October baseball
A six hour marathon sends the ALCS back to New York. Brandon Backe and Woody Williams throw dueling one-hitters and the Cards-Astros are scoreless in the ninth inning of a tied series.
I’m sorry, but there’s just nothing better than October baseball.
Matsui v. Ichiro!
Is Hideki Matsui really so much more popular in Japan than Ichiro! that it’s “not even close”? I have trouble believing the Fox guys when they say that. I mean… not even close? Popularity-wise, I’d say that Carrot Top is nowhere nearly as popular as say, kittens. But any two baseball players? You’d have to go Bonds v. Cal Ripken Jr. to get in that territory.
Bonds
I’ve long been a booster of Barry Bonds. I’ve also, as readers here know, said that until such time as we can determine for certain that any player used illegal performance-enhancing drugs, we should refrain from making that kind of accusation.
I read the San Francisco Chronicle story this morning and really, it was the first time I’d read something that made me sigh, hang my head and think “It’s probably only a matter of time before they prove it.”
“Barry, you’re killing me,” I told my awesome Barry Bonds bobblehead.
He nodded.
Random Thoughts
Just because, a list of things that have strolled through my mind the past few days, as I’ve actually been able to watch a little bit of playoff baseball.
1. I could have sworn that Tim McCarver told me that pitching and defense won championships. Why are the four remaining teams all offensive machines who hit the crap out of the baseball?
2. How do the Yankees spend $180 million to build a roster and fail to come up with a decent LOOGY, especially when your division rival boasts a line-up of lefties with platoon issues?
3. Carlos Beltran is pretty good.
4. Albert Pujols is better.
5. Nearly every team left in the postseason has been burned by bringing in inferior middle relievers to face the heart of the order in the 6th and 7th inning, while their closer loses a chance to close anything out and ends up sitting on his hands. Have we ever seen a more glaring series of examples that the current way to build a bullpen is not ideal? The organization who has determination to bring back a true “relief ace” is going to reap some pretty big rewards.
6. Alex Rodriguez. Jason Varitek. David Ortiz. Derek Lowe. John Olerud. Mike Myers. The ALCS is a collection of reminders of Mariner blunders over the past 10 years. Good times…
7. I guarantee that we hear a Clint Nageotte-Brad Lidge comparison at least once during the offseason, especially if they officially decide to move him to the bullpen permanently.
Melvin’s extension
I’ve been thinking about this lately, and there’s something weird in this season’s extension of Melvin.
In early May, the team was in a lot of trouble. Melvin had a two-year deal, and after season one, they didn’t extend it — they waited until the team had stumbled badly.
The team reacted to rumors his job might be at risk that early in the season by giving him another year. Now, at the time they gave us a whole set of reasons why, some of which didn’t make sense:
– Bavasi wanted to wait until he’d seen enough of Melvin to make a decision (why such a short time? why not wait out the rest of the contracted year for more information?)
– Vote of confidence in the whole team: “In terms of timing, this sends a strong message from our ownership group and front office to our fans, the media and our players that we are 100 percent behind Bob Melvin and this team.” — Howard Lincoln. Don’t worry, fans, we’re confident this is a blip.
– Confidence in Melvin specifically. “But I did sense when I started seeing things in the media that suggested Bob was at risk, and knowing how highly we think of him, it was very appropriate that we do this now.” (Lincoln again) Also some player comments about how important it is to know that Melvin would be there the whole year– even though he was signed for the whole year anyway — seem strange.
Here’s what’s weird about this in retrospect is that this seems to be another of the organization-over-Bavasi moves. Bavasi said the right things at the time, but it’s notable that in re-reading the quotes from news stories at the time, it seems like Lincoln’s doing all of the talking, and Bavasi’s kind of left acting dumb. Lincoln gets to talk about timing, showing confidence in the team, and so forth, while Bavasi has to say “Uh, I like shiny things.”
It makes me think that there was a discussion that went
Lincoln: The fans are restless, and the team’s losing. We need to show the fans we know what we’re doing. Wait, I’ve got it — we’ll give Melvin an extension.
Bavasi: Well, we’re only paying him 500 a year, and we can still fire him… sure, I guess.
