The Futility Infielder

Bobby Bragan (1917-2010)

2010-01-25T10:13:00.006-05:00

Baseball lifer Bobby Bragan died last week at the age of 92. The man did just about everything in his career, arriving in the majors as an infielder with the Phillies in 1940, learning to catch and becoming the backup backstop of the Brooklyn Dodgers a few years later, transitioning to managing first at the minor league level (where he won championships with the Fort Worth River Cats and Hollywood Stars) and then in the majors (going 443-478 with the Indians, Pirates, and Braves, getting fired in midseason all three times). A protege of Branch Rickey, who hired him to skipper both Fort Worth and Pittsburgh, he managed future Hall of Fame players such as Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Bill Mazeroski, Warren Spahn and Eddie Mathews. After moving onto coaching, he then served as president of the Texas League, and later of the minor leagues' governing body, the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues. His was a full, rich life.

Bragan last made headlines in 2005, when he came out of retirement at 87 years old for one game to become not only the oldest manager in professional baseball history (beating Connie Mack by a week) but also the oldest manager to get ejected; he was tossed on the heels of the ejection of one of his players. Around the country, he's been memorialized as the last manager of the Braves' Milwaukee era, the first of their Atlanta era, and as Fort Worth's foremost ambassador to the sport, a man simply known as "Mr. Baseball."

As a Brooklyn resident and a Dodger fan, to me the most compelling part of his career is the transformation Bragan experienced during his four seasons in Brooklyn (1943-1944, 1947-1948, with two seasons missed due to military service). It wasn't for his hitting (.258/.306/.324 during his Dodger days, highlighted by a game-tying pinch-double in Game Six of the 1947 World Series) but rather for his initial opposition to and ultimate championing of Jackie Robinson, whose breaking of the color barrier afforded him a front-row seat to an earth-shaking change. During the spring of 1947, Alabama native Bragan supported Dixie Walker's infamous petition stating that he didn't want to play with Robinson. Unsympathetic, manager Leo Durocher roused his team at 1 AM andtold them, "Take the petition and, you know, wipe your ass."

Bragan soon paid a visit to Rickey's office. From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Randy Galloway:

I will always treasure the Alabama-native drawl telling me this one from long ago:

"Mr. Rickey, well, since you asked, sir, I got to admit, I don't want no colored boy playing on the Dodgers."

And so, in 1947 the Jackie Robinson story was about to begin in Brooklyn, and general manager Branch Rickey, whom Bobby claimed to have admired and feared "as much as God himself" told the Dodgers' backup catcher, "Bobby, I ought to get rid of you, but you know what, I don�t think I really believe that�s in your heart, what you now tell me about this young man [Robinson]."

Within six months of Bobby meeting Jackie in spring training, and Jackie breaking baseball's color line, Bragan began a family friendship with Robinson that would last until Jackie passed away, and then continued with Jackie's widow.

"Knowing Jackie Robinson turned my life around," Bobby always said.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Ken Sugiura:

Bragan initially resisted Robinson, as did other teammates, most of them like Bragan raised in the South. Bragan even sought to be traded rather than play with Robinson.

That changed when the team took a two-week road trip early in the season.

"On those long train rides, that's when I really started to get to know Jackie," Bragan told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2007, the 60th anniversary of Robinson's entry into major league baseball. All of us did, actually. This man was about class, culture and courage. All my prejudices begin to slowly fade.

"I started off that trip determined to have nothing to do with Jackie. But when that trip was over, the team goes back home, then, when the second road trip started, I was one of those jockeying to sit next to Jackie on the train. Jackie Robinson, the person and the ballplayer, changed my views, and changed my life."

Profiled as the leadoff personality in Donald Honig's The Man in the Dugout: Fifteen Big League Managers Speak Their Minds (you can read the entire chapter via Google Books), Bragan elaborated:

Jackie won the respect of everybody by sheer guts and ability. Nobody ever came into the big leagues under less favorable circumstances, and he handled himself beautifully and he played like a demon. he was one of the greatest ballplayers ever to come down the pike.

Being Jackie Robinson's teammate was one of the best breaks I ever got. Watching what he had to go through helped me. It helped make me a better, more enlightened man, and it helped me to have a future in baseball as a manager because later on I was gong to have to manage fellows like Felipe Alou, Maury Wills, Henry Aaron, and plenty of other black players. If I hadn't had that experience with Jackie, I don't think I could have done it. It was a breakthrough for me, a great experience that I learned from and built upon later in life.

Jackie and I became good friends. Side by side we mourned our great loss in the same pew at Mr. Rickey's funeral. The respect and admiration that we shared for our mutual "father" served to cement our friendship.

A gifted raconteur, Bragan had a lighter side as well, particularly when it came to his managing career. After finishing above .500 in three straight years in Milwaukee (1963-1965) but failing to climb higher than fifth place in a 10-team league, he recalled, "I told them in Milwaukee that I was leaving, and I got the biggest ovation I ever got... But I'm taking the team with me." Former Star-Telegram columnist Jim Reeves retells a scene from Bragan's autobiography:

In the foreword to Bragan's book, "You Can't Hit the Ball with the Bat on Your Shoulder," Howard Cosell called him "baseball's Music Man ... Elmer Gantry in uniform."

Cosell tells about the day in 1957 when Bragan, then Pittsburgh's skipper, was sitting at the piano in Howard's Manhattan apartment, playing and singing "Mack the Knife," when he was interrupted by a call from Pirates GM Joe Brown. Bobby took the call, talked for a couple of minutes, then resumed singing.

"What did Joe want?" Cosell asked.

"Mack the knife is ... back in town," Bragan sang, then added a new verse. "Joe Brown just fired me."

Judging from all of the testimonials to Bragan that have surfaced, he cemented many a friendship during his time in the game. He'll be missed.

Kicking Chass (again)

2010-01-22T18:39:00.003-05:00

As somebody who's all too familiar with the senile ravings of fomer New York Times columnist and Spink Award winner Murray Chass, I tip my cap to Baseball Analysts' Patrick Sullivan. After being singled out for attack over the issue of the Hall of Fame�� and having his credibility compared to that of Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, another of the field's bigger idiots, he responded by exposing the numerous fallacious assumptions on which Chass' bilious screed rests. Most of it might not translate in an excerpt, but the end, where Sully catches some hopelessly bad math, certainly does:

The piece ends the way so many of these do. After berating those of us who look to statistics to form the basis of our baseball-related arguments, he transitions to Tommy John's Hall of Fame case, comparing his to Blyleven's.
John had a career 288-231 record with a 3.34 earned run average. Blyleven�s record was 287-250 and his e.r.a. 3.31. John retired 57 percent of the batters he faced, Blyleven, with all his strikeouts, 59 percent.
Yup, stats. But not just any stats, moronic, wrong stats that say Tommy John yielded a career .430 on-base percentage and Bert Blyleven yielded a .410 figure. Truth is, John's career on-base against was .315 while Blyleven's was .301. I am not sure where that gets us, but at least we're dealing in reality.

Anyway, back away from the word processor, Murray. People, successful people, knowledgeable people who adore baseball, are all laughing at you.

Nice work!

This and That

2010-01-22T15:56:00.002-05:00

In today's Prospectus Hit and Run, I examine the fates of Orlando Hudson and Randy Wolf after the Dodgers failed to offer them arbitration, thus surrendering the right to first round draft picks and supplemental first round compensation picks in each case, hardly chump change. The decision wasn't out of step with the industry trend; only 10 out of 26 Type A's were offered arbitration.

Still, given the long odds that either would return to the Dodgers given their desire to receive well-deserved multi-year deals, the decision was surprising and rather enraging. But one reader of my last piece on the Dodgers' offseason took issue, asking, "I disagree with the idea that Hudson wouldn't have accepted arbitration. He most likely would have and would be due a raise. And would Wolf really be off the market right now were he not free?" I thought it was a question worth a closer look, given that Wolf signed a three-year, $29.75 million deal with the Brewers, but that Hudson remains at large.

At this point, all 10 of the Type As have signed contracts for 2010. Seven of them did so with new teams, thus costing their signing teams either a first-round or second-round draft pick...

The sample sizes are obviously small here, but I think we can make some inferences. Let's start with the guy who signed. Given the perception that Type-B free agent Andy Pettitte had no plans beyond returning to the Yankees, Wolf was clearly the second-best starting pitcher on the market after [John] Lackey. He'd even had a better year than Lackey both by traditional standards (the latter was 11-8 with a 3.83 ERA in 27 starts) and the more advanced metrics. The next tier down, both performance and dollar-wise, appears to be Joel Pineiro (two years, $16 million with the Angels) and Jason Marquis (two years, $15 million with the Nationals), a pair of Type B free agents who are both low-strikeout worm killers coming off their best seasons in at least half a decade. As is Wolf for that matter, though he's considered less of a one-year wonder because the perceived value of his 12-12, 4.30 ERA, 0.5 WARP 2008 showing is boosted by his late-season run with the Astros.

The team that signed Wolf was the Brewers, who managed to go 80-82 while finishing last in the league in starter ERA (5.37) and SNLVAR (8.0), and thus in dire need of rotation help. As it happens, the Brewers finished with a record more or less at the point of inflection where the marginal dollar value of an additional win starts to climb, so it doesn't take too great a leap of faith to suppose that they might have been willing to rationalize the punting of the draft pick handcuffed to Wolf had he been offered arbitration. Perhaps that would have lowered their bid on the pitcher somewhat, but I don't think it would have lessened their desire for a multi-year deal. Even if the entire Milwaukee option wasn't on the table if Wolf had been offered arbitration, it's certainly possible that another team which fancies itself a contender (correctly or not) might have been willing to make that same choice. The Mets come to mind, and in a world where they also sign Bay, Wolf would have only cost them a second-round pick. Perhaps the Angels, who having lost two Type As were already going to net compensation picks, would have valued his services more highly than Pineiro. All it takes is one team.

As for Hudson, while he lacks the versatility of [Chone] Figgins and [Marco] Scutaro � the other infielders in this set, neither of them perfect comps�he's got a longer track record of above-average play than either. He's stuck in a strange market, though. Consider that the Giants, who at 88 wins finished near the summit of the marginal dollar value of a win curve, chose to lock up the similarly aged but significantly inferior Freddy Sanchez for two years before the World Series even ended, rather than wait to see how the market unfolded. Then, of course, Brian Sabean moves in mysterious ways. Sanchez underwent season-ending knee surgery to repair a torn meniscus, and the word on the street this week is that he just underwent shoulder surgery, threatening his opening day availability. Maybe they should have had Boston's doctors give him a physical.

...At this juncture, Hudson probably would have been better off had he been offered arbitration and accepted. His comments about Torre � which weren't over the top by any means, but were critical � certainly fueled the impression that he had no desire to return. The Dodgers may have taken them too personally, leading to a suboptimal business decision. Hudson found himself in the bargain bin last winter because he (and/or his agent, Paul Cohen) misread the market by searching for a long-term, big-dollar deal during an exceptionally tough winter. He's apparently seeking a larger payday to make up for last year's shortfall, though he did wind up making about $8 milllion thanks to his incentives. A report linking him to the Nationals suggests he's asked for $9 million for 2010. It's not that he's not worth it; at an average of 4.3 WARP per year over the past four, he is. But with none of the big-money contenders particularly in need of a second baseman, the O-Dog is out in the cold.

Switching gears for the second half of the piece, I examine the Hall of Fame case of Jim Edmonds, who earlier this week expressed a desire to mount a comeback after sitting out all of last year. Edmonds' JAWS case is actually sound; he ranks as the seventh-best center fielder of all time thanks to strong defense as well as offense; his scores (66.2/ 46.5/56.4) are substantially ahead of the JAWS standard (68.3/44.0/56.1) and well ahead of recent electee Andre Dawson (59.6/40.2/49.9).

But Edmonds has a few things going against them, starting with a short career in which he accumulated "only" 1881 hits and derived a fair amount of his value from walks. The writers haven't elected an expansion era (1961 onward) player into the Hall with less than 2000 hits, and they've poorly served high-OBP guys like Tim Raines, Ron Santo and Bobby Grich, all of whom rank among the very best players at their positions outside the Hall. Furthermore, Edmonds never won an MVP award and never led the league in anything. Regardless of how his comeback fares, I don't see his candidacy getting the reception it deserves when the time comes.

The Sausage Factory

2010-01-21T11:12:00.001-05:00

If you're wondering how the sausage that is the Baseball Prospectus annual gets made, editor Steven Goldman explains it in his latest chat:

Nick (Manhattan): I'm curious about the annual. Did Joe Sheehan contribute? And are the authors cited at the end of team sections so that we know who is writing what? I've always thought it would be nice to know who did what because you have such distinct voices.

Steven Goldman: Hi, Nick. No, Joe did not contribute. It's not something he had chosen to do in recent years. Consistent with long-standing BP tradition, we still have not by-lined the chapters. As we've said many, many times before (and as I alluded to a couple of answers ago), too many fingers get into each chapter to make that an easy thing to do. Let's talk about the St. Louis Browns chapter in the 1953 Baseball Prospectus annual. I might write the essay and the Rogers Hornsby manager comment. Jay Jaffe might do most of the comments, but as editor I might feel that his Dick Kryhoski comment missed the point, so I might ask him for a redraft or for various reasons (Jay may be skiing in Utah) change it around myself. Then I'll ask Kevin Goldstein to come in and take a look at what we wrote for all the prospects on the team, and in a couple of cases, Kevin might say, "You know, the Joe DeMaestri comment really overestimates his minor-league numbers. I have three scouts who tell me he hits with his eyes closed." So Kevin will rewrite that one. Then Christina will take a look and add her two cents and add and subtract a few more details (sometimes this happens in the opposite order -- she starts, I close). After that, it goes to the publisher's editor, who makes his own comments. Those come back to us, we evaluate them and keep what we can use, and stamp it finished -- at which point they trade the whole roster and Christina and I have to scramble to account for the changes, which causes even more rewriting.

See what I mean? And aren't you sorry you asked?

