Mariners fandom, as seen through logical positivism
Second in a series of high-faluting articles that came out of discussions about how to cope with being a Mariner fan. You can blame Jeff for encouraging this kind of content.
True fandom is grounded not in the unquestioning belief in a team and the infallibility of everything it does. The meaning of our fandom is built on
verifiable facts, stacked one on top of another. Each fact must be verifiable, and so the fan must be both scientific and suspicious. Emotional ties are neither true or false, but meaningless.
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Batted Ball Stuff, and More Felix Worship
If you’ve been reading the blog for long, you know that I often express my love for two things; batted ball statistics and Felix Hernandez. It’s been awhile, so let’s do some catching up.
Studes has two articles, one a week old and one current, that are just full of awesome information using graphs of batted ball data. You really should read both articles, but in case you’re in the mood for a summary:
He shows that there’s a direct correlation between batter strikeouts and the value of their fly balls, displaying the trade off hitters must make when deciding what type of swing to employ.
He also relates this to pitching, showing that strikeout pitchers generally give up weaker fly balls than contact pitchers, thus having the overall effect of lessening the value of the outfield flies against them. Groundball pitchers are just the opposite though; usually, when they give up a flyball, it’s a mistake, so the run value of their outfield flies allowed is higher than the average.
There’s also stuff in there on relief pitchers and batting average on balls in play and a really neat new chart of displaying a pitcher’s performance. With a little bit of goading on my part, he put up this chart for King Felix, and it’s a perfect segue into more love for Felix.
Look at that chart. 67 percent of all batted balls against Felix in the majors last year were grounders. If someone got bat on ball, there was a 2 in 3 chance that it was a worm burner. The major league average is just 44 percent. In fact, if you look at outcomes as a percentage of batted balls, Felix is off the charts on all three of the main categories. He gave up outfield flies on just 17 percent of batted balls, compared to 31 percent for the league average. His LD% was 14 percent compared to a 21 percent league average.
I heart King Felix.
Mariners fandom, as seen through Materialism
First in a series of high-faluting articles that came out of discussions about how to cope with being a Mariner fan. You can blame Jeff for encouraging this kind of content.
Fans without a team are in a state of anarchy, almost unbeing, restless and chaotic, a life almost not worth living. It is natural then that these fans seek out teams that they can follow and believe in, even in places where their favorite sport is not popular. Otherwise, they may fall into cheering at silly, trivial things, like the changing colors of traffic lights, or racing clouds. Read more
Baseball Between The Numbers
Friend of USSM and general man-about-town Jonah Keri has a new article at Baseball Prospectus about their new book, Baseball Between The Numbers. Jonah uses Bruce Sutter’s election to the Hall of Fame as an opportunity to talk about some of the chapters within.
You’ve heard us talk about the new volume before, at and immediately after the BP/USSM event a while back. Now, you can pre-order the darn thing.
It’s too bad we don’t have a post category for “commercialism,” because I’m going to use this same time-hook to plug the book again. If half of Jonah’s excitement about the project is justified, then I’m sure I’ll enjoy it twice as much as anything I’ve read lately, non-Okinawa category.
Here’s a summary excerpt:
Baseball Between the Numbers covers 29 seminal baseball debates that will get both casual fans and hard-core statheads whipped into a frenzy. The book includes the chapter “Are Teams Letting Their Closers Go to Waste?”, which tackles the very topic that sparked huge differences of opinion in SutterGate. Following in the tradition of John Thorn and Pete Palmer’s “The Hidden Game of Baseball,” the work of Bill James and other influential thinkers, Baseball Between the Numbers brings new analytical tools to bear, with BP’s unique writing style adding a twist.
That ‘graph’s not my favorite bit from Jonah’s article, though. That would be this:
If you’re a member of the media and would like to request an advance copy of the book, please e-mail Jonah Keri by clicking here.
Ah, the fringe benefits of being a world famous baseball blogger/freelance writer/whatever. Jonah, just dial 1-900-2-JEFFY and I’ll give you the address.
Between The Numbers has jumped in sales over the past few hours, and so has Baseball Prospectus 2006, which is offered as a package with the forthcoming title. You can be the first kid at your school, house, basement or block party to have read it.
Unless you invite me to your block party. Which you should.
Attention Travelers to Asia
As Ichiro gets focused to play in the World Baseball Classic, those of us who occasionally fly east might turn our thoughts to scheduling.
If you’re going to Japan anyway at some point next year, let’s say, why wouldn’t you plan on being there March 3-5? That’s when Ichiro and his Japanese squad play in the first round of the tournament. South Korea, China and Taiwan will also play games in the other T-dome, the one not in Tacoma.
The story I link, from the Mainichi Shimbun, is pretty standard fluff about how Ichiro is excited to play in the classic, will aim to win, and then will prepare for the regular season. But the thought of watching the inaugural WBC in Tokyo is pretty exciting.
