SEAT LICENSE RENEWALS It's almost spring
when a young man's thoughts turn to... those expensive
seat licenses. An online cash advance can help relieve the anxiety.
From the Streets of Baltimore to the Sofas of Brooklyn
A bit groggy here after a long week which began with a fun ballpark trip to a Baseball Prospectus event in Baltimore — one which included Orioles president Andy MacPhail, six BP authors, and XM Radio hosts Mike Ferrin and Grant Paulsen — and was capped by having stayed up past 2:00 AM on each of the past two nights watching the Dodgers and Diamondbacks battle into extra innings — a combined eight hours and 39 minutes digested via TiVo, both times after taking in Yankees games and other baseball earlier in the day.
I've been fairly busy on the content front as well. Don't tell anyone I told you, but the forthcoming BP site facelift features a new author page where you can see my latest work at a glance and/or grab an RSS feed (consider this a beta version, with no warranty implied). Onto the highlight reel:
• "Disastropiece Theater" examines the Astros' 0-7 start (which ran to 0-8) and the fates of teams that started similarly badly:
Houston, we have a problem. On Monday, the Astros lost 5-0 to the Cardinals, running their 2010 record to 0-7 and marking the third time in this young season that they've been shut out by an opponent. To date the Astros have been outscored 42-13 — by an average of 4.1 runs per game — which comes out to a Pythagenpat winning percentage of .114.
As bad as those numbers look, this doesn't seem terribly remarkable at first glance, particularly given that last year's Astros opened at 1-6 while being outscored 43-16 and shut out twice. Without digging through our archives, I'd guess that I deployed the time-honored (if slightly misremembered) Apollo 13 reference in response to that mess as well. Meanwhile, last year's Nationals got off to an 0-7 start, and the year before that, it was the Tigers plunging to an 0-7 start for the third time in seven years. Happens every spring, right?
Actually, no. Since 1901, just 25 teams have started 0-7, only five of whom have been outscored by wider margins than the current Astros; two more were outscored by the same margin... Interestingly, it's the 1988 Orioles with the worst run differential after seven games; they're the ones who went on to lose a mind-boggling 21 consecutive games to start the year, far outdistancing the 1997 Cubs (0-14), the 1904 Senators and the 1920 Tigers (both 0-13, though the Senators actually tied their second game).
So the Astros have their work cut out for themselves if they really want to make history. Nonetheless, this is not a good list to be on. None of the previous 24 teams which started 0-7 made the postseason, and only two, the 1980 Braves and the 1983 Astros, even cracked .500 for the year. As a group, these teams compiled a combined .380 winning percentage for their seasons, essentially the equivalent of a 62-100 season.
Beyond that, there's an analysis of the problems specific to the 'Stros, namely their offense, their general manager and their owner. There but for the grace of God...
• As the Astros ran their record to 0-8, I wondered (via a Prospectus One-Hopper - those are free, by the way) how many managers had run into similar fates as new Houston skipper Brad Mills. One of the three I was able to find was mighty familiar:
Moose Stubing, 1988 Angels, 0-8 This one's close to my heart. Lawrence George "Moose" Stubing was a Bronx-born minor league masher in the 1950s and 1960s in the Pirates, Giants, Cardinals and Angels chains. In a minor league career of 1419 games, he hit .283 and slugged .474 with 192 homers, mostly at the Double-A level, with his best seasons coming in El Paso (.316/.454/.613 with 35 homers and 120 RBI in 1964 as a 25-year-old). He hit just .212/.321/.357 in 148 games at Triple-A, and went 0-for-5 with four strikeouts in his cup of coffee with the 1967 California Angels. After playing, Stubing joined the Angels' organization, serving as a scout and minor league manager from 1971 through 1985. During that tenure he spent two years (1980-1981) managing the Angels' Triple-A affiliate in my hometown, Salt Lake City. An amiable lug, he'd show up in the offseason refereeing NCAA basketball games in the Western Athletic Conference and later the PAC-10, generally drawing cheers from the crowd, a rarity for just about any ref. Stubing went on to spend six seasons (1985-1990) as the Angels' third base coach, taking time out to assume interim manager duties at the end of 1988, after Cookie Rojas had been fired with a 75-79 record. He went 0-8 and was replaced over the winter by Doug Rader, never to get another chance to manage in the majors, thus becoming the first player ever to carry 0-fers as both a player and a manager. Stubing was still in baseball as of last year, serving as a special assistant to the general manager for the Nationals, but was relieved of his duties at the end of the year.
Somewhere I have a copy of the Referee magazine with Stubing on the cover, holding a pint of beer:
• National and American League flavors for the Hit List. Speaking of the two teams I've spent the wee hours with:
[#5 Diamondbacks] So Much For the New Guys: With Brandon Webb nowhere in sight, a big part of the Diamondbacks' bid for relevance hinges on Edwin Jackson and Ian Kennedy, both acquired in the Granderson blockbuster. So far, so-so; the two have been cuffed for a combined 6.75 ERA in four starts despite an 18/6 K/BB ratio in 21.2 frames. The Snakes are 2-2 in those games despite not getting a quality start, though Jackson's second turn is mitigated by his hitting a two-run homer amid a 13-run fourth-inning outburst.
[#7 Dodgers] Staff of the Undead: Given the choice for an opening day assignment between Clayton Kershaw and Chad Billingsley, Joe Torre opts for — wait for it — Vicente Padilla, who pitches as though suffering from a gunshot wound (4.1 6 7 7 3 2). He's not the only retread on this pitching staff, either; Ramon Ortiz, Russ Ortiz and Jeff Weaver have allowed 10 runs in 12.1 innings over 15 appearances thus far, with an 8/9 K/BB ratio. At least Torre deserves props for anointing knuckleballer Charlie Haeger his fifth starter; he whiffs 12 in his first turn, albeit in a losing cause, and even adds an inning of scoreless relief.