Just thought I'd share that.

Baby Blues

2010-01-19T12:40:00.003-05:00

In my latest piece for Baseball Prospectus, I examine the Dodgers' offseason in light of the news that they avoided arbitration with Chad Billingsley and Matt Kemp, signing the latter to a two-year deal. Both were among the core of eight players who are arbitration eligible this winter:

Last week, a scrap of good news emerged from the Dodger camp, as the team agreed to terms with Matt Kemp and Chad Billinglsley, two of those arbitration-eligible players (both first-time eligibles are represented by former big league ace Dave Stewart, whose menacing glare surely must have been worth something at the negotiating table). Billingsley, who pitched his way onto the All-Star team last summer before enduring a second half so wracked by injury and inconsistency that he didn't make a postseason start, signed a one-year deal for $3.85 million. Kemp, who enjoyed a breakout season which saw him lead the team in WARP (7.3) and post the highest EqA of any qualifying center fielder (.304), inked a two-year deal for almost $11 million. His 2010 salary of $4 million is believed to represent a high for a center fielder in his first year of arb eligibilty, but his 2011 pact ($6.95 million base plus $600,000 in potential incentives) is more significant.

That 2011 deal more or less represents the Dodgers' strongest acknowledgment to date that the world will not end after the coming season, which should come as a relief to anxious fans. According to the data at Cot's Baseball Contracts (h/t new colleague Jeff Euston), the team has just four players under contract after this year: Kemp, Rafael Furcal ($12 million), Casey Blake ($5.25 million), and Carroll ($1.925 million). The club will still have control over the seven remaining arb-eligible players: Billingsley, James Loney and Hong-Chih Kuo (who will be in their second years), Jonathan Broxton, Andre Ethier, and Russell Martin (third years), and George Sherrill (fourth year).

Given the significance of those players to the team's current and future prospects, one can understand the unease which the uncertainty over their salaries represents at this juncture. That goes doubly when one considers the pre-sale teardown that the recent divorce proceedings of owner John Moores forced upon the division rival Padres; under California's community property law, Moores and his wife split the team 50-50, requiring the sale of the club to settle the tab. The 2010 season isn't so much of a concern for the Dodgers, given all the parts in place, but the threat that the McCourts' divorce could force a similarly wrenching course of action still looms large, particularly when one considers the additional evidence of their tight-fisted ways.

I spent a lot of space summarizing those tight-fisted ways in the forthcoming Baseball Prospectus 2010. Breaking it down to a hail of bullets:

��Failing to offer obviously departing Type A free agents Orlando Hudson and Randy Wolf arbitration, thus costing themselves first-round picks as well as supplemental first-rounders, all worth about $24 million according to some old work by Nate Silver.

��Forgoing the free agent market this winter in anticipation of the raises those arb-eligible players would receive in order to keep payroll down. Meet Jamey Carroll, the team's marquee signing this winter!

��Consistently surrendering better prospects than they might otherwise have to in their midseason trades in exchange for remaining more or less payroll-neutral. Catcher Carlos Santana (the Indians' number one prospect, traded as part of the Casey Blake deal in 2008) and third baseman Josh Bell (the Orioles number two prospect, traded as part of last summer's Sherrill deal) are the most prominent of this bunch, which also includes Andy LaRoche and 2006 first-rounder Bryan Morris (who admittedly looks like a bust in the making) in the Manny Ramirez trade and 2007 second-rounder Michael Watt (not the Minutemen bassist) in the 2008 Greg Maddux deal.

��Paying a major-league low $8.5 million in signing bonuses to draft picks over the past two years, and going similarly cheap when it comes to international signings ��long a Dodger stronghold.

��Deferring partial contract payouts until 2011-2014 to Ramirez and Rafael Furcal as well as the not-so-dearly departed Andruw Jones and Jason Schmidt.

Ugh.

In the face of all of that cost-cutting, one can see where locking in Kemp, if only for one extra year, counts as progress... Despite all the talk of this crop of baby blues, it's worth noting that the team's strong showing last year had less to do with the performances of their young and largely homegrown nucleus... than is sometime assumed. A couple of weeks ago, Matt Swartz ranked the 30 teams according to the WARP contributions of players in various service-time classes. The Dodgers ranked just 13th in the majors in WARP received from non-market salaries (NM), players either in their pre-arbitration or arbitration-eligible years. On the other hand, they ranked third in the majors in WARP received from auction-market salaries (AM), players with enough service time to be eligible for free agency or to have come from Japan or other foreign markets...

While the Dodgers received more value from their non-market players than three of their four NL West competitors (all except the Rockies), their advantage over the Giants, who received the least value from such young 'uns, amounted to less than three wins. On the other hand, the Dodgers got nearly as much value from their auction-market players as the rest of their NL West competitors combined. Of their eight most valuable players according to WARP, five (Hudson, Blake, Rafael Furcal, Ramirez and Wolf) were free agent signings.

Since filing the piece, various reports from the Twitscape have Martin ($5.05 million), Sherrill ($4.5 million), Loney ($3.1 million), and Kuo ($950K) signing one-year deals, and the latest word is that they've tied up Ethier and Broxton via two-year deals as well. There are no dollar amount attached to those two, but Ethier's is certainly higher than Kemp, since for arbitration purposes, he's a year ahead in terms of service time. The great MLB Trade Rumors offers Nick Markakis' two-year, $17 million deal as an appropriate comparison given service time and general caliber of play, which is what this arbitration business is all about anyway. Stay tuned.

Friday's Child (The Return)

2010-01-15T13:56:00.004-05:00

So I'm finally finished with what I refer to as my winter workload, my contributions to the Baseball Prospectus and Fantasy Baseball Index annuals as well as Maple Street Press' Dodgers Annual, edited by Dodger Thoughts' Jon Weisman. All of that stuff is about a month away from hitting the shelves, but I'm back in circulation at Baseball Prospectus with a couple of articles this week.

Today's piece is a recurring feature based upon a chapter I wrote for BP's pennant race book It Ain't Over, "The Replacement-Level Killers." It's about players whose production was so awful that it might have prevented their team from reaching the postseason, yet so easily replaced that it's more an indictment on the managers and general managers who put up with that production rather than solve the problem (though many of these teams took steps to try to address them). Since we're in the middle of the Hot Stove season, I checked in on teams' attempts to remedy these problems and found, to my surprise, that many of them had taken a half-assed approach, likely in connection to economic uncertainty. The Giants were one of two teams to actually fill multiple Killers, and since I hate the Giants, here they are as the excerpt:

Second Base:
Emmanuel Burriss (.211 EqA, -1.1 WARP), Freddy Sanchez (.221 EqA, 0.3 WARP), Giants

The Giants finished last in the majors in EqA, and at no position did they get worse production than at second base, where five players made at least 16 starts and hit a combined .236/.281/.329; remove Juan Uribe (.274/.331/.538 in 35 games at second, less than he saw at third or short) and those numbers become .227/.269/.280. Burriss more or less held the job from Opening Day to mid-June before being sent to the minors and subsequently hurting his foot. The team then spent the next six weeks briefly trying on Matt Downs (.187 EqA, -0.1 WARP), Kevin Frandsen (.086 EqA, -0.5 WARP) and Uribe for size before trading for Sanchez, who strained his shoulder two weeks after arriving and then tore his meniscus upon returning from that injury. All told, the team finished four games behind the Rockies in the Wild Card, a gap that could have easily been narrowed with a competent solution at the keystone.

Remedy (?): The Giants didn't even wait until the World Series was done to re-sign the 32-year-old Sanchez to a two-year, $12 million deal, this despite the fact that the signing has limited them to some fairly cut-rate solutions elsewhere which cast Mark DeRosa as a corner outfielder, Aubrey Huff as a first baseman, and Night Train as the house's top red wine option. Yeah, good luck with all of that.

Right Field:
Randy Winn (.248 EqA, 2.2 WARP), Nate Schierholtz (.249 EqA, 0.4 WARP), Giants

In the final year of a three-year, $23.5 million deal, Winn hit a godawful .262/.318/.353, a performance driven � through a guardrail overlooking a cliff � by a .158/.184/.200 showing in 125 PA against southpaws, the single worst righty-on-lefty performance of the Retrosheet Era (1954 onward). With Bruce Bochy dissatisfied with left fielder Fred Lewis' production (his .348 OBP, second on the team, clashed with the sub-.300 zeitgeist the manager was trying to instill), Winn also saw significant time in left so as to allow Nate Schierholtz (.267/.302/.400) to wave a wet noodle at NL pitchers. If not for Winn's above-average defensive contributions (+15 FRAA) things would have been even worse, but as it was, this debacle and the one at second base were enough to dash the Giants' Wild Card hopes.

Remedy (?): With Winn gone and the team saving its pennies in fear of a big arbitration award for Tim Lincecum, the Giants appear to be vying for an entry on There I Fixed It by letting Schierholtz and John Bowker battle for the right to eat up more outs than necessary.

Writing about ineptitude is always one of the more fun parts of my job, and this one was no exception. Anyway, earlier in the week I wrote a piece arising from a question in last week's chat, is an attempt to answer the question ��an important one popularized via Bill James' Keltner Test ��of who the best player at each position is outside the Hall of Fame, using JAWS. Five of the 10 position leaders (and two runners-up) are on the current Hall of Fame ballot, and part of the JAWS ticket which went 0-for-7 on Hall of Fame election day. The rest aren't so obvious. Who would have thought I had a good excuse to write about George "Piano Legs" Gore or dust off an old comparison of Bobby Bonds to Reggie Jackson?

Center Field

JAWS Standard: 68.3/44.0/56.1

Best eligible player: George Gore (62.5/44.6/53.6)
Who? "Piano Legs" Gore was a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing character with massive calves. He played center field for Cap Anson's Chicago White Stockings from 1879 through 1886, a span during which he was a key part of five pennant winners; he went on to play for two more pennant-winning Giants clubs. He led the league in walks three times during an era where one needed six to nine balls for a free pass, and was consistently among the league's OBP leaders, hence his strong WARP totals, though they still leave him shy of the JAWS standard in center field. I don't know if the Veterans Committee ever seriously took up his case, but Lord knows there are far less accomplished VC-anointed outfielders in the Hall of Fame; his JAWS numbers crush those of Hugh Duffy, Max Carey, Earl Averill, Hack Wilson, Edd Roush, Earle Combs, and Lloyd Waner, all VC selections.

Runner up: Jimmy Wynn (57.1/47.6/52.4)
The Toy Cannon spent the first 11 years of his career playing in the Astrodome, a godforsaken hitting environment if there ever was one. Properly adjusted for context, he was a helluva hitter, topping a .300 EqA six times during that span, with a high of .348 in 1969. He had two more outstanding years with the Dodgers in 1974 and 1975 before injuries washed him out of the majors at age 35. In the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James ranks Wynn 10^th all-time among center fielders, and likens him to former teammate Joe Morgan, another small, strong, speedy guy with outstanding control of the strike zone and good defense.

Right Field

JAWS Standard: 75.7/46.6/61.2

Best eligible player: Dwight Evans (59.5/37.7/48.6)
Evans spent parts of 19 seasons in the Red Sox outfield (1972-1990), during the prime of which he was overshadowed by Jim Rice and Fred Lynn. He wasn't entirely overlooked, however, cracking the AL top five in the MVP voting twice (1984 and 1987) and winning eight Gold Gloves in a 10-year span (1976-1985). Like many other players here, he was undervalued in his day because a large part of his offensive contribution came via walks; he topped 100 three times and ranked in the league's top three six times in a nine-year span. He lasted just three years on the BBWAA ballot, though, and his numbers, which were once above the JAWS standard, now come up short. They're still ahead of Rice's (34.2/28.5/31.4) by more than one win per year at their peaks.

Runner up: Bobby Bonds (55.2/41.8/48.5)
Barry's father was a pretty fair player in his day, best known for reaching the 30/30 club (homers and stolen bases) five times, an all-time record shared by father and son. A natural center fielder who got stuck in right field by the Giants because he had the misfortune of arriving when Willie Mays was still a going concern, Bonds seemed to spend much of his career under a cloud of bad luck. He and Reggie Jackson were almost exactly the same age and debuted one year apart. Both had power, considerable speed and a ton of strikeouts, and the two players finished with similar career rate stats (.268/.353/.471/.296 EqA for Bonds to .262/.356/.490/.300 for Jackson), Yet one was a superduperstar who won an MVP award and five World Series rings, and stuck around into his 40s. The other never finished higher than third in an MVP vote, played just three postseason games, left the majors at 35, and died young.

The leader at first base, Mark McGwire, had an eventful week, admitting during a Monday media blitz that he used steroids during his career. This was not exactly news; ever since an AP reporter named Steve Wilstein found a bottle of then-legal androstenedione in his locker, we've had plenty of clues that Big Mac was on the juice. He was named in Jose Canseco's book, involved in an FBI investigation into steroids trafficking called "Operation Equine," and last seen in public tearfully tiptoeing around his right not to self-incriminate during the 2005 dog-and-pony show in front of Congress.

It was a dark day for baseball, of course, and an even darker day for journalism, as many of the fourth estate hacks who goaded McGwire to come clean now vilified him for doing so. Via Twitter, Craig Calcaterra, who's been killing it over at NBC's "Circling the Bases" blog, offered a dollar to the first person who caught one of the come-clean camp slamming McGwire for coming clean, and soon claimed his own reward by nailing Jon Heyman, who twattled, "If you lie for 10 years, and everyone knows you're lying, what's the value of finally telling the truth?" Craig asked Heyman directly, "On October 18th you wrote 'its time for Mark McGwire to come clean.' If you don't think there's value, why did you say that?" He got no response.

Which isn't to say that Heyman was the only egregious offender. The ever-idiotic Dan Shaughnessy shat himself in public once again by invoking Hitler, always a popular pastime among morons on the Internet. Even the more reasonable Tom Verducci and Ken Rosenthal spent their time on the MLB Network after viewing McGwire's interview by declaring that now for sure they wouldn't vote for him for the Hall of Fame, because he had removed all doubt about his involvement with steroids. Guh.

