BIG BAD BASEBALL

SO MANY SIDE DOORS, SO LITTLE TIME...

2012-02-23T20:12:00.001-08:00

We have two parallel exercises in what might be called "transparent sidestepping"--the art of feebly waving one's arms in one direction while diverting one's eyes the other way, thus revealing the truth inside the sham and the sham inside the truth.

The first one is found in the news that Ryan Braun's suspension appeal has been upheld due to MLB's apparent usage of the LAPD "chain of custody unit" (which, by the way, was never actually proven to be the weak link in the O. J. Simpson case--the "Trojan horse" there was a racist cop).

The second one is found in the latest incarnation of the Hall of Fame wars, this time in the hands of Joe Posnanski, who found it necessary and desirable to take a passive-aggressive swipe at Jim Rice so copiously parsed (a la Bill Clinton's excruciatingly arcane hair-splitting on the definition of oral sex) that the actual motive shines like a crazy diamond even as it seemingly remains hidden in the sleight-of-hand that is Poz' shell game.

Let's save the brains for later and start with Braun. Rob Manfred, MLB's counsel, isn't going to win an Oscar for his "vehement disagreement" with the panel findings that tossed out Braun's test results.

Rob Manfred: secretly untying the
Gordian knot??

Folks, please remember that we are still in the Bud Selig era (which still abbreviates to the BS Era, in case you've forgotten). MLB doesn't want to have a tainted MVP, now, do they? So why would it be so surprising that they would figure out a way to ensure that Braun's appeal would prevail, even as they purport to disagree?

Please note that there is no assumption of guilt or innocence here with respect to Braun. The argument is simply that MLB would find it in its best interest to not have the embarrassment of an MVP who was found guilty, even in a "false positive" scenario. So the best way to ensure that the entire matter will flutter off into a morass of confusion and anti-climax is to botch the chain of custody.

With such a strategy implemented, Bud and his boys can concoct a hand-wringing, highly plausible (if you throw a towel over your head to muffle that uncontrollable giggling, that is...) scenario where human error trumps HgH, where a rogue twit (conveniently deployed as a courier...) tramples the vintage where the grapes of wrath (aka testsoterone) have been ruined by promiscuous refrigeration.

And the game can go on with everyone clearing their throats on cue, grimacing and gesticulating, vowing that their unmitigated disaster of a testing program will one day become the type of protective shield you can take home to Mother.

Those "curiously long" posts from Poz have more than a little bit
in common with this geographical phenomenon....

That's how you get paid the big bucks, kiddies.

Now, on to Poz and his pose. Let's face it: you know Joe is up to something when he tries to sneak Mike Cameron past us as a proxy for Jim Rice and "fails" to reference his friend and mentor, Bill James--whose Win Shares system could have answered the question with about nineteen hundred fewer words than Poz deployed in what is becoming a more and more pronounced Parkinsonian "ox-bow rhetoric" (you know, when the river just keeps bending back and forth, back and forth).

It's clear that this approach is deliberate, as ol' Poz tries to make it look like he's not dumping a load on the BBWAA for putting Rice in the Hall by comparing him to someone whom everyone knows is not a Hall of Famer. But Poz' need to linger over the back-and-forth, meandering around the same point, is a dead giveaway that this is a passive-aggressive act of solidarity with the man who just posted a metric ton's worth of his Win Shares data in a tiresome "open letter to the Hall of Fame" (the organization he kicked in the head back in 1994).

Coinkydink? James brings out his archer's set to aim
for a bullseye HOF argument on Dwight Evans; a week or
so later Poz brings out the scaled-back "tainted X" for
Jim Rice...

Poz could have saved a lot of time by simply quoting Bill's system, which shows that Rice is ahead of Cameron by about thirty Win Shares (or ten wins). The exact figures: Rice 279, Cameron 246. (Mike makes up a lot of ground from Win Shares' defensive component...and in support of Bill, let's just note that the scale he uses to measure defense in his system is a helluva lot more credible than the ones built around Wins Above Replacement--which aren't consistent with the method used to calculate offense, are built around shaky premises and assumptions, and just otherwise smell funny.)

But this wouldn't have been enough of a knock on Rice, or such a carefully-calibrated meander around the so-called "art" and "science" of baseball. It was necessary for Poz to toss up the road numbers of the two players, which bear some superficial resemblance to one another.

Again, a simple summary stat--adjusted on-base-plus-slugging (OPS+)--would have been the best way to compare those numbers. In fact, ol' Poz uses those to look at the overall hitting accomplishments of Rice and Cameron. For some reason, though, he doesn't choose to use it when looking at their road stats.

And why is that? Well, possibly it's because if he did so, he'd have to acknowledge a bit more overtly that the differences in offensive levels between Rice's career (70s-80s) and Cameron's career (90s-00s) are significant enough to put some distance between their road stats when these are presented in league-relative terms.

Mike Cameron, whose overall performance in Fenway
didn't measure up to the rest of his career.

When we do that, we see that Rice's OPS+ on the road is 119, while Cameron's is 111. While that puts Cameron within shouting distance of Rice as a road hitter, it is not "pretty much identical," as Poz is so off-handedly attempting to claim (and the wording there is masterful in its casualness, the unmistakable signature of someone whose parsing skills are on a par with those of our controversial, too-sexy-for-his-smirk 42nd President). It's a brilliant attempt at scale distortion--where the larger issue is granted, but the special pleading, the appeal to a context that is presented with the most scant amount of evidence possible--worthy of some of his mentor's brusque efforts in this regard over the years.

Rice, of course, used Fenway at a level that clearly overawed his supporters. Many others didn't. (Cameron, for one. He hit only .227 there.) Another player who took major advantage of his home park was Ron Santo, but this remains the most carefully buried of all statistical facts in the long campaign to get the Cubs' third baseman enshrined. Santo has seemingly gotten credit for Wrigley Field as somehow being just part of his repertoire, while Rice is dressed down for his success in Fenway.

Now please don't think that any of this constitutes a defense of Rice's induction. We are still on record as supporting Santo's induction, while finding Rice to be a player whose peak has been overvalued by the Hall of Fame voters.

What we really are saying, of course--to Poz and Bill James, and all of those who've rallied around (G)rantland as a place to gleefully jump the shark--is simply this:

Get. Over. It.

Even this kind of shambling, ox-bowed, excruciatingly parsed, infinitely resigned posturing is clearly nothing more than the pea of rage being slung around in a rhetorical shell game.

You guys are still mad about Jim Rice, and you are showing virtually no ability to put it behind you.

Just let it go.

Prediction: if Poz writes about Jack Morris in 2012, that will be the tipping point...so hold your tongue, Joe!!

SHOCKING! "REAL WORLD PROOF" THAT MONEYBALL LITERACY IS WANING...

2012-02-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

In the impending wake of that Mayan world-destruction thingee, the Earth just keeps slipping off its axis...whispers and shouts have begun to abound in the baseball world to the effect that the post-fin de siecle hegemony of Michael Lewis' pox baseballiana, Moneyball, is entering its death spiral.

We're apparently going to have to get those last digs in soon, since these real-world rumblings are confirming the copious research that our capricious associate, 3-D "Don't Call Me Crash" Davis, has conducted for us with a series of fearsome algorithms and one very large, gnarly piece of wood (he claims it's a divining rod--we suspect he may be "massaging" the data with it...though "flogging" might be a more accurate term).

Anyway, 3-D's method (such as it is...) involved sifting through millions of on-line records to determine what he called (when he wasn't doing 12-ounce curls with his Aryan beer of choice...) the "Moneyball literacy index." What he discovered was that it wasn't Billy Beane's cult of personality that drove the "discourse" concerning the book and what it offers as a "narrative" (there's that word again...) about roundball and crooked figures.

The shocking separation of what made Moneyball the book a lightning rod and what made the film adaptation a commercial success is captured in 3-D's chart, which we've dumbed down with all of the excruciating attention to detail that we're so known for in our hazy attempt to emulate those who've made their pound of flesh via claims of "deadly accuracy."

The chart shows that the post-season success of the Boston Red Sox in 2004 and 2007 (as promulgated by recently departed GM Theo Epstein) is what pushed the Moneyball discourse upward in a pattern that is disturbingly similar to the "fake bull market" on Wall Street during the same time frame. (Happily, Moneyball proved impervious to the world-wide financial crisis and, as the chart shows, glided through that volatile period, thanks in part to the long gestation period for the inevitable movie adaptation.)

But 3-D's big finding is that as the film moved into production and pushed inexorably toward an actual release date, that Moneyball discourse began to founder and, in a kind of pinnacle of counterintuitivity, began to fall even as the film went on to gross over $100 million at the box office.

3-D isn't 100% certain that the index will continue in freefall in '12 (then again, he's not certain where his next meal is coming from, now that his analyst job with the shadowy independent, rifle-rack-funded franchise, the Idaho Grifters, has been put on "hiatus"), but the signs seem to indicate further retrenchment. Epstein (pictured in the graph refusing the offer of a free screening of the film...) has gone on record that divulging proprietary information is akin to some kind of socialist conspiracy. Bill James has gone on record as claiming that he never read the book in the first place.

And, frankly, why would they? Bill is professionally uninterested in reading a book where they write about him [EDIT: ...except when he conveniently forgets, nine years hence, that he's at least partially read the book]; Theo, with his preternatural media savvy and his familial connections to the entertainment industry, isn't interested in seeing a baseball movie that doesn't tell his story.

But the combination of disinterest and shoegazing displayed by two of baseball numberologism's biggest icons is almost certain to drive down the suddenly fragile literacy index into a quagmire of confusion and lack of consensus, until the entire concept will be rendered...meaningless.

Hey...wait a minute...

BROWSING IN THE KID'S CANDY STORE

2012-02-17T09:11:00.000-08:00

Just a quick entry to commemorate one of latter-day baseball's galvanizing figures--Gary Carter, who left us the other day (aged 57) much too soon. The stories about Carter's larger-than-life personality are so well-documented that it would be redundant to reference these at any length, except to say that behind any impression of self-aggrandizement that Carter may have demonstrated over the years lay a child-like heart of gold. He was not called "Kid" for nothing, even when he had occasion to behave badly.

So just a couple of nuggets mined from Forman et fil to characterize Carter's on-field skills, which never overtly screamed greatness but blended into the gestalt of a Hall of Famer in the way that some pieces of music carry more than just the collection of notes that comprise it.

A feature of the Kid in his prime was his ability to play so many games at a grueling defensive position and still have so much left in September--it was his best month, and over the first twelve years of his career (full seasons: 1975-86) he posted a .297/.368/.497 line. That .865 OPS was quite an achievement, particularly considering the cumulative effect of catching.

Forgotten by virtually everyone was Carter's stretch-run hitting in 1985, when he hit 13 homers in September-October as the Mets relentlessly stalked the St. Louis Cardinals in one of the great division races (with no wild card safety net in place at the time).

1987 was the point when Carter's skills as a hitter suddenly atrophied, and his stretch record from that point forward (.232/.296/.377) reflected his early decline (right at the often-crucial age-33 turning point that we've seen before).