As for the two usual suspects in the AL:
[#2 Yankees] The defending champions rack up road series wins in Boston and Tampa Bay before returning home to ring in a celebration which includes a classy tribute to the departed World Series MVP, Hideki Matsui (now the Los Angeles Godzilla of Anaheim). New arrivals Curtis Granderson and Nick Johnson fare well, but Javy Vazquez isn't feeling the love; he's booed in the Bronx, perhaps because his ERA in pinstripes dating back to the 2004 All-Star break now stands at 7.52 (101.2 innings including postseason).
[#9 Red Sox] Big Papi, Big Problems: Despite coming from behind to win on opening night, the Sox drop their season-opening series to the Yankees in Fenway, then play the patsies as the Twins open Target Field as well. Amid their slow start, concerns mount regarding David Ortiz, who starts 4-for-26 with no homers and 13 strikeouts, including two or more in five straight games. Colorful in expressing his frustration, Ortiz is at least somewhat vulnerable given the presence of Mike Lowell on the bench. PECOTA isn't terribly concerned, forecasting a .274/.368/.514 weighted mean (a .290 True Average) for the 34-year-old slugger, but Jay-Z has beef.
• And finally, there's the One-Hoppers version of my Jackie Robinson Day missive, which includes an addendum regarding every player wearing number 42, as gleaned from the great Vin Scully, whose Jackie Day broadcasts are worth the price of the Extra Innings package alone:
Watching Thursday night's Dodger game, I heard Vin Scully re-tell a story — told by Dodger pitcher Carl Erskine first in his bookWhat I Learned from Jackie Robinson and then to the New York Times' Dave Anderson here — in which the Dodgers played a game in Cincinnati after Robinson had received a death threat. Police sharpshooters covered the ballpark, making for a tense situation. At a team meeting, outfielder Gene Hermanski offered a suggestion for the Dodgers manager (in the book, it's Burt Shotton, in 1947, in the Times it's Charlie Dressen in 1951; Hermanski was on the team until June 15 of the latter year, but the date of the former is more plausible given the initial tension). "Hey, Skip, I’ve got an idea," said Hermanski. "If we all wore 42 out there, they won’t know who to shoot." The question introduced a bit of levity which helped ratchet down the tension; everybody, including Robinson, laughed. Read in light of that story, the act of every player wearing the number becomes one not just of unity but defiance.
Scully also re-told his Ice Skating with Jackie story, which was preserved for posterity last year in the must-bookmark Sons of Steve Garvey Vin Scully Repository. This one on racism, Bill Veeck, and the flight of major league spring training facilities to Arizona is rather appropriate given the Jackie Robinson theme as well.
Two years ago, MLB made a major $1.2 million commitment to the Robinson Foundation over a four-year period to fund scholarships in the name of each of the 30 clubs. Each year, $300,000 is invested, representing 30 scholorships [sic] worth $10,000.
Derek Jeter, the Yankees captain and all-time hits leader, donates a scholarship in perpetuity at the $250,000 level. He remains the only Major League player that endows a Robinson scholarship.
DuPuy said that MLB's contribution has no time limit and will go beyond the current term of agreement.
I'm sorry, but $1.2 million? That doesn't even buy you a futility infielder these days, and $300,000 isn't even the major league minimum salary anymore. Hell, one benevolent superstar's own foundation nearly equals the entire MLB contribution!
While the money is certainly important to the people who receive it, that's still the equivalent of pocket change left on the nightstand as opposed to a truly meaningful contribution. If baseball really wanted to make an impact in Robinson's name, whether via the Robinson Foundation, the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities initiative, which combats the shrinking participation in the game by African Americans, or other worthy organizations, it would donate a single day's gate receipts instead of contributing such a token amount.
According to the annual Team Marketing Report, the average non-premium ticket price this year is $26.74. Multiply that by the 2009 average attendance of 30,323 per game times 15 home games around the majors and you've got about $12.2 million to spread around, roughly 40 times the amount MLB is trumpeting about contributing annually. Sure, weekday attendance might actually make for smaller per-game attendance, but we haven't even included premium ticket prices in the equation. In any event, we're talking about a substantially larger amount of money being spread around to honor baseball's most important contribution this country's history.
We can employ PECOTA and JAWS in the service of gauging [Mauer's] progress towards Cooperstown. If he were simply to deliver what his weighted mean forecast expected of him this year (6.1 WARP), his seven-year Peak score of 40.6 WARP would be higher than five of the 13 Hall of Fame catchers, four Veterans Committee selections (Ernie Lombardi, Roger Bresnahan, Ray Schalk and Rick Ferrell) as well as the more contemporary Carlton Fisk, whose peak was diluted by injuries. That's a decent start, particularly given that it's within hailing distance of the Peak score component of the JAWS standard for catchers:
Rk Player Career Peak JAWS 1 Johnny Bench* 84.7 55.0 69.9 2 Gary Carter* 79.7 51.6 65.7 3 Ivan Rodriguez 82.9 42.3 62.6 4 Mike Piazza 68.7 50.1 59.4 5 Bill Dickey* 71.9 44.6 58.3 6 Yogi Berra* 73.2 43.8 58.5 7 Gabby Hartnett* 73.0 42.6 57.8 8 Buck Ewing** 66.6 46.3 56.5 9 Carlton Fisk* 65.9 37.5 51.7 10 Joe Torre 61.8 40.0 50.9 AVG HOF C 60.6 41.0 50.8 11 Mickey Cochrane* 55.9 40.9 48.4 12 Jorge Posada 53.6 40.7 47.2 13 Ted Simmons 53.5 37.8 45.7 14 Charlie Bennett 48.5 39.5 44.0 15 Roy Campanella* 45.7 41.0 43.4 ... 23 Ernie Lombardi** 40.7 28.8 34.8 24T Joe Mauer 34.5 34.5 34.5 24T Roger Bresnahan** 38.7 30.3 34.5 33 Ray Schalk** 31.2 29.7 30.5 53 Rick Ferrell** 28.8 21.2 25.0 *BBWAA-elected Hall of Famer **VC-elected Hall of Famer
Turning to Mauer's PECOTA Ten-Year forecast — less useful for its relatively flat shape than for the cumulative weight of his contributions — if we were to assume he hits his PECOTA mark of 6.5 WARP in 2011, Mauer's Peak score would rise to 45.7, as his abbreviated 2004 season would be dropped. Among enshrined catchers, that would elevate his Peak score above those of Mickey, Campy, Gabby, Yogi and Dickey, putting him in what we at the JAWS headquarters like to call "Flavor Country." At that point we might have to start calling him Joey.
