Breaking Pitches and Broken Pitchers

My pal Nick, a.k.a. the Clubhouse Lawyer, called my attention to a study published in the July-August 2002 American Journal of Sports Medicine regarding youth pitchers and injury. The study found a significant correlation between the number and type of pitches thrown and the rate of elbow and shoulder pain in youth pitchers.

According to the press release (I have not read the actual article), the AJSM followed 467 pitchers ages 9-14 for one season. Data was collected via pre- and post-season questionnaires, postgame interviews concerning injury and performance, and pitch count logs; pitcher videos were used to analyze proper mechanics.

The study found that 15% of all pitching appearances resulted in shoulder or elbow pain (joint pain, not muscle soreness). Curveballs increased the risk of shoulder pain 52%, and sliders increased the risk of elbow pain 86%. Ouch! Intriguingly, the use of a change-up lowered injury risks for both elbow injury (12%) and shoudler injury (29%), though it’s not clear from the press release whether that’s in combination with breaking pitches or as an alternative. As for pitch counts, the correlation between pitch count and elbow pain was not statistically significant, but “there was a significant relationship between an increased number of game pitches and the risk of shoulder pain.” The authors of the study note that the risk of breaking pitches “is magnified for the prepubescent athlete because the growth plates in the elbow and shoulder joints are still open and are more susceptible to stress-related injuries.”

These results are interesting for their quantification of injury risks, but not surprising. “[I]ncreased number of game pitches” equals high pitch counts, and high pitch counts are where we presume most pitching-related arm injuries come from–specifically, the accumulation of microtrauma from the repetitive pitching motion. The risk of breaking pitches on young arms is (one would hope, at least) conventional wisdom.

The study obvioiusly has implications at the big-league level, but it’s important to note what it does and doesn’t show. Nick and I had a lively back-and-forth email session on this, which I’ll re-run here.

Jay: Most interesting for the quantification of injury risks, but hardly a surprising result–it’s right in line with the conventional wisdom that throwing breaking pitches before the arm is fully developed is a bad idea.

Nick: I think what’s most fascinationg about this study, is that it implies that the seeds of destruction (or at least major arm injury) are planted before major league scouts ever lay eyes on a pitcher. Perhaps when drafting pitchers, organizations should do background checks on little league, junior high, and high school pitching history of potential draftees. It would appear from this initial study that poor use of pitchers at the adolescent level has much more to do with major injury risk than overuse at the professional level. I look forward to more studies on the subject.

Jay: Implies is the important word. We can speculate all we want, but we don’t know what comes of THESE 9-14 year olds–how many of them are still pitching several years later, whether they sustain injuries or what kind.

In this study, we’ve got young kids, we’ve got breaking pitches, we’ve got pitch counts, and we’ve got increased injury risks. We don’t have a link to whether THEY are at risk for further injury later, or what kind of injury.

I suspect a good many of the ones who get hurt early fall by the wayside before they ever get to high school or college ball, and the ones who make it that far do so because they didn’t get hurt in their adolescent years. I don’t think you see too many high school or college pitchers who survive consistent abuse. 15 year olds who need rotator cuff or Tommy John surgery don’t make comebacks.

Nick: Clearly this is very much an initial study. You’d think the Major League Baseball would have a vested interest in serious medical studies on the links between pitch, type, pitch count, and injury rates in all age groups. What this study suggests, and what clearly needs further in depth study, is the link between abuse of adolescent pitching arms and the likelihood of major injury to adult pitchers. With the amount of money at stake, you’d think MLB would want to more about pitching related injuries than “it’s an unnatural stress on the arm, a certain percentage of career ending injuries is to be expected”. Then again, look who’s running the show.

Jay: You’d think they’d have an interest. But with all of them rocket surgeons piping up on the management side during the current labor situation, it seems pretty clear that the likes of Bud Selig, John Moores, Tom Hicks, Drayton McLane, David Glass, and Jeffrey Loria need Mapquest and a military-precision GPS system to find their own […] asses. Expecting them to extrapolate the link between adolescent pitching arms and major league contracts is like expecting the family mutt to take over the responsibility of managing your stock portfolio.

Of course, it’s tough to dig too deeply into the implications of a study for which I’ve only read a press release. While the results aren’t quite the smoking gun needed to indict current big league managers who abuse the arms of promising young hurlers, they do shed some scientific light on the situation and offer a promising avenue for further research. I’ve sent away for a copy of the full article, and I’ll report back if I glean any further wisdom from it.

Sponsored by The Futility Infielder

The Internet is a tough racket to make a buck in, kiddo. I learned it the hard way. Six years ago, I worked for a weasel whose company churned out guidebooks about websites. Real paper-and-ink books about a medium that was moving so fast it turned our product into Instant Doorstop. But you don’t want to hear that story. It gets ugly fast, goes downhill from there, and puts me in a very grouchy mood.

