Reed Broussard maintain public face, other random stuff
PI: Two displaced players act optimistic. Sexson has goals. Moore continues to chase down former Mariners to fill column inches, this time cornering Alex Rodriguez.
Anyway, moving on… in the Times, trying to make boring drills interesting, and trying to make a story about that interesting.
But in Baker’s Blog, there’s this
Manager Mike Hargrove wants added focus on situational hitting, which is how you wind up with contests like the one featuring $100-a-head batting practice bets.
Which… well, whatever, teams always say stuff like this in spring training. No team ever shows up to camp and announces they were good enough at situational hitting so they’re going to focus on swinging for the fences.
But moreover…
The trend in baseball in recent years has been to get away from the stolen base,
Wow, it’s a broad generalization, let’s trash it! Quick, to the AL stats!
1997: 1491/723 2,214
1998: 1675/754 2,429
1999: 1462/689 2,151 total
2000: 1297/587 1,884 total
2001: 1647/673 2,320 total
2002: 1236/579 1,815 total
2003: 1279/547 1,826 total
2004: 1253/573 1,826 total
2005: 1216/509 1,725 total
2006: 1252/500 1,752 total
Statistical attack proving ineffective! What? How can this be? That’s worked for years! Must… move… on…
…with statistical experts arguing that it is not worth the effort unless the runner in question is successful 75 per cent of the time.
(boggle) How’d that get into the Times? Someone needs to take this whippersnapper aside and have a chat with him.
Also, in high-leverage situations, statistical experts would argue you can go below 75%. But wow. I’m a little frightened of this Baker fellow and his suspicious command of facts.
He’ll probably leave soon for a San Diego paper, though – don’t be scared.
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39 Responses to “Reed Broussard maintain public face, other random stuff”
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Finnigan to Baker is the baseball equivalent of swapping Jake Woods for Johan Santana.
I’m not sure I could be enjoying the Geoff Baker era any more than I am. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but he’s a reasonable, intelligent, interesting writer.
Does Baker ever make it into the print edition? I would really, really hate to find a reason to buy the Times, but if I have to….
I was actually very encouraged to hear Sexson talk about getting 100 walks, even if Grover immediately revealed that he has no idea what walks are about: he still thinks they are in part a negative thing, a result of getting “pitched around”, and not a wholehearted positive. Even getting pitched around, walks are men on base and thus not outs and thus rally points. Offense, in other words. A walk is a positive event. It’s bizarre to see a former player like Grover who doesn’t understand what a significant part of HIS OWN GAME was about. Sort of like Joe Morgan. Not that Grover was in Morgan’s league as a player.
But 35 more walks from Sexson this year? Hell, yes.
The guy’s been dealing with J.P. Ricciardi for the past how-many-years. In Toronto, bases are safe as kittens.
From the PI:
“If Richie gets there because he’s striking out less and being more selective, that’s what we’re looking for,” Hargrove said. “But if he gets there because the others teams are just pitching around him, that’s not good for us. We want them to have to pitch to him.”
Unless WFB is hitting behind Sexon, I think I’m going to be OK with him taking BBs, no matter what.
Ah, Sexon were great. I loved Strong Arm of the Law. Barnsley’s finest.
There’s nothing wrong with what Hargrove said about Sexson’s walks. If he has no protection and gets walked a lot as a result, that’s not a good thing. Not because the walks aren’t a good thing, but because the lack of a threat behind isn’t a good thing.
Early in the year last year, when Everett was hitting behind Sexson, that was certainly the case. Guillen does provide a bit of a power threat behind Sexson.
If things break right, a lineup of Ichiro-Beltre-Ibanez-Sexson-Guillen-Johjima-Lopez-Vidro-Betancourt might turn out to be pretty good.
Of course that isn’t the lineup Hargrove will use.
There’s no such thing as protection.
What I wouldn’t give for an profantiy laced Earl Weaver rant about stolen bases. I also wish that some manager would arrive in spring training and announce that all his team was going to work on during ST was hitting home runs, just to mess with people.
And then some reporter would write about how to get 6 runs, you only need to hit .182 if you only hit homeruns or got out.
Any team that’s willing to play Troy Glaus at shortstop clearly isn’t built for speed.
Mind explaining this? And you might explain it to Barry Bonds while you’re at it.
