Game 123, Mariners at Twins
Washburn vs Baker, 5:10 pm.
I’m throwing the game thread up before the line-up gets announced so that I don’t have any chance to react on the off chance that Kenji’s playing center field and hitting leadoff today or something. Because, for this thread, I want to put down my analyst hat for a second.
The Mariners are hosting something called Lolla-Blue-Za on Monday – the M’s are attempting to leverage the first playoff run we’ve seen in years into some city wide fan excitement, and are asking everyone to wear blue to to the Mariners-Angels series next Monday-Wednesday.
The name is ridiculously corny, but that doesn’t matter – I’m on board. The M’s are winning, there’s a pennant race in Seattle, and some of the best memories of my life were made at the Kingdome during the summer months of 1995. There’s something legitimately exciting about being at the ballpark in a game that means something, cheering on every two strike pitch, and demanding curtain calls from the players who hit monumental home runs.
So, if you’re going to the M’s-Angels series next week, wear blue and yell a lot. It’s been a long time since games at Safeco mattered as much as those three games will. We can talk about sustainability of performances all day long, but in the end, we all just want the team to win. So go nuts next week rooting for a sweep.
Game 122, Mariners at Twins
Ramirez vs Garza, 5:05 pm.
HoRam on the road. Hilarity ensues.
Projecting Future Performance
Last week, Geoff Baker wrote a series of blog posts that dealt with the issue that has been dominating the blogosphere conversation for most of the past three months – the playing time of Adam Jones, Raul Ibanez, and Jose Vidro, and how it should be distributed. Don’t worry – this post is not about that topic. At least, not explicitly. This post is about a commonly accepted principle that was laid out very well by Baker in that trio of entries. The idea is summed up in this statement:
It’s going to be hard to keep Raul Ibanez out of the lineup now that he’s hit six home runs in nine games. Equally tough to sideline Jose Vidro now that he’s back to being a hits machine. I was all for playing Adam Jones every day when those other guys were struggling back in July. But things have changed. The veterans have stepped up and earned their playing time of late.
In July, Geoff was on board with the belief that Adam Jones would be able to help the Mariners as an everyday player, and the struggling veterans should be ceding playing time to the more talented youngster. He felt the struggles of guys like Vidro and Ibanez warrented a change, and Jones provided a superior option. He doesn’t feel that way anymore. Why? Because Raul Ibanez and Jose Vidro are hitting well recently, and Baker believes in the predictive power of the hot hand.
This isn’t a unique position. Almost everyone believes in the predictive power of the hot hand. The overwhelming majority of people in America base their future expectations – not just in sports, but in life – on their most recent experience. In sports, this is even more prevalent, as we’ve all witnessed players perform at a level far beyond what we expected them to do. Joe Dimaggio’s 56 game hit streak may be one of the most celebrated records in sports. Seattle saw Ken Griffey Jr hit home runs in eight consecutive games. Or, to bring it back to the current reason for this discussion, Raul Ibanez has seven home runs in his last 48 at-bats after hitting six bombs in his first 372 at-bats. He’s on fire. He’s swinging the bat well. Each pitch looks like a beachball. Pick your cliche`.
We all know a hot streak when we see one, even if we don’t know why they occur. There’s a debate about whether hot streaks are random fluctuation of events or an actual change in skills for a temporary period of time. I don’t even begin to know the answer to that question, and I can see the validity of both arguments. But that’s not what this post is about.
No, this post is about the predictive power of the hot streak and how that should affect our expecations. As Geoff laid out in the three linked blog entries above, the common wisdom is recent success should be a huge factor in determining playing time. Raul Ibanez is on fire (over 48 at-bats) and Adam Jones hasn’t earned his playing time (over 23 at-bats), and those performances were enough to change Geoff’s mind about who should be taking the field for the rest of the year. Getting away from that specific discussion, the issue I want to address is how much credence we should give recent performance in developing our expectations for how a player should perform going forward, even in the very near future.
And, you know me, I’m not a big fan of developing opinions on anecdotal evidence. I know there are random examples that we can cite to support any cause we want, but I don’t particularly care about that kind of analysis. I want to know what a large swath of history tells us about the predicitve power of recent performance. Do hot hitters actually perform better, even for short periods of time, once we’ve identified that they’re hot hitters?
Keep in mind – this is a statistical argument. This isn’t one of these cases where all the people who think I’m an idiot who needs to care less about the numbers can tell me to get my head out of a spreadsheet and go watch a game, because the hot streak supporters are making an argument based on numbers. All I’m doing is testing the hypothesis of whether the numbers they’re choosing to believe in actually have any meaning.