Suffice it to say, my experience taught me one thing: it’s a cold day in hell when somebody gets excited about paying for a website. But that’s exactly what happened Monday when the online baseball encyclopedia, excuse me, Thee Online Baseball Encyclopedia, baseball-reference.com, announced it was selling sponsorships of individual pages. The result set off an entertaining feeding frenzy, as those of us who admire the labor-of-love website and the work put into it by its founder, Sean Forman, opened our wallets without hesitation.

Forman has come up with an ingenious plan to help offset the bandwidth costs of his site, which has served over 80 million pages in two years. For the three of you here with no interest in baseball statistics, those pages contain stats–from the most basic to the most obscure–of every major league player and team. Ever. It’s a brilliant site because it’s lean and clean. Everything is cross-linked, and it all loads quickly. The 1998 Yankees link to Tim Raines, which links to the 1986 National League leaderboard which links to Fernando Valenzuela, ad infinitum. A guy could spend hours there.

B-Ref is selling hyperlinked text ads on each page for $5 and up, based upon how much traffic that page receives. The most expensive player, Barry Bonds, goes for $290; the most expensive page, the league directory page, rolls for $385 a month. Babe Ruth: $240 a year. Luis Sojo: $10.

And the feeling of sponsoring the Luis Sojo page: priceless. Having supported B-Ref in the past but still feeling karmically indebted, I put my money where my mouth is upon discovering the sponsorship opportunity. As Sean graciously rewarded my past work on the site (I designed the Babe Ruth banner and button) with some matching funds, I quickly found myself with a bankroll and a lunch hour to spend it.

I sprung for eight pages in all:

• A few true-blue futility infielders: Sojo, whom I informally claimed as the 2001 Futility Infielder of the Year), Mario Mendoza (the man with the Line), and Twins manager Ron Gardenhire, the first player or ex-player ever to refer to himself as a futility infielder. Gardenhire, by dint of the Twins’ success in his rookie year managing, has already clinched the 2002 Futility Infielder of the Year award, unless Fred Stanley rescues a house full of burning kittens, Mickey Klutts stumbles on a cure for cancer, or Enrique Wilson wins World Series MVP.

• A trio of my Wall of Famers: Tommy Lasorda, Pedro Guerrero, and Jay Buhner (the best ballplaying Jay ever). I’ve been meaning to write more of these, and I can see sponsoring a few of the less expensive ones as I expand this site.

• Two Yankee favorites: Alfonso Soriano and David Cone. One becoming a star, the other on the verge of retirement and enshrinement in the Wall, if not the Hall, of Fame.

A pretty good haul, I’d say. The only player I really wanted that I couldn’t get was Jim Bouton, already taken by Don Malcolm of bigbadbaseball.com. My brain cramped as somebody else on Baseball Primer bragged about sneaking off with the 1969 Seattle Pilots: “THE ONLY ONE!” To quote the immortal (and as yet unclaimed at $10) Pilots manager Joe Schultz, “Ah, shitfuck.”

Plenty of other people were just as swept away; Forman claimed over 180 pages sponsored by 140 users in the first day, including at least one who got out of hand: “I had to cut one guy off earlier,” he wrote on the Primer thread. “He clearly had left his senses. I hope you don’t all get your credit card bills next month and think, ‘What the hell was I thinking?’ Please sponsor responsibly.”

Many of the sponsorships were obscure obsessions gone vanity plate (Floyd Rayford: $5); several other webloggers, like me, used theirs to flog their blogs. Baseballblog.com’s Aaron Gleeman (a Twins fan) bemoaned the rising cost of sponsorships (which last 12 months) as pages grew in popularity: “I was hoping I could keep Adam Dunn for a few years. It may turn out to be a small market/large market situation. I won’t be able to afford Adam Dunn and Torii Hunter when they start getting more page views, so I will have to let them go. Then Sponsorship Yankees will just grab them up for big bucks.”

That’s optimism for you. We should all be so lucky that B-Ref thrives enough to cover its costs and repay its founder for the work (and thought) he’s put into it. Go buy yourself a player, and support a great site.

Two Week Notice

By now you know that the Major League Baseball Players Association finally set a strike date on Friday, giving themselves and the owners two weeks to work out a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. After a rare glimpse of optimism earlier in the week, both sides now sound increasingly pessimistic about bridging their gap, particularly on the revenue sharing and luxury tax issues.

If you’ve been reading this site with any regularity, you know that I am generally pro-player in this battle, and have been for some time. I remember the 1981 strike, back when I was 11 years old. I’d already read Jim Bouton’s Ball Four a couple of times, and the name Marvin Miller was certainly familiar to me when the players struck. I was disappointed at the timing of the strike, with my beloved Dodgers in first place and Fernandomania sweeping the nation. But I held no blame towards the players. Ball Four had exposed, to me at least, the routine buggery owners and general managers had used to bully players prior to free agency. Conditions have obviously changed since Bouton’s book, but as he noted more recently, “For a hundred years the owners screwed the players; for twenty-five years the players have screwed the owners – they’ve got seventy-five years to go.”