So set aside Bavasi for a second. What the ownership group, and in particular Lincoln, thought when the team was starting to go down, was that the fan base would be reassured by an extension to Melvin. I don’t even know where to start with this, but it’s bugged me the more I’ve thought about it. But two things:
First, that public confidence in Melvin was the problem that needed solving
Second, that extending his contract would solve that problem
It makes me wonder about what happens this year if the team starts to tank again. Will they announce an extension of Bavasi, or the PA announcer (who doesn’t deserve it, as long as I’ve brought that up), or the Moose?
It’s a bizarre mix of misdirection and wrong direction, all at once.
“Hey, Mariners, you’re headed off that cliff.”
“No we’re not. Here, I’ll accelerate to make you feel better.”
And yes, I recognize that we need some hard news around here.
Evaluating Managers
I rank a manager’s jobs in importance to remaining employed as:
– Keep his team happy and motivated or, barring that, motivated
– Deal with the press
– Pick the players for each day’s lineup
– Manage the pitching staff
– In-game tactics
– Team strategy
– Prepare his team for each series and each game
– Arrange the day’s lineup
This is not how important they are to his team’s success. A manager could be abjectly horrible in post-game press conferences, cold to reporters in general and terrible in his call-in radio show, and it wouldn’t cost the team a run. But it would affect perception of him tremendously, and the baying dogs would chase him night and day.
It could cause more than a run’s damage, too. You can see where if a manager was constantly under fire from the media (and we can safely assume, the fans, because he’d come off terribly on TV), it might spill over to the coaches and players and cause them pain. So even the seemingly trivial skills tie into the first and most important: keeping the team playing. If a manager’s slagging his team after every game, it might motivate them, but it’s much more likely to piss them off and make them not want to give their best effort, our of spite and because doing so would make the manager look good.
Bobby Cox is great at keeping his mouth shut: it’s hard to come up with an instance where he’s said anything bad about any of his players. It makes him a little boring, but if you’re a player, I can understand that you want him to chew you out for a mental error in private and protecting you in public.
But again, we don’t know the difference in actual team performance between a Cox-lead team and, say, a team led by a frustrated Lou Piniella.
The value of keeping a team happy and motivated is hard to objectively measure. Do the players complain about the team or praise it? Does that really have more to do with players or the manager? At the extremes, this is noticeable: players generally love being on Dusty Baker’s teams, even as he gets them to play bench roles or platoons. Some managers, who don’t last long, can’t get the respect of their players. But in between, it’s quite hard to tell the difference betweek the good and that below-average.
Trying to guage it by performance is tough. Almost every team plays horribly for some stretch of the season. They bobble balls, make stupid baserunning mistakes, chase bad pitches every at-bat. And even the worst teams put together a week or two where they make fans wonder where they’ve been all season. There are some danger signs a fan can spot. But do the players consistently seem to space out, or give half-assed efforts defensively? Do they bitch about their playing time and the team’s direction? Do plays break down when signs are missed or misunderstood?
On the whole, though, we’re a long way from being able to measure the ability of managers to motivate their players.
Let me try that list again in terms of things we can attempt to measure:
– Pick the players for each day’s lineup
– Manage the pitching staff
– In-game tactics
– Team strategy
– Arrange the day’s lineup
Daily lineups
Picking the players who take the field is the most important part of a manager’s job. A manager has great leeway on how to put together each day’s team, and they get to use it 162 times a season.
This is also where it’s possible to evaluate a manager’s preferences and do quality second-guessing.
For instance, say the team has a young corner outfielder who plays good defense and hits like crazy against both left and right-handed pitchers. But the manager insists on platooning him with a weaker, scrappy hitter he likes.
There are two possibilities: one is that the manager sees something flawed in the kid’s approach, and is covering it. The other is that he’s making a mistake, and valuing insubstantial factors over actual performance. This happens all the time with managers picking veterans over minor-leaguers, even minor-leaguers with amazing track records.
There are sometimes considerations that outweigh baseball reasons. If the team wants a manager to showcase a player for a trade, the manager might play them in a strange position, or start a horrible pitcher in the hopes that he’ll string together two good games and convince someone to bite.
