions of their Jay than I do.
Looking at these, who do you think the real Jay Payton is, the mediocrity who put in 1000+ plate appearances over 2 1/2 years, hitting a thin .273/.316/.407, or the guy who tore up the NL in July once the Mets had flatlined themselves out of Wild Card contention? Caveat emptor.
ESPN's Rob Neyer has a good piece about the general lousiness of the Mets' outfield, and points out that in Payton, the Mets traded their most productive outfielder. I say that if Payton's the best you've got, you might as well pack in some dynamite, blow shit up and start over. I'd shiver at the prospect of Perez taking over centerfield if I didn't have good money to bet on the "over" for collisions with Cedeno. *That* will be fun to watch.
This page has taken quite a jump recently in terms of traffic, enough to make July the busiest in this site's short history, and 50% busier than the previoius six months' average. I know that my coverage of the All-Star Game Weekend had something to do with it, but a bit of networking with my fellow webloggers helped as well. I'd like to give big thank-you shout-outs to David Pinto's Baseball Musings, Geoff Young's Ducksnorts, John Bonnes' TwinsGeek.com, John Perricone's Only Baseball Matters, and of course Pete Sommers' Baseball News Blog, all of which have brought this site to their readers' attention recently. These are some really smart weblogs, and I encourage anyone reading this to check them out.
Barely three weeks after he was traded from the Florida Marlins to the Montreal Expos, Cliff Floyd was traded again, this time to the Boston Red Sox. Thus he's completed an unseemly journey between three teams linked by this past offseason's franchise-manipulating shenanigans.
Recall that current Red Sox owner John Henry is also the former owner of the Florida Marlins, and that current Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria is the former owner of the Montreal Expos. When Henry's group "won" the bid for the Sox, Loria was allowed to buy the Marlins and sell the Expos to Major League Baseball, semmingly a precursor towards contracting the poor Expos. This unholy triangle was of course aided and abetted by Commissioner Bud Selig. Selig managed to overlook the fact that Henry's group may not have been the highest bidder for the Sox (as the condition of the franchise sale mandated). One wonders if Selig hasn't served up another fat pitch for ol' John Henry here.
When the Expos acquired Floyd, it was on the heels of their acquisition of ace pitcher Bartolo Colon from the Cleveland Indians in exchange for two prospects. The Expos stood at 46-41, 9.5 games out of first place in the NL East and 5 games out of the Wild Card, but the deal made sense in a win-now kind of way. Three weeks later, the Expos have slumped with Floyd (7-12) but remain only 6 games out of the Wild Card, despite falling to 16 in back of the Braves in the East. Instead of hanging tough with their augmented lineup, they send Clifford packing in exchange for two middling Korean pitching prospects (including the wonderfully-named Seung Song, whom I saw pitch at the All-Star Futures Game) who aren't as good as what they gave up. If winning now is no longer the mandate, and contraction is still in the cards (cough, cough), what the hell good are prospects for the Expos?
Despite the rant and the presence of my favorite toupιed whipping boy, I'm not quite ready to call this one a conspiracy. Baseball Prospectus' Joe Sheehan (who, like me, is a Yankees fan) falls just short of uttering the C-word as he tries to make sense of the trade; his article is well worth a read, especially when it points out how much attendance increased during the short span when the Expos appeared to be in the race.
But unanswered by any conspiracy theory I've heard is why Selig/MLB/Montreal would do Henry a favor by gifting their newly acquired slugger when Bud already did an even bigger favor by fixing the Sox sale. One would think he's already got Henry's support for whatever nefarious scheme he blunders into. And so long as you're selling off the Expos for scrap, why stop at Floyd--why not trade Colon, Vladimir Guerrero and Jose Vidro in exchange for Quebec's independence or a fifty-foot statue of Tim Raines or something useful like that? I don't get it.
As a Yanks fan, I'm not going to sweat the Sox acquiring Floyd too much. Had they pried loose Jim Thome from the Indians, I might have worried a bit, because it's always Whacking Day for Thome when he faces the Yanks. He's got 3 HRs in 20 ABs against them this year, and 12 in 124 ABs over the past four seasons. No wonder he seems to hit one nearly every time I'm watching. My favorite Yankee opponent, hands down.
But just because I'm not worried about the ramifications for the Yanks and don't think it's truly a conspiracy doesn't mean I don't have a bad taste in my mouth about this. Anything involving players traded into or out of Montreal this year is highly questionable and deserving of further scrutiny. Anything involving Selig and the operations of an individual team, particularly the two teams he's so incestuously involved with (now there's a pleasant image) shouldn't pass unnoticed either.
So with apologies to Franklin P. Adams, who wrote the second-most famous baseball poem of all time (after Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat"), and a nod to my late grandfather, who was given to composing bits of doggerel in his letters, I leave with you with this:
Baseball's New Sad Lexicon These are the saddest of possible words:
"Loria to Selig to Henry."
Trio of bandits, reeking of turds,
Loria and Selig and Henry.
Ruthlessly wrecking our great old pastime,
Making a trade that ought to be crime.
Words that are heavy with nothing but slime:
"Loria to Selig to Henry."