I’m guessing a little bit, but I think your statement might be based on a different definition of “protection” than mine.
I couldn’t agree more. Baker is fantastic! Not perfect, of course, but so far he’s leaps and bounds ahead of Finnigan, not that that was hard. Still, I like his blogging, and between him and Stone, the Times is slowly gaining some esteem on their baseball coverage…
Could you please point me to a decent study that finds a significant protection effect?
Mind explaining this? And you might explain it to Barry Bonds while you’re at it.
Sure. Nobody’s found in any reasonable studies that a hitter’s ability to hit improves depending on who follows them in a batting order.
Yeah, there are effects where hitters hit better with men on base- but that’s something where EVERYBODY sees it (in other words, the whole league hits better with men on base than with bases empty).
Talking about “Protection” is like talking about “the little things like getting runners over with productive outs wins games” and “pitching and defense win ballgames”- a “baseball wisdom” nostrum that isn’t borne out (since protection doesn’t appear to exist, team productive outs aren’t particularly correlated with team winning, and the single team stat most correlated with team winning percentage, historically, is on base percentage, an offensive statistic).
I wouldn’t expect a significant protection effect outisde context-specific stats like RBI or WPA.
For example, David Ortiz’s WPA is absurd, and people often credit Manny with helping him on that.
But can we tell? I doubt it. Batting averages either change too often to provide us with big datasets, or change rarely enough that we can’t compare data. Plus, WPA can be dominated by high-leverage events over just a few plate appearances.
Geoff also blogs about Mariner fundamentals
Jerry Brewer writes about Edgar’s talk to the boys.
McGrath points us to a new book club, Joe Posnanski’s chronicle of Buck O’Neil’s final year.
Kirby Arnold talks Jeff Clement with Roger Hansen.
If things break right, a lineup of Ichiro-Beltre-Ibanez-Sexson-Guillen-Johjima-Lopez-Vidro-Betancourt might turn out to be pretty good.
It could if Guillen is good. Again, my big problem with the M’s as constructed is nobody walks. If Sexson DOES get 100 walks, that would go some ways to getting rid of that problem, though I doubt that a lineup with Ichiro, Guillen, Lopez and Betancourt could EVER display much patience.
One thing, though. Carl Everett had an OBP last year of .297. Guillen has had 3 years under that in 10 MLB seasons, and has beaten league OBP in exactly 3 seasons (his 3 most recent healthy ones). Seattle #5 hitters last year posted a .264/.335/.466 OPS all year long, 9th in the AL (better than Guillen’s career numbers, though not better than his 2003-2005). So basically, Guillen HAS to hit like he did in 2003-2005 for the offense to improve at that spot.
I think there’s two ideas that get confused as “protection”.
Idea (1) is that hitters hit better with a better hitter behind them. No study I know of supports this to any useful degree.
Idea (2) is that it’s bad for the hitter’s team to get an IBB. Baseball Between the Numbers has a chapter on this, and the answer is that IBB’s almost always favor the hitting team more than just letting the hitter hit. ALMOST. Barry Bonds is often an exception, certain game states are sometimes an exception, and hitting in front of a bad pitcher is sometimes an exception. This is from memory, if someone with the book in front of them wants to correct me, go for it.
It should be noted that Barry Bond’s getting IBB’d, even in cases where its less valuable than him hitting, is still extremely valuable to the batting team. You’d rather have Barry getting an IBB than almost any other hitter doing his normal thing.
once again, the Veterans Committee declined to add anyone to the HOF
Any argument that relies on Barry Bonds is going to be tough to apply anywhere else. The fact is, walks don’t take away from hits; they take away from outs. Walks are good. IBBs are good, too. Barry Bonds’s zillion IBB added a huge amount to the Giants’ run totals.
You can’t walk on pitches in the strike zone. You can only walk on pitches out of the strike zone. And hitters, even good hitters, suck when they swing at pitches out of the strike zone. Those are not usually the golfed homers that we can all remember one or two examples of, but cheap popups and lazy flies and groundouts, if not misses.