Add a third season from that Ten-Year forecast, 6.4 WARP for 2012, and Mauer's really in business, for his Peak score would rise again, to 47.3 (dropping one of those 4.8-WARP seasons). Not only would that push the odds-on favorite to be the top catcher of the 21st Century past Buck Ewing, the best one of the 19th century, it would lift Mauer's total line (53.5 Career/47.3 Peak/50.4 JAWS) above the Hall standard for catchers. And amazingly enough, he would still be shy of his 30th birthday, though he would need at least a token appearance in 2013 to reach the Hall of Fame's ten-year eligibility rule. Less uniformity to those three phantom seasons — say, 9.0, 3.5 and 6.5 WARP over three rollercoaster years — could actually push Mauer's peak score even higher, and he'd presumably be well on his way towards rounding off his Hall of Fame case with some minimally positive contributions in his thirties.
Further down in the piece is the data behind the unsurprising tendency of catchers to supply two-thirds of their total career value (in WARP) before the age of 30, and some back-of-the-envelope calculations showing that the flat structure of Mauer's deal, literally $23 million per year, makes it easier for the Twins to get their money's worth out of him, as the rising cost of a win on the open market will counter the player's tendency towards age-related decline:
The bottom line is that even with more conservative projections than PECOTA is offering, one can model an array of happy outcomes which provide value to the Twins as Mauer marches not only towards Cooperstown but into the discussion of the top five catchers of all time, at least according to JAWS. Darker scenarios exist, of course, but so long as Mauer's healthy and productive, let's celebrate the upside, because we're watching something pretty special.
Indeed. So special that I made him my first pick (fifth overall, behind Albert Pujols, Hanley Ramirez, Matt Kemp and Alex Rodriguez) in the True Blue LA Fantasy League. My team is the Dukes of Flatbush, in honor of the Dodgers' Brooklyn history and the fact that I'm a fungo away from Flatbush Avenue. Clever, maybe, but using an unironic team name feels akin to what the players call "playing naked," i.e., without greenies — just doesn't have the same oomph. Any bright suggestions?
Over at Baseball Prospectus' new One-Hoppers blog, I've expanded and revised my take on Willie Davis to include some comments from the New Bill James Historical Abstract as well as my own JAWS-flavored take: "He was sort of the Mike Cameron or Kenny Lofton or Devon of his day — a fine supporting player whose merits for Cooperstown fall short of the mark, but who could certainly play. There's no shame in that."
As such, this video has been cracking me up for the past couple of months. Too good not to share. It's even got a great baseball reference to boot. Enjoy!
Alas, that turned out to be Koufax's final game. The pitcher was actually forgiving of Davis' woes, and as the great Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote, "I don't think the shock of Game 2 of the World Series was that Willie Davis dropped two fly balls off Koufax fastballs in center field, I think it was that Koufax fastballs ended up in center field in the first place."
Anyway, Davis was so much more than that. He patrolled center field for the Dodgers for 14 year, from 1960 through 1973, a span during which they won three pennants and two World Series. The tail end of his career overlapped with the beginnings of the great Longest Running Infield which drove the team's next four pennants (1974-1981). He is the Los Angeles era franchise leader in hits (2,091), extra-base hits (585), at-bats (7,495), runs (1,004), triples (110) and total bases (3,094). His legacy looms large.
Davis passed away on March 9, and he was fondly remembered at a ceremony at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday which brought together several generations of Dodgers, from Peter O'Malley to Frank McCourt, from Maury Wills and Tommy Davis to Bill Russell, Ron Cey and Reggie Smith. Both his talent and humanity drew tribute. "Willie treated every player with respect and he made you feel welcomed," said Smith, who watched Davis while growing up in Southern California and played with him in St. Louis in 1975. "Willie had it all and he was probably the fastest man I ever saw in baseball."
Indeed, his speed was remarkable. "He was the only man I've ever seen who, when he hit a ball in the gap, the opposing team watched him run," said Lou Johnson, another Dodger teammate from the Sixties. Recalled Tommy Davis (no relation), who raced against him in a 60-yard dash in spring training, ""I realized he was fast," Davis said, "because Johnny Podres and Stan Williams were betting on him -- and those guys knew how to bet."