Okay, so now that the overly long introduction is out of the way, let’s look at the evidence. The best research done on this issue that I’ve ever read comes from The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, written by Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andy Dolphin. For people who care at all about baseball statistics, The Book is a must read. These guys are among the very best researchers on baseball issues alive, and The Book is a comprehensive review of almost any question relating to statistics you’d want to see asked. While it’s not the easiest reading you’ll ever have, it still comes highly recommended.
In the second chapter of The Book, the guys tackled the very question this post deals with – do hot streaks present any kind of real information that is useful in understanding how a hitter is likely to do going forward? To test this, they pulled in every play from the 2000 to 2003 seasons and identified hot and cold streaks as the upper and lower 5% of all performances over any five game sample that included at least 20 plate appearances. The best 5% of performances went into a hot bucket and the worst 5% went into a cold bucket. That gave them 543 unique players creating a total of 6,408 “hot streaks”, and 633 players creating a total of 6,489 cold streaks. With nearly 13,000 streaks in the sample, they eliminated nearly any bias complaint you could happen to have with the study, and created a sample large enough to give us a conclusive answer – do the players who have been identified as “hot hitters” perform better than expected based on their historical averages, and vice versa, do the slumping hitters perform worse than expected in their next few games?
Without getting too deep into the statistical minutae (for that, you should buy The Book), here are the numbers (from page 56, for those of you who already own it) – for offensive performance, they use a metric called Weighted On Base Average, of wOBA for short, which essentially sums up total offensive performance and scales it to look like on base percentage. Think of it like OPS, just better, and on a different scale. .340 is average, .400 is great, .300 is bad. Just like OBP – but as a total sum of offensive production.
Average wOBA of hot hitters during streak: .587
Expected wOBA of hot hitters in 1 game after the streak: .365
Average wOBA of hot hitters in 1 game after the streak: .369
Expected wOBA of hit hitters in 5 games after the streak: .365
Average wOBA of hot hitters in 5 games after the streak: .369
As you can see, the production of the hitters in their sixth game after being identified as being hot (and hot doesn’t even begin to describe a .587 wOBA – that’s scorching), the players performed .004 better than expected if we had just used a three year average of their past performance and had no knowledge of what they’d done in their previous five games. Statistically significant? Yes, but by the thinnest of margins.
Since I’m wary of overstepping fair use and giving away too much copyrighted material, rather than spelling out the actual numbers of the cold hitters, I’ll tell you that the result in basically the same on the opposite end – the players performed worse than expected by an ever so tiny margin immediately after a five game super slump. They also re-ran the data over a seven game sample and looked at the performance in the following three games after being identified as hot or cold and found the numbers consistent with the five game samples.
But, I know, there will be some protests about how not all hot streaks are the same, and averaging 543 players together will be unfair to those who were really, truly hot. Thankfully, the guys included a list of the 10 hottest hitters over a seven game stretch. Marcus Giles had the most success run, going 18 for 25 with 7 extra base hits from July 25th through July 29th of 2003, good for a .720/.731/1.160 line. 18 for 25! His next 5 games? 0 for 4, 2 for 4, 0 for 4, 2 for 3, and 0 for 4, a grand total of 4 for 19 and a .211/.348/.368 line.
Giles was not alone. Of the ten hottest hitters from 2003, nine of them then proceeded to hit worse than expected (again, based on historical averages and ignoring the recent hot streak) in their next three games, with only Magglio Ordonez bucking the trend and continuing to hit well. From July 20th through July 24th, Ordonez went 13 for 19 with seven extra base hits, then went 12 for 20 with five more extra base hits in his next five games. That gave him a 25 for 39 stretch where he ran an 1.850 OPS over 46 plate appearances and is one of the best runs in recent baseball history. From July 31st through August 3rd, Ordonez followed this 10 game hot streak with an 0 for 14 series of hitless games, and in the 47 plate appearances (spanning 11 games) after we could identify him as one of the hottest hitters in recent memory, Ordonez hit .244/.340/.366.
The first sentence of the conclusion of the chapter, quoted from The Book:
Knowing that a hitter has been in or is in the midst of a hot or cold streak has little predictive value.
Historical evidence suggests that knowing that a player is on fire should do essentially nothing for our expecations of what he’ll do going forward, even in the very near future. In fact, given the choice of being totally ignorant of recent performance or knowing exactly how each player performed in a small sample, you would, in almost every case, be better off being totally ignorant. The natural tendancy to overstate the value of the predictive power of the hot streak (or cold streak) outweighs the sliver of actual useful information that is included in hot streak analysis. Because of our own biases, we’d make more correct decisions if we had less data.
