Cone-tender Once Again

David Cone continues his unlikely resurgence in a Red Sox uniform. He won his sixth straight decision for the Sox last night, allowing 3 runs in 6 1/3 innings as they beat Toronto 6-4. Dating back to June 3, the Sox have won Cone’s last ten starts. Cone has been especially effective since Pedro Martinez went down with a rotator cuff strain, going 3-0 with a 3.10 ERA in 29 innings since Pedro’s demise.

Cone’s resurgence isn’t the only reason the Sox pitching has them hanging tough in the AL East race. Hideo Nomo’s gone 4-0 over the past month, with a 3.52 ERA, and Rolando Arrojo has pitched well, posting a 1.64 ERA in 22 innings (1-1). But Tim Wakefield (1-3, 7.17), and Tomokazu Ohka (0-3, 11.25) have undone their good work, enabling the Yankees to overtake the Sox.

A deeper look into Cone’s numbers makes one wonder how long his performance can continue. He’s averaging only 5 1/3 innings per start, upping that to a whopping 5 2/3 over the course of the streak. His 4.24 ERA is almost half a run higher than the team’s ERA (3.76), and his WHIP (walks + hits per inning pitched) is a mediocre 1.50.

More clues can be found in examining his reverse batting record–that is, the cumulative batting statistics of those who faced him. Opponents are hitting .277 off of him, with 13 home runs (1.72 per 9 innings) and an OPS around 800. They’ve created about 45 runs, using Bill James’ formula (ten more than Cone has actually allowed), posting a .595 Offensive Winning Percentage.

So how is he doing it? For one thing, he’s been getting good run support, 5.3 runs per game. For another, he’s been striking out lots of batters, 7.3 per 9 innings pitched. And though his low innings count means he’s not exactly doing the Sox’s overworked bullpen any favors, he does at least afford them a measure of predictablity–he’s been over 5 innings in every start of the streak, and it’s not as if he’s taking anybody by surprise when they pull him in the sixth inning. For Cone’s part, he attributes improved breaking pitches to his return–something that was sorely missing from his arsenal last season.

I wouldn’t bet the farm on him just yet. Given these tendencies, there’s a pretty solid chance Cone’s performance will decline between now and the end of the season. And who knows how long his luck with the bullpen will last? Or how long the rest of the staff will hold up? They’ve reattached body parts in so many ways that they could run testimonial ads on thistothat.com.

It is with no small dose of mixed emotion that I watch him succeed. Cone was a favorite of mine in New York, and he’s shown the kind of heart, guile, and poise which so endeared him to Yankees fans, only this time wearing an enemy uniform. After he suffered through such a monumentally disastrous season with the Yankees (4-14, 6.91 ERA), it’s nice to see him catch a break here and there. I’m not rooting for him with the same zeal I rooted for a departed David Wells. But I’d love to see him reach 200 wins and give himself a shot–however long–at the Hall of Fame. So if anybody’s going to help keep the Sox afloat, it might as well be David Cone.

On the Road Again

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

Helping the Rookie

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

Don’t Panic!

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

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

McGriff Redux

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

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

1982: Houston sends P Don Sutton to Milwaukee for P Frank DiPino, P Mike Madden, and OF Kevin Bass. Sutton goes 4-1 down the stretch, beating Jim Palmer on the final day of the season and leading the Brew Crew to their only World Series. Bass is the best of the bunch on the other end, a key player on the ‘Stros oh-so-close 1986 team, thoguh DiPino develops into a solid closer, for awhile at least.

1987: Detroit sends P John Smoltz to Atlanta for P Doyle Alexander. Alexander goes 9-0 down the stretch as the Tigers win the AL East; Smoltz wins a Cy Young Award and becomes a member of the best trio of starters in recent memory.

1988: Los Angeles sends 3B Pedro Guerrero to St. Louis for P John Tudor. The Dodgers win an unlikely World Series without my favorite player; Tudor was adequate at best, and wasn’t effective until returning to St. Louis.

1989: New York Yankees send OF Rickey Henderson to Oakland for P Eric Plunk, P Greg Cadaret, and OF Luis Polonia. The A’s win a World Series and reach another with the game’s greatest leadoff man, who has an unreal postseason (.441 AVG, .448 OBP, .941 SLG, 11 SB). The other three enjoy undistinguished but lengthy careers.