Davis had his critics as well, not to mention his problems. He converted to Buddhism late in his career, and was often ridiculed by closed-minded sportswriters. He had financial woes late in his career, and following it. Playing in the death valley of 1960s Dodger Stadium, the most parched run scoring environment on earth, his numbers looked meager; he hit .275/.306/.385 for his career at Chavez Ravine, .281/.314/.428 everywhere else. Still, his lifetime True Average (a/k/a Equivalent Average) was .274; a .260 is league average after adjusting for park and league scoring levels, so he was actually a significantly above-average hitter for his time. Translated to a 4.5 runs per game environment (as BP does for every player), his career line comes out to .300/.335/.467, with 2,738 hits, 242 homers and 438 steals — numbers that start to look Hall of Fame caliber — and his defense, according to BP's numbers, was 104 runs above average for his career.
Still, he was viewed as something of an erratic player and character. As the New York Times obituary notes, Murray "suggested that Davis had tinkered with his batting stance too much. 'Willie, you see, did imitations. The only way you could tell it wasn’t Stan Musial was when he popped up.'" (The entire Murray column from which that was taken is here. It's worth a read.)
The best of the Davis tributes online belongs to Bruce Jenkins of the San Francisco Chronicle:
Willie Davis might have been the coolest ballplayer I ever saw. He exuded style, a sense of the pure aesthetic, and he could have excelled at any sport. His choice of baseball was a blessing to the game, and among those of us who watched him up close at Dodger Stadium in the early 1960s, there was no question he was the fastest man alive. In a race from first to third with a running start, I'm not sure even Bob Hayes could have caught him.
Davis was found dead Tuesday at the age of 69 (authorities believe there was no foul play), leaving behind a legacy of unique, unforgettable talent. He made two All-Star teams, racked up 2,561 hits, had a 31-game hitting streak, won three consecutive Gold Glove awards, but he wasn't an elite outfielder in the National League. With the likes of Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson and Roberto Clemente in the mix, that just wasn't possible.
What none of those players had — few that I can recall in any era — was Davis' combination of urban cool and blazing speed. He addressed the world at a slow, measured pace, never in a rush. He basically let life come to him. Even as he approached home plate with a bat in his hands, he struck the impression of a man wearing shades at the far corner table of a jazz club.
There was lightning inside him. He turned it loose at the crack of the bat. Like so many good left-handed hitters, he crushed the low fastball, drilling it up the alleys on a laser path. That's when Willie Davis struck fear in the hearts of every opponent, because that would be a triple.
As Tommy Lasorda inevitably lamented, Davis has gone to visit the big Dodger in the sky. So long, Willie.
Back in the mid-1990s, a trio of young shortstops burst onto the American League scene. Soon dubbed the "Holy Trinity," Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter and Nomar Garciaparra were part of an elite three-way positional rivalry not seen since the days that Willie, Mickey and the Duke ruled the center field scene. The trio were heirs of a sort to Cal Ripken, Jr., who a generation earlier had opened up the shortstop position to bigger, more athletic and more offensively adept types — a development which played no small part in moving the game towards a higher-scoring era. Arguments raged over which of the three was superior, though they often came down to a choice between Rodriguez's video game offensive totals and Jeter's championship rings, with Garciaparra's own merits somewhat lost in the fray. But no matter which dog one had in the hunt, for a few years it certainly seemed as though all three were racing towards Cooperstown.
On Wednesday, the first one of that trio officially bowed out of the race. Garciaparra, who was traded away from the Red Sox mere months before they broke their 86-year World Championship drought in 2004, signed a one-day contract with Boston and announced his retirement. Though just 36 years old, his brittle body had aged far beyond its years, the result of a genetic condition which causes the development of excess scar tissue at the injury site. Already been interrupted by a wrist injury which cost him most of the 2001 season, his career had been on the downslope ever since Achilles tendonitis cost him the first two months of the 2004 season. From that season onward, he averaged just 323 plate appearances per year and qualified for just one batting title while serving a total of 384 days (over two full seasons!) on the disabled list. He did no less than 10 stints due to a groin tear, a fractured wrist, and an endless litany of oblique, knee and calf woes. As his body crumbled, he played just 57 games at his natural position following his exit from Boston.
...While Garciaparra couldn't match Rodriguez's home run numbers or Jeter's championships, during the period that the three players overlapped up to that point — a carefully manicured stretch, admittedly — he had actually been the most valuable of the Trinity:
——-—————-—Jeter———-——-——— Year Age Tm TAv FRAA WARP 1997 23 NYA .273 -14 3.6 1998 24 NYA .300 1 6.8 1999 25 NYA .324 -7 8.0 2000 26 NYA .300 -21 3.9 Tot .299 -41 22.3
Helped by a knee injury which cost Rodriguez a month during the 1999 season and by Jeter's already-dismal defensive numbers, Garciaparra squeaks by both players in terms of WARP, and he edges past them in True Average as well. Of course, by that point A-Rod had already put up a 9.5-WARP season in 1996, and Jeter had enjoyed a pretty fair year himself.
...[Garciaparra] won't wind up in Cooperstown due to the sad denouement of his career. He leaves behind a bittersweet legacy in Boston, where he reached stardom but like so many other Red Sox stars departed under unhappy circumstances. Nonetheless, he enjoyed a fantastic stretch at the outset of his career. Not only was he a part of one of history's great concentrations of talent at a given position, but for a brief period he could make the claim at being the best of the bunch. No matter what came after it, that's pretty special.
TAv is True Average, formerly known as Equivalent Average, a measure of offensive value per out which adjusts for offensive level, home park, and team pitching. A .260 TAv is defined as league average, a .300 is great, a .230 is replacement level. FRAA is Fielding Runs Above Average, WARP is Wins Above Replacement Player.
In any event, beyond that professional take on Garciaparra and his minimal Hall of Fame chances, I've also got a One-Hopper which expands upon this brief tribute regarding the Dodgers' 4+1 game.