Of course, the ideal isn’t to have less data, but to understand our biases and compensate accordingly, allowing us to live in a data-filled world and still make optimal decisions as often as possible. That’s part of what we’re trying to do here, and what statistical analysis does a good job of explaining – identify where human error leads us to drawing conclusions that are unsupported by the realities of life.
Going back to the Mariner-centric discussion that started this all, we have the Raul Ibanez/Adam Jones situation. If you, like Geoff Baker did, believed at the end of July that Adam Jones was a better player than Raul Ibanez and should be taking the field everyday, then nothing that has happened on the field since then should change your opinion. Raul Ibanez isn’t any more likely to hit well tonight than he was three weeks ago. His expected performance should be, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same. Whatever you thought of him on July 31st, you should also think of him now.
History paints a clear picture. Again, quoting from The Book (page 45):
One of the running themes of this book is that, very frequently, fans and analysts make too much from too little.
This is an important bias to keep in mind when performing any kind of analytical exercise. Our natural emotional reactions lead us to overvalue what has happened recently, and too often, we draw incorrect conclusions about what is going to happen based on things that have little or no real predictive value.
I actually have a lot more to write on the subject of correct player evaluations and projections (including talking about longer hot streaks, such as Jose Vidro’s, and how to evaluate a real change in performance), but for time and space reasons, I’m going to have to make that a post for another day.
Before I go, I’m going to make a request – please don’t turn the comments into another chance to rehash the same old argument we’ve been having for the last three months in the comment threads. If you feel that Ibanez should be starting due to clubhouse chemistry, veteran experience, or if you never felt that Jones was better than Ibanez, that’s fine – that’s also not what this post is about. The topic is about the predictive power of hot and cold streaks. I’ll be a much happier author if that’s what we talk about in the comments.
Game 121, White Sox at Mariners
Felix Day! It’s Felix Day!
Standard lineup except with Burke catching.
Game 120, White Sox at Mariners
BATTLE OF TEH OCCASIONALLY EFFECTIVE STARTERS!111ONEONEONE!!
Danks v Weaver!
What kind of a lineup would you run out against Danks? No no no no. No!
No.
CF-L Ichiro
DH-B Vidro
RF-R Guillen
LF-L Ibanez
3B-R Beltre
1B-R Sexson
C-R Johjima
2B-R Lopez
SS-R Betancourt
Yup! That’s right! You like that bench, Jones, you more-talented option that could improve the defense hugely with a fly-ball pitcher on the mound? You better, because that’s where you get to sit. Yeah!
The case against Contreras
In which I disagree with Dave’s argument that the M’s should take him even if they munch the whole salary.
The argument for Contreras is, is I may, essentially this: he’s moderately better than HoRam, the team needs him, and his contract is not that outrageous.
The first point, that Contreras would be better, is pretty much inarguable.
And I’d further argue that I entirely agree that at this point in the season, whatever helps them get into the playoffs is justified. The additional cost of his salary this year is negligible, and those remaining starts he picks up from HoRam could well be the difference.
My issue is essentially this — he’s in his mid-30s, and will be 36 and 37 in the next two years of his deal. His long-term outlook even before this year wasn’t that great: PECOTA’s five-year valuation, for instance, ran
Year VORP
2007 18.2
2008 13.2
2009 10.9
And that was based on him holding up a little better this season no less.
I’ll engage, in a way, in a logical fallacy here and appeal to authority, on several fronts:
– The White Sox chose to put him in the bullpen while Danks has been horrible for stretches this year
– In a year where several teams were hunting for pitching help (where Matt Morris moved!) no one took Contreras
– Contreras, as much as Dave’s now convinced that his contract would be easily movable at the end of the year, cleared waivers. No other major league team wanted to risk having the Sox give them Contreras with that contract. Not the dumb ones, but not even the smart ones. Not the ones with great pitching scouts who saw the same things we have.
I’ll also make the appeal to anti-authority. The M’s have shown repeatedly just this season (Davis, Parrish) that they aren’t any good at evaluating pitchers. If they trade for Contreras, we’re all hoping that for once, their crazed, ineffectual methods agree with Dave’s endorsement. That’s unsettling.
Moreover, I wonder how easy it really would be to move that deal at the end of the year. This seems a lot like the old fantasy lie (“I’ll throw in player x even though you don’t need him, and you can move him yourself- you’ll get a draft pick at least, right?”). If Contreras is good for the rest of the year, he becomes easy to move – but if that’s the case, how likely is it that he’s moved? Then the team’s paying $10m for a season with a 36-year old pitcher with declining stuff, and trying to move him for… for what? And if he sucks, the M’s end up eating a lot more salary if they want to move him.