The joy of no-no: Gary Carter collars Charlie Lea after catching his no-hitter,
May 10, 1981

As a defender, Carter is sometimes overlooked for his skills, particularly with respect to controlling the running game, but for a ten-year stretch (1974-83), he was at or near the top in this area, throwing out 42% of opposition baserunners attempting to steal. Those skills began to erode in 1984 and would plummet during his years with the Mets, bottoming out in 1988 when his throw-out rate crashed to 19%.

While he was a much diminished player from age 34 until the end of his career, Carter's accomplishments with the (tragically murdered and still lamented) Expos were the stuff of legend. He played with a burnished glow that more than occasionally spilled over into a kind of rapture which transcended self-congratulation even as it mimicked it. His emotions were tangible--sometimes cocky, more often overflowing with wonder.

Rest in peace, Kid. Thanks for everything.

CESPEDES = CRUZ: LATE BLOOMERS, BROKEN CIRCLES & MO(E)BIUS STRIPS

2012-02-16T10:38:00.000-08:00

Let's begin with some pointed misdirection...

1) Does it seem as though the 2011-12 offseason has been unusually long in unfolding? We are days away from spring training and there is still a considerable amount of activity that hasn't happened yet...someone with time on their hands and some semi-pronounced database skills might just compare the pace of transactions across time, and see if this impression holds up.

2) What is undeniable, however, is the increasing emphasis/investment in foreign players who are expected to step in and contribute immediately at the big league level.

3) Which brings us to Yoenis Cespedes--no, wait, we need to comment about Billy Beane. (It's not as if we haven't been doing this for more than a decade, having been the first to look askance at the much mythified one--even before Michael Lewis brought his meatgrinder to things.)

Billy Beane 2012: in full camouflage mode

Please note that Beane's new extension means that, barring some kind of cosmic disaster (wholesale worldwide nuclear meltdown, Nate Silver running for office, Murray Chass and Darren Viola moving in together...) he will be employed by the same up-down, over-under, sideways-through franchise for 20+ years--the type of IBM-style stability that seemed impossible (at least until someone invented this "slogging" softwear, which theoretically permits someone industrious enough to go on forever, posting post-mortem well after rigor mortis).

It's probably the most counter-intuitive aspect of Beane's entire career profile--at least as the frozen-in-time, Brad Pitt-in-amber-waves of engrained fast-and-loose-with-the-facts-ma'am set of circular signifiers would plop it down in front of you like a cup of ice cream that had been thawed and refrozen a couple dozen times by a mischievously malfunctioning refrigeration unit.

That said, it's as strangely comforting as it is comfortably strange. All of which is prelude to our Mo(e)bius strip meta-analogy, where GMs (and regular folks) embrace what they have discarded, proving that a broken circle (or, in the case of Eno and Cluster, a broken head) can be stapled, glued, or otherwise unceremoniously reaffixed, albeit not without a twist.

SO what is that twist--that ironic echo that makes history into a tail-chasing ouroboros? Well, it's just this: Cespedes, the Cuban star whom the A's have just signed for $36M over four years, is a virtual clone of the Rangers' late-blooming Nelson Cruz. It's rather astonishing that few if any have noted this as yet (but that's why we're here, smirking in the bulrushes) but there you have it: two linebacker-y guys with circular, windmill swings and the Caribbean tendency to flex rather than flow.

Cruz is a product of his ballpark--he's a superstar in Arlington, but close to a replacement-level player elsewhere. A collateral irony is that the Rangers have just tied themselves to an odd contract with Cruz, one that seems likely to pay him the most when he might well be producing the least--the two-year, $15M deal pays out the lion's share of dough in 2013, which is probably the year that Cruz, who's looking a lot like the type of player Brock (Broken Head) Hanke so cannily characterized so many years ago as a "cream skimmer" (a guy with a late, truncated peak that is sort of a "supernova" from a series of power-hitting adjustments at AAA which play themselves out over 4-6 years in the majors).

But there's another, far more interesting twist here. Cruz passed through several teams before he bloomed in the hothouse environs of Arlington. The second of these teams, in fact, was the Oakland A's (2000-04: he never made it to the big club).

Billy Beane, in some earlier incarnation of his restless, listen-to-his-daughter-sing-songs-ripped-off-from-Juno-apparently-before-there-was-a-Juno-to-rip-off, late-mid-early ouroboros phase, traded Cruz to the Brewers for a backup infielder named Keith Ginter. (Ginter is one of Beane's Leggo-that-Eggo-on-my-face transactions, one of several can't-miss rip-off trades that backfired...Charles Thomas is another one.)

Cruz got traded to Texas in 2006 and his swing got tweaked--the circle was broken and reattached, so to speak--and, by 2008 he was a late-blooming slugger. So much so, apparently, that otherwise canny Craig Wright was fooled by his abbreviated 2010 season into thinking he was actually a star (pays to look at those home/road splits, folks--it can happen even to the near-best).

So Cespedes is, simply, Beane reinventing a player that he discarded. Not reacquiring, of course. Reinventing, as a matter of doing what most baseball GMs do--chasing their own tails. (The canny detail in the A's contract with Cespedes is that they can trade him at any time: in the monetized gas chamber within the prison-house of baseball, this is a key detail. It's most important to always be able to break that circle and reattach with as many umbilical kinks as seem appropriate at the time.)

Cespedes, like Cruz, is exciting. He may have a bad ballpark fit (odd corollary fact: Cruz can't hit a lick in Oakland, an irony that falls on the proton side of Beane's charge card: to wit, a .194 BA and a .567 OPS) but he's got that same macho flair. If he hits .250 with 20+ homers (and all of baseball's digital projectionists are grope-thinking at this level of achievement--funny thing, that..), he will get a pass from the reeling A's fan base and should settle into a level of "cream-skimming" that will give Beane sufficient maneuverability as he divines future head-fakes.

Roy Liechtenstein channels the aftermath of Moneyball,
four decades before its invention...

And privately, Beane must be wryly amused at how the term he's been lumpened in with ("Moneyball") has been so thoroughly circularized, broken, reassembled and kinked up to the point where the snake can no longer be sure whether his insides are outside or vice-versa. It now has so many "true definitions" that it can literally mean just about anything to anyone, and the fact that it contradicts itself is its own proof, leading to the type of self-destructive pride that underlies virtually all of the "cling to the model" behavior that those yoked to the delusions of "consultant culture" must play out no matter the cost. It's like what happened when abstract expressionism went "pop": the structures that had allowed a cadre of interlopers to decenter meaning into a self-consuming, chase-its-own-tail myth were slammed up against a meta-ironic backlash that crammed pop culture down the throats of those who would otherwise have stayed in their mom's basements.

Sea-change? Cluster-f*ck? Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose? Yes, yes, yes. But, in the all-too-soon-to-be-Mo(e)bius-ized words of Vittorio Gassman in the great Italian comedy Il Sorpasso, 'tis better to chase tail than chase one's own tail--until, of course, it becomes clear that it's all one and the same.

GETTIN' DIZZY: TWO-YEAR WIN DATA, 1901-

2012-02-10T00:21:00.000-08:00

Dizzy Dean was exhumed the other day--no, not literally--and there was the usual 60/40 split in the numbers world over his induction in the Hall of Fame. Given the penchant in the numbers world for marginalizing the concept of peak, this is about business as usual for ol' Diz, whose two famous appendages (his mouth and his toe) figured large in his short, meteoric career.

In an era where starting pitcher wins don't mean anything (except when someone like Justin Verlander wins a bunch and becomes MVP), it's harder to appreciate the impact of workhorse pitchers; Dean's achievements during his peak have become subject to the gravitational effect of the "advanced metrics" that purport to measure his value.

Contexts have changed, of course. No one can now do what Dean, or Sandy Koufax, or a number of workhorse pitchers in the 1970s were able to do--pitch a boatload of innings and win more than 50 games over a couple of consecutive seasons. But looking over the discussions, it's clear that the contextual problem is mostly historical--no one, so far as we can tell at least, has bothered to quantify two-year win totals for starting pitchers.

So we did it--twice. The first table you see lists the 28 pitchers who have managed to win 50+ games over two seasons since 1901-02.

The table is sorted in descending order of ERA+ for the two-year 50+ win feats; the color coding indicates which pitchers have been inducted into the Hall of Fame (yellow) and which have not (green). The last pitcher to make this list? Denny McLain, in 1969.

The ERA+ sort indicates that the Hall of Fame voters (either front-door or side door) have actually done a good job in distinguishing quality from good fortune. While 18 of the 28 pitchers on the list (64%) have been inducted, 13 of the 14 with the best ERA+ performance in the two-year 50+ win feats are in. The top half in ERA+ has a 93% induction rate; the bottom half in ERA has a 36% induction rate.

Ol' Diz is down in the bottom half in terms of ERA+, but he has something going for him that many of the others on the list don't. What's that? He hit the 50+ win total in three different two-year periods, tying him with Pete Alexander, Cy Young, Ed Walsh, and Joe McGinnity (pitchers from a earlier era, where workloads were somewhat higher) for third place behind Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson.

What we really need to see, however, is the full historical record. We can guess that the high win total for each two-year period has dropped off over time, probably right down to around 40 from a high point in the mid-60s (during the early deadball era). A yearly breakout will give us a better sense of how two-year peaks (both in terms of wins and ERA+) translate into Hall of Fame induction percentages.

So we slogged through the data and the big, long, honking table that runs from here into the next county down the right side of the page gives you a whole lot of data goin' on.

What we added was the #2 in total wins and the difference in wins between #1 and #2. Naturally, the more wins available to a pitcher, the more likely there will be a sizable gap between #1 and #2. In the current day, you can pretty much throw a blanket over the #1 and #2 guys.

Pitchers in bold type are in the Hall of Fame. When we look at the 110 leaders in two-year wins, we see that Hall of Famers have been the leaders in 61 seasons. When we find the last inductee to lead the majors in wins (Steve Carlton in 1981-82), we can see that operating correlation between leading in wins and making the Hall of Fame is at around 75%

Since we're right down in his region, let's note that Dizzy Dean lead the majors in most wins over two years three consecutive times. In 1934-35, he had 14 more wins than the nearest pitcher (Hall of Famer Carl Hubbell). He did not lead the majors in ERA+ during any of those seasons, however.

The overall ratio of leader years by HoF members to overall seasons where they lead in ERA+ is a bit lower than in the win column--52 out of 110, or 47%.

The boxes around the data in selected years highlights the incidence of seasons where the wins leader is also the leader in ERA+. This occurs in 33 of the seasons, or exactly one-third of the time. 19 of these were achieved by Hall of Famers (57%).

We're right in Koufax territory, and we can see that Koufax led the league in two-year ERA+ four consecutive times. The only pitcher to beat that feat is Walter Johnson, who led for five consecutive years (from 1911-15).

The leading twin total has steadily dipped since 1901, actually falling below 40 in 1983-84, when our old pal Jack Morris became the first pitcher in baseball history to lead the majors in cumulative two-year wins with less than 40 wins.