• • •
Having covered the Red Sox and Dodger flavors — and a bit of the Yankees' flavor, with Jeter involved — in my Nomar coverage, I've also got something expressly more pinstriped. Over at Pinstriped Bible, I join Steven Goldman and fellow guest traveler Cliff Corcoran for a roundtable concerning the Yankees' fifth-starter battle between Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes. Here's a taste:
STEVE: Given that Joba was averaging 91 MPH during Wednesday's start and his velocity was down last year as well, is it possible that we're no longer looking at a potential elite starter or am I jumping to conclusions?
JAY: It's probably a bit early to start worrying about any pitcher approaching maximum velocity at this stage of the spring, but the results (11 runs in 3.2 innings via two appearances) are certainly unsettling. That said, I think we're at the point that every minor variation in what Joba does relative to expectations is under such a microscope that we - by which I mean everyone following the Yankees, not specifically you two - are in danger of losing perspective. It's the Yankees brass that's brought this situation about, and one has to wonder if the uncertainty of Chamberlain's role at this point in time is weighing upon him.
STEVE: You bring up a good point about the Joba-scope, Jay. Still, though we always talk about how it's crazy to make decisions based on small sample-performances in Spring Training, but on the other hand, isn't there a point at which you have to say, "Track record be damned, we need to see this player execute already?" Cliff?
CLIFF: ...Track record should absolutely play a part in it, however. In a perfect world, the players competing for jobs in camp aren't all starting from zero. Rather, they're demonstrating the skills that allowed them to compile the track record that got them to this spot in the first place. To use an extreme example, based on track record alone, Ron Guidry should be the fifth starter. He's in camp as a special instructor, so he's available and in uniform, but ask him to win the job and you'll realize that he's 59 years old and no longer has those skills. Based on track record alone, Chamberlain should be the fifth starter, because in his 32 major league starts before the team started skipping his turn and limiting his innings late last year, he posted a 3.27 ERA and 8.74 K/9, while Hughes has a 5.22 ERA and 7.1 K/9 in his 28 major league starts.
Joba also has the advantage of being prepared to throw up to 200 innings this season, but he has to prove that his velocity is not an issue, that he can still break off those nasty sliders we saw in 2007 and 2008, that his curve and change are effective major league pitches, that he can mix those four pitches effectively, and that the debates and rules that hounded him over the past two years haven't undermined his confidence on the mound. Jay is right about Joba being under a microscope and there being a loss of perspective about his performance as a starter (I imagine the stat I quoted above will surprise a lot of readers), but Chamberlain also has to prove that he can withstand that concentrated heat without bursting into flames.
... For one of the most memorable moments I've experienced in over 30 years as a Dodger fan. I speak, of course, of Garciparra's 10th-inning walk-off homer off the Padres' Rudy Seanez on September 18, 2006, capping a miraculous comeback in which four Dodgers — Jeff Kent, J.D. Drew, Russell Martin and Marlon Anderson — hit consecutive solo shots in the ninth inning to tie the game.
For all of the Yankees-Red Sox battles in which a prime-era Nomar Garciaparra was a centerpiece — getting through that middle of the lineup with him ahead of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz was like running across I-95 during rush hour — it's the walking wounded warrior of his Dodger days doing the damned-near-impossible that I'll remember most vividly. I still have that game on my TiVo, and you can be damn sure I'm watching it tonight in honor of his retirement.
The Baseball Prospectus 2010 book promotional tour starts in earnest this weekend. On Sunday, February 28, I'll join Cliff Corcoran, Steven Goldman, Kevin Goldstein and Christina Kahrl for a panel discussion at the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center at Montclair State University in New Jersey (if you need directions just know that when you come to a fork in the road, take it). First pitch is at 3 PM. You really don't care whether the US wins the gold medal in hockey, anyway, right?
On Monday, March 1, the law firm of Goldman, Goldstein, Kahrl and Jaffe will be at the Barnes & Noble at 18th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan starting at 6 PM. We'll answer questions and sign anything except veal cutlets, because as Casey Stengel liked to say, his ballpoint pen slips on veal cutlets. Me, I'll be packing a Sharpie in an attempt to surmount such obstacles.
Also, on March 9 Steve, Kevin and I will be appearing at Washington, DC's legendary Politics and Prose bookstore. More details on that one as the date near; see BP's events page for further details.
• • •
Saturday's radio hits:
• Another Wisconsin hit, this one on WFAW 940 AM at 8:30 AM Central, streaming here.
• Out in Dodger country, I'll be appearing on KCAA 1050 AM at 8:40 AM Pacific, streaming here.
More to come on Monday. I'm also booked for another appearance on the Fox Strategy Room streaming webcast at 1 PM Eastern that day. I'll be working overtime to get my mustache in shape for all of this action.
Earlier this month, my pal Jon Weisman migrated his great Dodger Thoughts blog from the Los Angeles Times to the new ESPN Los Angeles family. Among his first posts is one which directly involves me. Jon is the editor of the forthcoming Dodgers 2010 Annual from Maple Street Press, the same folks who publish Bombers Broadside, to which I contributed for the 2007 and 2008 editions. Here's Jon's rundown of the contents of the glossy 128-page book:
Sweep And Low (the end of the 1980 season), by Dodger Thoughts commenter BHSportsGuy
The Great Dividers (the 20 most controversial Dodgers of the 2000s), by Jon Weisman
It's quite a star-studded cast, and I'm honored to be part of it. Maple Street Press is also doing annuals of the Yankees, Red Sox, Twins, Phillies, Mets, Mariners, Cubs and Cardinals, and via the Twitscape, it sounds as though at least some of those books are already shipping. Each one goes for $12.99.