For all the insanity over starters, who (besides the Mariners) would hand Contreras a two-year, $10m/year deal after this year?
On the other hand – and I don’t mean to argue for it here — given their recent track record, it’s likely if the M’s had $10m to spend, they’d only find some 36-year old starter to sign to a four-year deal. We might be better limiting the damage to two years.
And, again, you have to weigh that risk against the chance they miss the playoffs, 5th-starter upgrade or not. As much as it might be a huge PR boost for the team, the M’s are still neck-and-neck with two teams (Yankees and the gestalt Indians/Tigers) for the wild card and would have to catch the Angels for the AL West title. If they gamble and miss the playoffs, they’d have picked up that weighty contract on the chance that (again) this guy who cleared waivers, who no one else was willing to take on at that cost, is movable. And then the question becomes “how much salary do we have to eat to get him out of here?”
I don’t care about all of this: the M’s have tons of money to burn, and none of the salary stuff makes any difference in the team’s pursuit of a pennant this year, or the team on the field. But that’s the tradeoff we’re looking at: it’s a large gamble that Contreras gets the team to the promised land over the Yankees/Indians-Tigers, and they don’t have to eat too much money, against something we don’t know. I, as Geoff Baker’s argued on his blog, think the M’s have to have some backup plan: they’re going to throw some other pitcher into the rotation, use relievers L/R/L on one-inning stints, something. The trade is “Trade for Contreras and wager huge money” versus “M’s unknown option with unknown chance of working out”.
Baek’s not healthy and there don’t seem to be any other suitable internal options, but I don’t know that I’d give up on the unknown option that early: the M’s have had good success going to their player development guys and saying “who can we pluck out of the minors and bring up now?” I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Fontaine & Co. have a list of guys they think will be an upgrade over HoRam, and who wouldn’t expose the team to nearly as much risk. And at this point, given the track record of pitchers like O’Flaherty to stock the bullpen over the Davis/Parrish pickups, that option doesn’t seem so bad.
On the Moose and Coco
It bothers me that we haven’t said anything about this since it happened, but I wanted to say:
– Red Sox fans who were (and are) outraged have every reason to be. If Ichiro’s knees were hurt in a collision with Stomper, the A’s mascot, there’d have been a run on torches and pitchforks within the hour, followed by a mass short-term migration for the bay by people in M’s gear.
– Bavasi & the M’s baseball side showed a lot of class in their immediate horror and concern.
– And yet, the organization hasn’t done anything we know about and didn’t even say good things.
If the groundskeepers clocked an opposing player with a rake and they went down with a concussion, it’d be just as horrible – we want the games to be between the teams, unaffected by the clumsiness of others on the field.
And there’s what’s worse: if the groundskeepers knocked into someone accidentally as part of their non-dancing duties, they’d at least be on the field for a reason. The Moose doesn’t have any legitimate baseball reason to be out there. If he’s going to be there, there should be a massive burden on him and his attendants to keep out of the way of the players and umpires, who should have absolute right of way.
If I ran the Mariners, I’d at least have made noises about looking into ways to prevent this possibility in the future, of examining that parasite-infested non-moose the routines to ensure player safety, and so on… but we haven’t. All we got was the shrug and the “accidents happen” speech.
It’s embarrassing for the team, and for us as fans of the team, to be associated with that. I hope at least that behind the scenes, they’re making sure that that kind of thing doesn’t happen again.
Contreras’ Audition
Plenty of rumors abound that tonight’s start at Safeco was something of an audition for Jose Contreras in front of a team interested in potentially acquiring his services for the stretch run. If you think White Sox GM Kenny Williams was in Seattle tonight because of the coffee, well, he wasn’t. The Dodgers are also in the mix (and had a scout at the game), but the M’s have been linked to Contreras most heavily in the last week or so.
So, how did it go? If you’re someone who likes to judge by results, it was a mixed bag. He gave up 5 runs in 7 innings and got his 15th loss of the year, and his ERA now sits at 6.18. Not great. But, if you’ve read the blog for any length of time, you know that one of my soap boxes is using tools that aren’t results based to project future performance. And really, that’s what the Mariners care about – what is Contreras likely to do going forward if they acquire him. So, throw the results out the window. What did the process look like?
First off, let’s start with his stuff.
The fastball sat between 92-95 MPH, coming in with sink and varied arm angles. He didn’t have great command of it, leaving it up in the zone and catching too much of the plate, but he was around the zone with moving, above average fastballs. Ron Kulpa’s generous strike zone and the Mariners aggressive approach helped his strike percentage, but make no mistake, he was throwing strikes with the fastball.