There was a good deal of flirting with the 35-win total in the early-mid 2000s, but it's possible that an era of diminished offense might cause the leaderboard to stay above 40 a la the totals in the 70s/80s.

The color coding reflects the level of ERA+. As the chart at left shows, the hotter the color, the higher the ERA+. The very best seasons are shown in purple (>200 ERA+) and pink (190-199 ERA+). There was a great deal of peak pitching in the eleven years between 1993-2003, mostly turned in by four pitchers: Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson.

The chart makes a bit of a case for Ron Guidry, who dominated during the late 70s (with ERA+ in the 170s). Dave Stieb, a fine pitcher whom many folks tout in place of Morris, had a nice little run in the early 80s, but his ERA+ numbers are merely very good, not stellar.

We're currently in an era where the win leaders are a good bit more "decentralized" than was the case in the past, but note that there was a similar stretch right after Koufax' retirement where nine different pitchers led in wins. It's always been a bit on the random side. Such is less often the case with ERA+, where there is a stronger tendency for repeaters.

So what about ol' Diz? Obviously he's a "peak" candidate, and the peak as measured here looks pretty darned good. His ERA+ is a bit soft, but the only others who lapped the field in wins over a two year stretch with greater distance between them and the #2 guy are Walter Johnson, Cy Young, and Pete Alexander. That's pretty good company, even if wins don't mean much. Dizzy is not embarrassing anyone by his presence in Cooperstown.

FROM OUT OF LEFT FIELD

2012-02-06T21:01:00.000-08:00

The unsinkable Amelie Mancini, expatriated French artist who came to America in 2006, settled in Brooklyn and discovered baseball, has done it again.

Left Field Cards, a side project obviously concocted to take her mind off the on- and off-field troubles of her adopted team (the New York Mets), has just released its second series of linocut cards that feature an appealing whimsy that's deployed with a tongue-in-cheek primitivism.

The new set is called "Edible All-Stars," and while a few of these players don't quite live up to the noun, they all fill the bill adjective-wise.

More details on Mancini's conversion to baseball can be found in an engaging essay/interview with the artist that appeared late last year on the Mets360 web site. She quickly realized that her allegiance with the Mets was something of a Faustian bargain:

"I finally understood the rules and that the team I picked wasn't an easy choice. (I mean, really, Amelie, how could you not pick the Royals??) By then it was too late, I'd already gotten a Mets tattoo."

Mancini has also completed a series of baseball paintings, but for those of us in the 99% category, owning a complete set in her Left Field Cards is probably the most practical approach. It's hard to go wrong with these colorful cards, which come five to a pack, ten to a series, and are strangely, wonderfully satisfying.

As enjoyable as these first two series have proven to be (the first one, still available, is entitled "Bizarre Injuries"), we must admit to waiting with rapt interest for the release of what's touted to be Series #5, which is entitled "Men With A Van."

I'm sure she'll knock that one out of the park, too. Let's Go, Amelie!

ANGELL, CONE AND THE FOUR-FORTY

2012-02-01T10:09:00.000-08:00

Long Gone to San Francisco for the tenth annual edition of Noir City, followed by the invasion of the all-too-common cold (a "gift" from the loveliest of colleagues), so we will check the compound sentences at the door and man the Kleenex...

Roger Angell, as envisioned by
David Levine

During recuperation, we've finally cracked open A Pitcher's Story, New Yorker legend Roger Angell's volume on the life and times of David Cone. Published in 2001, the book leaves out Cone's final years on the mound and doesn't touch upon any type of career evaluation--as is often the case with Angell, his focus is as much off-field as it is with the action between the white lines.

The book has a circuitous structure, moving back and forth centripetally from Cone's embattled 2000 season (4-14, 6.91 ERA), the year that quite probably chilled his Hall of Fame chances (more on that later). As is also often the case with Angell, it seems that the narrative progression is built around his innate sense of shifting tonality--though, here, the range seems narrower and more muted than has been the case in his earlier work.

And there's also a sense of deja vu, as if Angell couldn't keep himself from revisiting the theme of career collapse that he'd so compellingly examined in "Gone for Good," his highly acclaimed portrait of Steve Blass.

So while we don't wind up suffocating from a sense of "been there, done that" (the details of Cone's story add flavors that rescue it from being 100% derivative), we can sense when Angell's narrative suffers from what we are dealing with right now--more congestion than is comfortable.

David Cone--perfection followed by drastic decline...

The book was originally going to be more analytical, but Cone's rapid decline--a descent that, ironically, began immediately after pitching a perfect game on July 18, 1999 (against a team that no longer exists)--made such an approach unfeasible.

As always, Angell is good at psychological portraiture, and his talents don't desert him here. One senses that he has more discomfort with his subject, however, due to the greater age difference between himself and Cone--he references this fact on several occasions, as if to indicate that the "post-modern" sexual lifestyle is something completely alien to him. (It's also clear that Cone didn't want to go into these matters in any level of detail, and it falls to Cone's wife Lynn to provide greater perspective on the impact of his sexual peccadilloes.)

Angell shows the influence of the then-current pitch count craze, raging as it was in 2000, by subscribing to what we might call the "single-game catastrophic high pitch count theory." As was always the case with this approach, it focused on only the few cases where such a high pitch count correlated with a soon-manifested injury. Cone's 166-pitch game was clearly excessive, but there's no evidence that it had any effect on the length or quality of his career. Ironically, Cone reported a significant reduction in arm pain in 2000, the year that was by far the worst in his major league career.

Cone comes across as an interesting personality, and it's actually a bit disappointing to see that he's not doing more with his post-baseball career other than work as a sportscaster for the YES network.

Carl Mays--one pitch from glory...

As for Cone and the Hall of Fame: his collapse after his 1999 perfect game weakened his candidacy via traditional stats. His won-loss record was 178-97 (.647) on July 19, 1999; from then on, he went 16-29 (.355). Pitchers who win 200+ games and have a lifetime WPCT of .600 or higher have all gone into the Hall of Fame (with the lone exception of Carl Mays, whose fatal beaning of Ray Chapman has left him permanently on the outside looking in).

Cone wound up 194-126. By sabermetric measures (we always endeavor to leave "metrics" out of our "narrative" and vice-versa), Cone scores well, maybe a bit better than what's actually the case; but he would not be a bad Hall of Fame choice and he just might get a nod down the road apiece from the Veterans' Committee.

Angell displays his well-known interest in "baseball trivia" (all the while rightly acknowledging that there is nothing trivial in baseball to those who have been captured by it) in several digressions within the book (in fact, the book's structure might best be characterized as a series of digressions). The question that might resonate best with you, dear reader, is the one he dubs the "Four-Forty," and it goes like this:

What players with four or fewer letters in their surname managed to hit forty or more homers in a season?

At the time the book was written, the answer was eleven. That's changed since then. We'll let you cogitate on this one for awhile--and try to solve it from memory, as Angell and his colleagues did--it's a more sporting quiz that way, the treasures of Forman et fil notwithstanding.

MACRO-MANAGEMENT: AL BULLPENS, 2000-2011

2012-01-25T08:03:00.000-08:00

A few surprises in this data set. We are looking for macro-patterns, and today the search is focused on the overall performance data in bullpen stats for the American League over the past twelve seasons (that's 2000 through 2011).

First: things don't even out.

The basic twelve-year data (at left) shows that over twelve years there is an effective range of a full earned run per game between the best performing team (the Angels) and the worst (should we be surprised to discover that it's...the Royals?).

The correlation between the won-loss record by relievers and overall bullpen ERA is a good bit stronger than what one might believe (PEARSON test brings it in at around 80%). The only real outlier in the chart (at right), the team at the far left (we show best to worst from left to right here...) is, of course, the Yankees.

What may surprise is the more conservative "tuck-in" that the overall bullpen data suggests to be the case. The won-loss record for relievers actually stays within the parameters of overall winning percentage: it is a centrifugal rather than a centripetal force.

While there are a number of examples of high-win, high WPCT seasons (three teams--the 2006 Twins, the 2007 Mariners, and the 2009 Yankees--all had bullpen WPCTs over .700), the overall ERA for good teams (92+ wins) in this time frame trails the overall WPCTs posted.

As the data shows, bullpens in general do not lift up good teams' winning percentages, nor do they drag down the won-loss records of bad teams. The effect is, in fact, the opposite.

Finally, let's look at the overall bullpen rankings for the teams over the 2000-2011 time frame (as ranked by bullpen ERA).

This table has been color-coded to display some additional info: World Series winners are shaded in orange; pennant winners are shaded in yellow; playoff teams are shaded in green. Teams that finished under .500 have their rankings shown in red.

At the bottom of the chart the pennant winner rank is shown in its own line. That average rank is 4.3. The opening (2000) and closing (2011) pennant winners (Yankees, Rangers) are the only teams with seriously sub-par bullpen ERA rankings: everyone else is in the top half, with seven of the twelve pennant winners ranking in the top three.

The average playoff team is shown next as an average. Overall, the average rank is 5.4. Only one playoff team--the 2005 Red Sox--finished dead last in bullpen ERA.

Finally, "bad" teams (those with a WPCT under .500) are represented with their average. As you'd expect, this is relatively high at 9.4. Two of the chief culprits here are (who else?) the Royals, with an average rank over the twelve-year span of 11.8, and the Orioles, who are on their heels at 10.4. (The Royals have finished last in bullpen ERA six times in the past twelve years, though they made a good jump in 2011; however, they did something similar in 2007...only to regress to the bottom again.)

The chart also shows that there has been a good deal of performance volatility, particularly around pennant and playoff teams. The Red Sox showed a lot of this in the 2003-05 period, and they have been the most ping-pongy of all AL teams over the twelve years represented here. The White Sox had a bullpen apotheosis in 2005 and won the World Series; the next year, the bullpen lit itself on fire. The Rays made a huge jump in bullpen performance from 2007 (last) to 2008 (3rd), which is one of the reasons that they exceeded all the improvement projections made for them that year. The Rangers made it to the World Series with two vastly different performance levels from their bullpens in 2010 and 2011.

2010 was the only year in which the top four bullpens (as measured by ERA) all made it to the playoffs at the same time.

Most volatile bullpens over the time frame: Red Sox, Indians, Rangers.

Least volatile bullpens over the time frame: Yankees, Orioles (but not in a good way!), Angels, Royals (again, not a positive manifestation...), Twins.

JACK-KNIFE: THE LAST TWIST...

2012-01-24T23:57:00.000-08:00

Who hasn't had enough of "Whisky Jack," the man who would be an albatross, an eyesore, a bare New Years' Eve lightbulb in need of a lampshade?

The signature line that launched a thousand rants: their version
would replace that second line with "105 lifetime ERA+"...

Clearly we haven't. And since those who followed in our wake seem even more conflicted as the clock ticks down to the next Hall of Fame election, let's give Jack Morris one last look--and possibly discover just what it is that his supporters may be sensing within the fractured syntax of their "narrative" (the word that would, if it could, eclipse "metrics" as the most abused construct in the orotund post-neo rhetoric).