I don’t honestly think today’s players look at the situation with that kind of acrimony. But I do share their sense of skepticism with regards to the owners’ intentions and to their claims that baseball is hemmorhaging money. I’m not a financial genius, but the work of people such as Doug Pappas has given me a reasonable understanding of the shenanigans that owners can use to conceal profits in their balance sheets.

So I bear the players no ill will for working to protect the gains they’ve made over the past quarter-century. I certainly have more respect for their union than the inept NBA players’ one which failed so miserably at the bargaining table and in the court of public opinion during the 1998-99 lockout. Yes, I’d be heartbroken if the World Series were cancelled again, but this game is too strong, too rich in history to be destroyed by morons like Bud Selig and Jeffrey Loria. Owners, especially stupid ones, are an eminently replaceable commodity, just like slick-fielding shortstops who can’t hit their weight. If this labor war shakes some of the dumber ones out of the game, good effin’ riddance. The players are the irreplaceable product, and the minute owners forget that, the absurdity of their position is revealed. Nobody will go to Miller Park to watch the replacement Milwaukee Brewers or PNC Park to watch the replacement Pittsburgh Pirates–the real thing is nightmarish enough.

My observation of the contrasting ways in which teams like the Yankees and the Brewers have run their organizations over the past few years has shaped my views greatly. I grew up hating Steinbrenner for the way he bullied his players (and managers), but since his post-suspension re-emergence, he’s managed to curb that tendency. He understands that within the game, nothing makes money like a winning ballclub. So George seeks out new revenue streams, then takes the money and pours it back into the team via player contracts and a strong international scouting presence. My take is that he wishes every other team would do the same. Yes, he’d like taxpayers to build him a better Yankee Stadium, but he knows the team’s Bronx address is part of its hallowed heritage, and that his team can compete just fine without more luxury boxes.

But all markets are not created equally. The Oakland A’s and the Brewers, to choose two examples, come from much smaller markets, but they’ve shown that intelligent management (or lack of same) is every bit as important as money in creating a competitive ballclub. It isn’t about a shiny new ballpark built at taxpayer expense. It’s about creative baseball minds that are open to new ideas on the field and in the front office.

Unlike most baseball writers, I don’t claim to have any coherent plan that would solve the ills of the major league game. While I think some improved form of revenue-sharing has to be put into effect, that money MUST be put back into the teams instead of into the owners’ pockets. Any revenue-sharing system which penalizes a successful mid-market franchise like the Cleveland Indians in order to prop up the inept large-market Philadelphia Phillies is wrong. Any system that rewards decisions to sign the likes of Neifi Perez to a long term contract at the expense of jettisoning home-grown talent like Jermaine Dye or Johnny Damon is wrong. Any system which makes the Brewers the most profitable team in baseball while fielding such a shoddy ballclub is wrong. And I’m sorry to my fans in Milwaukee to keep harping on their team, but we all know that these aren’t Harvey’s Wallbangers we’re talking about. I want them, as well as fans of every team in in every city, to have pride in their ballclubs.

Enough soapboxing. There are much better writers than myself who are covering this much more eloquently. Bootleg Sports’ Dayn Perry has a great starting point, covering the 5 best and 5 worst articles on major league baseball’s economics. Among the best: the aforementioned Pappas (even if you never come back to this site, please read his work), Forbes’ Magazine’s analysis of MLB’s claimed $500 million in losses, and Bryan Burwell’s comparison of Bud Selig to the inept scam artist from the movie Fargo. Perry’s article on the worst writing about baseball economics is also worth reading. The execrable, arrogant Mike Lupica, the toadying Phil Rogers, and the Wall Street Journal make the dishonor roll, and with good cause.

Pappas’ most recent piece at Baseball Prospectus is also required reading. It addresses the big stumbling block in the current negotiations, the double-whammy of revenue sharing and the luxury tax. As Pappas notes, the owners’ current proposal will not improve competitive balance; it’s fundamentally flawed:

“That flaw is requiring all teams to share 50% of all their local revenue, from Dollar One. By creating a 50% marginal tax rate that applies equally to the Yankees and the Kansas City Royals, the owners’ revenue sharing plan discourages both clubs from spending money to improve their teams. Discouraging the Yankees is part of the plan, of course, but anything that deters the Royals from reinvesting their revenue-sharing proceeds in better players will only worsen “competitive balance.”

Pappas instead suggests a formula for graduated revenue sharing, in which the more money a franchise earns beyond certain thresholds, the more heavily it’s taxed. Pappas claims such a system would also correct the problem generated by the split-pool system the players favor: curbing the subsidizing of teams which aren’t trying to improve. One can only hope Donald Fehr, Gene Orza, Bud Selig, Robert Dupuy, and the player representatives read this. You definitely should.