If you swing at garbage, pitchers will throw you garbage, because they know that’s how to get you out. There isn’t a pitcher on earth who doesn’t LOVE watching dumbasses swing at crap in the dirt. If you don’t swing at garbage, you force pitchers to come into your hitting zone, where your chances of doing damage increase dramatically. Pitchers hate that. Taking walks increases the hittability of the pitches you see, and INCREASES your power and average in all of your other appearances.
“Protection” doesn’t even make logical sense. If pitchers could reduce the damage potential of good hitters by pitching around them, they’d do it ALL THE TIME. There is NEVER a good time to give a good hitter a bunch of fat pitches. If pitchers believed that walking a hitter was a good idea, they’d do it, no matter who was coming up next. The whole idea suggests that pitchers have secret strategies for getting hitters out, but don’t use them unless they’re in danger from the next hitter up, which seems to me to be ridiculous.
Protection is the kind of old baseball idea that’s designed to make fans think they’ve gotten ahold of some special insight denied to the casual observer. But they don’t, not here. It’s distracting from understanding what’s really going on, which is revealed in rather different kinds of analysis.
#5: I’m sure you meant “Saxon”, just as I meant “Sexson”.
How ’bout that Piniero in Boston?
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
I think Joel’s going to get lit up like a pineita.
“Piniero” was on purpose. Sorry.
Regarding “protection”: A whole lot of electrons could be saved if we recognize, as other baseball researchers have, that there are two forms of protection: weak and strong. “Weak protection” simply means that a strong hitter on deck makes the batter less likely to get a walk, conversely a weak hitter on deck lead to more walks for the batter. There’s debate of course about how advantageous this is for the batter, but anyone who’s watched baseball knows that this pattern occurs. Think of walks to the hitter when the pitcher is on deck, walks to Barry Bonds in order to pitch to some weaker hitter (or walks to Sexson with Everett behind him), etc. Again we can debate the desireability of these walks, but there’s no question that the prowess of the on deck batter does affect what happens to the batter.
“Strong protection” is when the on deck batter’s prowess actually increases the hitting prowess of the batter, who sees fewer walks but (if strong protection exists) gets so many more (or longer) hits that he more than makes up for this. Most studies have concluded that strong protection does not exist.
A good summary by David Marasco:
http://www.baseball1.com/faqs/protection-faq.html
Note that he doesn’t even bother to research the question of weak protection, any of us who have watched a #8 hitter being pitched around in order to bring the pitcher up to bat knows that weak protection exists. But strong protection probably does not exist.
That’s not true. The efficacy of walking the #8 guy’s been debated. Larry Dierker refused to do it as the manager of the Astros because he worked out that it wasn’t worth it.
Further, you omit in that very article the note that “I’ve skipped weak protection. Most people are willing to believe that
weak protection exists [Is there a study that shows this?] ”
Most people believe a lot of things. That doesn’t make them true. I’m still waiting for a good study that even this weak protection is significant.
I’m more of a Denim and Leather fan.
Where were you back in ’79
when the dam began to burst?
“Weak protection†simply means that a strong hitter on deck makes the batter less likely to get a walk, conversely a weak hitter on deck lead to more walks for the batter. There’s debate of course about how advantageous this is for the batter, but anyone who’s watched baseball knows that this pattern occurs
But here’s the thing- does “weak protection” actually have a significant effect on offensive outcomes? It’s not very hard to come up with an outcome where it ends up being a nullity, at which point we’re debating angels on the head of a pin.
The one case I CAN think of that’s sort of related is that Bill James ran a simulation study in his Historical Baseball Abstract where he IBB’ed Babe Ruth in the middle of a lineup of bad hitters every plate appearance, and one where he let him hit, and ran a number of seasons each way, and found the lineup where Babe Ruth walked every time scored more. The thing is, that’s a function of Babe Ruth not ever making an out for an entire season (and hitters having more scenarios with runners on base, which works to their advantage) more than it’s proof of “weak protection”- plus Ruth was being walked with BAD hitters coming up behind him, so one could argue if anything this rebuts a theory that pitching around guys on a regular basis wins ballgames, and IBBs are overused.
I located this Markov model study that indicates a greater non-intentional walk rate per plate appearance for a batter when the next batter is a pitcher.
Exciting Inter-Squad Game reports here and here
Personally, I think it’s reasonable to say that in some situations “protection” changes the way that some managers make particular strategic decisions involving IBB and such. So in that sense, protection exists.