Let's digress long enough, however, to remind the reader that all denials, reformulations and elisions notwithstanding, the BBWAA voters do know that the "disloyal opposition" has been hard at work in scorched earth tactics with respect to Jack. We may not be able to quantify it--the saddest of all possible words except possibly for Tinker to Evers to Chance--but (in honor of my all-too-indulgent colleague Darren Viola) it's best to acknowledge that the spore is on the wind--tonight, and for each of the next 350+ days as the countdown to anti-ecstasy looms larger with every forward click.

Jack, bob-bob-bobblin' along...
say, where's the bobblehead for
"Steely" Dan Petry??

We'll get to what really looks to be the underlying reason why Morris is getting support in just a minute or two, but first let's examine some data that isn't lashed to the mast of WAR's siren call. (Noodling around with the present-day implementation of WAR, by the way, leaves one with some troubling concerns about park factor distortions, something that just might be part of the "narrative" that Morris detractors have whipped up.)

But that's a battle for some other day--it would be both premature and a needless distraction to force-fit it into the Morris controversy. Instead, let's focus on the interesting issue of mediocrity and how it applies to starting pitchers in general (and, of course, ol' "Whisky Jack" in particular).

Pitcher mediocrity can be measured in a lot of ways...most of the time we see it in season-long "chunks" (a word that probably won't become as charged with meaning in the post-neo world as "metrics" or "narrative"--a darned shame).

But there are other ways to slice data, and it just might be better to take a more global view of mediocrity--one that collateralizes performance across an entire career.

We can do that by utilizing Bill James's Game Score, a stat that is probably a bit overdetermined but is still useful in cutting across the lamentable tendency to see all performance from the straitjacket of individual years.

Mediocrity, as measured by the Game Score, is arguably those games where the pitcher posts a score between 40 and 49. These are games that don't usually produce a high chance of success for the starting pitcher's team, but that operate in the nether region between competitiveness and (looking to create a term that can move in the circles with "metrics" and "narrative"...) just plain "suckitude."

These games do just that, producing an aggregate pitcher WPCT in the .360 range. (Teams tend to win about 41% of these games, as they come very close to breaking even in those games within this region that don't result in decisions for the starters.)

Don Cardwell: half as good as Curt Schilling,
but just as unlucky when he was mediocre...

Of course, there is variation in the individual won-loss records. Occasionally it's quite dramatic. (Say hello to Curt Schilling and Don Cardwell, whose WPCT in these 40-49 GS games is .182. That works out to a record of 5-27.) The more of these games you have--and we'll keep you guessing as to how many ol' Jack has for a while longer--the closer to that aggregate .360 you'd think people would come, but that isn't always the case, either. Look at Larry Jackson, with 75 such games, and a .192 WPCT (10-42). And how about Nolan Ryan (93 such games, with a 8-57 record, or a .123 WPCT).

This is the region where the luck of the draw really comes into play--run support, for one thing; or the simple non-uniformity of runs allowed within the context of the scoring rules that define the Game Score. None of these measures is, as we like to say, a perfect instrument. Here, however, we can at least measure some of the impact of luck as it relates to mediocrity, and point ourselves in the direction of pitchers whose won-loss records may be at least a bit misleading.

But you really want to know about Jack. So where does he rank on the scale of mediocre games? Is he a top ten guy, along with the likes of (gasp) Greg Maddux (115 games in the 40-49 range), Don Sutton (110), Tom Glavine (104)? Does his winning percentage in this game range approach the apostles of good fortune such as Andy Pettitte (35-24, .593 WPCT) or Kenny Rogers (40-31, .561)?

Handsome, smooth, and just a little bit too bland,
Roger Smith (77 Sunset Strip) was the Jack Morris
of actors--but he reached the Babe Magnet Hall of
Fame by marrying Ann-Margret.

When we frame the question in this way, 60% of you are 90% sure that we're going to try to pull the rug out from under the other 40% of you. And that other 40% are 70% sure that the original 60% are probably overconfident at least 80% of the time. There's a secret formula in there somewhere, but 66.7% of you (the same number of BBWAA writers who voted for Morris in the last election) will dismiss it out of hand, while the other third will plead the Fifth.

It turns out that Morris is forty-first on the list that reads "Most Starts With Game Scores between 40 and 49." He had 77 such games, which ties him with Mike Morgan and Bob Friend, puts him one behind the aforementioned Pettitte, and one ahead of Tom Seaver, Mike Flanagan, Mike Torrez, and Jim Clancy.

As 77% of you suspected, however, Jack was luckier than average in these mediocre games. As a matter of fact, he won as many games in such performances as Morgan and Friend combined. All in all, Jack was 29-26 in these starts, which equals Morgan (15) plus Friend (14), who, oddly enough, combined for 77 losses in such games. (And you thought we couldn't tie that all together, now, didn't you?)

So Jack was lucky. He won about nine more games that he should have when he was mediocre. If we wanted to follow that line of thought, we could adjust his won-loss record and downgrade it from 254-186 to 245-195. Would that be enough to derail Jack's Hall of Fame momentum?

Possibly. But you want to know (yes, you do...) who had the most "mediocre" starts. We already told you that Maddux has 115. He places fourth on the list. #3 is Frank Tanana, with 118 (with a personal won-loss record of 26-58). #2 is Jamie Moyer (123 games, 46-40--another guy who caught a break when he wasn't at his best).

It would be boffo if the man at the top of this list were Bert Blyleven, but it's not so. (Bert does have 93 such games, however, in which he went 21-45; his .318 WPCT is a bit under the aggregate.) No, the man with the all-time record for mediocre starts is Tommy John, with 129 (and a 28-50 personal won-loss record). That's three lefties at the top of the list, leading one to seek a connection between the term "southpaw" and "going south."

Now of course there is not a single BBWAA writer who knows these stats and how they relate to Jack Morris. What they know is that Morris had a late kick in 1991-92 (which is just about the last point in time that remains reasonably within memory for many BBWAA members) and that he was a big winner for two consecutive World Champs in those years. This has obliterated the fact that Jack was seriously subpar from 1988-90.

The strange thing, in fact, is that when we break out Jack's career, it's clear that he's really more of a "peak" candidate than anything else. Combining together Jack's twelve best years in terms of won-loss record (not saying that this is what should be done, mind you, but doing it anyway...), he has a 204-123 record. That works out to a .623 WPCT. The remainder of Jack's career is exceptionally bad (50-63, 4.59 ERA), but, as Jonathan Bernhardt--doing his damnedest to occupy the rhetorical space of Chris(tina) Kahrl circa 1999--so slitheringly put it: Morris is a winner.

The BBWAA voters probably have no idea that Morris parlayed good fortune in mediocrity to such a tidy little WPCT, but they are as subliminal a bunch as their "disloyal opposition" is not: they don't have to quantify, cauterize, conspire, or even Midasize in order to have a bone twinge about Jack. (Not that some of these folk aren't simply bandwagoning to get the collective goat of the numbers guys: that's part of the latest "surge"--another word, like "metrics," etc., that's been defaced by the special mud that is meant for major league baseballs but is currently ricocheting into the eyes of the disenfranchised.)

Please understand that none of the above is meant as an endorsement for Jack's candidacy. It simply shows the components that are located "underneath the narrative" that so many post-neo folk have given a semiological credence via their arch articulation. It's our theory that the components took awhile to coalesce beyond the subdural level, and that the scratch'n'claw tactics of the disloyal opposition unleashed a virus, which in this case operates more like the toxic agent found in poison ivy.

In other words, rash behavior has created an itchy situation, and it's not out of the realm of possibility that the more we scratch, the more that itch will scratch back, until it spreads to over 75% of the affected body. And that will bring on that all-too-rare occurrence: the Hall of Fame induction as knife-twist, the unconscious, autonomic coiling of a python-like organism, scissoring itself around the strangled voices of those whose votes and opinions remain marginalized.

How grimly appropriate, then, that our final image herein depicts the ultimate result of this careening, disconnected anti-narrative, this jack-knifed discourse that brings any hope of mutual understanding and forward movement to a halt. As with much in the world these days, unstable events in the foreground overwhelm the longer processes and points of reference in the background. Thus the deeper structures get overlooked in the noise.

The Morris candidacy has progressed in a way that certain anomalous things happen: the shouting becomes its own form of silence, felt but not heard, acted upon without any actual articulation. Underground forces pop up, like gargoyles peering out of manhole covers. One man's train wreck is another man's pinnacle of success.

Just wait till next year...

CORRELATING POWER/PLATOON SPLITS 1: SUB-HoF LEFTY FIRST SACKERS

2012-01-18T23:09:00.000-08:00

Penumbra....

It's time to mess around with some data in the subcutaneous regions. (We all need to wind down from the agitato of the Hall of Fame's bloody penumbra.)

...bloody Penumbra. (But Cristina Brondo
might be worth getting sliced up for...)

So we will fly under the Hall of Fame--literally, in this case.

The vagrant thought that motivated this was an old chestnut: the platoon advantage. Or, rather, the disadvantage as it's often manifested in lefty hitters vs. lefty pitchers. We wondered if there might be any rhyme or reason in it--meaning some other kind of correlating pattern which explained its overall behavior.

So we decided to take a subgroup of hitters who would have been good enough to have actually given a prolonged opportunity to hit against lefties.

That group, after a couple of generous swallows of a high-powered Trappist ale, was identified as the left-handed hitting first basemen from 1930 to the present who are just below Hall of Fame level play.

We gathered the 38 hitters and calculated their personal OPS+ against lefties (we call it LOPS+, and it corresponds to the sOPS figure that Forman et fil calculate on their splits pages). That data is presented in the table at the left.

When we average out some of the other salient data about these guys, we discover that, as is the case generally in baseball as it's moved into the present, power is increasing. We took our three historical categories (30s-50s, 60s-80s, 90s-now) and averaged the ISO (isolated power) and the XBA (our stat, called eXtra Base Average, the percentage of total bases that are created from extra-base hits). When you look at that, you'll see that there's a big uptick in the last 20 years.

This is also accompanied by a general improvement in the performance level of the lefty-swinging first sackers who are "bubbling under" the HoF.

The XBA values, not shown in the chart, mirror the ISO: .556 for the 30s-50s group; .573 for the 60s-80s group; .640 for the 90s-to-the-present group.

The overall LOPS+ value for all 38 lefty-swinging first basemen is 79. That is, they lose about 21% of their overall OPS+ as a result of facing left-handed pitchers.

The historical data shows that there was a slight dip in the platoon performance of the lefty first-sackers who played in the 60s-80s group.

From this, it doesn't look like there's a whole lot to this study...

But it turns out there's another way to slice the data. (There's always another way to slice the data.)

And, in this case, the slice we want to do looks at a grouping of players by their ISO/XBA.