Elsewhere at Dodger Thoughts' new home, Jon's got a lengthy, must-read piece for which he interviewed embattled Dodger owner Frank McCourt one-on-one for an hour, discussing the controversies that have embroiled the team in recent months — the divorce proceedings between the owner and wife/former team CEO Jamie McCourt, the decisions not to offer arbitration to free agents Randy Wolf and Orlando Hudson, the team's recent failures to spend in a manner commensurate with their standing in the amateur draft, their propensity for surrendering top-notch prospects in trade in exchange for holding the line on salary. I've detailed these controversies multipletimes myself, so I welcome a fresh perspective, particularly from the man who signs the checks. Here's what McCourt (and Weisman) have to say about the July 2008 trade in which the Dodgers sent catching prospect Carlos Santana (no, not the guitarist) — now considered one of the game's top hitting prospects — to the Indians in a deal for Casey Blake:
If there was a moment that really seemed to call into question the Dodgers' ability to commit to prospects, it was when the team traded Carlos Santana and Jonathan Meloan in mid-2008 for a three-month test run of Casey Blake. (Blake re-signed with the Dodgers as a free agent after the 2008 season.) It was widely reported, to the point that almost no doubt remained, that the Dodgers included Santana, a catcher who was having an explosive year in A ball, so that they wouldn't have to pay approximately $2 million in Blake's remaining '08 salary.
McCourt said in the interview that he had "no idea" about that aspect of the trade, that this was general manager Ned Colletti's territory. This is an example of the plausible deniability McCourt periodically exercises that seems not quite so plausible, given the level of detail with which he'll talk about other aspects of the Dodgers. Subsequent to the interview, neither Colletti nor anyone else with the Dodgers would comment about this on the record.
However, a source within the Dodgers organization insisted that the following was true: The Indians were not going to trade Blake to the Dodgers unless they got Santana in the deal. His inclusion had nothing to do with money.
If you know my policy on anonymous sources, you know that I always say you should take them with a grain of salt. So please do. But also realize that the original report was never confirmed on the record, either.
In any case, there's still a baseball debate to be had on the trade, even if Santana was the centerpiece for the Indians rather than a money-saving throw-in. Was Blake worth the price of a red-hot catching prospect? Blake had immediate value but was aging. Santana had all the promise in the world, though he was a 22-year-old in A ball who might end up moving out from behind the plate defensively.
Even if the original reports about the trade were true and the Dodgers did it to save $2 million, it's not like they haven't spent that $2 million and more elsewhere since then, and rather recklessly at times to boot (Guillermo Mota fits this bill rather perfectly). On the other hand, if my source is correct and the Dodgers simply believed Santana and Meloan for Blake was a smart move, was the team right to do it? It was debatable then, is debatable now even after Blake's presence on two division-winning Dodger teams, and will continue to be debatable for some time to come.
Focusing on the $2 million distracts from the real issue, which is how well the Dodgers evaluate players and needs, whether it's Santana for Blake, Andy LaRoche for Manny Ramirez, Tony Abreu for Jon Garland, and so on.
"The Santana trade is an example of ... the pressure to trade players in course of season," McCourt said. "You give up real value for that. Sometimes you're able to -- sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not. Sometimes what you give up is less than what you thought it was, sometimes it's more than what you thought it was. There's always pulls and tugs on this."
The entire piece is well worth reading, so kudos to Jon on that front. I'm not going to pick apart McCourt's replies, many of which do deserve some deeper dissection than the piece provides; Dodger Divorce's Josh Fisher is already hard at work on that front.
Elsewhere in the Dodger universe, Baseball Prospectus colleague Will Carroll created a stir with the release of the Team Health Reports spreadsheet, which shows all five of the Dodgers' starting pitchers — Chad Billingsley, Clayton Kershaw, Hiroki Kuroda, Vicente Padilla and James McDonald, though the latter is just one of a handful of fifth-starter candidates — projected as red lights, meaning they have a 50 percent chance of winding up on the disabled list due to various factors — age, past injury history, team injury history, and PECOTA attrition rate — applied to an actuarial table based upon 10 years of MLB data clustered by age and position. The Dodgers' THR itself discussing the ratings for each player hasn't been published, but the intrepid Mr. Weisman pre-emptively interviewed Will, who had this to say about the pitchers:
I doubt anyone will quibble with Kuroda or Kershaw as risks. Kuroda's a litle inflated in that he was out for something that's unpredictable [a line drive to the noggin which caused a concussion] and then going out again [due to a herniated disc in his neck] makes it look worse than I think it really was. Kershaw is young, threw a lot of innings (not outrageous, but an increase) and is expected to have another increase this year. Risky, yes. Red, yes, but my god, the upside. McDonald is a case where if he's the five starter on Day 1 and stays there all year, his innings increase will be insane. I doubt the Dodgers would ignore this, but I can't project that forward.
As for Billingsley - who I don't hate - he wore down in the latter stages of the season. He was pretty solid, but if I tell you that Dan Haren has a similar pattern, would it bother you? Risk is not reality, but the fact is that every single one of the Dodgers starters as we speak now is a demonstrable risk. All goes well, no worries and the Dodgers run away with the division. One thing goes bad? Meh, most teams can survive. Two or three ... not so much, especially if they have to start rushing some of their good young arms.