But by and large, how does the manager distribute his playing time? Does he platoon and find ways to allow his players to succeed, or does he somehow get the crappy utility guy 250 ABs instead of 110? Is he able to find ways to rest his regulars without hurting the team’s defense or offense too badly? If a regular player goes down, how does he patch the lineup for the week, and how does he adjust the lineup?
Manage the pitching staff
The most obvious criteria is whether they regularly overuse pitchers. To distill the years of debate on this, throwing over 120 pitches a start is bad for the pitcher’s next start and their overall health.
Baseball’s been remarkably civilized about this in recent years. Most pitchers never go over 120 in the course of a season, and the per-game average for even the most heavily-used pitchers is around 110.
Less obvious is the “quick hook” and “too late to pull” qualities. If a pitcher’s clearly tired and throwing poorly, does the manager get them out early, or do they allow them to keep throwing and lose the game? Conversely, are they so aggressive that they remove good pitchers after brief struggles? It’s hard for us to easily measure this. We can try to look at quality starts and blown quality starts, but those are imperfect measures.
As with picking the lineup, there’s also some effect in setting pitchers up for success, and protecting them from failure. While generally a manager’s going to be better off with the pitchers on hand compared to trying someone new, there are instances in a season where there are chances worth taking. For instance, it can be worth pitching a left-hander against a team even if that means calling up a random AAA guy and re-working the rotation if the opponent is so weak against left-handers. A good manager constantly looks for chances to make adjustments that let him steal those advantages, and a poor one does not.
The bullpen management provides many way to evaluate a manager.
I reject, immediately, the notion that a team needs a 9th-inning-only closer, and that closer needs an 8th-inning setup man. This is a dead end in baseball’s evolution, and eventually we’ll get past it. If a manager displays flexibility and insight in playing matchups over roles, especially if they’re willing to call in their best pitcher when they most need them, whether or not it’s the ninth and they’re up by 1-3 runs, that’s a great thing. Few managers are that smart.
In general, how does the manager use his relievers? Does he recognize talent, and use it when it’s important, or does he keep ineffective veterans
In a more subtle sense, does the manager seem to take the strengths and weaknesses of his pitchers into account? If a reliever is overall quite good but has a home run problem, and there are two runners on with a slugger up, up by two on the road, you’re better off bringing in a less-effective groundball pitcher. In individual instances, good moves will backfire and bad moves will work out sometimes, but if you continually see the manager bring in a homer-prone reliever in situations where a home run could cost the team a game, that’s a good indication he’s not being smart. You should be especially worried if their justification for a particular move displays a remarkable ignorance of the facts — say, they bring in a homer-prone flyballer instead of the groundballer, and then claim that the flyballer was the best bet to get a ground ball double play to get out of the inning — because if they don’t know their staff’s talents and weaknesses, they’re not going to do well trying to play to them.
In both the bullpen and the rotation, are they willing to make changes when changes are required, or will they stick with a player in a role they’re unsuited for long after it’s obvious to everyone else?
In-game tactics
First, the running game, because this is something we can easily set a few metrics for. Most statistical research will tell you that a stolen base needs to work 75% of the time to be effective. There are situations where one run is important enough that the reward makes the extra base worth more, and it’s worth trying a steal if you think there’s only a two-thirds chance they’ll make it. You can also argue the threat of the steal has value, so it’s worth a few counter-productive steals to establish that.
But really, anything less than a 67% success rate means the manager, in total, is taking runs off the board and hurting his team. As I write this, the success rate of teams ranges from 80% (Mets) to 59% (Braves). The Mets advanced 90 more bases without creating an extra out. That’s a huge swing in the team’s fortunes over the course of a year, and easily two games in the standings.
So there are two things to look for:
– The team’s total success rate at stealing bases and number of attempts
– Who’s stealing
The Braves sucked at stealing bases, but they also were close to the back of the pack in total attempts. While we could argue that they should have taken it even farther back, they weren’t running themselves ragged counter-productively.