McGwire sure as hell didn't cover himself with glory with his admission, and his belief that steroids actually had no effect on his level of accomplishment was laughably self-delusional. It was also, however, a pretty typical display of the athletic mindset, the long-hardened belief in one's own abilities often in the face of directly contradictory evidence ("I still believe I can get hitters out in this league," says the pink-slipped pitcher). Nonetheless, he apologized, showed contrition, cried enough times to make even children uncomfortable, did just about everything short of committing fireside harikiri. Yet it wasn't enough for some.

As is often the case when a big steroid story breaks, I spent about three and a half hours doing morning drive time phoners ��13 in all ��for the Fox News Radio network, sparring with some hosts, agreeing wholeheartedly with others and trying to put what was said into context. I found it notable that though he was hired as the Cardinals' hitting coach back in late October, his "Meet the Press" moment, which had to be a precondition for his return from oblivion, occurred after the Hall of Fame election cycle, perhaps so the slugger could avoid the accusation that he was pandering to BBWAA voters or at the very least could avoid overshadowing the other candidates on the ballot. Yet some hosts didn't seem to understand why this genie was coming out of the bottle now.

Some of the hosts were well-prepared and had the news in perspective; the guys on Louisville's WHAS and San Diego's KOGO were especially good. The poor guy on WMT in Cedar Rapids, an admitted Cardinals fan, sounded like he had contemplating throwing himself out of his office window but had realized that it being just the second story, probably wouldn't put him out of his misery. On the other hand, the host on Omaha's KFAB asked a rambling two-minute question in which he tried to connect the steroid culture with President Bill Clinton's infidelity, doing so much pontificating that I thought he was about to kiss a baby and announce a Senate bid. Being a good lefty, I called him on it, accused him of scoring political points irrelevant to the matter at hand and stuck to my talking points. This was not my first rodeo.

So how do I feel about McGwire? Disappointed and saddened but hardly surprised. He's a product of a very specific time in baseball history, one where he made some bad choices in which the MLB Players Association, the owners, the commissioner, the media and fans were quite complicit. It's the height of hypocrisy to hang him for those choices and declare that we need to expunge his numbers from the record book. Hell, if the stats from the thrown 1919 Black Sox World Series � as grievous a crime as has ever been committed against the integrity of baseball � are on the books, then a few tainted home runs can certainly stand. Records record what happened on the field; it's up to us to interpret them properly. Sadder and wiser, we move on with our lives.

All Hall, All the Time

2010-01-07T16:05:00.004-05:00

Wow, now that was an unintended hiatus ��thirty days since my last blog post here at Futility Infielder. Needless to say, I've been plenty busy over the past month, even cobbling away at my winter work during a 10-day trip to Mexico in honor of my 40th birthday. After completing my work for the Baseball Prospectus 2010 annual and the Fantasy Baseball Index, I'm back in circulation. Aside from those responsibilities and my random Twitter activity, I've primarily been occupied with the Hall of Fame vote via my annual JAWS series:

��Part one examined the first and second basemen on the ballot, including the Crime Dog, the Big Cat, Big Mac and Roberto Alomar.

��Part two examined the shortstops and third basemen on the ballot, including Barry Larkin, Alan Trammell, Robin Ventura and Edgar Martinez, who played third before migrating to his natural home as a designated hitter.

��Part three examined the outfielders, including Tim Raines and Andre Dawson.

��Part four, published mere hours before the voting results were announced, covered the pitchers, including Bert Blyleven and Jack Morris.

The four-part series identified seven players as worthy of election to the Hall (Alomar, Blyleven, Larkin, Martinez, McGwire, Raines and Trammell) but as I conceded in the conclusion of the finale, I wasn't at all surprised when that slate was shut out and Dawson gained entry; in fact, it's exactly what I predicted. Today's addendum to the series breaks down the actual voting results:

The announcement of Dawson's election was overshadowed in some circles by two near-misses that were shocking for entirely opposite reasons. Stathead pet candidate Blyleven, in his 13th year on the ballot, moved up from receiving just over 60 percent in the last two years to 74.2 percent, a mere five votes short of enshrinement. Alomar, in his first year on the ballot, received 73.7 percent, falling just eight votes shy of the magic number.

Whether the latter is due to the collective grudge still held by certain writers over the infamous 1996 incident in which Alomar spit in the face of umpire John Hirschbeck�an impulsive, unpremeditated act for which Hirschbeck has not only forgiven Alomar but gone on to befriend and defend him as the two have worked together to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote awareness of the genetic disorder which claimed the life of the ump's son�or due to the BBWAA's more generalized institutional politics, which create a hair-splitting artificial distinction between first-ballot Hall of Famers and the rest, is unclear. Likely the incident had direct bearing on some voters' willingness to invoke that first-ballot distinction.

In any event, it's highly likely that a year from now, Alomar will gain induction. He received the highest-ever vote percentage of any first-year player not elected; in fact, since the BBWAA switched back to an annual vote in 1966, no player has ever polled above 43 percent on his first ballot and not eventually won election from the BBWAA. Furthermore, no player has ever polled above 64 percent and not eventually gained induction by either the BBWAA or Veterans Committee routes, which means Blyleven is practically sitting in the catbird seat, too. The Hall of Fame might as well start casting both plaques now. Particularly since next year's class,, which is headed by Jeff Bagwell, Rafael Palmeiro, John Olerud, Kevin Brown, and Larry Walker, isn't terribly strong, and the following year's class is as thin as prison gruel. As I joked in Wednesday's chat, there may not be five players worthy of more than a paragraph in my annual JAWS rundown, and Bernie Williams is easily the top candidate on the ballot, but far from a slam dunk.

In any event, it's the first time in Hall history that two players on the same ballot missed by fewer than 10 votes. Blyleven's five-vote shortfall was the fifth-smallest in history, and the sting of the near-miss was amplified by the news that the 539-vote tally included five blank ballots, cast either as a protest or as evidence of an ongoing midlife crisis. Each of those five blank ballots thus required three votes in favor of a given candidate to offset. Had that ignominious quintet gotten lost on the way to the mailbox, Blyleven would have still fallen a stitch short with 74.9 percent of the vote; in this game they don't round up. In fact, he needed the support of all of them, at least one of whom publicly declared during his supermarket-aisle meltdown that he had voted for the pitcher last year.

As agonizing as the near-misses were, I'm optimistic that both Blyleven and Alomar are on track for next year. Furthermore, I think there's hope for Raines and Martinez:

Among the holdovers, Tim Raines (30.4 percent in his third year) received nearly an eight percent bump, a showing that's at least somewhat encouraging. Sutter (29.1 percent), Duke Snider (21.2 percent), and Luis Aparicio (12.0 percent) all received less during their third years of eligibility and still eventually got the call, with the latter representing the biggest comeback of any candidate to gain BBWAA entry. Mark McGwire (23.7 percent in his fourth year), rose nearly two percent from last year and set a personal best by 0.1 percent, but with more than three-quarters of the electorate giving him the cold shoulder over steroid allegations or simply his continued unwillingness to talk about the past, he's going nowhere.

Besides Larkin and Alomar, only two other first-year candidates received above five percent, the showing needed to remain on the ballot for another year. Edgar Martinez got 36.2 percent, and Fred McGriff received 21.5 percent. While those showings may disappoint their supporters, rallying from this point is hardly unprecedented. Consider the less-than-stellar debuts of these 11, all of whom eventually earned the requisite 75 percent:
Player %
Gary Carter 42.3%
Hoyt Wilhelm 41.7%
Rich Gossage 33.3%
Eddie Mathews 32.3%
Jim Rice 29.8%
Early Wynn 27.9%
Luis Aparicio 27.8%
Bruce Sutter 23.9%
Billy Williams 23.4%
Don Drysdale 21.0%
Duke Snider 17.0%

Onto a few choice questions from the chat:

dianagramr (NYC): Hi Jay ... thanks for the chat. Is Edgar Martinez's run creation in the ballpark with Jim Rice's, when you take into account Rice's subpar defense in LF? In other words, how much better must a DH be in order to make the Hall, assuming voters take defense into account?

JJ: If Edgar's overall production WERE the ballpark, Jim Rice's overall production would be stuck in the breakdown lane 50 miles away. It ain't even close. Edgar accumulated double Rice's WARP over the course of his career (68.9 to 34.2) and about 2.5 wins more per year at his peak. (46.4 to 28.5). I can't tell you if that will be enough for the voters because there really isn't much evidence to suggest voters DO take defense into account at all, or even that some of them think rationally about the process.

Christina Kahrl (BP Volcano Hideout): Five blank ballots were submitted, apparently. While I can understand that more readily than ballots that have Morris but not Blyleven or Dawson or Parker but not Raines, that seems interesting.

JJ: Blank ballots are voters' way of throwing themselves on the ground in the middle of the produce aisle and hoping mommy notices.

Especially given that Mariotti was one of the guys who voted for Blyleven in the past.

Nick Stone (New York, NY): Jay, since I'll be under a pile of work when the HoF announcement is made, I've tried to come up with a question that will cover every conceivable issue raised by the results: What does the (election/stagnant support/dropping off the ballot) of (Andre Dawson/Bert Blyleven/David Segui) say about the BBWAA's general attitude towards (impatient mustache aficionados/Dutch Old Masters/ill-considered bleach jobs)? Does the dramatic falling off of the ballot of (Karros/Raines/McGwire) mean baseball will change the composition of the Veterans Committee in order to better represent (the undead/people with a basic understanding of baseball/chicks who dig the long ball)?

JJ: Too funny! I definitely think that the disappearance of Segui from the ballot is a shot across the bow at those ill-considered bleach jobs, and that the road to the Hall just got considerably longer for Mike Piazza, Alex Rodriguez, and Bret Boone. The disappearance of Karros from the ballot means that the VC will be changed to better accommodate the undead.

Bern Wang (bernwang@hotmail.com): I doubt Bernie Williams will ever get in to the HOF since he was usually overlooked on those Yankee teams (never finished high in MVP voting) and so he won't "seem" like a HOF to many of these voters...but do you think he has a decent case? He had maybe 8 great years in a row and was quite possibly the most valuable player on those Yankee teams from 1994 through 2002. At the very least, I guess with Jim Rice being in, Bernie definitely has a legit case for being in as well since he was clearly better than Jim Rice.

JJ: Bernie's got four more World Series rings than Jim Rice, and the rest of his candidacy is hardly anything to be ashamed of. You'd be surprised what hitting .300 and playing center field for the World Champion Yankees can do for a guy's Cooperstown credentials. Not that it helped Mickey Rivers...

And if that ain't enough on the topic, I recorded a Baseball Prospectus Radio segment with Will Carroll today which you can hear here, via BP's home page, or via iTunes (subscribe to the Baseball Prospectus podcast).

Quick Thoughts on the Blockbuster

2009-12-08T14:38:00.006-05:00

Crawling out of my hole to offer a quick take on a nearly-completed three-way blockbuster between the Yankees, Tigers and Diamondbacks, I'm left with these take-home points.

��The Yankees get center fielder Curtis Granderson at the cost of Austin Jackson, Ian Kennedy and Phil Coke. It's a win-now move for a team that just won it all, which makes it rather curious. Granderson's performance collapsed against lefties (.183/.245/.239 in 2009) and during the final week his routes to the ball looked awful, but he's basically a plus defensively according to the major systems, and a relatively affordable player ($5.5/$8.25/$10 million in 2010-2012 with a $13 million club option and $2 million buyout for 2013). The Yankees' big-picture desire to decrease payroll from their 2009 level wound up costing them a decent prospect whose upside may be Grandersoneque in Jackson (#7 on Baseball America's list of top International League prospects). Kennedy has some upside as well, but he's managed to throw more than 120 innings in just one of three professional seasons, and is more likely to wind up a fourth starter or setup man at this stage. Coke is a lefty who can get guys out but has gopher problems as well -- a completely replaceable commodity.

Granderson's arrival strengthens the team's hand in negotiations with Johnny Damon. They're now dealing from strength, and don't have to dance to the tune Damon and his agent call. That may preclude him coming back, but it also precludes the team making an overly generous deal just to retain somebody whose value is a bit distorted by the euphoria of winning the World Series this year.

��The Tigers have $72 million of junk on their 2010 payroll in the form of contracts to Dontrelle Willis, Nate Robertson, Jeremy Bonderman, Magglio Ordonez, Brandon Inge and Carlos Guillen, a group that was worth all of 3.6 WARP3 last year. They trimmed none of that deadwood while trading the two players, Granderson and Edwin Jackson, who might have enticed another team to eat salary in return for taking on a good player. In the past, Granderson would have been handcuffed to a Robertson or a Willis. The Tigers do get a decent haul in the form of Austin Jackson, Coke and the Diamondbacks' young hurler Max Scherzer, but this is the move of a team rebuilding, not a team contending.

��As for the Diamondbacks, all I've got on my scorecard are underpants gnomes, ? and profit. I like Scherzer (4.12 ERA, 9.2 K/9 in 170.1 innings as a 24-year-old) more than Jackson (3.62 ERA, 6.8 K/9 in 214 innings) because he's got better command of a more electrifying arsenal, though I suppose there's a bet to be made on Kennedy's upside as well.

Update: Apparently Daniel Schlereth, the Diamondbacks' #2 pitching prospect coming into the year, is also headed to Detroit. Schlereth grazed the majors last year, going 1-4 with a 5.89 ERA and 22/15 K/BB ratio in 18.1 innings. He's a pure reliever who offers mid-90s velocity from the left side, a rarity. The deal now makes even less sense for the Diamondbacks, and more for the Tigers.

Arbitration Blues

2009-12-02T12:39:00.004-05:00

Tuesday marked baseball's arbitration deadline about which I had much to say in the Twitscape regarding both the Yankees and Dodgers. Neither team offered any of their free agents arbitration, decreasing the likelihood that they'll return, but the landscapes surrounding those decisions are quite different.