Yikes. As noted before, McDonald has some competition among the ranks for the fifth starter job, including a couple of guys who popped up on colleague Kevin Goldstein's Top 11 Prospects list earlier this week, Scott Elbert and Josh Lindblom. The list is headed by shortstop Dee Gordon, son of former Yankees reliever Tom Gordon, and anagram for "Dodger One," for whatever that's worth (you're free to go to town on his full name, Devaris Strange-Gordon, if you like). Here's the list as well as Kevin's writeup of Son of Flash:
Five-Star Prospects 1. Dee Gordon, SS 2. Chris Withrow, RHP Four-Star Prospects 3. Ethan Martin, RHP Three-Star Prospects 4. Aaron Miller, LHP 5. Scott Elbert, LHP 6. Trayvon Robinson, OF 7. Garrett Gould, RHP 8. Ivan DeJesus Jr., SS 9. Josh Lindblom, RHP Two-Star Prospects 10. Kenley Jansen, RHP 11. Kyle Russell, OF
1. Dee Gordon, SS DOB: 4/22/88 Height/Weight: 5-11/150 Bats/Throws: L/R Drafted/Signed: 4th round, 2008, Seminole CC (FL) 2009 Stats: .301/.362/.394 at Low-A (131 G) Last Year’s Ranking: 7
Year in Review: A highly athletic shortstop, Gordon earned Midwest League co-MVP honors in a stunning full-season debut. The Good: Gordon's tools are the best in the system by a mile, and among the best in the game, with one scout calling him, "A Jimmy Rollins starter kit." He has outstanding hand-eye coordination and a knack for contact; he has the potential to develop enough power for 10-15 home runs annually. He's a pure burner who led the league with 73 stolen bases, and he's a quick-twitch athlete with well above-average range and arm strength. The Bad: Gordon is quite raw, and while that creates plenty of room for excitement, as he's been able to produce big numbers on sheer athleticism, there's also concern, as he's far less refined than most players his age. He needs to improve his plate discipline and work on becoming more consistent defensively, but both of those issues saw considerable improvement as the 2009 season wore on. Ephemera: Dodgers farm director DeJon Watson was a roommate with Gordon's father, Tom, when both were minor-leaguers in the Royals system. Perfect World Projection: He’s an All-Star shortstop. Path to the Big Leagues: Gordon needs at least two more years in the minors, and there's still a chance he'll need to move to center field. Timetable: Despite his performance, most see Gordon as a one-step-at-a-time player, so he'll likely spend most, if not all of 2010 at High-A Inland Empire.
A five-star prospect is one which by Kevin's definition ranks among the top 50 prospects in the game in his forthcoming Top 100 Prospects list. While one might be skeptical about how raw Gordon is — he didn't commit to playing baseball until his senior year of high school — it's worth noting that the Dodgers were able to spin a similarly raw Matt Kemp into an All-Star caliber player. In the comments to the piece, Kevin elaborated on Gordon, "As you are watching a guy hit .300, steal 70+ bases and get to balls at short no human should get to, and you realize he's doing it without really having much of an idea of what he's doing out there. That creates tons of understandable excitement, but it doesn't come without its reservations as well."
Whew. It never rains but it pours around here, right? Especially when it snows...
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.
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.
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.
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.
When our initial PECOTA projections were unveiled in mid-February, the Dodgers' overall chances at reaching the postseason only stood around 29 percent, with an eight-win gap separating them from the Diamondbacks. By the time the season opened, their odds were up to 57 percent (48 percent for a division title, nine percent for the wild card) thanks to the late-February addition of Orlando Hudson and the early March re-signing of Ramirez.
Those two deals, along with the early February signing of Randy Wolf, came at substantial discounts in a bad economy. This was a feather in Colletti's cap, as he was able to reduce the Opening Day payroll by about $18 million relative to 2008.
As it was, PECOTA's 93-win forecast was pretty accurate, particularly given that it nailed both the Dodgers' ranking as the league's stingiest pitching staff (they tied with the Giants for the fewest runs allowed at 3.77 per game) and fourth-highest scoring offense (4.81 runs per game). While [Chad] Billingsley didn't live up to the system's expectations due to a bad second half, Wolf put together a career year and [Clayton] Kershaw pitched well beyond his years, posting the league's lowest hit rate (6.3 H/9), second-best homer rate (0.4 HR/9) and fifth-best strikeout rate (9.7 K/9) and ERA (2.79). Jonathan Broxton led the league with 4.9 WXRL while anchoring the circuit's top bullpen.
As for the offense, its .273 EqA ranked second in the league. [Manny] Ramirez was projected to rank seventh in the league with a .315 EqA, and while his 50-game suspension prevented him from getting enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, his .327 EqA would have ranked fifth. [Andre] Ethier (.301) and [Matt] Kemp (.298) both beat their projections slightly as well while becoming the first Dodgers to top 20 homers since 2005.
Key Stat: .346 OBP
Despite playing in one of the league's top pitchers' parks, the Dodgers put up the NL's highest OBP as well as batting average (.270), enabling them to overcome a meager .412 slugging percentage (seventh in the league) and the third-lowest percentage of runs scored via homers (30.1). There simply wasn't an easy out to be had in their lineup; of their eight regulars, only leadoff man Rafael Furcal (.335) finished below .350, and even he came on strong late in the year. Though Ramirez (.418) cooled off after his suspension, he nonetheless set the tone, walking 71 times in 104 games; his 21 intentional passes ranked third in the league behind Albert Pujols and Adrian Gonzalez despite his lengthy absence. Juan Pierre (.365) filled in admirably during that 50-game stretch and elsewhere off the bench. [Casey[ Blake (.363) set a career high. Kemp (.352) and Ethier (.361) set career highs in walks as well as homers, a sign of growing respect in the eyes of opposing pitchers. Russell Martin (.352) and James Loney (.357) kept the line moving despite mysterious power outages which raised questions about their future viability.