When we lump players into six XBA categories (.499-, .500-.549, .550-.599, .600-.649, .650-.699, and .700+), we see that there's almost a linear correlation. We've run the power data "backwards" in our chart; it runs from the most powerful to the least powerful, left to right, in order to show the virtually linear improvement in platoon advantage.

So what we're seeing here is that the more XBA or ISO these players have, the worse they are at hitting left-handed pitching.

Now possibly this is simply an intuitive thing. It might just be common sense to you all that the more a left-handed hitter successfully swings for the fences (or emphasizes extra-base power), the more trouble he might have with southpaws.

But it's not something that we've ever seen broken out in any way. So, here it is.

We of course realize that this is a highly targeted small sample size. It surely isn't representative of average players--though it could be. One thing to test is the performance of other lefty-hitting players who play different positions, but who hit at an analogous level for their defensive position. (In other words, hitters from other defensive positions who are the "bubbling under the HoF" types.)

We'll probably get to that a bit later on in the remaining off-season.

Ryan Howard: disappearing into a cloud of smoke
against lefties...

OK, it's coming back to us. What spurred this little exercise was the ongoing discussion of Norm Cash, the Tigers' long-time slugger. Cash had a fine career, and he gets touted as a "skirting the HoF" type from now and then.

But he had a very pronounced platoon split (just 61 LOPS+, one of the worst such scores among the players we've broken out).

The positive point, however: he owned righties.

That makes him eerily similar to a man who, unlike him, is widely considered to be a vastly overrated player--Ryan Howard.

Cash spent a portion of his later career being sat out against lefties. That was a lot easier to do in those days because the Tigers weren't paying him an absolute king's ransom to play. The Phillies might be well-advised to have Howard sit against lefties, but given what they're paying him, it just isn't feasible.

SAKOGUCHI ON SAKOGUCHI

2012-01-12T09:04:00.000-08:00

The makers of this poignant mini-documentary about iconoclastic painter Ben Sakoguchi, whose "Unauthorized History of Baseball" is but one of many "orange crate label" series that he has produced in a startling display of focused artistic energy, didn't see fit to bring baseball into the narrative, but as Sakoguchi talks about his life and art (a most welcome first) you can see a generous array of the baseball paintings in the right corner of the frame...

The occasion for the video is Sakoguchi's inclusion in the Japanese-American National Museum's ongoing series, Drawing the Line: Japanese Art, Design, and Activism in Post-War Los Angeles, which is featured at their Little Tokyo-based facility just east of downtown L.A. For more information about the exhibit, which is part of the expertly coordinated Pacific Standard Time cluster of exhibitions that have been running throughout Los Angeles since October, please visit their web site. The Drawing the Line exhibition continues through February 19th.

Ben Sakoguchi today...

The only problem with Sakoguchi's video is that it is much, much too short. The filmmakers do a wonderful job of capturing the essence of Ben's unique personality, and the story they are able to tell in just over four minutes is affecting, but more time with his prolific, often outrageous, consistently challenging and thought-provoking work is what the viewer will want after such a tantalizing glimpse. (A half-hour or hour documentary is what's needed: let's hope that it will happen--soon.)

Ben "back in the day"...

You can take a self-guided tour of Sakoguchi's work at his web site, lovingly maintained by his wife Jan, who is also the very principled portal through which prospective buyers of Ben's work must pass. [Full disclosure: we are pleased and honored to have somehow slipped through the cracks in her radar to have become a proud owner of several "Unauthorized History of Baseball" paintings.]

Such a tour, which will remind you of Ben's fruitful association with the Baseball Reliquary, will also demonstrate to you how much more there is to his work than baseball.

JIM, JACK AND THE LASH OF THE BACK: BASEBALL's CULTURE WAR HEATS UP

2012-01-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

First and foremost: congratulations to Barry Larkin for his enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. He is an exemplary choice in every way.

•

Jack (aka "Whisky Jack")...

...and Jim (who some would rather have
dipped in something other than bronze).

While yesterday's Hall of Fame vote didn't deliver a lethal blow to our little scenario for future results (more on that below...), it did crystallize the dynamics of the culture war that continues to rage between two increasingly armed camps: the mainstream media and the blogosphere.

What's clear from the increase in the support for Jack Morris (up to 67% from the low-to-mid fifties in the two previous years) is that the mainstream media has been listening to the blogosphere. But what they've heard--much as was the case with Jim Rice--has caused them to dig their heels in.

It's plain as the nose on Pinocchio's face that the BBWAA writers have taken umbrage at the ridicule that has been relentlessly sent their way by a very vocal minority (a kind of "Green Party" of "baseball activists") that hounds them. As is the case with any stacked deck, there are essentially two choices for alleviating the effects of such a condition: evolution or revolution.

The blogosphere, following the more combative post-Abstract muckracking of Bill James, has chosen revolutionary ardor. Buoyed by the fact that baseball front offices have adopted statistical and economic concepts from the ongoing "advanced metrics industry," they operate ideologically, attempting a full-court press of cultural revolution.

But they've only been given the keys to daddy's car. They don't own the car, and they don't have enough revolutionary praxis to steal it away from either its owners or its guardians: the mainstream press.

Thus the Hall of Fame has become the bloody battleground for symbolic control of the flow of ideas and the control over the nature of discourse. As we've demonstrated elsewhere, the flaws in the Hall of Fame voting process have been exaggerated, beginning with James in The Politics of Glory, who opened the door to what has become a tidal wave of revisionism by declaring that the process was irretrievably broken and advocating radical new mechanisms for voting.

Thus the BBWAA has been under assault from the forces of revisionist revolution for the better part of two decades, with a yearly flashpoint that occurs in the second week of every new year.

Make no mistake: the BBWAA is far from perfect in what it does. But nothing in this world is. And when an organization holds an important key to how "cultural definition" is coined, it's best to proceed from a less combative position.

Rich and Bert: accentuate the postive...

Rich Lederer's campaign for Bert Blyleven was effective not so much because it encompassed all of the deep technical truths that animate the world of "advanced metrics," but because it was an example of positive advocacy. By contrast, the neo-sabe campaigns against Jim Rice (and, now, Jack Morris) have failed to gain traction. If anything, they may have helped hasten the very thing they were attempting to avoid.

Frankly, the Hall of Fame is the most pointless place to wage a cultural war. But neo-sabes can't quite let go of their Stalinist roots. They factionalize as well--and as frequently--as any cadre of folk, even those with a bitterly cynical brand of utopian fervor. (It's that combination of impulses that earmarks it as a tiny but potent signifier for the ongoing malaise in American culture.)

The sane response to a Hall of Fame that's seen as a hopeless quagmire is to simply start one's own. A somewhat more moderate subgroup in the analytical world began this in the mid-80s, well before the Internet. That group predated the Hall of Merit by fifteen years, and it began as an intellectual exercise not motivated by the cynical depredations that permeate James's bracing-but-divisive Politics of Glory. That group called itself the Baseball Maniacs, attempting to own up to the obsessiveness that such immersion in minutiae so clearly entails. They did not think that the world would change much if they conducted a thought-experiment about who the best ballplayers were. They did not think it quite so urgent that a semi-lax organization be overthrown due to the "cultural abominations" it had perpetrated upon a helpless humanity.

As noted, the result of these negative campaigns against Rice and Morris seems to be that the organization with the power to make a "bad decision" will only be motivated to go ahead and do it, if only to remind everyone that they have the power to do so. Now, in some cases, such actions can serve to undermine authority and pave the way for cultural change. That's what some would call a Trotskyite tactic for "dialectical transformation." And, clearly, creating martyrs has brought about change--some of it good.

But people become resistant to such tactics. They learn to discount and deflect them. Cycles of change occur as cultural combatants revise and reapply their words and actions.

But the other problem for the neo-sabes who want to reform/control/blow up the Hall of Fame and drive all the BBWAA "morons" into the Red Sea is this:

--Not nearly enough people are going to get up in arms if/when a controlling organization goes "rogue" and puts Jim Rice and/or Jack Morris into its Hall of Fame.

There's no traction for "cultural transformation" here. It's better found in the front offices. If it permeates the front offices (and, to some extent, it is doing so, but the jury is still out on that eventual outcome), then there will be a slower but more lasting set of changes.

"Mandarin revolution" is a double-edged sword, and one must not proceed prematurely to the next state of change without risking backlash. The road to what looks like a sudden transformation is usually preceded by a long march. That is the reality of the situation here, and it will be best to accept and absorb the so-called "setbacks" in order to find the path that will lead to success. Given what's happened, there is really no other recourse.

•

So Morris' rise in the voting reflects more than just a strategic failure on the part of the numbers mob. It demonstrates that if you push against an inchoate monolith, the inchoate monolith tends to push back.

The corollary to the famous film noir maxim "No good deed goes unpunished" that's appropriate here is: "Poke a sleeping bear once too often, and you won't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from--because you will be the meal." The BBWAA is the bear; we are the visitors to the park. You don't change that essential relationship by yelling at the bear.

We weren't convinced that the Morris matter had taken root in the way that it has, but this year's result makes it clear that we're now in that "elemental test of manhood" phase.

Organizations do (at least) as many bad things as good things when they are threatened, or feel threatened. Lederer's approach shows how small changes can be made; the campaign against Rice (and now Morris) is pitched at such a volume that it can't help but create backlash.

From the tiny standpoint of our own ongoing HoF projections, they weren't blown out of the water by yesterday's results. Jeff Bagwell came up a bit short of our projection, but his upward movement was strong; while there's considerably less certainty that he'll make the necessary jump for enshrinement in 2013, we'd still grade it at 60-65%. None of the other results were particularly divergent from what was predicted; like many of those whose individual voices remain less combative than the unfortunate "echo chamber" effect of the numbers blogosphere, we're heartened to see Tim Raines move up in the vote, but caution his advocates to be ready to weather a protracted plateau as a series of more obviously qualified candidates begin to appear on the ballot next year.

[EDIT: Some might wonder why, if the Hall of Fame is characterized here as not being worth so much worry, why we've (recently) advocated a "Hall of Fame Redux." A fair question. That idea is just that: an intellectual exercise that follows in the wake of very diligent efforts by a group of committed baseball scholars and historians to shape an alternative roster of the best players using the most rigorous methods available to them (the Hall of Merit).

The thought-question answered by a "Hall of Fame Redux" is what would that roster of inductees look like had the same bureaucratic constraints been in place for the Hall of Merit as was the case for the BBWAA. While this is admittedly an esoteric idea, the interest in seeing such a result simply won't go away, at least from yours truly. We will know more about what the exact differences are in the de facto "inner circle" of the Hall of Fame by participating in such an exercise. Perhaps this is pointless, as it will not change anything. But any new perspective has the potential to spark future actions and change, even if they seem less than promising at first glance. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.]

PERSPECTIVIZING POSADA

2012-01-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

Jorge Posada has announced his retirement...the late-blooming Yankee backstop was a mainstay during a time when the gorillas from the Bronx were exceptionally successful even by their standards.

His retirement leaves only two players from the beginning of the Yankees' late 90s dominance still active (Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera).