The Yankees' only Type A free agent is Johnny Damon, who's coming off an excellent season capped by a key role in the team's World Series win. He made $13 million a year over the life of his deal, but just turned 36. A one-year deal for him to return via arbitration might have cost the Yankees $15 million, a figure that apparently was too rich for Brian Cashman's blood. Damon's got a strong enough hand that he can likely do better in length if not average annual salary, even from the Yankees (two years, $25 million with an option, perhaps).

What's annoying is that because he's a Type A, foregoing the arbitration offer costs the Yankees two high draft picks, one in the 16-30 range of the draft (the top 15 picks are protected), the other in the supplemental phase (31-50, roughly speaking). That's a substantial amount of value; four years ago, colleague Nate Silver estimated those two picks as worth $9 million for the 16-30 and $3 million for the supplemental. Since then, the market has leveled off, inflation has occurred, and WARP has changed, but if anything, the value of those picks is probably higher. Apparently, the fear of being stuck with a pricey one-year deal � though really, it's difficult to get too badly burned on such a pact � outweighed the return for the Yanks, offering further evidence that even Cashman is on a budget.

The Yankees also decided not to offer arbitration to Andy Pettitte and Hideki Matsui, but both of them are Type B free agents, meaning all the Yankees turned down was the right to supplemental picks worth about $3 million apiece. Weighed against the higher likelihood that both would accept and win their cases at prices out of Cashman's control, again, the risk was apparently too great. It's still a likelihood that at least Pettitte returns; the most recent Collective Bargaining Agreement struck down a provision that teams who didn't offer arbitration to their free agents were prevented from signing them until the following spring. Now, the two sides can hopefully negotiate a more sensible deal.

If the Yankees' moves generated a few headscratches, the Dodgers' moves left observers � and particularly fans of the club � slackjawed. They had two Type As, Orlando Hudson and Randy Wolf, both of whom were extremely unlikely to return. Hudson, who was benched in September and never regained his job, poured gasoline all over whatever bridge back to Chavez Ravine existed, while Wolf, as the second-best pitcher available on the market after John Lackey, will almost certainly draw multi-year offers that would exceed what he could get in arbitration. Neither of the two was offered arbitration, a pair of decisions that offer resounding evidence that GM Ned Colletti's hands have been tied by the unseemly divorce proceedings of the McCourts.

The Dodger blogosphere understandably went into a lather over the news, and I threw some fuel on the fire via Twitter: "Picturing Colletti wearing nothing but sandwich board reading 'What part of "We have no money" don't you get?'" I wrote, followed shortly by a back-of-envelope calculation based upon Nate's research: "So, for avoiding 4 bonuses ($1-2 mil per, max), Dodgers lose out on $24 mil of picks by not offering Hudson & Wolf arb." The conclusion, to me, was obvious: "Frank McCourt hates America more than he does his wife."

As heads cooled, the reality of just how screwed the Dodgers are began to set in. In the aftermath, Colletti framed the non-moves as "made strictly from a baseball perspective," adding in a separate note (link unavailable), "While I am blindfolded and bound to this chair, it really is a comfortable chair. I ask my family and friends to remain calm and don't try to be heroes, as I am unharmed and will be released if you comply with the demands."

Despite having lowered payroll by $18 million dollars between Opening Days 2008 and 2009, clearing $30 million more via the current crop of free agents, and saving about another $13 million via Manny Ramirez ($8 million in lost salary due to the suspension, and $5 million less in 2010 than in 2009), the Dodgers are expected not to make any major additions this offseason because eight key young players � Chad Billingsley, Jonathan Broxton, Andre Ethier, Matt Kemp, Hong-Chih Kuo, James Loney, Russell Martin, and George Sherrill � are arbitration-eligible, and thus in line for sizable raises. Furthermore, not only are they pennywise and pound-foolish when it comes to a substantial return on a relatively small investment in 2010 first-round picks, but they've been that way for longer than most of us realize. In an around-the-horn play, True Blue LA pointed me to a Memories of Kevin Malone entry which in turn pointed to a Los Angeles Times piece containing research from Baseball America, including the following double whammy:

The Dodgers have paid $8.5 million in signing bonuses for draft picks over the last two years � the lowest figure among all major league teams, according to Baseball America.

The Dodgers, so proud of their heritage in Asia and Latin America, today are a non-factor in bidding for top amateur players abroad. In 2008, according to Baseball America, major league clubs combined to sign 115 such players for bonuses of more than $100,000. The Dodgers did not sign one.

Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. Still on a roll, True Blue details a laundry list of cost-cutting maneuvers over the past two years; basically, because of a mandate that they be more or less payroll-neutral, their big trade acquisitions have cost them better prospects, such as Andy LaRoche, 2007 second-round pick Michael Watt, and Indians' top prospect Carlos Santana, a 22-year-old catcher whose loss resounds given Martin's 2009 decline. Quoth colleague Kevin Goldstein: "Santana's bat is so special that if he was a first-base prospect, he'd still be elite." I asked Kevin if he would rank among the game's top 10 or 25 prospects in his 2010 Top 100 list, and he suggested that he'd likely be somewhere in between those two numbers. Ouchie.

The big concern for 2010 comes down to how the Dodgers are going to fill their rotation behind Clayton Kershaw, Billingsley and Hiroki Kuroda. They have some in-house prospects (Scott Elbert, James McDonald and Josh Lindblom) and suspects (Eric Stults, Charlie Haeger), but none of them is so obviously ready that they are a guarantee to fill even one spot. Which means that they not only need to find the next Randy Wolf, but they'll need substantial reinforcements as well. And I don't mean Jeff Freakin' Weaver or Braden Freakin' Looper. Their road back to the playoffs, let alone the NLCS, just got a bit harder.

Even so, Dodger Thoughts' Jon Weisman outlines a best-case scenario expectation for 2010, while Mike Scioscia's Tragic Illness offers a modest proposal that the team trade Andre Ethier for pitching. I don't really think the choices help the 2010 club enough to tempt Colletti, who's been forced to think about nothing but This Year by ownership's shortsightedness, into attempting the pursuit of any of them, but it's an interesting piece if only because it serves to remind that the team may need to breach its current core in order to improve in other areas.

It's a dark day for Dodger baseball, as both Weisman and MSTI conclude. I concur, to the point that I'm going to have to substantially rewrite my Baseball Prospectus 2010 team essay in light of this news. Which is about the last thing I need given all the other fires I've got going.

� � ��

In better news, ironically released the same day (perhaps to soften the blow of the arbitration shitstorm), the Dodgers made it official that Vin Scully would return for his 61st season in 2010, and that he'd continue to do NL West road games as well as the home games. Big League Stew calls attention to the good news with a three-minute clip of Scully highlights dating back to the days of Jackie Robinson, and including some non-baseball ones. True Blue LA ups the ante with a link to Scully's nine-minute call of the Kirk Gibson home run in the 1988 World Series. Also on YouTube is Scully's incomparable call of the four consecutive homer game set to a video-game re-enactment. Bask in some of the work of the game's greatest announcer, and remember, Dodger fans, that we at least have that to look forward to in the coming year.

Clearing the Bases�Post-Turkey Lurkey Edition

2009-12-02T10:58:00.007-05:00

Still buried in winter work, and will be for the next few weeks, limiting much of my current writing to 140-character missives via Twitter. Rounding up some of my stray BP links in case you haven't been following along:

��A few weeks back I looked at 2009 home run rates, overall, by league, and by ballpark. Overall, home runs per game increased by 3.3 percent this past season, a figure that masks a 4.9 percent drop in the NL and a 12.7 percent climb in the AL, producing the widest AL-NL split since 1996. The changes aren't entirely explained by the two new New York parks, though Nu-Yankee Stadium was the easiest place to homer (1.463 per team per game) and CitiField the sixth-hardest (0.802 per team per game).

��Next up was an analysis of the top two free agent hitters available, Matt Holliday and Jason Bay. The pair share the same position (left field) and thus have relevance to the beasts of the AL East given that they've both got vacancies ��the latter, of course, having served as the Sox's left fielder since Manny Ramirez's trade to the Dodgers. The two are very close as hitters, with virtually identical translated OBP and SLG lines (career-wise) but differing walk rates and batting averages: "The major point of contrast is that Bay walks considerably more often, drawing an unintentional pass in 11.8 percent of his career plate appearances, compared to 8.2 percent for Holliday. It all comes out in the wash: Holliday owns a Clay Davenport-translated career line of .312/.384/.541, while Bay is at .285/.384/.540."

Where the two differ is defense. Using a three-year average of the big three defensive systems (BP's Fielding Runs Above Average, Fangraphs' Ultiamte Zone Rating, and John Dewan's Plus/Minus), Holliday has a staggering 18-run annual advantage, making him worth something like $3.6 to $5.4 million per year more depending upon where you set the value of a marginal win.

��In an Unfiltered post, I revisited Jaffe's Ugly MVP Predictor in advance of the AL MVP announcement. At the time of the original article, Joe Mauer's Twins were a game under .500, making him an extremely unlikely winner based upon Wild Card era voting trends, but the Twins' late rush to the postseason vaulted him into the system's crosshairs. JUMP doesn't peg him as the winner, but it places him in the AL top three between Mark Teixeira and Derek Jeter. That classifies him as a "secondary hit" for the system, which as designed can put every MVP since 1995 except 1999's Pudge Rodriguez in that class. Which isn't to say either of those Yanks should have won, just that historical precedent favors big sluggers and middle infielders on 100-win teams over catchers on Wild Card winners. In the NL, JUMP nails Albert Pujols as the winner, which wasn't too surprising given his monster year.

��In part of what will be a six-part series on the winter free agent market, I examined the available relievers. It's a group that upon examining three-year track records for performance and health, can basically be divided in two by a sizable gulch, with the top six clearly separated from the rest of the pack. Number one on the list is Billy Wagner, who agreed to a deal with the Braves last night. Numbers three and six, Rafael Soriano and Mike Gonzalez, who both spent time as Atlanta's closer last year, are that much more available; both have drawn interest from the Yankees and Red Sox. Number seven, the first one on the other side of the divide, is Brandon Lyon, who apparently is also drawing interest from the Yankees, but it sounds as though their rotation plans need to fall into place first.

��Which brings us to Tuesday's arbitration news, which, come to think of it, deserves a post of its own. Stay tuned.

Thank Heavens for Angell

2009-11-26T11:33:00.006-05:00

Among the numerous things I'm thankful for every year, one of them is the arrival of Roger Angell's annual recap in The New Yorker, which I sat down and read last night over a bottle of seasonal ale after tiring of discerning the minutiae of various Angels pitching prospects. From Angels to Angell, now that I think about it. The piece is in the November 30 issue, which hit my mailbox this week, but alas, the digital edition is available only to subscribers.

Angell is 89 now, at some complain that he's got an air of things-were-better-in-my-day about him. Alex Belth cherrypicks a few of the piece's great quotes regarding Alex Rodriguez, Reggie Jackson, and Hideki Matsui, and they all contain a hint of disdain for the present as opposed to the past. Nonetheless, even if he weren't still such a master of prose, Angell's perspective would be a valuable one simply because the breadth of baseball history he witnessed firsthand � back to the days of Ruth and Gehrig, or the Gashouse Gang, or Willie Mays in his prime in the Polo Grounds � grants him an authority on the subject that's virtually unmatched. If he sounds a bit crotchety at times, well, where the hell else are you gonna get a comparison like this:

He throws with an elegant flail, hiding the ball behind his hip or knee and producing it from behind his left shoulder, already in full delivery. His finish brings his left leg up astern like a semaphore, while his arm swings back across his waist. This columnar closing posture � he's not twisted off to one side, like other pitchers, but driving forward, with the back leg still aloft, as his eyes follow the pitch � is classic and reminded me strongly of some fabled pitcher from my boyhood. He looked a little dusty and work-worn out there, which may have contributed to this impression. I thought about Dizzy Dean or Lon (the Arkansas Hummingbird) Warneke, but they were righties. Then I remembered Hal Newhouser, the Tigers' lefty ace in the nineteen-forties, who ate up batters much in the way that Lee does. Later, I put my question in a phone call to Seymour Siwoff, the dean of the Elias Sports Bureau. "Hmmm," he said when i mentioned the flying back leg, "let me think about this for a minute." There was a pause, and then he said, "Why do I think it was somebody on the Tigers?"

A few other favorites... On the American League Championship Series:

Nothing much about the Championship Series with the Los Angeles Angels feels like fun in retrospect, even from this distance. Mostly, it was terrifying. I remember calling home once in mid-game from the Yankee Stadium press box, and hearing "I can't stand any more of this!" when my wife picked up the phone. Did anyone actually enjoy Game 5, out there in Anaheim, when the home-team Angels went ahead by four runs in the first ininig, watched that lead disintegrate in a six-run Yankee seventh, and came back with a winning three of their own in the bottom half? Top and botom, that inning required forty-four minutes, and it felt like a colonoscopy."

On the Yankees' outsized ace:

Too bad, but I'm not going to get around to C.C. Sabathia's sunny looks and pavillion-sized pant and weird, white-toed spikes, or ask batters how they feel about his fastball-cutter-changeup assortment that arrives (he's six-seven and two hundred and ninety pounds) like a loaded tea tray coming down an airshaft.

On Derek Jeter: "Just when you think you appreciate Derek enough, you don't."

One could say the same thing about Angell. My only beef with the piece was that it felt too short, lacking a grander perspective on the regular season and rushing to a close with the suddenness and finality of Game 6 itself, leaving us to face alone what Ken Burns termed "the hard facts of autumn." I wanted to read Angell's unwritten digression about the new Yankee Stadium and his deeper thoughts about Sabathia; when exactly are we going to get those from the nearly nonagenarian bard, whose output is down to these annual summaries? I realize that print is his medium and that the contraction of magazine advertising and the high cost of paper restricts his space. Why not produce a double-length piece for the web that we can, as Alex did, print out and read at our leisure? It seems like an opportunity missed for a guy who's got all too few innings left.

That said, it's still a damn good excuse to plunk down $5 and enjoy one of the old masters. Get thee to a newsstand while you still can, my friends.