1990: Boston sends 1B Jeff Bagwell to Houston for P Larry Andersen. Boston wins the AL East., though Andersen’s impact is minimal (0-0, 1 Save); Bagwell becomes one of the best players in the game, hitting 300+ HR and leading Houston to 3 consecutive playoff appearances.

1992: New York Mets send P David Cone to Toronto for 2B Jeff Kent and OF Ryan Thompson. Cone wins his first ring as a Blue Jay and starts his odyssey as a mercenary; the Mets fumble future MVP Kent along to Cleveland for a fat Carlos Baerga, and Thompson starts his tour of oblivion.

1993: Oakland sends OF Rickey Henderson to Toronto for P Steve Karsay and OF Jose Herrera. Henderson wins another ring, though he only hits .215. Karsay battles arm injuries for years before emerging as a first-rate reliever in Cleveland.

1995: Toronto Blue Jays send P David Cone to the Yankees for P Marty Janzen and two other pitchers. Janzen wins six games over the next two years; Cone wins six postseason games and four World Series rings with the Yankees.

1998: Seattle sends P Randy Johnson to Houston for P Freddy Garcia and P John Halama. Johnson reels off a 10-1 record and becomes the ace of the NL Central champs; Garcia and Halama combine for 51 victories over the next two seasons, bolstering the Seattle rotation. Garcia is 11-1 for the runaway Mariners this season and was the winning pitcher of this year’s All-Star Game.

1999: San Diego sends C Jim Leyritz to Ney York Yankees for P Geraldo Padua. Leyritz struggles for the Yanks (.227, 0 HR, 5 RBI) but hits the last home run of the 1900s in Game 4 of the World Series, proving that he’s still the King of the postseason; Padua has yet to surface.

2000: New York Yankees send OF Rickey Ledee & P Jake Westbrook to Cleveland for David Justice. Justice revives the struggling Yankee offense, leading them to their third straight championship. Ledee is traded to Texas where he continues to rot, Westbrook only now is emerging as a solid pitcher.

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

The Decline of Derek

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

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

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

       AVG    OBP    SLG   SL*OB

1996  .314   .370   .430    .159

1997  .291  . 370   .405    .150

1998  .324   .384   .481    .185

1999  .349   .437   .552    .241

2000  .339   .416   .481    .200

2001  .295   .376   .431    .162

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

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

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

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

Hanging with Score Card Harry

I’m on the road this weekend, spending a couple days up in sunny Northampton, Massachusetts, at my friend Nick’s mother and stepfather’s place. Interestingly enough, Nick’s stepfather is the great-grandson of Harry M. Stevens, the famed sports concessionaire. Stevens occupies a prominent place in the creation of the baseball experience. He is credited with introducing both hot dogs and scorecards to the sporting public, and built an empire around these staples.

There are a few pieces of Stevens-related memorabilia hanging in a hallway here. There’s a bio of “Score Card Harry” from the New York Clipper, dated June 27, 1896. It details the growth of Stevens’ operation, beginning in Columbus of the Ohio State League, in 1887, and continuing through his gaining the right to sell scorecards at the Polo Grounds in 1895. Also on the wall is the cover of one of those 1895 scorecards for the New York Base Ball Club (the Giants), featuring a full-color illustration of a ballfield from the first base side. A spectator with top hat, moustache, and cigar is in the foreground.

The item which has caught my fascination for the better part of this afternoon is an even older scorecard. This one is a 2-color card from 1892, the offical score card of the Washington Base Ball Club (the Senators). It features a photo of Boston catcher and future Hall of Famer Mike “King” Kelly on the cover, and the scorecard is unfolded into four panels. On the front side are ads for sporting goods, alcohol, and tobacco. The back is also visible thorugh a cutout on the other side of the frame. The lineups for a game between the Senators and the Cleveland Spiders are printed. Here they are (I used Baseball-reference.com to fill in the first names):

Senators:

Paul Radford, 3B

Tommy Dowd, 2B

Dummy Hoy, CF

Henry Larkin, 1B

Jocko Milligan, C

Charlie Duffee, LF

Danny Richardson, SS

Frank Killen, P

Patsy Donovan, RF

Spiders:

Cupid Childs, 2B

Jake Virtue, 1B

George Davis, 3B

Ed McKean, SS

Jimmy McAleer, CF

Jesse Burkett, LF

Jack O’Connor, RF

Chief Zimmer, C

George Rettger, P and Cy Young, P (both listed)

The Washington lineup isn’t much, befitting a team which went 58-93 and finished 10th out of 12 teams. The most recognizable name is that of Dummy Hoy, a 5’4″, 148 lb deaf-mute outfielder who, according to the Baseball Online Library, was the reason umpires adopted hand signals for safe, out, and strike calls. Hoy went on to rack up over 2000 hits, played in four major leagues (NL, AL, Players League, and the American Association), and lived to the ripe old age of 99. He even got to throw out the first pitch of a World Series game in 1961, the year of his death. The only other Senator I recognize, but who wasn’t in the lineup that day, is Deacon McGuire, a catcher who played in 26 seasons. McGuire’s last appearance in the bigs is one for the annals; in 1912, when he was 48 years old, he was part of a one-game makeshift team fielded by the Detroit Tigers. The regular Tigers were on strike in support of a suspended Ty Cobb, and the replacements were pounded 24-2 by the Philadelphia A’s.

The Cleveland lineup is much better; they went 93-56, and finished second in the NL. Cy Young you know about (511 wins, and an award named after him, for you rookies out there). George Davis was in the second year of a Hall of Fame career which included over 2600 hits. Jesse Burkett was even better than Davis, hitting over .400 three times (the only other man to do that that Cobb fella). Burkett, known as “the Crab” for his cheerful disposition, ran off a seven-year span in which his hit totals ranged from 198 to 240, and he finished with 2850 for his Hall of Fame career.

The Spiders’ lineup was incredibly stable. Only two bench players saw any action, and of the seven pitchers, two appeared in only one game and another (the aforementioned Rettger) in five. Young pitched in 53 games, completing 48 out of 49, going 36-12 with a 1.93 ERA. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

Returning to the scorecard, the back has several alcohol ads, including one for Faust Beer, “the Healthiest and Finest Drink you can offer your friend,” brewed by Anheuser Busch, and Pabst Milwaukee Beer, which “leads them all, and everybody uses it.” For those who use too much of it, there are ads for the Silver Ash Institue for the Cures of Alcohol and Opium Habits, and the Blackstone Gold Cure Institute for the Cure of Liquor, Opium, and Morphine Habits. I don’t know about you, but I’m picturing an opium den under the bleachers of Boundary Field, where the Nats played.

The scorecard itself is only partially filled out, listing what appears to be a line score for each team; if this is to be believed, the Senators scored 11 runs in the first inning, added two in the sixth, and five in the seventh (I’m a bit skeptical). The Spiders apparently managed only one in the sixth and three in the seventh, making the final score 18-4. Another possiblity is that the scores are cumulative, and that the 11 in the first is actually a tally of two, in which case the final would have been 5-3. The inning-by-inning boxes aren’t filled in, but there are some dots in totals columns (AB, R, 1B, TB, SH, PO, A, E) which reveal that whoever was scoring lost interest fairly early (two players have three at bats, the rest one or two).

Anyway… Stuart Rose, Stevens’ great-grandson, obtained the scorecards and other items at an auction after the business (which was passed down to Stevens’ sons upon Harry Stevens’ death in 1934) was sold. Stuart was kind enough to break out the auction catalog, which includes some amazing reproductions of the types of memorabilia more likely to wind up in a Sotheby’s auction than an eBay one:

• the cover of the program from Opening Day at Yankee Stadium (April 18, 1923)

• an autographed photo of Babe Ruth hitting his 60th home run (!!!), inscribed “To my second Dad, Harry M. Stevens, from Babe Ruth, Dec. 25th, 1927″

• a photo of a giant hot dog which reads:

50 Years Old

Look How He's Grown

Golden Jubilee Testimonial Dinner to the Stevens Boys 

on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Hot Dog 

by the New York Baseball Writers. 

Hotel Commodore, Jan. 14, 1941.