I’m going to remain optimistic that the two sides can work this out, but I know that even if the players strike, what comes out of it will ultimately benefit the game. Sooner or later, both sides will blink. Especially the owners, who make up a far more contentious contingency than the players do. From A-Rod to 13-year minor league veteran Alan Zinter, the players have more in common than do George Steinbrenner and Carl Pohlad, and a solid track record of defending their turf. My money is on them.

Stretch of What?

What do you do in a wild card race when the most un-clutch pitcher of his generation, Kenny “The Gambler” Rogers, turns you down”? You make another move for the stretch drive. You acquire a guy who’s 4-9 with a 4.55 ERA and a reputation for being soft, a guy whose last start went walk, walk, walk, HOMER before he even retired a batter. And you book a golf vacation for October 1. The Cincinnati Reds may as well do that after acquiring Shawn Estes from the New York Mets for two prospects with great names (Pedro Feliciano and Elvin Andujar).

Lee Sinins, who runs the daily Around The Majors mailing list, wrote of the trade, “Actually, this is a nice trade for the Reds. They get one of the nicest players in baseball. Estes isn’t one of those self centered players who only thinks of himself and his teammates. He helps the competition by consistently giving them more runs (both earned and unearned) than the league average, adjusted to his parks, which have been some of the best pitching parks in the league.” Ouch!

D’oh!

A reader named Phil pointed out to me that Claude Osteen was in fact a lefty. So much for my memory–I even found a picture of the baseball card I was thinking of. Sure enough, he was STILL a lefty. I have traded my fact-checking monkey to the Cincinnati Reds for Pete Rose’s sideburns.

Claude Osteen???

Speaking of the Royals… former correspondant from the depths of the the AL Central Rany Jazayerli has an excellent study on Baseball Prospecuts comparing pitchers in a five-man rotation versus those in a four-man rotation.

Rany studied 68 pitchers who made between 37 and 43 starts in a season between 1973 and 1975 (I’ll call them the 4-Men), and 68 who made 34 or 35 starts between 1991 and 1993 (the 5-Men). The raw statistical edge between the two groups is split, with the 4-Men featuring a lower ERA and the 5-Men a higher winning percentage. But the big difference is in the number of innings thrown by the 4-Men, an average of 50 more per pitcher. That’s 50 innings which under the 5-man rotation would be given from the #1 starter to the #5, a big cost in runs. Furthermore, those extra innings thrown by the 4-Men didn’t cause any long-term damage to those pitchers; five years later, they were still throwing MORE innings MORE effectively than their counterparts. As Rany concludes:

Bottom Line: if these numbers suggest anything, it’s that pitching in a four-man rotation is less damaging than pitching in a five-man rotation. Now, the difference between the two groups isn’t enormous, and neither is the sample size, so I’ll concede the point that these differences are not statistically significant. I’m not trying to argue that working on three days’ rest is more healthy than working on four days’ rest, only that it isn’t less healthy. Given the obvious tactical benefits that come from taking innings away from the worst pitchers on your staff and giving them to your best, shouldn’t that be enough?

Very interesting stuff. Early on in the piece, Rany imparts some historical perspective to the issue, explaining that the Dodgers were the first to use it–basically because “unlike almost any other organization, they actually had five quality starters. How many teams can boast five starting pitchers whose names are still recognizable a quarter-century later?” The five to which he refers (the Dodgers 1972 rotation) are Don Sutton, Tommy John, Claude Osteen, Bill Singer, and Al Downing.

I thought about that one for a moment, then looked at the Dodger rotation the following season, when Singer was replaced by Andy Messersmith. By my reckoning, that’s even more memorable a collection of ballplayers, with three of the five familiar enough to produce knee-jerk associations, the fourth a popular Hall of Famer and one of my personal favorites:

Al Downing – yielded Hank Aaron’s 715th homer

Tommy John – gave his name to ligament replacement surgery and a statistical family of pitchers

Andy Messersmith – one of two players in a landmark arbitrator’s ruling which created free agency

Don Sutton – Hall of Famer, 324 wins, fought Steve Garvey

Claude Osteen – ?

Claude Osteen won 196 games in the major leagues; he also lost 195. He made up for this with a 1-2 record in the 1965 and 1966 World Series, putting him eternally at .500. Osteen was something of Sandy Koufax’s mirror image, a righty who wore #23 (I remember this from an old baseball card showing an awkwardly-torqued elbow which made me think of the Dodger ace). He was the only non-Hall of Famer of that 1966 rotation which included Koufax, Don Drysdale, and the rookie Sutton–each of whom topped 40 career shutouts. Those four also combined for 893 wins and 704 losses in their respective careers, a .559 winning percentage:

           W    L

Sutton   324  256

Drysdale 209  166

Osteen   196  195

Koufax   165   87

TOTAL    893  704  (.559 Win Pct.)