Management Review
We talk a lot about player performance, their values, their worth relative to salary, and the context in which they help the team win. Through the conversation on player value, we infer a lot of things about our beliefs of the team’s management, though, I realize, we rarely state those things outright. So, since it’s a pretty slow period in Mariner-land, I figured now would be a good time to lay out my personal feelings on the Mariner front office, how they operate, what they do well, and what they could do better. Keep in mind, this is my opinion, and Derek, Jeff, and Jason may not agree with anything or everything that I write. So, try not to take this as the USSM decree on the organization. This is Dave’s opinion, for better or worse.
M’s Payroll
Art Thiel has a piece in the P-I this morning about the Mariners 2005 Payroll. Apparently, the team was pretty pissed off by the numbers released last week by the AP that calculated “Final Payroll” as of August 31st. And, really, they have a right to be upset, because that’s a pretty terrible way to calculate real payroll.
So, in an effort to show everyone that they really did spend money last year, the M’s gave Thiel their numbers, or what they are claiming their actual 2005 payroll was. It’s a rare moment of transparency from an organization that has attempted to mislead the public on payroll information every chance they get. You can read Thiel’s articles for the specific numbers, but the club claims they paid $99.042 million on players during the 2005 season, and for once, the math works. There are no noticable gaping flaws in this calculation, as there always are in the annual Bob Finnigan “we have no money left to spend” spin pieces.
Interesting to note, the Mariners claimed all of Spiezio’s ’06 salary and the buyout on his ’07 option against the ’05 payroll. However, they didn’t claim the buyout of the ’06 options for Pokey Reese, Wiki Gonzalez, or Shigetoshi Hasegawa, which apparently will count against next years payroll. So, apparently, if they release you during the season, everything they owe you in the future counts on current payroll, but if they release you after the season, it goes towards next years payroll.
What does this mean to us? Well, for once, the club is being truthful with its fans, which is good news. And they have a few million more to spend this year than we originally thought, since we had assumed the Spiezio contract would remain on the books this year.
But, mostly, it just reinforces how much money was summarily wasted last year. The club spent $16.46 million on Scott Spiezio, Ryan Franklin, Shigeotshi Hasegawa, Gil Meche, Wiki Gonzalez, Dan Wilson, and Aaron Sele. The average VORP for that group was 2.22. It’s basically a group of replacement level players who provided similar performance to what a league minimum minor leaguer could have done. That’s a $14 million dollar hole right there.
You’d hope that the M’s could look at that and see that what killed them was consistently overpaying by a little bit for what they considered to be mid-level talent. The signings of Jarrod Washburn and Carl Everett do little to reassure me that they learned any lessons from last years debacle.
Portland mayor scoffs at stadium for Marlins
Tom Potter got into the headlines on a slow news day by stating (again) that he and Portland have no interest in helping to build a ballpark for the Marlins.
The Marlins are on a ridiculous tour of possible new locations for their franchise, and team reps met with him yesterday.
So good news and bad news: no local competition, which would have been cool, also means the M’s continue to enjoy their massive regional media deals, so they’ll keep making tons of money.
Marlins president David Samson said:
“Governments do make decisions when they attract businesses to the community,” Samson said. “Baseball is not the only industry, by any stretch, to ask for government help when deciding where to have its corporate headquarters.”
That’s true, but that doesn’t make it a good deal. Long-time readers will recognize this from Jeff’s logical fallacy post as “Argumentum ad numerum” — the appeal to numbers (“everyone else is doing it, so it must be right”).
Left Handed Sock, Free to Good Home
442 at bats. .249/.366/.518 line. 110 hits, 60 (!) of them going for extra bases. 79 walks and 169 strikeouts.
Ladies and Gentleman, that’s Russell Branyan, the past three years, against right-handed pitching.
He was designated for assignment by the Brewers, and they’re “attempting to find him a big league job”. He’s already signed for 2006 for the grand total of $800,000 – and the contract is not guaranteed.
The guy has some serious flaws in his game. He’s basically a DH who shouldn’t play the field. He has no business ever facing a left-handed pitcher (.181/.233/.319 vs lefties last 3 years, 1-20 against them last year). He strikes out at an historic rate because of gaping flaws in his swing.
But replace “strikes out” in the last sentance with “makes outs” and that paragraph describes Greg Dobbs as well. And Greg Dobbs is never going to hit 30 homers and draw 80 walks in 500 at-bats.
If the M’s are willing to get past their hatred of strikeouts, they could have a quality bench player for nothing.
Random Mariner news
Kevin Appier’s in on a standard minor-league contract. In the MLB.com Mariners Mailbag, there’s a discussion of Snelling’s rehab (short version: return to playing around the All Star Break… we’d hope), among the standard fluff we’ve come to expect from those features (though this one, as far as I could see, did not contain any huge, obvious errors, which is nice).