Meanwhile, the Mets were among the best and took advantage of their strength. The Phillies had a great success rate and didn’t, for reasons I’ll get into. We can say though that we know that the Mets did a good job with their running game, and though the Braves weren’t, they at least didn’t try and push it, as the Nationals and Marlins did with only slightly (66%) better success.
For the second, who’s stealing, let’s take a look at the Phillies and Mets, both of which had good years on the bases.
The Phillies have one runner, Rollins, who is 36-4, Abreu was 20-4, Chase Utley is 14-4, and Aaron Rowand is 10-4. No other player has more than 5 attempts.
The Phillies are having most of the team sit still, the guys with good speed taking good chances, and Rollins has a green light to steal at will. That’s an excellent strategy: as we don’t want teams to steal for a low success rate, it only makes sense for them to steal with players that can do it well enough to swipe successfully at least two-thirds of the time.
The Mets are nearly the same way: Reyes is the speedster, Wright and Beltran have 25 and 20 attempts, and Endy Chavez has 15. They have more players who’ve gone under ten times, but you see nearly the same pattern: they’re playing station-to-station with the slow guys and letting the faster ones win.
This seems like an obvious strategy, but it’s not at all. Many teams, for whatever reason, keep stealing with guys who get caught. Florida’s Alfredo Amezaga has 19 SB that cost the team 12 CS. Jamey Carroll has 10 SB to 12 CS.
Next, for another quick measure of a manager’s brain activity, look to the team’s count of sacrifice bunts. The sacrifice bunt is almost never a good move. The more a manager uses it, the worse they are. The more they can resist the temptation to manage by the book, the better off the team is.
And it’s also a situation where managers vary enormously. This year, Colorado was credited with 116 sacrifice bunts. Toronto made only 16. Colorado sacrificed over seven times as often. That’s enormous. Of course Colorado’s an NL team, so that’s an unfair comparison, because NL teams use their pitchers to sacrifice all the time. As you’d expect, the top 16 teams are all NL teams, and the bottom 14 AL, but it’s not as stark a division as you’d think. Here are the ranges as I write this:
AL Teams: 16 (Toronto) – 50 (Kansas City)
NL Teams: 56 (Philadelphia) – 116 (Colorado)
KC was 2.5 times as likely to sacrifice as Toronto, and Colorado 2 times as likely to sacrifice as Philadelphia.
Managing the Phillies, if you’re curious, Charlie Manuel, formerly of the Indians.
There are other subjective measures a fan can look at:
– when are they stealing?
– are the sacrificing in really stupid situations where giving an out is dumb, or are they relatively smart choices?
Beyond that, it’s hard for a fan to make evaluations of a manager’s in-game strategies. Too much of it has so many factors that go into a decision that it’s hard to call any single decision wrong, or right. You can still try, though, to answer another big question:”Does the manager make effective use of his bench during games?” Or, too see this another way, does the manager find ways that the bench players can get into games in a way that allows them to contribute?
If he has a player who is a clear liability defensively, does he find a defensive caddy for them, and make use of them? If there’s a guy on the bench who can’t play much defense but is a huge left-handed power hitter, does the manager seize chances to send him in to pinch-hit? Or does everyone on the bench rot?
Even if you hold back criticizing particular instances of pinch-hitting or substitution, you can still get a sense of the manager’s priorities and beliefs that allow you to make judgments about those beliefs.
For instance, say a manager never pinch-hits for his catcher, wishing always to have two catchers available (one in the game, one on the bench). As a philosophy, this is clearly risk-averse and can cost his team runs: if the backup catcher is a .150 hitter and it’s an extra-inning game with runners on where he has some quality pinch-hitting options, the risk is worth it.
And so on. You may also notice if a manager is particularly inflexible about rules, which may not only be bad because the rule is dumb but made worse because unwavering adherence to those rules means that other managers can take maximum advantage of them.
Team strategies
Do they run the bases aggressively, or conservatively? Should pitchers make the fastball their primary pitch and throw it at least 70% of the time?
These are extremely hard for fans to judge. We’re reliant, generally speaking, on people who have access to play-by-play databases and pitch distribution information to crunch these kind of numbers for us.
