Bloomquist, pitcher
So scrappy people keep hijacking threads. From Drayer’s blog:
“Ben has been struggling to adjust to his pinch hitter off the bench role. He’s not one to complain, in fact he is one of the most good natured guys you could ever expect to meet, but he is going a little stir crazy in his new role.
Now just because he doesn’t like his new role doesn’t mean he is not going to put everything in to it. He has been trying to find ways to stay ready. About two weeks ago, in the 6th inning of a game he asked Willie Bloomquist to throw him some batting practice from behind the screen in the hitting cages.
Willie, who can often be seen messing around with different pitches and would one day like to get up on the mound for an inning, took things a step further. He pulled the screen in so it was close to the hitter, then started pitching to Ben. He wasn’t throwing batting practice fast balls, rather he was throwing splitters, sliders and fastballs that from that short distance were right on Ben. Ben said that got his eye ready, and in the words of Bloomquist “If he can hit me, I figure he can hit anyone.â€â€
Hargrove extension rumors
Geoff Baker writes in the Times blog:
I actually did hear the other night, from an assistant in another team’s front office, that Hargrove had quietly been given an extension for 2008 behind the scenes. Such an extension, I’m told — and nothing has been confirmed to me — would not preclude him from being fired this year. In other words, the team would eat the money. Again, just to repeat, this is just the word going around. Do not treat it as gospel. The point of me bringing it up now, rather than before, is that even if true, it would not impact the tenuous state of Hargrove’s job security.
With nothing announced, I’m inclined to think it’s close but in-progress instead of a done deal: if the team’s going to spend money like that, they’re likely going to do it in public because they think it’ll help answer questions about his job security – paying $250k or $500k or whatever it turns out to be to try and stop the speculation.
But, as Baker notes, that extension’s not going to end the speculation. They gave Melvin an extension and fired him under similar circumstances, as we all know.
Or, to recap:
1) Melvin’s been put on the hot seat by comments from ownership attempting to
2) Seeing continued speculation that Melvin is on the hotseat, the team attempts to end speculation by giving him an extension
3) Extension fails to end speculation
They might as well just put money in a big pile and set it on fire. It’d be prettier to watch than this last week’s games.
Game 14, Mariners at Angels
Jeff Weaver vs Ervin Santana.
Bloomquist playing second, hitting second. Beltre dropped to 7th.
Cult of Doyle update for 4/22
16 games, 39 at-bats, 5 runs, 9 hits, 1 double, 1 triple, 1 home run, 7 RBI, 7 walks, 5 strikeouts for a .231/.385/.388 line. That’s a decent OPS line, if walk-heavy.
On the Mariners, he would tie Beltre (who has about twenty more plate appearances) for the team lead in walks, and be behind only Johjima in OBP among regulars, with Vidro-esque power.
Game 13, Mariners at Angels
Horacio Ramirez WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
CF Matthews
SS Cabrera
RF Guerrero
LF Anderson
DH Hillenbrand
1B Quinlan
C Napoli
3B Izturis
2B Aybar
Also: check out Geoff Baker using OBP to explain why the M’s offense is worse than it appears. I remember when Stone was the only person on the staff who ever mentioned OBP.
Book event at Jackson Street Books today
2pm!
2301 S. Jackson Street, Seattle. Jackson and 23rd, “in the strip mall adjacent the Red Apple Market, between the dry cleaner and the City of Seattle neighborhood center” I hear.
On bullpen usage
The lengthy post I did on Hargrove’s reliance on roles and how it likely cost the team a game generated a lot of good discussion and some derision that I would even throw out Putz as an option in discussing Hargrove’s options. I disagree that this (or really, any strategy or move) is beyond questioning, and this is an important subject worth our consideration.
Here’s my basic point: modern bullpen usage, with its reliance on one-inning specialists, is a poor use of pitchers.
The role, and the mystique, only began with the invention of the save, and since the save statistic was kept, the role of the closer’s become narrower and narrower, until they’re now largely limited to only pitching the ninth, only if the team’s up 1-3 runs.
This is not how teams managed their pitchers for almost all of baseball history. For a long time, of course, pitchers were expected to go all game, and the pitchers in the bullpen were scraps and cast-offs, often starters who’d lost their endurance as they aged, random kids hoping for a shot.
Then we got the modern relief ace, the stopper, brought in to quench rallies, regularly throwing more than one inning.
In any event, I wanted to throw out some avenues for further reading about optimal bullpen usage, if you’re curious why there’s a huge contingent of really smart people who think the rigid adherence to roles, with 8th inning = setup man, 9th inning = closer, is not the best way to do things.
Baseball Prospectus stuff
“How to Run a Bullpen” (Me)
This is why modern bullpen usage is inefficient. It’s like saving your best pinch-hitter for when you’re behind by three runs, or only starting your best option at shortstop on days when there’s a full moon because that’s when things get crazy. Resources should always be deployed where they can do the most good, and modern closers as blood-lusting Gods of War, along with their Phobos/Deimos setup men (one lefty, one righty), are a bad use of resources.
Includes leverage chart!