Having left the original purpose of this column and gone galloping down some weird tangent, I now give you another rotation to consider in terms of impressive career totals, the 1970 Minnesota Twins:

                 W    L

Jim Kaat       283  237

Jim Perry      215  174

Bert Blyleven  287  250

Luis Tiant     229  172

TOTAL         1014  833 (.549)

Anybody who can find a rotation with more wins, losses or decisions in their collective career wins a prize. Tomorrow, I’ll offer up one of those fancy charts on the pitching staff which included 8 men who won 150 or more games in the big leagues. You’ll want to get some sleep before then, trust me.

Something You Don’t See Every Day

Watching tonight’s Yanks-Royals game, the Royals just took a 2-1 lead as Mike Sweeney brazenly stole home off of Andy Pettitte. Sweeney, who was just activated at the beginning of the series after missing a month, isn’t exactly known for his speed (now 5 SB this year, 35 for his career). But he drove in the tying run with a sharp single down the rightfield line, advanced to second when Raul Mondesi misplayed the ball, and took third on a sac bunt. After Pettitte struck out the next batter, he had rookie Aaron Guiel in a 1-2 hole–a pitch away from being out of the inning.

With the double-whammy of having his back to the baserunner AND pitching from the stretch (that ought to be in the dictionary under “futility,” right next to underthrowing into double coverage and locking the barn door after the horse has escaped), Pettitte obviously had no idea Sweeney would run. Thus Sweeney got a terrific jump, getting past halfway down the line before Pettitte delivered the ball to Posada, and beat the Yankee catcher to the plate.

I’ve seen a few steals of home in my time, even recently–the Mets’ Roger Cedeno off of Ted Lilly earlier this year, Raul Mondesi off of Randy Keisler last year. Most of the other ones were on the front end of delayed double steals, or missed suicide squeezes that miraculously survived. Rarely have I seen one which was as bold as that Sweeney’s, or as flat-out exciting. Even in the dog days of August, playing for one of the worst teams in the league, somebody’s battling, and playing heads-up baseball. Unique moments like that are what keep me watching.

Clearing the Bases, Sweating Profusely

It’s a hot August night in New York City, following a long, hot day. Hot enough that a power transformer went down near my office, causing a fire that blew off two manhole covers, one less than 50 feet from my window. At this point I can’t string more than about three sentences on the same topic, so here’s a notes piece.

• Did somebody say hot? Bernie Williams is en fuego. Both the New York Times and the Daily News had articles today on how the Yankee centerfielder is streaking despite two ailing shoulders which require daily treatment. Bernie’s numbers for July (.368 AVG/.427 OBP/.557 SLG) and August (.357/.413/.476) have long since erased the memory of his early-season struggles, bringing him up to .324/.411/.487 on the year. Though his power numbers have suffered (he’s on pace for only 22 homers), the enigmatic Williams seems content to concentrate on putting the ball in play and hitting the gaps. Given that he’s got the 3rd best OBP in the league, nobody’s complaining except the Jeter-haters, and they don’t count anyway. As I write this, tonight’s ballgame is in the fifth inning and Bernie’s got a 2-run homer and a 2-run double. Did I say en fuego?

• Retracto Ad Absurdum. Every man has his price, including Nelson Doubleday, apparently. After raising quite a ruckus last week, Doubleday has reportedly agreed to sell his half of the New York Mets to co-owner Fred Wilpon. Back in June, Wilpon had filed suit against Doubleday for failing to live up to an agreement to sell his half once the team was apprased. Last week Doubleday countersued, claming that the appraisal was biased, and that the Commissioner’s office was “in cahoots” with Wilpon to artificially devalue the franchise.

According to the agreement, Doubleday will get $135 million for his share of the team, actually a smaller amount than the one set by appraiser Robert Starkey, once debt was subtracted. But Doubleday will receive $100 million up front, rather than an earlier-agreed-upon 20 percent of the sale price, with the rest to be paid over five years. Doubleday will also get $20-40 million if the Mets move into a new ballpark, based on how soon that actually happens. So for his squawking, Nelson got his hands on the loot sooner rather than later, and all it cost him was a public statement along the lines of what came out of the Commissioner’s office churned out on Doubleday’s behalf:

I am pleased this is behind us.While I was not happy with the results of the appraisal, I deeply regret and apologize for the conclusions many drew from the papers that were filed last week by my lawyers.

I did not in any way mean to impugn the integrity of the commissioner, who has been a longtime friend and will continue to remain one, or anyone from his office. Nor did I intend the counterclaim to get in the way of the ongoing collective-bargaining process. That was not my intent or goal. If it did, I apologize to the commissioner and to Don Fehr if it in any way had a negative effect on bargaining.

How convenient.

• Dateless wonder. The news on the labor front–with the players again declining to set a strike date, is cause for some optimism. Consider all of my fingers crossed (this makes it very difficult to type, but if Bernie can gut it out with his bum shoulders, I’ll carry on).