He's not going to be a force in the Hall of Fame voting in 2017, though one expects him to stay on the ballot for a few years. His association with the Yankees during an extremely successful timeframe should boost his vote totals, as opposed to what happened to a switch-hitting catcher with a similar profile (Ted Simmons, who dropped off the ballot with only 4% of the vote in 1994).

Here's a brief sketch of factoids concerning Posada's career that will add a little more perspective.

First, of course, is that late-bloomingness. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of players who had their career year at age 35.

That age-35 season is the best such season turned in by a catcher that age in baseball history. (WAR-mongers might argue for Elston Howard's 1964 season, but they'd be doing so on the basis of the sketchy defensive values that the system kicks out for catchers. Posada's 153 OPS+ dominates the list of 35-year old backstops.)

The lengthy post-season that was so often part of the Yankee experience during Posada's career seemed to grind him down. Forman et fils' post-season breakouts show a marked decline over the escalating course of the post season: Posada's OPS in division series was .790; in championship series it was .742; and in the World Series it fell to .667.

In terms of his career development as a hitter, Posada began as a much better right-handed hitter, as our chart of his cumulative left-right splits demonstrates. He made a rapid improvement from the left side in 2000, and continued to improve as a lefty from then on--one of the contributing factors to his ability to remain an extremely effective hitter into his mid-to-late 30s.

That sharp dip in 2011 that's shown for his right-handed hitting (the one marked "LHP") shows the specific nature of Jorge's decline. He was just 6-for-65 against lefties last year. (That might have been a contributing factor in his decision to hang it up.)

The thought of playing anywhere else probably also influenced Posada. Of all the ballparks in all the major leagues, the one he really didn't want to walk out of (to rework that Casablanca reference just a bit...) was New Yankee Stadium. The revamped "House That ~~Ruth~~ George Built" proved to be exceptionally cozy for Jorge: in the three years he played there (at the advanced age of 37-39), the park literally kept his career going. He hit .302 there, with an OPS of .938. On the road, those number were considerably more wan--as in .209 and a .665 OPS. In 2011, Posada hit .165 away from the Bronx, with a .524 OPS.

Laura Posada: perhaps the reason for the "home
field advantage" is now abundantly clear...

Of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't work in a couple of "midwestern angst" digs into this. First, Rob Neyer's knee-jerk notion that Posada was held back from enough career games in 1996-99 to cost him a slot in Cooperstown wasn't really worth the time it took to write the column. (That's the Damoclean sword of the Internet--it just coerces that empty content out of you...) [EDIT: Hi, Rob!! :-)] There's a good chance that Jorge will end up in the Hall--but it will be sometime after 2030 or so, when many more things have shaken out. Second, it turns out that Posada's very favorite place to hit is--you guessed it--Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City (.340 BA, 1.011 OPS).

Get lost, Chet!!

Finally: evidence that Posada just isn't a West Coast kind of guy. On West Coast road trips, Posada hit .246, was on-base about a third of the time (.331), slugged .386--a total OPS of .728. Everywhere else (including his two homers in Tokyo, which is so far west that it's in the Far East and thus doesn't count) he hit .276/.374/.483, for an OPS of .857. Note to Jorge's red hot wife Laura: no Chet Baker records to get him in the mood. It'll just get him fouled up and off his rhythm.

Thanks for the memories, Jorge.

RELIQUARY REVS UP FOR ETERNAL BALLOT #14

2012-01-07T18:09:00.000-08:00

The Blue Bum tells it like it is: Stephen Seemayer's
paintings revamp the Dodgers' increasingly fragile legacy.

While oh so many of you are fixating on the scarifyin' prospect of Monday's Hall of Fame vote (Barry Larkin is looking good), you might want to turn your attention to an election in which any and all are allowed to participate: the Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals, where you can buy your own vote for a small yearly fee of $25 (that's less than seven cents a day, campers).

It involves a shift in mentality that might not be possible for those who are over-invested in statistics or "official stories." Rather than expending emotion and intellect in Hall of Fame revisionism, there's an alternate path that involves an entirely new vision, a true re-visioning, in fact, of baseball history. The voters of the Baseball Reliquary get to engage in this process directly, and they've done a sensational job in producing a unique slate of Eternals. Their "outsider" stance welds together the most disparate strands of baseball's ongoing tapestry.

This year there are a dozen new candidates for the Shrine of the Eternals. Some of the better-known names include: Bert Campaneris, Jose Canseco, Charlie Finley, Hideo Nomo, Lefty O'Doul, and Joe Pepitone. (How would you like to have that sextet in a panel discussion?)

But where the Reliquary really shines is in its selection of the lesser-known figures in baseball history. These are the fleeting ones, who add the texture of individuality to the game--the characters who often are the purest embodiments of adversity, extremity and otherness: the qualities that abound in Reliquary inductees.

Bill Bergen

The half-dozen fleeting ones who are invited to take a bow in 2012:

--Gary Bell, an ordinary pitcher with an extraordinary wit, one of the three major characters in Jim Bouton's abidingly irreverent classic, Ball Four;

--Bill Bergen, whose lack of hitting prowess is the most extreme for any position player who ever amassed 2500 or more at-bats;

--Steve Bilko, legendary minor-league slugger whose long-ball exploits in the Pacific Coast League were so legendary that Hollywood appropriated his name for the classic Phil Silvers comedy, Sergeant Bilko;

--Charles "Victory" Faust, the type of "team mascot" that could never happen today, whose story would make for a quirky but compelling baseball biopic;

Toni Stone

--Annabelle Lee, aunt of Bill (Spaceman) Lee, whose left-handed pitching exploits in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League included a perfect game (Lee has said his aunt threw harder than he did);

--Toni Stone, the only woman to play in the Negro Leagues, signed by the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953 to play second base (thus replacing a future Hall of Famer: Hank Aaron).

These are not your garden-variety "Hall of Fame" candidates. They are literally the stuff that dreams are made of, people who lived out their dreams in the light of day. For thirteen years, with unerring insight, the voter population of the Baseball Reliquary has selected a troika of inductees that capture this quirky, undefinable resonance.

If the all-too-brief stories of these six unique, fleeting-but-eternal individuals capture even the briefest spark of interest in you, then you should join the Baseball Reliquary--the quintessential baseball "anti-institution" where your voice is always heard. Voting begins in April, so there's still time to join.

The fourteenth Shrine of the Eternals Induction Day will be held on Sunday, July 15th, in Pasadena, CA. As we've told you for almost as long as there has been an Induction Day, the ceremony is unlike any other you will ever attend. Don't miss it.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO FALL APART?

2012-01-06T23:07:00.000-08:00

The Big Z: according to many semi-reliable sources,
the bobblehead makers got the proportions right...

The new year, arriving on the heels of the Oakland A's tradeoff of three frontline pitchers and the Chicago Cubs (aka Theo'n'Jed's Sausage Shed) deep-throating of Carlos Zambrano's contract, is virtually guaranteed to send the post-neo saber-fatalists into paroxysms of punditry capable of outstripping the mainstreamers they love to excoriate. (Since news often travels in threes, we can only hope that the Houston Astros will bite the bullet and hire Keith Law in a dual role--deputy scouting director and team mascot.)

The consensus in the ever-Iagoseque world of numbers is that Billy Beane has at last been exposed as a corporate shill, in direct opposition to his portrayal in Moneyball (and, yes, we still owe you our rev-up on the film, the flim-flam, and the many talking dead bodies that are still molesting the many myths that were serially propagated over the past decade).

The universal contempt for his recent deals, which sent starters Trevor Cahill and Gio Gonzalez (snif!), plus reliever Andrew Bailey, off to far-flung destinations for a minivan full of farm-fresh produce, is an amusing reversal of the 1998 idolatry accorded then-Marlins' GM Dave Dombrowski for his acquisition of a rhythm section's worth of first-round draft picks.

The fine feathered folk who touted the "Swing Kids" strategy in 1998 lived through a number of years where the Marlins fell far short of the scenario predicted for them, were buoyed by the parallel success of the A's, whose longer-term run of fortuitous draft selections coalesced into a set of mythic performances in 2000-02 that ushered in a wonk-infused feeding frenzy.

His other nickname: Lew "Blow Up My Stadium" Wolff

But the A's stalled (purportedly because their "brand" of exploiting "market inefficiency" went by the wayside). As with the five-year plateau that faced them in 2002 when the Marlins remained on the wrong side of .500, the A's old constituency has finally gotten off the bus. Jonah Keri, the krown prince of profit-pundit shape-shifters, actually tossed an incendiary device into his most recent screedy-poo at (g)Rantland, dousing Beane with gasoline as the hired hand of an owner with an agenda as dire as Wayne Huizenga or Jeffrey Loria. (That A's owner is now nicknamed Lew "the Leper" Wolff.)

The massive irony, of course, is that as Wolff and Beane tear down their team, their actions are no longer brilliant. And yet as Theo'n'Jed (Epstein and Hoyer, the two goombas from Boston who've begun to share a reinforced houseboat on the shores of Lake Michigan) make a series of similar steps (while not actually resulting in any dramatic payroll reduction, mind you...), they are the beneficiaries of what is mostly a "hands-off" policy.

We might humorously ascribe this to an inverted variant of Keri's discarded (shape-shifter, remember?) "theories," which we could rechristen as the "failure cycle," but we really ought to get down to something actually worth reading about. Let's just finish this long opening aside by noting that five years is clearly the operating limit for the cultural heroes of the numbers set. Epstein, a clever shape-shifter himself, bought himself time by taking a powder: by leaving Boston (four years after his last big success, and with two years out of the post-season), he was able to re-set the clock.

"Lavrenti" Beane...

"Billy" Beria

Beane and the A's, however, are now worse off than a discredited mid-fifties Politburo member. While it's gratifying that the crossed-sword set is actually willing to acknowledge how many games the long-ago vaunted (and summarily eviscerated) Fish Fillets (aka the Marlins) lost in 1998--that's 108 big ones, for those of you who were riding the space shuttle at the time--it is by no means a done deal that the A's will suffer the same fate.

It's not a done deal, in fact, that they will actually be all that much worse than they were in 2011.

(Gasp!)

There, we've said it. And, of course, we have some of our always handy, usually idiosyncratic data with which to wrangle.

What does it take to fall apart? Nobody is really sure, of course, until after it's happened. But that won't stop many from predicting it, particularly if they've been unlucky in love. The A's are odds-on "favorites" to lose 100 games (for the sake of our data, we'll interpret this as playing less than .400 ball).

Teams in the .399- WPCT bracket, as the data from the past twenty years demonstrates, do not tend to be exemplars of the "fall apart" syndrome. They tend to be a good way toward the lower depths already, and merely slide further into a region below mediocrity. The overall average drop for these teams is 14 games, but this figure has tightened a bit in the most recent decade.

Using a formula that uses team ERA+ and OPS+ to solidly mimic Pythagorean Win Percentage, we see that in the last decade teams who've declined into sub-mediocrity have lost the most ground in their pitching staff.