His outpitch is still a splitter that is good and occassionally great. Sitting 80-82 with a lot of drop, it’s a true out pitch, especially against aggressive hitters. He commanded it well, usually burying it in the dirt and only leaving a couple up in hittable areas. His splitter is a real weapon, a swing-and-a-miss pitch that can be used to put away hitters when ahead in the count.
He also showed a couple of slurvy breaking balls. The slider, which he threw a couple of times in the 85-87 range, was better than the slower curve, which flashed 77, but neither were anything great. They’re both show pitches to keep hitters off balance, and are minimal parts of the arsenal.
Overall, that’s an above average package of stuff for a starting pitcher. Velocity, movement, an out pitch, at least passable third and fourth offerings, and okay command? That sounds like a league average starter at worst. The stuff is certainly still there.
What about the peripherals from the game – the results that might actually matter, if you’re into that kind of thing. In 7 innings, he threw 97 pitches, 70 of which were strikes, posted a 9-7 groundball flyball rate, didn’t walk anyone, and struck out five. That kind of line is good for a 3.63 FIP and a 3.20 xFIP, which are basically ERA scaled to eliminate things beyond his control. In other words, Contreras pitched like a guy who should have given up a 2 runs in 7 innings, not 5 runs in 7 innings.
If you watched the game, that should jive with what you saw. Guillen’s first inning double was an off balance swing at a pitch he was fooled on and barely hooked fair down the left field line. Guillen also later had a single that barely got by Uribe. Betancourt had a double that was a lunging swing similar to Guillen’s first inning double and wasn’t well struck. Ichiro’s bunt single was really a throwing error, and Beltre’s infield single was just the luck of a high chopper. The only hits that were ripped were the Ibanez homer, the Sexson double, and the Beltre double, and they all came in the first inning.
Tonight, Jose Contreras threw the ball like a guy who could start for almost any team in baseball. Considering the Mariners glaring need for a starter, if this was really an audition, I think they have to have liked what they saw.
The remaining contract, 2 years and $20 million, isn’t something you want to take on if you don’t have to. But, as I mentioned in the game thread, it’s not so far out of line with what healthy pitchers are getting on the free agent market that it becomes an immovable albatross. Whether it’s intelligent or not, major league GMs currently overvalue past success and health when it comes to veteran pitchers, and Contreras has both. Remember, if last offseason showed us anything, it’s that your most recent year performance isn’t particularly important in terms of dollars received, as Jeff Weaver, Randy Wolf, Adam Eaton, and Jason Marquis all cashed in despite miserable 2006 campaigns. $10 million for each of the next two years for Jose Contreras just isn’t a significant liability, given the current way teams view the value of guys like him.
Honestly, if I could acquire Contreras tomorrow without giving up any real talent in return, I’d make the move regardless of how much salary the White Sox were willing to eat. If they offer to pick up some of the money, that’s just a bonus. I saw enough tonight to confirm what I already felt that his performance record was telling us – he’s not done, and he’s not even really close to being done. He’s still a useful major league starting pitcher, and on a team that is running out Horacio Ramirez and counting on Jeff Weaver and Jarrod Washburn, he fills a big hole.
I’m officially on board with a trade for Jose Contreras.
Game 119, White Sox at Mariners
Future Mariner Jose Contreras v Current Mariner Miguel Batista. 7:05.
The crew that will determine whether or not there’s a trade?
CF-L Ichiro
DH-B Vidro
RF-R Guillen
LF-L Ibanez
3B-R Beltre
1B-R Sexson
C-R Johjima
2B-R Lopez
SS-R Betancourt
mmm… familiarity means comfort. Is beating up on Contreras in the team’s long and short-term interest? Would they be better off if he’s dominant? Who knows.
Another Notes Post
Just because there are a couple more things I should point out that are more blog related than Mariner related, they’ll get their own post.
1. USSM on KJR returns to its normal timeslot with Groz today – you can listen at 2:20 to try and figure out how many times my voice will crack this week. And, after Angry Dave made a long appearance last week, I promise to be more positive. Yesterday’s thread was awesome, by the way.
2. Also, reader Aditya Sood alerts me to the fact that we now have a Wikipedia page. I know they frown on people making changes to articles that are about themselves, so we’ll leave it alone, but if someone out there wants to give JMB the credit he deserves as a co-founder as well, that’d be great.
3. There was an article about the Pitch F/X system on Slate the other day. As far as I’m aware, no one on earth has a picture of me actually hanging in their living room, and I’m totally okay with that.