Wishing a happy thanksgiving to family, friends and readers. Here's hoping you're enjoying your turkey and stuffing among those whom you love.

Miller's Crossing

2009-11-18T10:27:00.003-05:00

The nation's leading sticks in the mud, the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee, are having a vote in a few weeks. Two of them, in fact, one on umpires and managers and the other on executives and pioneers. Marvin Miller, the former executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association who led the fight to end the Reserve Clause, is among the latter group. BizofBaseball's Maury Brown examines the ballot and asks if this is finally the year for the man who irrevocably reshaped baseball's landscape.

Sadly, no, I don't think so. I had the pleasure of interviewing Miller for a Baseball Prospectus feature a year and a half ago. Still feisty and sharp as a tack at 91 years old, he had just announced that he was fed up with the Veterans Committee's election process and wished to be taken out of consideration for all future voting:

As former executive director of the players' union that negotiated these changes, I find myself unwilling to contemplate one more rigged Veterans Committee whose members are handpicked to reach a particular outcome while offering a pretense of a democratic vote. It is an insult to baseball fans, historians, sports writers and especially to those baseball players who sacrificed and brought the game into the 21st century. At the age of 91 I can do without a farce."

Alas, the Hall has not abided by his wishes, as the VC's screening committee has put him up for yet another vote � and likely another defeat.

In our interview, Miller noted that the deck was stacked against him because nine of the 12 members on the VC had management ties. "[On]e thing a trade union leader learns to do is how to count votes in advance," he told me. "Whenever I took one look at what I was faced with, it was obvious to me it was not gonna happen."

Specifically, Miller was referring to the fact that three of the members of the VC � Bill Giles, Andy MacPhail and John Harrington � were front office executives and management hardliners during the late-Eighties collusion era.* Frustrated by getting their asses kicked by Miller, they tried to break the union by conspiring to chill the market for free agents after the 1985, 1986, and 1987 seasons. Their crime wound up costing teams $280 million dollars in damages, according to the 1990 settlement (pdf). From my BP feature:

In the 2007 election, [former commissioner and Miller adversary Bowie] Kuhn had garnered just 14 out of 84 votes, well behind not only Miller but six other candidates. In fact, of the elected, only [former Dodger owner Walter] O'Malley had received significant support beforehand:
2007 2008
Barney Dreyfuss ---- 83.3%*
Bowie Kuhn 17.3% 83.3%*
Walter O'Malley 44.4% 75.0%*
Ewing Kauffman ---- 41.7%
John Fetzer ---- 33.3%
Marvin Miller 63.0% 25.0%
Bob Howsam ---- 25.0%
Buzzie Bavasi 37.0% <25.0%
Gabe Paul 12.3% <25.0%
John McHale ---- <25.0%
Bill White 29.6% ----
August Busch Jr. 16.0% ----
Charley O. Finley 12.3% ----
Phil Wrigley 11.1% ----
The reason for that stunning reversal was a deck stacked significantly in favor of Kuhn and against Miller. Of the 12 men on the committee, only Monte Irvin, Bobby Brown and Harmon Killebrew ever played in the majors, and none of them played a single game in the post-Reserve Clause era. Along with three writers � Paul Hagen (Philadelphia Daily News), Rick Hummel (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) and Hal McCoy (Dayton Daily News) � the committee contained no less than seven owners or executives: Brown (American League president), John Harrington (Red Sox), Jerry Bell (Twins), Bill DeWitt Jr.,(Cardinals), Bill Giles (Phillies), David Glass (Royals) and Andy MacPhail (Orioles). If anyone needed further evidence that the vote was reliant on the Old Boy network, it's worth noting that DeWitt, Giles and MacPhail are legacies whose fathers (and in MacPhail's case, a grandfather) were on the management side during the Reserve Clause era. Worse, Giles, Harrington and MacPhail were all on the management side during baseball's disgraceful collusion saga in the Eighties.

"Now I took one look at that committee and I didn't have to have any help. I couldn't possibly get nine votes out of that committee," says Miller, noting not only the taint of collusion among those ranks but also more subtle links to management. "Just take Monte Irvin. Fine player, et cetera, but after he was a player, he worked for Bowie Kuhn for more than 10 years. Would you expect him to vote for me?"

Were this a jury, Miller could have demanded a mistrial due to the slate's bias, but Hall candidates have no such recourse. As Jim Bouton succinctly summarized, "Essentially, the decision for putting a union leader in the Hall of Fame was handed over to a bunch of executives and former executives. Marvin Miller kicked their butts and took power away from the baseball establishment � do you really think those people are going to vote him in? It's a joke."

According to Brown's article, Bell, DeWitt, Giles, MacPhail and Glass � a bloc of enough stooges to prevent Miller's election right there � are all still on the VC. The three players have been replaced... by two players, Robin Roberts and Tom Seaver. Both were among those who declined a seat on the committee the last time around, and while perhaps they can more eloquently state Miller's case to the rest of the committee, that's still one fewer vote than he had going in.

I'm torn here. While I'm 100 percent convinced that the man should be in the Hall of Fame, I also respect his wishes. I suppose I'd rather see him tell the Hall exactly how far to shove it if the election were to somehow turn out in his favor. Given the makeup of the VC, I simply don't see that happening. The bottom line is that we're in for another farce.

* In the interview transcript, I mistakenly listed the three collusion-linked execs Miller was implicating as DeWitt, MacPhail and Harrington. The feature, which was published a few days prior, gets it right.

Everybody Wins, Especially Greinke

2009-11-17T23:23:00.000-05:00

The Royals' Zack Greinke was a runaway winner in the AL Cy Young voting, which was announced on Tuesday, netting 25 out of 28 first-place votes. Greinke finished with a major league-low 2.16 ERA while striking out 242 hitters in 229.1 innings. His won-loss record was 16-8, certainly respectable, but also tied with Brandon Webb for the lowest win total by a starting pitcher in a non-strike season.

Indeed, it's a win for advanced metrics today. The Baseball Writers Association of America voters took a bold step into the 21st century today by demonstrating an understanding that Greinke's win total was compromised by playing for a last place club, and that other statistics ��ERA, VORP, WARP, SNLVAR, FIP, DIPS and their acronymous playmates � better illustrated his value. Not only that, the winner's underlying strategy on the mound has been colored by his understanding of sabermetrics:

Hernandez had two first-place votes, and Detroit's Justin Verlander the other. The Yankees' C. C. Sabathia finished fourth, and Toronto's Roy Halladay was fifth. All of those pitchers had more wins than Greinke, who was 16-8 for a team that tied for last in the A.L. Central. Hernandez was 19-5 with a 2.49 E.R.A.

"I thought that could push him over the top, because his won-loss record was way better than mine," Greinke said. "But I'm also a follower, since Brian Bannister's on our team, of sabermetric stuff and going into details of stats about what you can control."

Bannister, a right-handed starter, is known for his appreciation of modern pitching metrics, which emphasize the factors for which pitchers are essentially responsible: walks, strikeouts, home runs and hit batters. In Greinke, he found a like mind.

"He�s extremely bright, and he�s really picked up on using all the information out there to make his game better," Bannister said by telephone. "He's always had the talent. His confidence level, which is extremely high, combined with his knowledge of the numbers behind the game now, definitely makes him one of the best pitchers in the world."

Bannister said Greinke has learned to adjust his pitching based on the advanced defensive statistics. Because of the size of the outfield at Kauffman Stadium and the strength of the Royals� outfielders, relative to their infielders, it sometimes made more sense to induce fly balls.

"David DeJesus had our best zone rating,� Bannister said, referring to the Royals' left fielder. "So a lot of times, Zack would pitch for a fly ball at our park instead of a ground ball, just because the zone rating was better in our outfield and it was a big park."

To that end, Bannister introduced Greinke to FIP, or Fielding Independent Pitching, the statistic Greinke named Tuesday as his favorite. It is a formula that measures how well a pitcher performed, regardless of his fielders. According to fangraphs.com, Greinke had the best FIP in the majors.

"That�s pretty much how I pitch, to try to keep my FIP as low as possible," Greinke said.

Congratulations to Zack Greinke, the thinking man's Cy Young winner, to the voters, for getting it right, and to all the writers and researchers out there who've tirelessly pressed the case that baseball's new alphabet is more than an academic argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, that the findings of sabermetrics have practical application on the field even among the game's elite players. It feels like we all won something today.

For more on Greinke's win and the progress of the old guard, see Joe Posnanski, the man next to the word "more" in the dictionary.

The King of the Sports Page Ledes the Way

2009-11-16T21:29:00.000-05:00

Last week, Bronx Banter's Alex Belth put together a three-part series (one, two, three) on some of the greatest ledes � the opening sentences or paragraphs of newspaper or magazine articles � in sportswriting history, lines which pack a wallop that's stood the test of time. A student of the genre, Alex called upon great works by some of the heaviest hitters of bygone eras, including Red Smith, Heywood Broun, John Lardner, W.C. Heinz, Grantland Rice, Roger Kahn, and Shirley Povich. Here's Smith, on Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World":

Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it, The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly implausible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.

Baseball wasn't the only sport represented in that Murderer's Row; football, boxing and horse racing were prominently featured as well. There was even one devoted to auto racing, courtesy of Jim Murray, who devoted this immortal lede to a column on the Indianapolis 500: "Gentlemen, start your coffins."

Though I actually didn't get to read a ton of his pieces while growing up, Murray was a favorite of mine based on the handful of Los Angeles Times columns which crossed my path in my travels, and the occasional one which would show up closer to home via syndication. Thanks to the magic of Google, I located the first Murray column that I remember reading. It's from 1982, written on the occasion of the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, and yes, it's got a hell of a lede:

You folks all know my opinion of the Pebble Beach golf course. If it were human, they'd hang it from the highest yardarm in the British fleet. It's the golfing equivalent of the Spanish Main. Or the Spanish Inquisition.

These 18 holes were not cut in the picturesque countryside of Carmel Bay. They were dragged out of British prisons and shanghaied onto this hell ship. They are a classic band of cutthroats, blackguards without mercy, kindness or compassion.

Every one of them has murder in his heart, a knife in his teeth, hate in his soul, and a bottle of rum in his pocket. He'd kill you for your parrot.

Further down the article, where Murray decries the obscurities in the Open's field of players, is a classic requiem for a duffer that's stuck with me for more than a quarter century: "Stan Stopa is here. He's from Wilshire Boulevard. That's Wilshire Boulevard in Metaire, La., not the one in Los Angeles. Stan should be back early, folks."

I own a few Murray anthologies, so in a bit of downtime, I sent Alex a representative selection of his great baseball ledes, which he compiled into yet another entry in his Bronx Banter series. The first four of them hail from The Great Ones, the fifth from The Jim Murray Collection, both of which can be had for less than five bucks a pop via your friendly online used bookseller.

Apropos of the recent World Series, here's a pair of 'em, one on Reggie Jackson from October 19, 1977 ("Reggie Renames the House That Ruth Built") and one on Orel Hershiser from September 28, 1988 ("They Won't Call Him Dr. Zero for Nothing"):

NEW YORK-Excuse me while I wipe up the bloodstains and carry off the wounded. The Dodgers forgot to circle the wagons.

Listen! You don�t go into the woods with a bear. You don�t go into a fog with Jack the Ripper. You don�t get in a car with Al Capone. You don�t get on a ship with Morgan the Pirate. You don�t go into shark waters with a nosebleed. You don�t wander into Little Bighorn with General Custer.

And you don�t come into Yankee Stadium needing a win to stay alive in a World Series. Not unless you have a note pinned to you telling them where to send the remains. If any.

� � ��

Norman Rockwell would have loved Orel Hershiser. The prevailing opinion is, he wasn't drafted, he just came walking off a Saturday Evening Post cover one day with a pitcher�s glove, a cap 2 sizes too big and a big balloon of bubble gum coming out of his mouth.

You can read the entirety of the Reggie piece here via Google Books, and the Orel piece here via a cache of the L.A. Times's archived version.

Upon Murray's passing, Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly eulogized him in the magazine's pages, writing, "He wrote the nation's best sports column for 37 delicious years at the Los Angeles Times, but, come to think of it, the column was about sports sort of the way Citizen Kane was about sleds." That piece, along with Reilly's moving tribute from 12 years earlier, "King of the Sports Page," are both worth reading. Don't miss them ��this means you, Dad.

Get Back to Work!

2009-11-12T19:02:00.000-05:00

Not a whole lot to report here that hasn't been reported elsewhere. The Hot Stove season is upon us and after busting my butt to cover the postseason, I'm playing catch-up with my allotment of Baseball Prospectus 2010 comments. With my wife out of town on a business trip for a few days, I've taken the opportunity to bury myself in Dodger prospect minutiae while still keeping tabs on the various trade and free agent rumors going around, mostly via Twitter. And I've been sharing my razor-sharp analysis with the world via that medium as well. From today's Sports Business Daily (subscription required):

SI.com�s Jimmy Traina cites a source as reporting �The Who will take the stage� during the Super Bowl XLIV halftime show. An NFL spokesperson declined to confirm the report, only saying, �When we have something to announce, we�ll announce it� (SI.com, 11/12). The L.A. Times� Sam Farmer writes, �SI.com reporting the Super Bowl halftime show is.... The Who. Excellent.� But FoxSports.com�s John Halpin writes, �A band full of guys in their 60s? NO WAY!� Baseball Prospectus writer Jay Jaffe: �Because nothing says NFL like half a band of Brit Invasion senior citizens� (TWITTER.com, 11/12).

ZING! I had a better one about the surviving members trying for one last cash grab before reuniting with their deceased rhythm section, but it was longer than 140 characters, hence. Who says my expertise doesn't cross genres?

Speaking of crossing genres, artist James Blagden has set Dock Ellis' tale of his infamous no-hitter to a four-and-a-half minute Flash animation at a site called No Mas. It's also on YouTube, for those afraid to venture out onto the scarier parts of the information superhighway.

Sigh. Only 94 days until pitchers and catchers report. We now return you to your regularly scheduled offseason...