If you need a simple primer on the labor situation, Murray Chass of the Times has a decent Q & A, ideal for breaking down the issues into bite-size chunks. Chass points out, as Allen Barra did a couple of weeks ago, that “the players have not asked for anything new of real significance. The players are trying to hold on to the substantial economic gains they have made since the advent of free agency in 1976.” More chillingly, he notes that the players and owners have never negotiated a new Collective Bargaining Agreement without a work stoppage, with the players going on strike five times and the owners locking out the players three times. A worthwhile opportunity to get your basics straight.

• Say It Ain’t So, Joe! I was saddened to read that Baseball Prospectus’s Joe Sheehan has cryptically decided to hang it up. I don’t know Joe personally so I can’t speculate as to the reasoning or the timing, but leaving midseason and without advance warning does seem somewhat odd.

Over the past few years, I’ve enjoyed Joe’s insightful work in the published annual Prospectus, in his Daily Prospectus columns, and his occasional contributions to ESPN. Like Rob Neyer of ESPN, on any given day Sheehan could take on the game from a variety of angles, sometimes going straight for the numbers, other times speaking of the headlines, his own observations at the ballpark, or occasionally climbing atop his soapbox. Suffice it to say he’s taught me a lot (Lesson #476: When you can’t pull anything else off, a notes column will do).

Because Joe’s a Yankees fan in a field which often has its share of anti-Yankee bias (especially among his BP colleagues), Joe’s been a great ally to have when it came to Yank-related arguments, espeically at playoff time. But more than anything else, his work has been an essential staple of my lunch hours and late nights, and I will miss not having it around. I can only hope Joe finds some other outlet for his fine writing; here’s wishing him all the best.

Notes on a Weekend

On Sunday, in and around the several other things I was doing, I watched Mike Mussina trudge his way through six ugly innings against the Oakland A’s. He allowed 11 hits and 4 runs, including an upper-deck 2-run home run to Terrence Long, but the Yanks rung up 8 on Mark Mulder, the A’s fine young pitcher, and Moose got the W.

YES broadcasters Jim Kaat, Michael Kay, and Paul O’Neill spent a lot of time talking about Mussina’s woes. Kaat, who pitched in the bigs for about 74 years (oh, only 25?) talked about the way different players are willing to listen to advice from their coaches and implied that Mussina isn’t the most coachable ballplayer. Kitty spoke of his own receptiveness to coaches and how it came out of the fact that as someone who wasn’t a hard thrower, he was always looking for whatever extra edge he could get. I gather he thinks Mussina’s being too stubborn to listen to anybody else’s help in working his way out of this.

Kaat dismissed any notions about Mussina’s velocity being down despite the fact that other folks, from analysts to casual fans, are making the same observation. Then he started talking about how radar guns and baseball statistics are overrated. Sometime’s Kitty’s got great insights, but when he starts telling the statistics to shut up, I get nervous.

Not that this needs to become the Travails of Mike Mussina Weblog, but still on that note…

After my second whack at examining Mussina’s troubles, John Perricone, who produces the excellent Only Baseball Matters weblog, called my attention to another analysis by a nascent weblogger named Aaron Gleeman. Aaron points out three things that may be causing Moose to struggle: his declining strikeout rate, the Yankees’ defense, and his penchant for the gopher ball. Because Moose isn’t striking out as many batters as before, more balls are being put in play. The Yankee defense is nothing special (they rank 10th in the AL in Defensive Efficiency–a Bill James stat which tells us what percentage of the time a defense converts a ball in play into an out. More on that in a moment), and so more balls in play means more hits. Hence, more troubles for Moose.

Over at Baseball Musings, David Pinto points out how the Yanks’ Defensive Efficiency has been dropping as the season goes on. The formula for Defensive Efficiency is:

(Batters Faced Pitching – Hits – Walks – Strikeouts – Hit By Pitch) ÷ (Batters Faced Pitching – Home Runs – Walks – Strikeouts – Hit By Pitch).

DERs tend to be around .700; they are, essentially, the inverse of the batting average on balls in play. Here are the Yankee DERs by month, according to Pinto:

Month    DER

April   .726

May     .710

June    .669

July    .647

Aug.    .698

Wow. By comparison, the worst DER in all of baseball is Cleveland’s .681. The Yanks’ July .647 means that batters hit .353 on balls in play. That sure isn’t helping Mussina or the Yanks’ tired bullpen; it’s surprisng that Andy Pettitte is surviving, let alone flourishing, in that environment, given how he relies on ground balls. And it’s further evidence that the Yanks D is nothing to brag about.