Postscript: There's plenty more talk on the conspiracy front. The Boston Globe's Gordon Edes gives a bit of Beantown perspective, including a conversation with Sox CEO Larry Luccino. ESPN Insider's Jim Bake,r answering a letter from a reader, says the conspiracy theory could be plugged in if any one of a number of teams had acquired Floyd:
"Yankees: Selig doing favor for most influential owner in game
"Dodgers: Selig wants big market team to win western division for TV ratings
"Braves: Selig thinks a Braves world championship would be just the thing for baseball.
"And, on the end of the spectrum:
"Devil Rays: Selig thinks moribund team could use a shot in the arm so he can focus contraction hopes elsewhere.
"Brewers: No explanation necessary.
"Let's face it: The league owning a team is just plain bad mojo. Any move it makes, no matter how benign, is going to look like some kind of backdoor malfeasance. The conspiracy theory angle is much more fun, though."
As for the other ex-Yankee hitters, none of them are exactly tearing the cover off the ball:
AVG OBP SLG R HR BI
Chuck Knoblauch .192 .269 .271 26 3 16
Tino Martinez .248 .333 .404 36 12 51
David Justice .272 .406 .409 30 6 26
Chuck Knoblauch has had a tough season in Kansas City. A slow start, a 1-for-29 slump and a wrist injury which cost him six weeks on the DL put him him well below the Mendoza Line (a paltry .167) through the All-Star Break. Since returning, he's shown some signs of improvement: 9-for-27 (.333), including a 4-hit game. And he has yet to be caught stealing, going 17-for-17. None of which justifies the Royals having given him nearly 180 plate appearances in the leadoff spot. Apparently neither Tony Muser nor Tony Pena got the memo about scoring runs.
Call me crazy, but I think Knoblauch could help a contender as a 25th man down the stretch. His speed and baserunning skills are still there, and in limited opportuntity, he's shown himself to be a very good pinch-hitter (4-for-7 with a walk over the past 3 seasons). Break it down to a single high-pressure at-bat where you need a base runner and take your chances with the Lil' Bastard's ability to work the count.
In other years, some club might trade a second-rate pitching prospect and a frozen turkey for a chance to rent his Veteran Presence for two months. But in this cost-conscious year, it's doubtful that any team would look to take on even his meager salary for the stretch run. To say nothing about whether we'll even get to HAVE a stretch run.
Tino Martinez has failed to meet even the meager nutritional levels of an expired Big Mac. Mark McGwire, despite batting .187 last season, hit 29 homers and posted an 808 OPS, a level of production the Red One found so unacceptable he hung up his spikes. Even so, Tino has been a step down, with a not-so-shiny .248 masking a meager 737 OPS and 12 HRs, though at least he's been healthy.
Much was made of Tino's clutch hitting last year, and to the extent that we can pick and choose exactly what we want that to mean, the stats bear that out. His OPS was 94 points better with Runners In Scoring Position than overall, and 135 points better in Close & Late situations (7th inning or later with the batting team either ahead by one run, tied or with the potential tying run at least on deck). He was 6-for-15 with 19 RBI and a 1056 OPS with the bases loaded. By contrast, his clutch ability seems to have gone missing (which should come as no surprise to anyone who's studied the matter). He's only about 30 OPS points better in RISP than overall, 10 points lower than overall in Close & Late, and 2-for-12 with 12 RBI and an awful 485 OPS with the bases loaded. Proving only that small sample sizes don't mean much when it comes to the elusive Clutch Hitter.
On the positive side, he is walking more often--in fact he's already equalled last year's total, and his .333 OBP is actually higher than last year. Helluva good glove man, too. And Tino always was good with those one-day-at-a-time soundbites, so no doubt his Veteran Presence has meant something to the Cards during this emotionally trying season. And postseason experience should come in handy, if we have a postseason. Soundbites and October redemption are what he's got to sell.
David Justice got off to a hot start in Oakland (.301 with 4 HR and a 908 OPS through May 7), but then his alter ego, Cranky McGroin, put a damper on things, costing him 4 weeks on the DL. Since returning, Justice has been punchless (.352 SLG and only 2 HR in 177 PA). Still, he is getting base to a .406 clip, which means he's not exactly hurting the A's offense.
Another departed Yank of a considerably lower profile, Clay Bellinger has taken his jack-of-all-trades act west to the Anaheim Angels. Or rather, to the Angels' AAA Salt Lake City affiliate, where he can show off his World Series rings to the kids. Bellinger's hitting .268 with 11 HR and 35 RBI for the Stingers, playing first base, third base, the outfield and even catching a few games. He's been up and down with Anaheim already, going hitless in his only at bat for them. Can you say "organizational fodder"?
Finally, a couple of pitchers. Mark Wohlers has done a fairly brutal job at the back of the Cleveland Indian bullpen, the nadir of which was allowing 7 runs in 2/3 of an inning to Anaheim on April 30. His ERA has only recently come down from the Boeing Jet catalog territory, and he stands at 1-1 with a 5.48 ERA. Jay Witasick, on the other hand, has been surprisingly effective for the San Francisco Giants, posting a 2.16 ERA in 50 innings of setup work in front of Robb Nen. Witasick just went on the 15-day DL with a bruised foot after being hit by a line drive. Still, he ought to win some kind of prize as the only one of this bunch to have actually improved since leaving.
The collective performance of this bunch, while not exactly impossible to foresee, stands as further testimony to the Yankee front-office smarts. None of these players are outperforming their replacements, and while they may have their spots in the hearts of Yank fans, it's definitely better for the team that they've moved on.