Arrange the day’s lineup
I get a little annoying about criticizing lineups because I think teams should relentlessly chase every advantage, trying to win every game any way they can, but lineup simulations and discussion around this has generally agreed that it’s not that big a deal. The effect of having Joe Scrub playing anywhere instead of a good player is much greater than the difference between an ideally ordered lineup and a badly ordered one.
That said, it’s still an area where the manager controls his own destiny, and really should try and get what he can. There are many considerations into where each player goes.
Baseball-wise
– L/R handed (force the other team to burn relievers if they seek situational advantages)
– Hitting skill profile (contact/power/pitches seen/etc)
– Special hitting abilities (can the player bunt, or steal)
For example, one of the problems with the Olerud/Martinez lineups is that while both of those guys were offensive threats, they could not run the bases worth beans. They weren’t good at advancing on hits, they were easy to double-up at second, and once on, they clogged the basepaths for players behind them. You can’t go first-to-third on a single if a slow guy is barely going to manage to get second-to-third on the same hit.
It’s an interesting dilemma. The chances that the base clogging hurts the team during the course of a game are pretty slow, but it will happen, and then you’ve hurt the team. Wherever you put them in the order, putting speedy runners after them will negate part of the value of their speed, and putting ground-ball hitters behind them will dramatically increase the GIDP rate.
Intangible-wise
– traditional fits of players to lineup roles (#1 is highest OBP, #2 high contact+bunting, #3 best hitter…)
– player mental fit (does the player try to hit to all fields when hitting #2 but not #6)
This is where a lesser manager says “screw it” and slots his guys into the traditional order their skills suggest. If that means a .245 hitter with great speed leads off, well, so be it. Good managers will come up with lineups that make the most of unconventional talents. We’ve seen this on some of the A’s teams, where devoid of speed they manage to still put together an order where good baserunners with high OBPs bat early.
For a manager, taking the easy path means that they don’t have to spend a lot of time being hassled about it in the press, because any deviation from the most conventional lineup means they’ll be at least questioned about it at length if the team loses. But if they go with the most conventional arrangement and they lose, it’ll go without comment.
Lineup arrangement is a strange art. It’s extremely complicated, with many factors, some of which we can’t know from the outside. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t think about it, and compare our work to the managers, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they’re doing it right.
What can we know?
At a high level, we can evaluate easily only the running game and use of the sacrifice bunt. They’re readily available, sortable to compare against other managers, and useful. We can track pitcher workloads easily.
If you’re willing to spend time on it, who gets playing time and how the relievers are managed are crackable, though it’s almost impossible to do that for every manager, every game, to see how
But unfortunately, so much of the information we need to make comparisons is proprietary, and there aren’t readily usable tools for fans to use. It’s really a shame.
Hargrove sucks
It’s true.
Update: for some interesting data, check out Chris Jaffee’s study: 1, 2, 3. I’m not sure why the links don’t work on their own — thank goodness for the Wayback Machine.
Off-season timeline
Soooo slow news time for the M’s. Here’s what’s probably going to happen in the next couple of weeks.
Now: M’s quietly reach out to and interview managerial candidates. It’s possible they may even reach a decision before the end of the World Series, when MLB lifts their ban on announcements like, say, managerial hirings.
Then there’s a period where teams attempt to sign players to contracts to avoid heading to arbitration.
First week of December: last chance for teams to offer arbitration to players. Players not offered arbitration are free agents. Players who decline arbitration become free agents.
Now-February: players and teams sign contracts to avoid arbitration hearings by signing deals before they get to the hearing. Many split the difference.
February: arbitration hearings determine what those players who didn’t sign a deal will be paid next year.
Here’s what this means for Mariners fans waiting for big moves: the Dodgers will offer Beltre arbitration at the last possible moment, if they can’t get him to sign a contract before then. If he declines arbitration (and if he doesn’t re-sign, he’ll have the kind of interest that’ll make that happen — this isn’t Maddux 2003).
Sooo if we’re waiting for the big splashes, it’s likely to be a while.
Brad Radke
Continuing with the free agent profiles, and hopefully quickening their pace over the next few weeks.