But the eighteen teams in the most recent decade have clearly bifuracted into two distinct classes (as the more detailed breeakout will demonstrate). They've splintered into teams that genuinely, catastrophically collapse (we can put the 2011 Twins and Astros, the 2010 Mariners, 2008 Padres, and 2004 Royals and D-Backs into this category), as opposed to mediocre teams that were already skating closing to the thin ice separating them from pond scum status.

Only five out of these eighteen teams had better-than-league-average pitching in the year prior to their sub-.400 season. Four of them are teams that really collapsed. And these are the only four (out of nearly two hundred league seasons where teams scored a 100 or higher in ERA+) where the teams collapsed.

The A's had an ERA+ of 110 in 2011. While they've lost three front-line pitchers, one of them (Cahill) was slightly under the league average in ERA+ in 2011. The A's have quite a backlog of young starters, including several who were acquired in these most recent trades. There is no fait accompli that the A's pitchers will suffer a catastrophic reversal in 2012.

The data strongly indicates that it's the pitching that drives the decline process, however. (The steady-state bad teams show a more balanced decline.) So how far do the A's need to drop from last year's pitching performance in order to sink into the morass that so many are expecting?

Let's answer that with a bit of indirection. What's clear from the data when we separate the two classes of .399- teams (the bad-by-free-fall from the bad-by-steady-state) is that the 2011 A's have a performance profile more like the free-fall teams, but we have to remember than there is a totally unrepresented class of teams that need to be mentioned here; namely, the teams that didn't collapse at all, but remained at least mediocre (winning 75 or more games in the following year). The A's still have a backlog of pitching that can cushion their fall; if they are able to stay at or near league average, they are going to be able to win enough games at home to escape catastrophe.

The best Beane can do when asked to remove payroll is to reposition the team to have the best possible chance to tailor the talent distribution around the characteristics of his home park. He's done that.

Now back to the question. How far do the A's need to fall in order to fulfill the wish-fulfillment of those who would send Beane off to a sabermetric gulag? The answer: several ways--both of them requiring a drop-off combination of at least twenty percent (as shown in the diagram: projections for 2012 at the left; last year's data on the right). The two likeliest scenarios are: a balanced downturn that's relatively even across offense and pitching performance; or a catastrophic decline in one category (we've chosen to humor the doom-sayers and put it all in the pitching side of the ledger).

Both of these would get the A's down to a projected win total that'd drop below a .400 WPCT; the current likeliest projection, however, looks more like a more modest downturn, one that won't push the A's down into the type of oblivion that teams such as the Royals and Pirates have reached. (We've also included the current projections for the Cubs and those current sabermetric darlings, the Tampa Bay Rays, entering that fateful fifth year of being the daring Davids in the ever shape-shifting maudit Moneyball formulation still swirling in the snark-infested waters of the post-neo zeitgeist.

Consequently we're inclined to think that a mild drop-off in 2012 will be followed by a return of solid pitching in '13. Add in some incremental offensive improvement and the 2014 A's (wherever they might be playing) have a decent shot to be "the new Rays."

Be sure to forget that you read it here first.

THE COOPER COLLECTION: TEN MONTHS AND COUNTING

2011-12-30T14:53:00.000-08:00

Right in the middle of the 2012 post-season, a unique baseball collection will go to auction.

Baseball table game collector Dr. Mark Cooper (who always seems to have that monicker applied at the front of his name, just like Dr. Joyce Brothers) will let go of an assemblage of over 250 board games that span more than a century.

Heritage Auctions in Dallas is putting this event together, and it's currently scheduled to occur on October 25-26, 2012--an event that might just coincide with another post-season appearance by the local team (the Texas Rangers).

The graphics and visual layout of these early board games have the same antique charm and nostalgic resonance as so much of the more well-known baseball memorabilia, and often conspicuously feature star players of yesteryear (looking, no doubt, for endorsement income at a time when the possible windfall was something more than a drop in the bucket).

We'll feature more of these as we move closer to the auction date. It will be awhile before Heritage has a highly structured area up and running, so we'll keep the previews coming. Great stuff!

SOME CLARITY ON THE CONLIN CONTRETEMPS

2011-12-26T11:36:00.000-08:00

As the Christmas goose reaches its final stages of dessication, we now face an off-season of punditry, what with all sort of folk weighing in on Yet Another Despicable Display of Abjection--henceforth acronymmed (sp.?) to YADDA--swirling around the pressbox. Bill Conlin, longtime media fixture in Philadelphia, has become the Herman Cain of baseball writers--and quite possibly worse. Allegations of child molestation and sexual abuse have surfaced, and seem to be multiplying at an astonishing rate.

We rush to write about this because the rush to judgment is already proceeding at a breakneck pace. Our old pal Rob Neyer, in the final stages of a transformation from proselytizer to pundit, is out front asking readers to vote on Conlin's fate. While this is a wonderful way to indirectly moralize (let's call it meta-moralizing), it's still part of a "peer review posse" mentality that seems to be overlooking one basic fact of American law.

Bill Conlin: a handsome devil
even with the extra chin...

Which is: innocent until proven guilty.

What ought to happen in America, away from the blatherings of a fractious but oddly insular sub-world of the press, is that Conlin should be indicted and tried.

Until then, we should not have any polls about what his "fate" should be.

Complicating this scenario, however, is the fact that Conlin's alleged acts occurred so long ago that law enforcement is stymied by statute-of-limitation issues. (Neyer, to his credit, references all this. But he can't resist imposing a "court of public opinion.")

Late meta-capitalist genius at work: commodification
of the hash-slinging slang of misfortune and dross...

Further complicating the process is the unfortunate timing of a BBWAA/Hall of Fame award that Conlin received for lifetime achievement as a baseball writer. To be blunt, most of the rationale behind all of the feather-fluttering over a piece of YADDA that's come right into the BBWAA's nest has to do with the turd in the punchbowl that currently floats in disturbingly plain view.

Rob's poll is really a referendum on the nature and limits of moralizing and how far it can be extended into action where legal remedies are unavailable. In essence, what 70% of the respondents to the poll are currently saying is that we can impose sanctions and penalties even if we have no direct evidence that someone has done something wrong.

There is something innately disturbing in such a result, but it is not especially surprising. Human beings want to impose order: after all, it was humans who invented the phrase "nature abhors a vacuum."

Rob's poll would be more interesting (and more potentially useful to the BBWAA) if it addressed this aspect of the question. Absent conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, what penalties can/should be imposed on an individual who's widely believed to have done wrong on multiple occasions?

Civil law often provides remedies in cases where criminal law cannot. Wrongful death, damages for pain and suffering, palimony: the signs of an age encroached upon by shades of grey.

One way for a judgment against Conlin to gain traction would be for his alleged victims to escalate their accusations into a civil proceeding. But such a proceeding would be problematized by the length of time that has passed since the alleged acts occurred.

So--what to do? Pundits will rush to judgment; radio call-in shows will seek to boost their ratings; the public will furrow up its brow a bit more. All part of the Human Frailty Industry and the cyncial news cycle in quest of the next YADDA with which to feed itself.

We should do nothing to Bill Conlin until some kind of legal matter is undertaken against him. An oddly timed leak of an investigation is not in and of itself sufficient for a rush to judgment. The sense of deflation in Neyer's article at the realization that the only real action possible at this time is to downplay Conlin's presence in the Hall of Fame exhibit should not distract from the fact that, for now, this is the only possible action that makes sense.

It is embarrassing, to be sure. It is ill-timed and "inconvenient." But mostly it is a sad commentary on how so many of those who enter into the world of the media find themselves caught up in the need to promote readership via premature punditry.

We need a poll question that addresses how we reign in those tendencies without doing any more damage to our democracy, but it's a subject that is thornier and a good bit more murky than the pointed fingers that surround Bill Conlin.

For what it shows is that human beings, hamstrung by their own need for self-esteem, can become overly obsessed with reward and retribution. The urge to strip an honor from someone sometimes seems to be more innate than the desire to bestow one. A few deep breaths--possibly from some of that (purportedly) fine product from the shores of Humboldt County--might help more than a few of the current YADDA fulminators to chill out and wait for the rest of the Conlin story to emerge before preparing the tar and feathers.

PLAYING WITH THE LEFTOVERS

2011-12-24T00:25:00.000-08:00

Prince Fielder: a bit too ready for his close-up...

Twenty-eighty hours to Xmas and rather than wrap presents we can't help but spike the egg nog for old times' sake. And after one too many, we are seized by yet another silly but semi-subversive idea as we stumble over Jeff Passan's free agent master list at Yahoo.com. The one-liners there are strictly sweatshop material but the list shook loose a vagrant thought...

Which is, what would it be like if baseball simply declared the free-agent period over and done with at Xmas, with all of the remaining players summarily assigned to a new team? Baseball could have fun with a variant on expansion by creating a thirty-first team via a bidding war between the various metro areas with a rooting interest in joining America's giddiest monopoly, and by making the thirty-second team a team filled with the free agent leftovers left unsigned by Xmas.

This is, admittedly, more whacked than our earlier proposal (back in the 1995 BBBA) that teams simply be moved from city to city on a yearly basis...well, come to think of it, maybe this idea actually makes more sense.

Let's have that thirty-second team land permanently in a place where everything that happens there is supposed to stay there--Las Vegas. Let's call the team the "Leftovers." And let's have the team be disbanded every year, only to be replaced by a new set of free agents.

Of course, this would be hard to implement, because once teams saw who was available, they would tend to snap up all the best players by the deadline. But we could think up ways to make it work if we really wanted to: it's not that important to cross t's and dot i's for the purposes of spiked-egg nog whimsy. Suffice it to say you could devise a method that would ensure that a sufficient number of good players would be available to a franchise specializing in a permanently-imposed makeover. (If these players were all free agents again in the following year, for example, the Players' Union would probably sign off on it.)

Let's take a look at how this would work in our current 2011-12 offseason. And let's begin with some context, using Passan's master list. We've taken his rankings and distributed them across a grid of free agents that's organized by position. The ones in orange are the ones that have already been signed.

Passan has 181 free agents on his master list; as of December 23, 71 (just under 40%) have been signed. (Perhaps some enterprising researcher can tell us if this percentage is on track with the average progression of free agent signings over any given off-season.)

The list set up this way (players are anonymous, though we've coded Yu Darvish and his posting lottery fee in pale blue so you'll see where it is on the chart) tells us several interesting things.

First, more than half of the Top 50 free agents (according to Passan, of course: YMMV) have already been signed.

Second, catchers and middle infielders tend to have high signing percentages. Teams seem to focus on getting these guys signed early. (This is subject to further verification, however.)

When we look at the actual players who are sill available and place the best of them onto an actual roster, we get:

C--Ramon Castro (137), Jorge Posada (96), Ivan Rodriguez (146), Jason Varitek (160)
1B--Prince Fielder (2), Conor Jackson (122) Carlos Pena (19)
2B--Mark DeRosa (117), Carlos Guillen (118)
SS--Ronny Cedeno (72), Edgar Renteria (119)
3B--Wilson Betemit (57), Kevin Kouzmanoff (81), Sean Burroughs (171)
UT--Aaron Miles (134), Willie Harris (135)
LF--Johnny Damon (34), Andruw Jones (56), Scott Hairston (103)
CF--Coco Crisp (29), Rick Ankiel (94)

Roy Oswalt contemplating the potential run support
from his Leftover hitters...