“Optimal Bullpen Usage, Continued” (Me)
Research into the value of closers and bullpen usage shows us that the best places to use your best relievers is in close games, especially games that are tied, or where you have a one-run lead. The difference in quality between the first and the third man out of the pen isn’t as great as is generally perceived, so worrying about saving the best pitcher for the highest-leverage inning in a tight game doesn’t make much sense. For all this, though, how to use your best relievers in a game will almost never be quite as clear as choosing a .080 advantage over a .059 advantage in spotting your second-best reliever in the seventh or eighth, because the game situation will never allow you enough future information to use relievers in a way that will appear optimal in retrospect
There’s also a good chapter on this in “Baseball Between the Numbers” (“Are teams letting their closers go to waste?” by Keith Woolner)
Are teams wasting their closers? Not completely, but they aren’t getting as much out of them as they could, and it’s costing them wins. This is one area where the refinement of strategy has actually taken us away from the optimum usage pattern. During the “stopper” era of the 1970s, it was common to see a relief ace such as Rollie Fingers or Goose Gossage come in as early as the sixth inning to halt a nascent rally. That was the smart way to go. Focusing on situational leverage, rather than the accumulation of easy ninth-inning saves, is the best way to get the most out of the relief aces.
It’s a great essay, and I recommend it (and the book).
The Book
The Tango/Lichtman/Dolphin “The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball” has a lot on this. Helpfully, this is excerpted in Sports Illustrated for your enjoyment.
The Hardball Times
Which brings us to another great Tango piece, which goes into leverage and why it’s important to think about it when considering bullpens.
I really liked “The Closer and the Damage Done” (Treder) which examines the evolution of the closer and the modern bullpen.
The Closer model, with its highly specialized distinct bullpen roles, serves a purpose of greatly structuring and simplifying the in-game decision-making process for managers. Once the manager makes the determination of who his Closer is, who his primary Setup man is, who his LOOGYs are, and so on, then the decision of who to summon in various game situations becomes something close to following the recipe in a cookbook: when this happens, do that; once that’s happened, do this. Pre-1979 Bruce Sutter might be brought in during a crucial spot in the 7th inning – a tricky tradeoff decision for his manager to weigh – but a manager following the Closer model faces no such challenge. No matter what, if it’s the 7th inning, your Closer sits. One less thing to have to think about.
It’s a great read. Treder also wrote on the evolution of the lefty specialist in “A History of the LOOGY”: Part One and Part Two
Those should form an excellent introduction to the topic, but please, if you think there are pieces that should be added, drop them in the comments.
All of that raises the question of “why don’t teams do this, if it’s a better way?” Treder addresses this a little, but there are several reasons:
– it’s how it’s done (institutional inertia)
– it’s the easy way to go (risk/reward for managers favors running the bullpen this way)
– it’s what players expect (fit to role, financial rewards for performing to role)
You do see teams apply some of the lessons of baseball research, but usually they only go whole hog if they’re desperate. Generally, where you see this used is on the margins: a manager will annoit someone the closer, someone else the setup man, picking veterans, and then will use their stud youngsters in the role that used to be the “stopper”.
However, the prominent failure of “bullpen by committee” experiments (and the loud, public criticism that came with those failures) makes teams even more risk-averse. Even the A’s, who generally speaking will go out on the weakest limb to test these things, and who for some time enjoyed turning out “proven closers” and then trading them while their value was inflated, gave in and now only play with roles on the margins.
When we saw the White Sox go without a traditional closer and managed the bullpen by the game demands and matchups, they called it “closer by situation” and it worked just fine.
That something exists, and the establishment believes it’s the way things have to be, doesn’t mean that it has always been so, or that it’s the best way to do things. I hope these articles will help show how we got here, and how teams can get more from their relief pitchers.
Plot thickening
Just to stir this up more:
They probably just wrote up the notes based on the probable starters briefly listed on the M’s site and then retracted, right? I mean, what other explanation could there be?
hat tip to crosscut
Game 12, Mariners at Angels
Batista v Saunders. 7:05, FSN.
M’s field their standard lineup.
CF-B Matthews
SS-R Cabrera
RF-R Guerrero
LF-L Anderson
1B-L Kotchman
DH-R Hillenbrand
3B-B Izturis
C-R Napoli
2B-B Aybar
It was on the M’s website
Hi! You may have heard those wacky “internet rumors” that Morrow was starting, resulting in the standard mockery of internet sites etc.
Morrow was listed on the Mariners official site as Monday’s starter.
I’ll just type that again, because I think this is an important point to make.
Morrow was listed on the Mariners official site as Monday’s starter.
This was not some crazy rumor Dave posted. If you want to mock this crazy, nutty rumor, you can go ahead and mock the Mariners, because, and I’ve mentioned this before, Morrow was listed on the Mariners official site as Monday’s starter.
So go ahead, make fun of those unreliable internet sites, like the Mariners team site on MLB.com, for their crazy unreliable rumor-mongering and tomfoolery, because, as much as everyone loves heaping mockery on blogs, Morrow was listed on the Mariners official site as Monday’s starter.
If you want to get on us for not updating with the M’s denials and the disappearance of Morrow, that’s entirely valid.
(added) And, to be clear, I don’t think Baker’s slagging us — I dropped him a note about this, and he’s trying to respond to the hordes of Times blog comments/emails on this: he hadn’t read USSM at all until just now.