• • • • •

Terrence Long seemed to be everywhere the past few days. First he robbed Manny Ramirez of a game-winning homer in Boston on Wednesday. Then on Friday, he made a crucial assist to nail the go-ahead run at the plate against the Yanks in the 8th, and a great sliding bellyflop catch on a Ron Coomer bloop in the 15th. Today he crashed into the wall catching a long drive (he held on), and nearly took a homer away from Shane Spencer. Long doesn’t have a great reputation as a centerfielder–recall his misplay in the 2000 ALDS Game 5 led to a six-run first inning–but he had a hell of a week, and it was pretty fun to watch.

Coming to Jeter’s Defense… Or Not

I’ve been getting a bit more response from my readers lately, both in the comments feature of this blog (found at the end of each post, where it usually says “Comments [0]”), via email, and through other people’s weblogs. One of my readers, John C., has offered some lengthy comments relating to the Yankees lately. John commented on the Rob Neyer element of my previous post about Mike Mussina, and in writing a reply, I went over the gizmo’s length of 2500 characters, so I’m dragging this into the fairway to craft an even lengthier reply. But first, here’s what John wrote:

Jay,

All props to Rob Neyer for his sabermetric efforts but, really, is this the first wrong-headed thing he’s uttered about the Yankees, whom he admits he loathes? Remember that halfway through last season he called Alfonso Soriano the biggest bust of the AL rookie class [he’s been curiously silent about Sori this season ] based on nothing but his own bias against everything pinstriped. Remember that he’s the standard bearer of the belief that Derek Jeter is “the worst fielding shortstop in baseball.” When Michael Kay asked Neyer how many actual games he had seen Jeter play, he first admitted that he barely sees a handful of Yankee regular season games a year, then, of course, pointed to stats like range factor and zone rating that he himself at times has questionned. Kay’s point was that “range”, “hands”, and “arm strength” could not be determined by simply reading a series of numbers that didn’t account for the type of pitching staff (fly ball/strikeout vs. ground ball/contact) and the strengths and weaknesses of the infielders around him (which affect positioning, DP opportunities, etc.). Neyer sneered at Kay and actually alluded to this interview in a column the next week as an example of how the New York media was biased. As with Bill James, his mentor and one-time employer, Neyer suffers too deeply the failures of the Royals against the Yankees in his formative fan years. And that’s something you couldn’t glean from any stats.

John C.

No, John, this wouldn’t be the first time Neyer was wrong about the Yanks, and yes, he’s been slow to give Soriano his due, but let’s remember that Soriano’s glaring weakness, namely BALL FOUR, lowers his On Base Percentage considerably (right now it’s a rather pedestrian .334 despite a .306 batting average) and keeps him from being a truly devastating offensive force the way Alex Rodriguez or Jason Giambi are.

I don’t think the Neyer vs. Kay matchup is as one-sided as John makes it out to be, particularly if the topic is Derek Jeter’s defense. And before we go down this road, let’s just acknowledge that if Neyer is biased, then Kay, a Yankee employee who rubs most non-Yankee fans the wrong way, is even more so. Now, those of us who watch our team 100+ times a year (as I do, and perhaps you do too) have a tendency to believe “our guy is the best” if we see the great plays he makes over the course of all of those games. But when we look at the stats, we find that isn’t always the case.

So long as we’re on the subject… on Saturday, NY Times writer Tyler Kepner, who covers the Yankee beat, touted Jeter for the Gold Glove. This would be a laughable suggestion if it weren’t so appalling. It IS a topic that Neyer has addressed before, and more than once.

Jeter isn’t, by any objective measure, a great shortstop. In fact, most of the data we have says he’s Not Good. Jeter makes a lot of spectacular plays, and he makes them at times when everybody seems to be watching (playoffs, etc). He’s got tons of anecdotal evidence on his side. Michael Kay thinks he’s great, Tim McCarver thinks he’s great, and several millions of viewers who listen to them think he’s great. Joe Torre, George Steinbrenner, and every female in the tri-state area between the ages of 5 and 35 give him a hearty thumbs up as well, along with the occasional shreik when he comes to bat (really, it’s not pretty when George does this). But by any statistical measure, he is nothing special defensively. While no one fielding stat is definitive, and all of them contain biases, Jeter tends to be at or near the bottom by just about every measure.

Here is a chart showing Jeter’s ranking in 2001 and 2002 among other AL shortstops in four major statistical categories: Fielding Percentage, Range Factor (total chances per 9 innings), Zone Rating (percentage of balls fielded by a player in his typical defensive “zone,” as measured by STATS, Inc.), and Double Plays.

           FPCT  RF  ZR  DP

2002 (13)  8T   13  13  13

2001 (10)   6   10  10  10

The number in parentheses after the year is the number of qualifying shortstops in that particular season (those playing in 2/3 of their team’s games). So Jeter is dead last out of 13 in three of the categories, and below average in the other one. The picture is the same in 2001–dead last out of the 10 qualifiers in 3 out of 4 categories.