Empire State of Mind, Baby!

2009-11-05T22:47:00.003-05:00

Just before signing off early Thursday morning in the wake of the Yankees' World Series win, the YES network ran a montage set to Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind," the song which had become this team's anthem; the rapper performed it live prior to Game Two of the series, the one I attented. In my haste to record the montage, I changed the channel ��I was a bit excitable � but was pleased to find it online today. Enjoy!

Empire State Of Mind
Uploaded by KMFIS

Start Spreading the News

2009-11-05T16:03:00.000-05:00

After a night of revelry � I was a one-man dogpile � let's get straight to the opener of today's piece at Baseball Prospectus:

Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter may be the Yankees for whom the spotlight shines the brightest, but it was Hideki Matsui who did the dirty work on Wednesday night. Setting a single-game World Series record with six RBI, Matsui collected big hits in his first three at-bats to help the Yankees pounce on Pedro Martinez and the Phillies early, building up a 7-1 lead by the end of the fifth inning. As the Yankees did two nights earlier when they found themselves in an early hole, the Phillies made a game of it by summoning a brief hint of their offensive firepower, but it was too little, too late. For the first time since 2000, the Yankees are the World Champions.

Matsui, who punched a decisive solo homer off Martinez in Game Two, homered again in his first turn at-bat, this time following a Rodriguez walk which led off the inning (oh, those bases on balls) to give the Yankees a 2-0 lead. An inning later, with two outs, the bases loaded and Martinez's night going down in flames, he stroked a two-run single to widen the lead to 4-1. In the fifth inning, with one out, two on, and another Yankee run having crossed the plate, he greeted J.A. Happ with a two-run double to right-center to expand the lead to 7-1. I believe he also demonstrated his heretofore unknown prowess as a tenor by singing "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch, but I could be wrong, as by that point I was busy counting the remaining outs on my fingers.

For his performance, Matsui was named the World Series MVP, becoming the first designated hitter ever to win the award. Though he made just three starts and 14 plate appearances in the series, his .615/.643/1.385 showing (8-for-13 with a double and three home runs) ranked as the Yankees' most potent offensive force. Their lineup had its share of complementary performances, including Derek Jeter (.407/.429/.519), Johnny Damon (.364/.440/.455 and the series' most memorable play, his mad dash to third base in Game Four) and of course the ghost-chasing Rodriguez (.250/.423/.550 and six RBI, including the Game Four winner), but it was Matsui who not only led the team with eight RBI but was the only Bronx Bomber to hit more than one bomb, or to collect more than one game-winning hit. His showing was somewhat bittersweet, as it came in what well may have been his final appearance in pinstripes given his pending free agency and the Yankees' need to clear the DH spot for the aging stars above his pay grade. It left absolutely no doubt that the man can be a viable component on a championship team, so wherever he winds up next, Godspeed, Godzilla.

I took a special pleasure in Matsui's showing, as on Wednesday's Toledo radio hit, I told host Norm Wamer that the Matsui-Martinez matchup was the key to the game given the pitcher's struggles with lefties. It didn't take long for that call to make me look smart, as Matsui and the rest of the Yankee lineup made Pedro's night a short one. The 38-year-old pitcher simply couldn't muster the magic he'd summoned in Game Two, getting significantly fewer strikes on both his fastball and his changeup.

Meanwhile, Andy Pettitte gave the Yankees a dogged effort on three days' rest, yielding just one run through the first five innings even as his strike zone was squeezed by home plate umpire Joe West. He gave up a two-run homer to Ryan Howard in the sixth before departing, but that marked the big slugger's only blast of the series, and it was the only one of the eight yielded by the Yankees' lefties which came with a man on base. His showing marked the third time this October that he gotten the win in a series-clinching game (matching Derek Lowe's 2004 run), the sixth time in his career that he'd done so, and the second time he'd done so in a World Series (1998 being the other occasion). Though he's benefited from a career spent amid the three-round playoff format, he leads all pitchers in postseason starts (40), innings (249), and wins (18), and his 3.90 ERA is a ringer for his career mark. I don't believe he's done enough to reach the Hall of Fame once those credentials are placed alongside the rest of what he's accomplished in his 15-year career � he's a Clydesdale, not a thoroughbred, lacking a Cy Young and a whole host of statistical achievements which identify the game's top starters � but the man's earned his five rings.

The real difference between the two teams, ultimately, came down to the man who closed the door on the Phillies, Mariano Rivera:

Consider how closely matched the overall performances of the two rotations were, regardless of the number of days' rest or the handedness, and the bullpens, minus the Sandman:
Split IP H ER BB SO ERA
PHI SP 36.1 32 21 11 36 5.20
NYY SP 34.1 28 19 20 33 4.98
PHI RP 15.2 17 10 7 20 5.74
NYY RP* 13.1 13 8 4 14 5.40
Rivera 5.1 3 0 2 3 0.00
* Except Rivera
Mariano Rivera now has a 0.74 ERA across 133.1 postseason innings with a 107/21 strikeout to walk ratio and just two home runs allowed. He is the greatest closer of all time, and arguably the greatest postseason performer as well. The closers of each of the other seven teams which reached the 2009 postseason faltered at least once when the money was on the table, and those mistakes ultimately proved fatal. Rivera, as in three other World Series, was the last man standing. Along with Pettitte, Jeter and Posada � the "Core Four," they're called � he's now one of four Yankees to have earned seven pennants and five World Series rings dating back to 1996.

Old guard, new guard, it was all a gas watching the Yankees win. In doing so they vanquished a very strong and very special Phillies team, one which had been the first one since the 2000-2001 Yankees to repeat as pennant winers, and the first NL team since the 1995-1996 Braves to do so (an error I made in the article, acknowledged in the comments thread, identified the 1975-1976 Reds as such). One which, over the course of the past two Octobers, has given me a considerable amount of frustration as they steamrolled the Dodgers and stretched the Yankees nearly to the limit. As I wrote in the BP piece, it's easier to run across I-95 four times a night than get through the middle of that batting order.

So congrats to the Yankees, their organization and their fans, particularly to those of you who've followed their exploits via my work in this space and at BP. After writing to deadline for each of the Series' six games, I'm going to take a few days to catch my breath and dig into my annual winter workload, but you can rest assured there's plenty more baseball content to come from me during this offseason.

Laying an Egg

2009-11-03T17:20:00.000-05:00

You never know what you're going to get when it comes to A.J. Burnett, a sterling performance like he gave the Yankees in Game Two of the World Series, or an implosion like he gave them in last night's Game Five. Through his first four postseason starts this fall, he'd allowed just eight runs, four of them within his first 12 pitches in an ugly first-inning meltdown in Game Five of the ALCS. Last night's performance echoed that rough start. From today's piece at Baseball Prospectus:

The Yankees begain the game in a hole because Burnett laid an egg, surrendering six runs in two-plus innings. Pitching on three days' rest, he was unable to match the brilliance of his seven-inning, one-run Game Two start, not because of fatigue � his average fastball and curveball velocities were higher according to Brooks Baseball � but because he was unable to fool the Phillies with his curveball, in part because home plate ump Dana DeMuth's strike zone wasn't as wide as that of Jeff Nelson. Breaking down the breaking balls thrown in the two starts:
Game Tot Ball SS SL F I
Two 45 20 8 7 7 3
Five 16 10 3 0 2 1
For the unfamiliar, SS is strikes swinging, SL is strikes looking, F is foul balls, I is in play. Whereas Burnett generated not-in-play strikes on 22 out of 45 curves in Game Two (49 percent), he did so on just five out of 16 (31 percent) in Game Five, none of them called strikes. Five of his nine strikeouts in Game Two ended on a curveball, three swinging and two looking, as compared to one of his two walks. He got just one strikeout via curveball (swinging) last night, and two of his four walks.

The result was a nasty, brutish and short start that left the Yankees in a 5-1 hole by the time he departed. [Chase] Utley's homer, which followed a Jimmy Rollins single and a Shane Victorino hit by pitch on a bunt attempt, came on just his eighth pitch of the night. After escaping the second inning unscathed, he walked Utley and Ryan Howard � never, ever a good idea � to start the third, then yielded RBI singles to Jayson Werth and Raul Iba�ez. That was enough for Yankees manager Joe Girardi, who called upon David Robertson. He retired both Pedro Feliz and Carlos Ruiz, but the latter's grounder scored Werth to give the Phillies a formidable five-run lead.

Utley has been unreal in this series, tying Reggie Jackson's 1977 World Series record of five home runs. Until his first-inning blast, however, all of them ��indeed, all seven of the Phillies' homers in the series � had been solo shots. Colleague John Perrotto had a nice piece on Utley at BP today.

The Yankees had their chances against Cliff Lee, chipping away at the 6-1 lead until it became 8-5. They even brought the tying run to the plate twice in the ninth inning, only to have Derek Jeter ground into a double play and Mark Teixeira strike out. The series now comes back to New York, with Pedro Martinez slated to take on Andy Pettitte, the latter on three days' rest. Of course, the Yanks' decision to use a three-man rotation is under scrutiny:

Burnett's short-rest implosion raises the inevitable question regarding the Yankees' three-man rotation plan for the series. [CC] Sabathia wasn't terribly sharp on three days' rest in Game Four, throwing fewer pitches than in any of his other postseason outings, and yielding more than two runs for the first time. He'll go on three days' rest again in Game Seven if the series goes that far. While the Yankees haven't officially announced that Andy Pettitte will do the same in Game Six, they have little alternative. Potential fourth starter Chad Gaudin, whom some suggested should start Game Five to keep Burnett on regular rest, simply isn't cut out to face the Phillies' lefty-heavy lineup:
��vs LHB�� vs RHB��
Split AVG/ OBP/ SLG K % K/BB AVG/ OBP/ SLG K % K/BB
2009 .296/.408/.415 14.4 0.98 .224/.293/.380 27.2 3.29
Career .293/.389/.433 11.1 0.84 .249/.318/.409 23.4 2.80
That's a ticket to a beatdown right there, given that Gaudin can't even strike out as many lefties as he walks. In last night's roundtable, other readers suggested the Yankees do a so-called bullpen game for Game Five; again, a bad idea given that it's inadvisable to punt a World Series game by expecting the lion's share of the innings to come from the bottom half of the team's pitching staff. Prior to last night, none of the Yankees' non-closers � Phil Hughes, Joba Chamberlain, Alfredo Aceves, Robertson et al � had given the Yankees more than three outs without allowing a run since Game Three of the ALCS; thus far this postseason only Hughes and Robertson had done so even once. That the Yankees got three such efforts last night from Robertson, Aceves and Hughes doesn't mean they could have done so out of the gate, as those were low-leverage innings with at least a three-run deficit each time.

No, the Yankees are without realistic alternatives to the three-man plan because of earlier failures on the part of Girardi, pitching coach Dave Eiland, and general manager Brian Cashman. They handled Chamberlain so poorly that they got a 7.69 ERA from him over his final 11 starts. They dickered with Sergio Mitre, who gave them nine starts with a 7.16 ERA. Cashman could have dealt for Jon Garland during the post-deadline waiver period just as he did Gaudin (Jose Contreras, Scott Kazmir and Carl Pavano, the other starters of note to change teams during August, weren't fits for a variety of reasons, most of them obvious). He could have dealt for a more reliable fourth starter at the July 31 deadline. He didn't, and because of that, the Yankees reached this stage with just three reliable starters. The record of such starters isn't exactly promising, as I pointed out in my preview: coming into the year, short-rested starters in the wild card era had made 86 postseason starts, averaging just 5.4 innings per start, with a 4.59 ERA, a 21-34 record for the starters, and a 31-55 record (.360 winning percentage) for their teams. Still, given the experience of the Yankees' big three on pitching on short rest (30 starts, an average of over six innings per, and a collective ERA under 4.00), it was hardly the worst plan in the world. Putting as many innings as possible in the hands of your top pitchers is what wins championships, and the Yankees are still win away from doing so.

According to Clay Davenport's Monte Carlo simulations at the BP Postseason Odds report, the Yankees still have an 83 percent chance of winning the series based upon the home field advantage and the actual starting pitchers involved. That may be overstating things, since the program can't see who's on three days' rest, but the odds are still in New York's favor.

Chasing Away the Ghosts

2009-11-02T16:49:00.000-05:00

Johnny Damon's mad ninth-inning dash from second to third once he realized no one was covering will go down in the annals of World Series lore, but it was Alex Rodriguez who was the real story last night. From my writeup at Baseball Prospectus:

Last night, in the ninth inning of Game Four of the World Series, Alex Rodriguez put the lie to the seemingly endless string of complaints that have dogged him since 2004 regarding his ability to come through in the clutch. Never mind the fact that 15 of his 30 homers this year either tied the score or gave the Yankees the lead. Never mind the fact he had already bopped six homers during the Yankees' current postseason run, early-inning homers to kick off the scoring or late-inning � even extra-inning � homers to tie games. For some of his critics, that could never be enough, simply because he's the highest paid player in the game, and a socially awkward one at that.

Last night, in the ninth inning of Game Four of the World Series, Alex Rodriguez came to the plate with two outs and the opportunity to drive in a run to give his team the lead in a World Series game � the kind of situation just about anyone who's ever played baseball has daydreamed about, whether in their own backyards as a schoolkid or when putting pen to ink on a multi-million dollar deal. And he did. And it was good. Knowing that with a runner on third base he could expect a fastball, Rodriguez ripped a 92 MPH Brad Lidge offering into the right field corner to bring home Johnny Damon, restoring the lead that the Yankees had held from the top of the first to the bottom of the eighth, only to fritter it away. The Yanks would add two more runs on a Jorge Posada single one batter later, but it was Rodriguez who drove in the decisive run, giving the Bronx Bombers a commanding 3-1 lead in the World Series. It doesn't get much more clutch than that.