The third best starting pitcher in the American League in 2004 is a free agent, and his name isn’t Pedro Martinez. Brad Radke rebounded from what looked like a decline into mediocrity to post a year right in line with his peak seasons. He posted a career low 3.48 ERA in 219 innings and posting a VORP of 60.1, tied with Jason Schmidt and just a tick behind Roger Clemens. That’s pretty good company, especially considering Radke’s mediocrity the previous two seasons. Going into 2004, PECOTA had him pegged for a VORP of 27.7 with a 90th percentile projection of 61.7, which he hit almost on the nose. Essentially, Radke’s performance last year, in the context of his 2002 and 2003 campaigns, should only be expected 1 out of 10 times. Radke certainly bucked the odds and reestablished himself as a force heading into his free agency.
However, Radke is a completely different pitcher than nearly every other starter on the market. Pedro and the previously discussed Matt Clement are power pitchers with big time strikeout rates. Radke only struck out 5.9 batters per 9 innings last year, a total that would fit into the career lines of Shigetoshi Hasegawa or Jamie Moyer. However, Radke walked twenty-six men the entire season, for a rate of 1.1 walks per 9 innings. His impeccable command led to a lot of balls in play that his defense converted to outs. As Jamie Moyer put on display for most of the past decade, pitchers who both command the strike zone and keep the ball in the park can succeed despite a low strikeout rate, and this is the pattern to success that Radke followed.
There is little doubt that, barring injury, Radke is a quality starter and will likely continue to be for the next several years. However, the price figures to be a bit of a problem. Radke’s expriing contract was a 4 year, $32 million deal that paid him $10.75 million in 2004. Coming off one of the best seasons of his career, it is not likely that he’s going to be amenable to taking any significant pay cut. Radke’s success, name recognition, and previous high salary are going to make him an expensive option for whichever team decides to sign him this offseason. You will essentially be paying full price for a pitcher who has almost no chance to improve. The likelyhood of getting more value out of Radke than you pay for is next to nil. In the words of the immortal Hubie Brown, Radke lacks “upside”. The risk that is involved with multiyear contracts for pitchers in general still applies, but Radke fails to offer the reciprocal positive potential of being a value for his salary.
Radke would be a good signing for a team who is on the verge of contending for a World Series crown and can afford to take a risk in order to put the team over the top. The Mariners are in a position of needing to obtain value or long term security by locking up young players. Radke cannot offer either, and as such, shouldn’t be a strong option for Bill Bavasi this offseason. If the market implodes and you can sign him to an Aaron Sele type 2 year, $15 million contract, go for it. But beyond that, there are better bargains to be had. Let another team pay retail for Brad Radke. When it comes to pitchers on the wrong side of 30 with Radke’s skillset, I’d rather shop at Big Lots .
More on Brundage
The Oregonian feauters an article advocating Brundage for manager, which will tell you why I’m way pro-Brundage and also a little anti-Brundage, as Brundage talks about being “aggressive”.
Also funny is this:
He knows that to be successful at Safeco Field, the Mariners must adopt a speed-oriented, National League style. Seattle strayed from that approach this year when it fielded one of the American League’s slowest teams.
Brundage doesn’t actually say that in the piece. But I find this interesting — I am continually baffled why people think this. The Mariner teams that have been successful in Safeco have got on base and hit for power, not stolen bases.
2000 – 91-71, OBP 4th in AL, SLG 8th in AL, SB 4th in SL
2001 – 116-46, OBP 1st in AL, SLG 4th in AL, SB 1st in AL
2002 – 93-69, OBP 2nd in AL, SLG 9th in AL, SB 2nd in AL
2003 – 93-69, OBP 4th in AL, SLG 10th in AL, SB 4th in AL
2004 – 63-99, OBP 10th in AL, SLG 14th in AL, SB 4th in AL
Does anyone really think that the difference between the 2001 Mariners and the 2004 Mariners offenses is that they went from 1st in SB to 4th in SB?
Managerial search
According to both Finnigan and Hickey, the Mariners are going to interview Don Baylor in the next day or two, and the short list includes Terry Collins, Joe Maddon, and Grady Little.
Yawn.