Now, even these stats have their biases, as John noted. They don’t account for the type of pitching staff Jeter’s playing behind (groundball/flyball/strikeout tendencies), or the strengths and weaknesses of his surrounding fielders. Examining the second consideration first, here’s an expanded version of that chart which includes Jeter’s neighbors in each of the past two seasons, again with the number of qualifiers in parentheses:

                   FPCT  RF   ZR   DP  PCT

Jeter   2002 (13)   9   13   13   13   15

Jeter   2001 (10)   6   10   10   10   20

Ventura 2002 (12)  11    2    2   6T   64

Brosius 2001  (8)   8    6    4   4T   42

Soriano 2002  (8)   6    8    4    8   31

Soriano 2001  (9)   9    8    7    3   36

If we were to award points based on a reverse ranking order (so that placing 1st out of 13 would get 13 points, and 13th would get 1; ties split the points between the two spots), and then compute the percentage of points each of these seasons has “earned” out of the total possible score… well, we’d have a very crude system that didn’t tell us a whole hell of a lot, but what it would say is that of these six player-seasons, only Robin Ventura’s 2002 looks to be above average.

But that’s a pretty crude system which doesn’t take into account the biases we’ve discussed, nor does it prioritize any of these rankings, or distinguish between very small differences and very large ones (Jeter is two successful chances away from an exact tie with David Eckstein for 8th place in fielding percentage; he’s also 30 points worse in Zone Rating than any other shortstop). It’s not quite garbage, but I won’t get rich by selling these rankings either.

So let’s take a look at a system that DOES take those biases into account, namely Bill James’ Win Shares system. Now, Win Shares was introduced to the public less than a year ago, and it’s far from perfect. But Bill James has spent the past 25 years studying stuff like this, and his system is vastly superior to what I have to offer. James uses a 4-category weighted system (40-30-20-10) which starts from the team’s defensive performance and works down to each position and each player’s performance. It accounts for strikeouts, for flyballs/groundballs, for lefty/righty pitching balance, for park effects–you name it, and it’s in there somewhere.

The four categories James uses to evaluate shortstops are Assists vs. Expected Assists (40 percent), Double Plays vs. Expected Double Plays (30 percent), Error Percentage (20 percent), and Putouts as a Percentage of Team (10 percent).

I don’t have a category-by-category breakdown for Jeter’s numbers, but in the Win Shares book (which covers through 2001), we can compare Jeter versus hundreds of other shortstops throughout history. The currency which James uses to rank is Fielding Win Shares per 1000 innings, which he then converts to a letter grade. Derek Jeter averages 4.11 FWS per 1000 innings, a low total; a D+ in fact. For some not-so-random comparisons, Joe Tinker is at 7.28 (the highest), Phil Rizzuto at 7.14, Ozzie Smith at 6.42, Rey Ordonez 6.32, Cal Ripken Jr. at 5.69, Nomar Garciaparra at 5.16, Alex Rodriguez at 4.77, and Jose Offerman at 2.85.

Looking at it another way… Jeter ranks 103rd in career innings at shortstop. Of the 102 players above him, only two have lower rates of Fielding Win Shares per 1000 innings. Of the 290 shortstops who make the 3000 inning cut to appear on the list (the equivalent of just over 2 full seasons playing every inning), only 50 had rates lower than Jeter. By any of these measures, Jeter is well below average.

Again, I’m not claming James’ system is perfect, but Jeter’s performance doesn’t look too pretty through that lens. It corroborates the data we already have, as well as other sophisticated measures (Baseball Prospectus puts him at -28 runs below average in 2001 and -27 in 2000, for example). No amount of anti-Yankee bias on the part of Bill James or Rob Neyer will explain that away.

Jeter has a strong arm which allows him to make some spectacular throws, and he’s a heady player, which puts him in the right place at the right time for plays like The Play against Oakland in Game Three of the ALDS. But really, he doesn’t have much range. He’s slow to react to grounders, particularly to his left, though he has improved considerably this season compared to last, probably thanks to being healthier. That doesn’t mean he’s not an extremely valuable player; anytime you can get that kind of production out of a middle infielder it’s a big plus, and anytime you get that combination of leadership, smarts, and durability from a ballplayer, it’s an even bigger plus. But the list of Jeter’s best qualities doesn’t start with his defense, and while I Heart Derek, I won’t argue that he’s a good-fielding shortstop. Maybe not “the worst fielding shortstop in baseball,” but nobody worthy of a Gold Glove either.

Postscript:Though I beat him to the punch by a few hours (not that it matters, because he’s likely NOT reading this), Rob Neyer gives his take on the NY Times Gold Glove piece today, and his conclusion is the same: not great. Neyer also notes that it was John Sterling and not Michael Kay (Sterling’s radio partner for the last few years) who tried to humiliate Neyer on the air. Though he’s a homer, I’ll defend Kay to a degree because the man can actually write very coherently. I won’t waste my breath defending Sterling though. Even his “Theeeeeeeeeeeeeee Yankees win!” radio call grates on my nerves, and that’s about all that distinguishes him.