...Johnny Damon's dash is what will likely be remembered years from now, and a well-deserved memory it will be, particularly after the tenacious at-bat in which he worked his way on base. But he's not the only hero of this ballgame. On the night after Halloween, Alex Rodriguez chased away some ghosts with his first World Series game-winning hit. He's now hitting .348/.483/.804 with six homers and 15 RBI this fall, and after all the drama that has dogged him since reports of his steroid usage broke, he produced on the game's biggest stage in the biggest moment of his career. It may never be enough for some if his critics � it wasn't Game Seven in the bottom of the ninth with the Yankees trailing, and he didn't pledge to donate his entire annual salary to an orphanage in the postgame jubilation, after all � but those left standing to point a finger at him for being somehow unclutch are completely out of ammunition now.

And the Yankees are one win away from their 27th World Championship. The path to their fourth victory isn't as straightforward as it might otherwise be, given that tonight they'll face ace Cliff Lee, who nearly shut them out in Game One, while hoping that a less-than-fully-rested A.J. Burnett can string together his second straight glowing start, this time against a lineup that got a good look at his repertoire and his pattern of first pitch strikes. It may not be the ideal scenario for the Yankees, but it's one for which the Phillies would certainly trade.

Damon's dash really was something to behold, one of the crazier plays I've ever seen, and also one of the most heads-up. What amazed me after Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz two-hopped the ball to Pedro Feliz (the third baseman covering second during the shift on Mark Teixeira) was that he was so close when Damon made his break, perhaps less than three feet away. While Damon wasn't likely to lose any footrace to a guy who hasn't stolen a base since 2007, I have to think that a desperate lunge might have been enough to tag him out.

In any event, we've got a ballgame tonight, possibly the last one of the year. The boys and girls at BP, including yours truly, will be chatting it up starting at 8 PM Eastern. Check it out.

The Trouble With Lefties

2009-11-01T18:19:00.000-05:00

The Yankees pulled ahead in the World Series on Saturday night, two games to one. Andy Pettitte survived an awful second inning, while Cole Hamels fell apart like a cheap watch after a dominating three innings, with Pettitte himself contributing to that via an RBI single amid a three-run fifth-inning rally that ultimately chased last year's World Series MVP.

There's been a lot of talk about the root of Hamels' woes lately. As I wrote in my series preview, BP colleague Matt Swartz found that the difference between his 2008 and 2009 performances largely boiled down to fluctuating results on balls in play. While that may be convincing on some level, it doesn't explain why dating back to September 23rd, Hamels has now made seven starts, none of them quality, putting up a 7.32 ERA while allowing 2.3 HR/9. A look at his splits, however, is more telling: while he held opponents to a .228/.270/.388 line in their first plate appearance of the game, they hit .301/.342/.473 when seeing him in their remaining plate appearances. Last night was more of the same, as he struggled mightily once he tried establishing a curveball during his second time through the order. The Yankees went 5-for-10 with two walks, two doubles and a homer (.500/.583/1.000) after that first time through, turning the game around in short order.

Besides Hamels, the Phillies are having a few other problems. From my latest at BP:

As in the first two rounds of the postseason, they're again having trouble hitting left-handers, with the occasional big blow disguising their inconsistency. In Game One, they were 5-for-28 against CC Sabathia, Damaso Marte, and Phil Coke, while last night they were 5-for-25 against Pettitte and Marte. Six of those 10 hits have been for extra bases, but only one � a ninth-inning double off Phil Coke in Game One � has come with runners on base, and their overall line against lefties in the series (.189/.268/.453) is similarly shaped to that of the first two rounds (.194/.322/.444). Take away Jayson Werth's production and for the entire postseason, the rest of the lineup is hitting a fairly tame .174/.304/.383 against southpaws. With Sabathia and Pettitte lined up to pitch as many as three of the remaining four games (if the series stretches that far), this remains a huge problem for the Phillies.

Not that it's the only one. The lineup's first four hitters � Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino, [Chase] Utley, and [Ryan] Howard � are a combined 8-for-45 thus far against the Yankees. Howard, who whiffed six times in a row in Games Two and Three, already has nine strikeouts, three shy of tying Willie Wilson's 1980 World Series record. He hasn't walked in the World Series yet, either. Rollins, whose pre-series prediction (Phillies in five) has already been rendered impossible, is hitting an anemic .235/.316/.294 for the entire postseason. Further down the lineup, [Raul] Iba�ez has struggled this fall as well (.233/.313/.395), to say nothing of Pedro Feliz (.143/.182/.310).

With Phillies manager Charlie Manuel having decided not to bring back ace Cliff Lee on three days' rest given that he hasn't done so once in his career��a lunkheaded excuse, particularly given that Manuel pushed him to 122 pitches while protecting leads of 4-0 and 6-0 in the final two innings of his brilliant Game One start ��the Yanks have the upper hand in tonight's matchup pitting Sabathia versus Joe Blanton:

[Blanton]'s a thoroughly capable number four starter who put up a career-best strikeout rate this year (7.5 per nine), but it came at the expense of a career-high homer rate (1.4 per nine) and a career-low groundball rate (42 percent). Some of that is simply the shift in leagues and ballparks, from Oakland's pitcher-friendly Coliseum to the hitter-friendly Citizens Bank Park, but it's nonetheless an unsettling trend. Also unsettling is the fact that the righty yielded a .270/.321/.469 line against righties, compared to .252/.320/.401 against lefties. The Yankees themselves have shown more muscle against righties than lefties this fall (.252/.342/.450, compared to .255/.346/.418). They're poised to create another souvenir or two tonight.

The bottom line is that the Yankees come back with their ace tonight against the Phils' fourth-best starter, one who's got matchup problems against the Bronx Bomber lineup. While the series is by no means over, the two games to one margin and the way the rotations line up going forward makes this their series to lose.

The Yankees have also announced that A.J. Burnett will start Game Five on three days' rest. Barring what Joe Girardi termed any "unforeseen things," they'll stick with the three-man rotation from here onwards.

The Man Who Would Be King

2009-10-31T14:32:00.000-04:00

Attending a postseason game is always a thrill, particularly the later in October the Yankees' run goes. I'm lucky enough to have gotten to go to Yankee Stadium twice in one week, first for the ALCS clincher and then for Thursday night's Game Two of the World Series. It was my first World Series game since the 2003 opener, and my fifth of all time (1998 Game Two, 1999 Game Four, and 2001 Game Three being the others).

I attended the game with my friend Julie, and our seats were in the left field bleachers, providing a fitting bookend to the season given that the two of us were also in the bleachers for the Yankees' April 3 exhibition against the Cubs, the new ballpark's unofficial opener. Raising the stakes even more was the fact that Pedro Martinez started for the Phillies against the Yanks' A.J. Burnett:

For as much baggage as Burnett brought to the party, his opposite number, Pedro Martinez, brought more � an epic history of battles during his days with the Red Sox, highlights (his Yankee Stadium record 17-strikeout performance in 1999, the Red Sox's 2004 ALCS comeback) and lowlights (his 2003 ALCS meltdown, his promise to "Wake up the Bambino, I'll drill him in the ass," and the taunts of "Who's Your Daddy?") aplenty.

But the Pedro who took the hill for the Phillies is a different Pedro, five years and several miles per hour removed from the end of his Boston tenure, and nearly a decade beyond a peak that can stand with any pitcher in the game's history, from Walter Johnson to Sandy Koufax to Roger Clemens. He's older, sadder�his father died of cancer last year�but almost certainly wiser. No longer able to summon superhuman velocity, he showed during his NLCS start against the Dodgers (a rich enough tableau in its own right) that he could still baffle hitters by keeping them off balance, moving their eye level and changing speeds, hitting nearly every increment on the radar gun between the mid-70s and the low-90s while artfully working in and out of the strike zone across seven shutout innings.

Martinez held the Yankees to one run through the first five innings, striking out six and yielding only one run on a solo shot by Mark Teixeira into the Yankees' bullpen to lead off the fourth. But even when he was missing bats, he was running up his pitch count; his first four K's cost him 27 pitches. He surrendered another solo homer, this time to Hideki Matsui, on his 96th pitch.

Martinez finished the inning with his pitch count at 98, but much to our surprise, Phillies manager Charlie Manuel sent him back out for the seventh, apparently forgetting the hard lessons of the 2003 ALCS Game Seven. Martinez yielded singles to Jerry Hairston Jr. and Miguel Cabrera to lead off the seventh, with Hairston's pinch-runner Brett Gardner going from first to third, at which point Manuel finally went and got the wily, wiry 38-year-old. For all the taunts Martinez had endured on the night and over the years from the Yankee Stadium crowds�� particularly in the bleachers � it was an incredibly poignant moment. If this was the sun setting on Martinez's career, then it was one hell of a sunset, and I was determined to appreciate its brilliance:

I don't care who you root for, it was impossible not to feel for Martinez as he slowly strode off the Yankee Stadium mound, perhaps for the last time in his storied career. The crowd in the bleachers jeered him rabidly, but I could only stand and applaud, doffing my cap not only at the magnificent effort he'd mustered, but all of the pain and pleasure his years of battling the Yankees had brought. At least from this writer's vantage point, never was there an opposing player who made for better blog fodder. My season at Yankee Stadium wasn't the only thing that had come full circle.

Looking back at a recording of the game a day later, the close-ups of Martinez's face are priceless. Bated breath to collect his emotions before walking off the mound. A raised finger and a glance skyward as he headed towards the visiting dugout on the third base side. A head bowed, and then, as he approached the dugout, chin raised with a genuine smile [pic], perhaps at the large sign held by a Yankees fan near the dugout that read: "Daddy's Got a New House." Unable to withstand the lure of consumer capitalism in favor of a poignant moment in baseball history for one single second more, Fox cut to a car commercial. Perhaps their producer had something in his eye.

Their lead expanded to 3-1, the Yankees called upon the great Mariano Rivera to make his second two-inning save of the week. He went on to close out the game and help the Yankees even the series, and while there was so much more to say about his performance and that of Burnett, what stuck with me was Martinez, particularly as the reports of his post-game press conference emerged. Not to be confused with his pregame conference from the day before in which he made a bold declaration regarding the fans in the Bronx:

Q. You've had a unique relationship with the fans in the Bronx over the years. Why do you think that is? Have you thought about that over your career? And what about it do you enjoy?

PEDRO MARTINEZ: I don't know if you realize this, but because of you guys in some ways, I might be at times the most influential player that ever stepped in Yankee Stadium. I can honestly say that. I mean, I have been a big fan of baseball for a long time, since I was a kid. My first ball I ever got from a Big League player I actually got to purchase in Dodger Stadium in a silent auction, was Reggie Jackson. I was actually a big fan of the Yankees, too.

For some reason with all the hype and different players that have passed by, maybe because I played for the Red Sox is probably why you guys made it such a big deal every time I came in, but you know, I have a good bond with the people. After playing in New York, I went to realize something: New York fans are very passionate and very aggressive. But after it all, after you take your uniform off and you deal with the people, they're real human beings. It's all just being fans.

I have all the respect in the world for the way they enjoy being fans. Sometimes they might be giving you the middle finger, just like they will be cursing you and telling you what color underwear you're wearing. All those things you can hear when you're a fan. But at the end of the day, they're just great fans that want to see the team win. I don't have any problem with that.

From his postgame presser:

Q. Could you just walk us through what your feelings were? A long rehab for you over a year, you come in, you pitched a great game in the NLCS, and then tonight. I know when you're pitching, you're not thinking about that stuff, but now that you got back to a World Series game and pitched so well in it, talk about what's going through your mind about the whole year of rehab really.

PEDRO MARTINEZ: You know, regardless of what happened, the fact that I was the loser today for the game, I'm extremely proud and happy being able to participate, compete against a real, real good team, a very solid team, be able to put my team in position to catch up or win that game, and at the same time tell myself that I made the right decision by coming back and getting this opportunity, putting myself in the position to get an opportunity to pitch in the World Series.

It was a real good game. It was a real baseball game.

Q. As you were walking off the field, you were hearing it from the Yankee fans and the TV camera caught you breaking out into smile. Can you talk about as you were walking off the field kind of what was going through your mind in the new Yankee Stadium?

PEDRO MARTINEZ: Yeah, you said it right, it's a new Yankee Stadium, but the fans remain the fans. They're going to give you � like I remember one guy sitting right in front of the front row with his daughter, sitting with his daughter, and his daughter in one arm, and a cup of beer in the other hand and saying all kinds of nasty stuff. I just told him, "Your daughter is right beside you. It's a little girl. It's a shame you're saying all these things."

I had to stop and tell him because I'm a father myself, and God, how can you be so dumb to do those kind of things in front of your child? What kind of example are you setting?

But the fans, I enjoy that, because at the bottom, I know I played for the Mets, I know they really want to root for me. It's just that I don't play for the Yankees, that's all. I've always been a good competitor, and they love that. They love the fact that I compete. I'm a New Yorker, as well. If I was on the Yankees, I'd probably be like a king over here. (Laughter.)

That's not the case right now, and it's going to be that way.

As you'd expect, there were plenty of good articles about Pedro Martinez to go around, both before and after the game. Jonah Keri had some great stuff about Pedro's days with the Expos. The Wall Street Journal's Matthew Futterman provided great context for both of Martinez's press conferences while comparing him to Reggie Jackson and calling his comments "subversive." The Faster Times' Lisa Swan predicted the postgamer would be a doozy, no matter what the outcome (she also did a nice retrospective of great Martinez quotes as he was returning to the majors in August). Esquire's Charles Pierce to compared him to Luis Tiant, the hero ace of an earlier Red Sox era, for his ability to get by on guile and guts.

The legend goes that back when Martinez was breaking in with the Dodgers, manager Tommy Lasorda felt he was too small to withstand the rigors of starting. In retrospect, it seems clear he was right, at least if that meant starting for Lasorda, who broke many a promising young Dodger starter - Doug Rau, Rick Rhoden, Fernando Valenzuela, Orel Hershiser, and older brother Ramon Martinez. Who's to say the baseball world wouldn't have been deprived of a Hall of Fame talent and one of the game's great personalities had he not been traded to the Expos? Ultimately, it was in the best interests of baseball.