This will be a big winter for the Dodgers, with Billingsley, Ethier, Kemp, Loney, Martin and Hong-Chih Kuo all arbitration-eligible and ready to take up a significantly larger chunk of payroll. But whether it's a spillover from the Dodgers' ownership turmoil or a firm belief in their own resources, Colletti doesn't sound inclined to try signing or trading for a true ace who could properly orient the rotation for a short series, as Joe Torre ultimately failed to do. One would think the Dodgers could consider dangling Billingsley in a deal for the Blue Jays' Roy Halladay, or throw a significant amount of money at the Angels' John Lackey, who's been one of the game's top 10 starters over the past five years according to ERA+, and who's been battle-tested in the postseason.
I guess we Dodger fans shouldn't hold our breaths for such an ace. On the contrary, perhaps we should thank our lucky stars that as bad as the internecine struggle between Frank and Jamie McCourt over control of the team appears to look, it's considerably less likely to turn into the kind of fire sale that the Padres underwent in the wake of owner John Moores' divorce, at least in the near term.
None of which lessened my disappointment at their loss, but the outcome was hardly in doubt after the fourth inning. Indeed, the script looked all too familiar. From today's writeup:
Vicente Padilla's chariot turned back into a pumpkin last night. An unlikely hero of the Dodgers' playoff run via his two previous starts, he joined Game One starter Clayton Kershaw and Game Three starter Hiroki Kuroda in failing to survive five innings against the Phillies' offensive juggernaut. For the second year in a row, the Dodgers were unceremoniously bounced from the National League Championship Series in five games. Wait 'til next year.
It didn't have to be that way for the Dodgers, who came into the series as the favorites among a broad consensus of writers, gamblers, simulators, and moral degenerates thanks to the home field advantage, fewer questions about their pitching staff, and more righty hitters and lefty pitchers to counter the Phillies' ample supply of lefties. Dodger manager Joe Torre made a hash of his rotation, however, and far more often than not, the pitchers he entrusted failed to deliver. Consider the two rotations' performances:
Team IP H HR BB SO ERA
Dodgers 21.2 22 6 10 15 8.72
Philllies 30.2 24 6 4 22 2.93
The Dodgers had four full days of rest between playoff rounds, giving Torre the chance to align his rotation to best advantage, so that line above constitutes epic failure in both planning and execution. Subtract Padilla's Game Two gem as well as that of his opposite number, Pedro Martinez, and the two ERAs become 13.19 and 3.80. If you're the Dodgers, it should go without saying that that's no way to win a pennant.
The problem, ultimately, is that as strong as their rotation was — and they finished with the league's second-best ERA and tied for third in SNLVAR — the Dodgers lacked a true number one starter who could be depended upon to pitch deep into a ballgame come hell or high water and to make multiple starts in a competitive series (i.e., one longer than four games). The 21-year old Kershaw and 24-year-old Chad Billingsley, who was bypassed for a start, may both eventually develop into that stud, but neither is there yet. Randy Wolf, the Dodgers' most dependable starter this year, isn't that stud, either. To expect Kuroda, whose 2008 postseason performance outweighed his recent health woes in Torre's eyes, or Padilla, a free-talent pickup whose ERA has been six percent worse than the park-adjusted league average over the past six years, to rise to live up to such expectations was asking too much.
The Dodgers did have a few chances to make a game of it, but Torre managed from back on his heels throughout the game and indeed the series, failing to give Padilla an earlier hook and notably failing to get pinch-hitter Jim Thome to the plate with the bases loaded even at the expense of one of his trusted but underperforming position players. I suggested in last night's roundtable that one might have trouble finding an active manager with the cojones to bat Thome for one of his regulars, but a Casey Stengel or an Earl Weaver wouldn't have hesitated. Here's Joe's take:
...[W]hen I think about the Dodgers' failures — Torre's failures — I will recall an isolation shot on Jim Thome, alone in the on-deck circle, studying Ryan Madson, just as he'd studied so many pitchers before hitting his 564 career home runs, including 23 this season. I'll think about a team down five runs with five outs to go, with the bases loaded, with a glimmer of a hint of a ghost of a chance against a bullpen just aching to be exposed. I'll think about the decision to let first Russell Martin and then Casey Blake try their luck against Madson, someone who, throughout his career, has been tougher against righties than lefties. I'll think about how, when you start the eighth inning down six runs, you just hope for the opportunity to make a big score with one swing, to make a game of it, to pull off a miracle. I'll think about that miracle never getting closer than that on-deck circle.
I watched last night's game with friends, among them Jay Jaffe, who says that no manager in baseball would have made the move I insist was so obviously the correct one. Perhaps he's right. I could only come up with one name, and after sleeping on it, I don't think even he would do it. But winning a championship isn't something you do by following the path of the other 29 guys. It's something you do by making the right move at the right time to win that game. The right move was to get Jim Thome and his power to the plate with a chance to make it 9-8 with the top of the order batting in the ninth inning against Brad Lidge. Maybe Manuel goes to Scott Eyre (which is why you hit Thome for Martin, rather than wait for Blake), and even if he does, well, that worked out in Game Two. But you don't go down with Martin and Blake without getting 564 home runs and a .557 slugging average to the plate. The entire reason you put Jim Thome on the roster is so that maybe he can get you four desperately needed runs with one swing of the bat. Whatever the considerable skills of both Martin and Blake, they were the wrong men for the job. Their failures are Joe Torre's failure.
Sad but true.
I'll have more postmortem stuff about the Dodgers in tomorrow's edition of "Kiss 'Em Goodbye" at BP and ESPN Insider. In the meantime, I'll be rooting for the other half of my portfolio as the Yankees try to wrap up their first pennant in six years.