I haven’t seen anything that shows it has a significant effect, so I’m willing to accept that while protection exists, it doesn’t really matter much.
The whole idea suggests that pitchers have secret strategies for getting hitters out, but don’t use them unless they’re in danger from the next hitter up, which seems to me to be ridiculous.
It’s not so ridiculous at certain levels of baseball. For instance, in the minors, or even in early 20th century baseball, there are weak spots in the lineup. If you’re facing a weak hitter who can’t catch up to your fastball, why not just pump fastballs at him, daring him to hit it? Sure, maybe you would have a better chance at getting him out if you use your whole arsenal, but if the bases are empty and you just want to get through innings quickly and easily, sticking with the fastball at the bottom of the order could do the trick. In modern major league baseball, though, you have to pitch reasonably carefully to all the hitters, even pop-gun hitters like Willie.
Protection probably makes sense and has a noticable effect at many levels of baseball. Major league baseball just isn’t one of those levels.
29-
Yeah, but the takeaway from that is:
“My conclusion is that the basic assumption that batting performance is not affected by the strength of the following hitter is still valid. Leaving aside the effects when the pitcher bats next (which affects one batter per team in one league and usually not for the whole game), we see that batting and slugging averages are not affected, but strong hitters draw slightly more walks when followed by weak hitters. Additional walks lead to additional runs even when weaker hitters follow. ”
That seems to say to me: a strategy of strong batter being pitched around followed by pitching to weak batter INCREASES run scoring by your opponent- and, conversely, there’s no affect in thgat study where strong hitter + strong hitter INCREASES productivity beyond that of having good hitters. In other words, pitching around guys as a regular strategy, much like sac bunts and incessant stolen bases, is counterproductive.
32-
Reading Christy Matthewson’s autobiography or any account from contemporaries makes it clear that that easing up for some hitters was a valid strategy in dead-ball era baseball- even cases where you didn’t throw your best stuff to the weak hitters because they weren’t going to hit scuffed up mushy 75 MPH fastballs very far, plus the hit-and-run or sac bunt was nearly automatic with runners on in those days, so those were also occasions where you could ease up.
The IP and CG stats sort of bear that out, too- you try pitching 350 IP every 4th day with 90% CGs these days with EVERY hitter capabale of hitting you out of the park, and having to throw 90+ MPH, I suspect your arm would fall off by June.
If only we could unify these two forces with grittiness and clutchiness, we’d have a Unified Theory of Intangibles!
As far as a batting lineup, I’d much rather go with a different back end. Actually, I think the most important thing the team could do this year for the long term growth of the young players is to hit Lopez 8th.
Here is the suggested.
But I’d go with whoever is hitting highest OPS between Guillen/Johjima/Vidro at the 5&6 hole– my guess is Guillen or Kenji at 5/6; then Vidro at 7 then Lopez in the “second clean up.” Then Betancourt.
This would force Hargrove to actually let Lopez swing away and prove his power potential instead of forcing him to advance runners all year. I think it will be important to have Vidro 7th to get on base in front of Lopez. Let Guillen take his chances at the 5 with his power. If he or Sexson do end the inning, the next inning has a couple decent OBP guys infront of Lopez, opening up the back half of the lineup to actually be effective AND putting additional stress on the pitcher.
32, 34: Yes, I recognize that pitchers in Mathewson’s era “let up” and “bore down” depending on the hitter and the situation. But that was a long time ago, and the game is very different now. For one thing, there are really no more “bad” hitters anymore, aside from pitchers. Yes, Willie Bloomquist, but in 1910, every team had guys who made Bloomie look like Ty Cobb. Teams can’t and don’t afford that anymore. And pitchers bear down all the time.
26.
I think you’re misinterpreting what I was saying; there is no disagreement. In fact here’s what I said about walking batters to reach weak hitters such as pitchers:
Let me repeat and clarify: there is no debate that weak protection EXISTS. Pitchers frequenty walk batters, intentionally or semi-intentionally, in order to reach their weaker-hitting teammate.
Where there IS debate is whether this weak protection has any, as you put it, efficacy or significance.
(Furthermore, amongst people who have studied protection, there’s not very much debate about strong protection: most (all?) studies have not found evidence that strong protection exists.)
Ah. You’re entirely right, I botched that response.