A Great Start for Lee, A Rough Start for the Yankees

2009-10-29T17:20:00.000-04:00

Well, Game One of the World Series didn't go so well for the Yankees. From my writeup at Baseball Prospectus:

In yesterday's chat, Bronx Banter's Alex Belth asked me, "Is there any particular pitching match-up that you are looking forward to in the series?" I responded that the matchup I was most looking forward to was between CC Sabathia and Ryan Howard, particularly given the prospect of the big man pitching three times for the Yankees in a seven-game series, and the slugger's less-than-sterling reputation against southpaws. "I think that matchup will tell us something about what's going to happen over the next four to seven games," I wrote.

If that's the case, the Yankees are in trouble. Howard stepped to the plate with two out and a man on in the first inning on Wednesday night. Sabathia had gotten quick outs on a Jimmy Rollins bunt and a Shane Victorino popup, and was one strike away from retiring Chase Utley when he suddenly lost the strike zone with three straight balls. Though he got ahead of Howard on a called strike, the slugger roped his second pitch into the right field corner for a double, and Utley might have scored had it not been for Nick Swisher playing the carom perfectly. Sabathia then walked Jayson Werth to load the bases, and only escaped the inning when Raul Iba�ez grounded a 3-1 pitch to Robinson Cano to end the threat.

During the first two rounds of the playoffs, Howard went 2-for-11 against lefty pitching, but those two hits were huge, a two-run double off Clayton Kershaw in Game One of the NLCS which expanded the Phillies' lead from 3-1 to 5-1 and chased the struggling southpaw, and a two-run homer off Randy Wolf in the first inning of Game Four. The Phillies as a team got just 14 hits off of lefties during those first two rounds, but seven of them were for extra bases, including five homers, producing an uneven .194/.322/.444 line.

They only got four hits off Sabathia in seven innings, as he settled down after that shaky 27-pitch first frame, but two of those were solo homers by Utley. Which isn't to say Sabathia was all that sharp. In marked contrast to Andy Pettitte's religious devotion to first-pitch strikes in Game Six of the ALCS (20 out of 25), the big man got ahead of just 12 of 27 hitters, at one point starting with ball one to seven hitters in a row, including Utley on his first homer.

The two Utley jacks would have been enough, given how well Cliff Lee pitched for Philadelphia. In this battle of former Indians Cy Young winners who were traded the following summer � Mark Shapiro's worst nightmare, basically � there was never any doubt who had the upper hand. Lee dominated, striking out seven of the first 14 hitters he faced: Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira (twice), Alex Rodriguez (twice), Hideki Matsui and Jorge Posada. He also made two plays in the field which showed how in control he was, visibly sneering while making a basket catch on a sixth-inning Johnny Damon popup that scarcely forced him to budge from his landing spot, and snaring an eighth-inning Robinson Cano grounder behind his back.

The record shows that Lee only got first-pitch strikes to 16 out of 32 batters, but he went to 0-2 eight times, whereas his opposite number only got there four times. The irony is that Lee also went to 2-0 seven times, while Sabathia only got there five times, and thus ran up his pitch count. There wasn't all that much separating the two pitchers, and over the course of a seven-game series in which the two starters are slated to pitch on three days' rest in their next two turns, it may count in the Yankees' favor that Sabathia, the experienced one in such matters, threw only 113 pitches, while Lee, who's never taken the ball on short rest, threw 122 pitches. Whether or not that's a strike against Charlie Manuel remains to be seen.

Despite Lee's dominance, the Yankees still had a chance to keep things close. In last night's BP roundtable, I suggested Joe Girardi bring in Mariano Rivera to face Utley and Howard in the seventh inning after Phil Hughes walked both Rollins and Victorino to start the frame given the persistence of Rivera's favorable reverse platoon split due to the break of his cut fastball against lefty hitters. Girardi didn't, because managers don't think like they did twenty or thirty years ago, when they would call their top reliever into a ballgame when they felt it was on the line, regardless of inning. Firemen, they were called, because they were there to put out the fire instead of merely collect the last three outs and the statistical cherry on top, and we wore an onion on our belts as was the style at the time... Check the postseason game logs of Goose Gossage and Rollie Fingers; Bob Lemon and Dick Williams weren't afraid to call their numbers early, and that's part of the reason they won championships. In any event, even given the emphasis we place on better bullpen management at BP, at least a few of my colleagues disagreed, both at the time and in retrospect. As Joe Sheehan wrote today, "You're not going to start using Rivera as if he is Dan Quisenberry and we're all hanging out in Lee jeans and Adidas with fat laces." Girardi went to lefty Damaso Marte, who got two outs but allowed Rollins to advance to third on a fly ball to right field. Giriardi again could have called upon Rivera, but no, he went to David Robertson, who spent the first two rounds as the low man on the totem pole. The kid walked Werth to load the bases, then surrendered a two-run single by Iba�ez that was essentially the ballgame.

The Win Probability Added figures at FanGraphs, the Yankees' chances at winning stood at just 14.8 percent to start the inning given the 2-0 deficit. They dropped to 9.9 percent after the two walks, climbed back up to 14.9 percent by the time of the second out, and crashed to 4.3 percent with Iba�ez's hit. Thanks and good night.

Anyway, I have the good fortune of holding a ticket to tonight's Game Two, which pits Pedro Martinez against A.J. Burnett. Joe Girardi has already announced that he'll start Jerry Hairston (an Enrique Wilson-like 10-for-27 lifetime against Pedro, for the third-highest batting average of any active player with at least 25 PA against him, though the two haven't faced each other since 2004) in right field instead of Nick Swisher, who's mired in an 11-for-77 slump with two homers and four RBI dating back to September 16. He'll also start Jose Molina again instead of Posada, though Molina was helpless to prevent another early-inning meltdown by A.J. in Game Five of the ALCS. The righty's struggled at the beginning of games this year:

Split        HR    AVG   OBP   SLG   OPS  
Pitch 1-25    8   .263  .356  .441  .797
Pitch 26-50   5   .249  .330  .378  .709
Pitch 51-75   7   .232  .329  .400  .729
Pitch 76-100  5   .262  .319  .406  .725
Pitch 101+    0   .174  .371  .174  .545

If a personal valet catcher can't prevent that from happening, then what the hell good is he? I guess we'll soon find out.

Oh and on the subject of Pedro's ancient history, in the second half of today's BP column I take a look at the history of pitchers who started a postseason game for their teams after making less than 10 appearances for them during the regular season. Lots of recognizable names dot the list � Don Sutton, Tommy John, Rick Reuschel, David Cone, David Wells, Ramon Martinez, Oliver Perez � but Martinez's face-off with Vicente Padilla marked the first time two such pitchers faced each other. There's no real take-home as to what to expect tonight, but it was fun to research nonetheless.

I'll Show You the Bronx Banter Breakdown V

2009-10-28T12:23:00.000-04:00

Alex Belth, Cliff Corcoran and I cut a snappy two-part video series for SNY.tv's "Bronx Banter Breakdown" yesterday. Part two, covering the lineups, is now up at Bronx Banter.

While you're there, check out Cliff's excellent piece on the 1950 World Series and its future ramificiations:

To give you a sense of just how long it�s been since the Yankees swept Philadelphia�s Whiz Kids, the 1950 World Series was the last Fall Classic to feature two all-white teams.

That fact is not as trivial as it might sound. The Yankees� struggles in the late 1960s and early 1970s had several sources, including the institution of the amateur draft and the corporate ownership of CBS, but their failure to properly exploit the African American talent pool was undeniably a contributing factor. When they finally emerged from that slumber, it was with black stars such as Mickey Rivers, Willie Randolph, Chris Chambliss, Roy White, Oscar Gamble, and Gamble�s replacement, Reggie Jackson.

Similarly, the Phillies� surprising pennant in 1950 fed the organization�s resistance to integration. The 1950 Whiz Kids got their name not only because they won the pennant, but because they were the youngest team in the National League on both sides of the ball. In fact, the 1950 Phillies were the youngest pennant winners ever. The Phillies� oldest regular was first baseman Eddie Waitkus (the player whose shooting the previous year inspired The Natural). Just one of the six men to make more than ten starts for them was over the age of 26, and future Hall of Famers Richie Ashburn and Robin Roberts were both just 23.

Assuming that young squad would only get better with age, the Phillies didn�t even begin scouting black players until 1954, when Roy Hamey took over as general manager following four seasons in which the Phillies finished between third and fifth place. The Phillies didn�t field their first black player until 1957, didn�t have an African-American starter until 1961, and didn�t have an African-American star until the arrival of Richie Allen in 1964.

As i wrote in It Ain't Over, the teams that integrated early�dominated then National League for more than a decade after the color barrier was broken. The Dodgers won seven pennants between 1947 and 1959, the Braves won three, and the Giants two. Those Phils were the only breakthrough, their franchise was the last NL club to integrate, and they wouldn't even get back to the World Series until 1980. Serves 'em right to suffer.

All World Series, All the Time

2009-10-28T11:35:00.000-04:00

Weather permitting, the World Series begins tonight in the Bronx, and as you'd expect, it's a busy day for me. For starters, I had the honor of previewing the series for Baseball Prospectus, and I gave it a similarly epic-length treatment as the first two rounds. Cutting to the chase, here's part of the stuff about the rotation, and particularly the two teams' plans to throw at least some of their pitchers on three days' rest:

Thanks to the ridiculous number of days off built into the schedule, the Yankees reached the World Series by relying on just a three-man rotation. The word on the street is that they'll likely continue to do so, but that introduces a new wrinkle: while up to this point only Sabathia has needed to start on three days' rest, the three-man plan requires each starter to do so for his second turn of the series, and Sabathia for his third turn as well if the series gets to a Game Seven. The Phillies are leaning towards matching Sabathia with Lee in all three starts�dark days for Indians general manager Mark Shapiro, to be sure�but given their depth and their various pitchers' limitations, they're unlikely to maintain the power trio act. The options for the two clubs thus look something like this (days rest in parentheses):

Game 1: Sabathia (7) v. Lee (9)
Game 2: Burnett (6) v. Martinez (12)
Game 3: Pettitte (5) v. Hamels (9)
Game 4: Sabathia (3) or Gaudin (11) vs. Lee (3), Happ (10), or Blanton (12)
Game 5: Burnett (3), Sabathia (4, if Gaudin Game 4), or Gaudin (12) vs. Happ, Blanton or Lee (4)
Game 6: Pettitte (3) or Burnett (5, if Sabathia Game 4 and Gaudin Game 5) vs. Martinez (5), Hamels (3), Happ or Blanton
Game 7: Sabathia (3, if pitched Game 4) or Pettitte (4, if Sabathia Game 4) vs. Lee (3, if pitched Game 4) or Hamels (4)

Despite the plans, the overall postseason numbers for pitchers on three days' in the postseason during the Wild Card Era aren't terribly encouraging: 86 starts, an average of just 5.4 innings per start, a 4.59 ERA, a 21-34 record for the starters, and more importantly a 31-55 record (a .360 winning percentage) for their teams. Perhaps because of that lack of success, the tactic has largely gone out of style, with just 10 of those starts coming over the past five postseasons, including Sabathia's start in Game Four of the LCS, when he held the Angels to one run in eight innings on just 101 pitches.

The Yankees' trio has a good deal of experience on short rest, though drawing conclusions from their small sample sizes is as hazardous as in any other endeavor. Sabathia famously went 2-1 with an 0.83 ERA in three consecutive short-rest starts for the Brewers at the end of the 2008 regular season, though he went a bridge too far and was bombed by the Phillies in Game Two of the Division Series, his fourth straight such start. While he wasn't ridden as hard during the regular season this year, his innings total to date is one out shy of what it was going into last year's postseason thrashing. That aside, between the regular season and postseason, he's 4-2 in six starts with a 2.11 ERA and an average of 6.4 innings per start on three days rest. Though Pettitte hasn't pitched on short rest at all since 2006, he has such 20 career starts, including six in the postseason; he's 7-8 with a 3.93 ERA and an average of 6.4 innings. Burnett is a tidy 4-0 with a 2.33 ERA and 6.8 innings per start in such situations, all in the regular season, with three of them with the Blue Jays last year.

As for Lee, he's in uncharted territory, having never started in the majors on three days' rest. Neither, for that matter, has Hamels, Blanton, or Happ. Martinez did so only in the 1999 postseason opener, but departed after four scoreless frames due to a back strain. Since Manuel was notably resistant to the idea of Hamels going on three days' rest last fall, it's extremely unlikely he'll do so here, which means that the Phils will likely deploy either Happ or Blanton in Game Five, leaving Martinez to make two starts in the Bronx. The new stadium notwithstanding, he's no stranger there, but he's a different pitcher from in his Red Sox heyday, and facing the Yankee lineup in that bandbox on a chilly night carries a higher degree of difficulty than facing the Dodgers on a bluebird day in Chavez Ravine.

As with the NLCS, a lot depends on the Phillies' ability to counter the Yankees' southpaws. Thus far in the postseason, they're only batting .194/.322/.444 against southpaws, with a couple of well-timed Ryan Howard hits against Randy Wolf and Clayton Kershaw constituting the big blows. Sabathia and Pettitte are more battle-tested than that Dodger duo, and they're throwing the ball better at this point in time. Given the likelihood of them starting the lions' share the games, I've picked the Yankees in six.

More to come later today - a 2 PM Eastern chat, another Bronx Banter Breakdown video, and a Prospectus Roundtable to accompany tonight's action.

I'll Show You the Bronx Banter Breakdown IV

2009-10-27T15:43:00.000-04:00

Alex Belth, Cliff Corcoran and I cut a snappy two-part video series for SNY.tv's "Bronx Banter Breakdown" today. Part one is up at Bronx Banter, and in HD at SNY.tv.

One correction to an assertion I made within this video: Pedro Martinez has one postseason start on three days� rest, in the 1999 AL Division Series opener against the Indians. He left after four innings due to a back strain, then famously returned four days later to pitch six hitless innings of relief to close out the series in Game Five.

Regardless, he ain�t going on three in this series.