RF--Ryan Ludwick (47), Kosuke Fukudome (64)

Starters--Roy Oswalt (7), Hiroki Kuroda (13), Edwin Jackson (17), Hisashi Iwamura (18), Javier Vazquez (21), Rich Harden (38), Jeff Francis (61), Kevin Millwood (78).

Relievers--Ryan Madson (15), Darren Oliver (51), Chad Qualls (53), Brad Lidge (54), Joel Zumaya (79), Mike Gonzalez (80), Dan Wheeler (91), Shawn Camp (102).

It is a team blessed with surprisingly credible pitching and an offense that's barely existent once you get past Prince Fielder. You will see what we mean when you take a look at the team's projected batting order:

1. Crisp cf; 2. Damon lf; 3. Fukudome rf; 4. Fielder 1b; 5. Castro c; 6. Betemit 3b; 7. Guillen 2b; 8. Cedeno ss.

It's a team that projects to score 600-625 runs over the course of a season, which would have ranked thirteenth in both the AL and the NL last year.

When we played out the year, we got the following stats in one of those sim-seasons (as is often the case in a simulations, the game simply trashes a few players--this time it was Betemit):

What leaps out here is that Prince Fielder would be getting pitched around as often as possible. The team loses seven points of BA, five points of OBP, and nineteen points of SLG if Prince were to be replaced at first base by Carlos Pena. And estimates indicate that the team would score 35-40 fewer runs with Pena on first instead of Fielder.

The best estimate of the runs allowed for the pitching staff is right at 700 for the season. The Pythagorean Method suggests that this team would go 72-90 with such a runs scored/runs allowed differential.

What are the chances that a "leftover" team can be a playoff team? Probably about 1 in 9, which isn't awful odds. After all, some teams don't make the playoffs anywhere near that often, even with bonafide efforts to build a farm system and play within the current rules of MLB.

While definitely right on the ledge in terms of wackiness, there is something oddly irresistible about a team that has virtually 100% turnover from one season to another. The years in which such a team contends for the playoffs would contain a smidge of surrealism--a quality that wouldn't exactly hurt a game that has tilted dangerously in the direction of uniformity over the past couple of decades.

Er, Morganna--this is not what they meant by the "double switch"....

And, finally, for a team with such a built-in revolving door policy, the proper management method would be a return to the Cubs' "college of coaches" approach, with the person in charge on any given day determined by any number of occult practices--day of the week, biorhythms, seance, short straw, karaoke contest.

Or Vegas showgirls. Yeah, that's the ticket--a gaggle of showgirls are the perfect "brain trust" for the Leftovers. It would constitute sweet revenge for good ol' Morganna the Kissing Bandit, except that the ladies who managed the team might well decide within a matter of weeks that, unlike their highly protuberated precursor, they really didn't like every ballplayer that they happened to meet.

So many social problems to solve, and so little time!! Merry Xmas, and don't forget to doctor that egg nog...

THE HALL OF FAME LOGJAM: A PERFECT STORM DISPELLED...

2011-12-20T21:40:00.000-08:00

The mayhem Glenn Langan causes has nothing on what seems to be
heading in the direction of the Hall of Fame in January 2013...

The topic looms larger and larger, growing with a force as alarming as what faced poor Glenn Langan in The Amazing Colossal Man...

Before we know it, an avalanche of Hall of Fame candidates will come crashing down on the BBWAA. Doomsday scenarios of various forms and denominations are already being concocted.

We're actually going to try to go beyond the cheap symmetry in our title, and present our own speculative account of what's coming when the floodtide of qualified Hall of Fame players begins next year.

Our rationale is based on the fact that while a large majority of the BBWAA continue to exhibit a pronounced moralizing bent, they will be swayed by a series of practical considerations that will prevent them from imposing the type of across-the-board ostracism that many fear will be the case.

Forget about the Curse of the Bambino: might not the residual
malaise that continues to fester in Beantown stem from this
archetypal moment...the Great Molasses Meltdown?

But there's a greater worry: a crowded ballot will simply turn what is already a problematic enshrinement process into a molasses-like mush.

Some are envisioning a 2016 ballot with up to twenty bonafide Hall of Famers spinning their wheels in a combinatoric nightmare where no one can get the required vote percentage.

Others think the process will become a more protracted quagmire that will doom candidates to the vagaries of a Veterans' Committee that has been molasses-like in its own right over the past decade.

We think people who think this way are the luckiest...well, no, actually we think they are borrowing an entire molasses plant worth of trouble. And the psychology of the "disloyal opposition" to the BBWAA, a group that has done a better job of putting people through the front door of Cooperstown than anyone in the numbers community is willing to admit, is focused on the prospect of a "doomsday scenario" if for no other reason that it would constitute proof that the Hall of Fame's main voting body is more flawed than the cluster of seismic faults in and around the San Francisco Bay Area whose probability of catastrophic event is edging into Chicken Little territory.

Perhaps we should have called this article "Adventures in Future Schadenfreude." (And perhaps we would be in Pot. Kettle. Black. territory ourselves.)

What would be preferable would be to look at what is likely to happen in Hall of Fame voting beginning in 2013 and see if there is any reason to be constructing "sky is falling" scenarios.

Clearly, a 2016 voter stagnation'n'strangulation scenario depends on the BBWAA doing two major things wrong: 1) being unable to promptly elect deserving candidates and 2) conflating moral issues in such a way that all candidates suffer proportionally as a result.

If that happens, we would be looking at a 2016 ballot with the following 20 players still trying to get elected:

Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Tom Glavine, Ken Griffey, Jr.*, Randy Johnson, Jeff Kent, Barry Larkin, Greg Maddux, Edgar Martinez, Pedro Martinez, Mike Mussina, Mike Piazza, Tim Raines, Curt Schilling, Gary Sheffield, John Smoltz, Sammy Sosa, Frank Thomas, Larry Walker.

(*) means first year on the ballot

(numbers under the "2011" column in the chart indicate vote % in that HoF election)

Notice that for the purpose of this display, we are not even bothering to add in several folks who might still be on the ballot in 2016:

Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Lee Smith, Alan Trammell.

We are not expecting that the following players will receive (or retain) the minimum 5% support to remain on the ballot:

Juan Gonzalez, Kenny Lofton, David Wells, Bernie Williams.

Well, yes, if you look at it from this perspective, and come to the conclusion that the BBWAA, which shows a certain amount of molasses-like tendencies, will dawdle and double-dribble all over their shirts, then for goodness' sakes the sky has already fallen.

However...there are other perspectives. There are actually more than a few hopeful signs that argue against Chicken Little. We will go through them in a way that, if not convincing, will at least be confusing.

First, let's take a look at the most crowded ballot in the history of the Hall of Fame voting--1936. That ballot had nineteen hitters whose OPS+ was 130 or higher. It had eight pitchers whose ERA+ was 120 or higher (not including Babe Ruth). It had twenty-two players whose career Wins Above Replacement (WAR) was 60 or higher (not including Joe Jackson, who actually got two votes despite being ineligible).

The potential for chaos, for Chicken Little being more than just a future fryer with an advanced case of paranoia, was just as great.

What happened in that election? Five players (Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson) were enshrined.

Ah, you say. But those were five of the greatest players of all time, and the backlog of talent was much, much greater than five years. The players in the 2016 group have subtler, more elusive qualifications, and the BBWAA hasn't shown an ability to discriminate. This is the tsunami that will topple them, the perfect storm of candidates who will all founder on the rocks as the wind pushes all the boats against the current. Years of deadlock will ensue.

Sorry, we don't buy it. One way to track the level of deadlock is to look at how decisive the BBWAA is in terms of players. Is there a pervasive tendency to make players wait years after they first become eligible?

The answer is: no. The Hall of Fame had some issues with its voting rules, which took two decades to sort out. Once the BBWAA had a five-year waiting period and a yearly ballot, they began to become noticeably more decisive with respect to inductees. (This doesn't mean that they were flawless in identifying all Hall of Famers, and one of the criticisms of the BBWAA is in its inability to keep players with more subtle--and previously unmeasurable--achievements on the ballot long enough for arguments about them to ripen.)

But it's clear from the graph at right that the BBWAA has had no problem identifying first-round inductees. Their cumulative percentage has progressed upward steadily since the 50s and approached its original 30s level in the last decade.

Ah, you say. But there is a catastrophic complicating factor--AKA "the age of PEDs." The BBWAA has its own case of "roid rage" that it will be systematically imposing upon the voting process. This will lower the vote totals of all players coming onto the ballot, as demonstrated by what's happened to McGwire and Palmeiro.

We'll give you a "maybe" on that. So far the only serious vote suppression that has occurred has come at the expense of those two players. (The stats cadre wants to make a case that such is the case for Tim Raines, but the fact is that players like Raines often take time to ripen on the vine in terms of HoF voting. The insistence on the part of certain stathead factions that Raines is a first-ballot Hall of Famer is one part analysis, one part rhetoric, and one part attack-dog tactics. High OBP, low SLG players do take longer to get recognized, and Raines doesn't match up with players like Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, or Rod Carew, who were at the top of their leagues' offensive performance levels over a much longer period of time. WAR is not a perfect instrument.)

And what's likeliest to happen over the course of the next few years is that the BBWAA will single out the most controversial (read: arrogant) players from the age of PEDs and make examples out of them. As a voting group, they know that it would be impolitic to bar the doors of Cooperstown to all the players from the wraparound decades (1990s/2000s). They also know (when they are not pontificating) that the Mitchell Report is not...a perfect instrument.

To leave too many of these players out of the Hall of Fame based on the unreliable evidence that has been assembled would make everyone look bad.

And thus the real catastrophe would happen in Cooperstown, New York, where the ongoing financial health of the Hall of Fame--dependent on a PR stream from new inductees--would be seriously threatened.

Though many erstwhile revolutionaries would love to see the Hall crumble into dust, they should not hold out false hope for such an occurrence. The BBWAA isn't going to be party to that, no matter how devoutly one might wish it so. They will be stepping back from this brinksmanship and making an example of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

And there is tremendous good fortune in the fact that the two greatest players of the "age of PEDs" will be systematically ostracized. It will force the BBWAA to examine players that would otherwise get less attention in the voting process. This will serve to sustain several worthy candidates through what will be a crowded ballot period (people like Raines and Edgar Martinez) and give them a chance to be enshrined within the fifteen year period.

There is already good evidence to indicate that this is going to happen. Roberto Alomar's election in his second year of eligibility signals that the BBWAA is very likely to be selective in its punishment.

Barry Larkin

Craig Biggio--how many catcher/second
basemen/center fielders are there
in the Hall of Fame? None--yet.

Alomar's selection is good news for both Larkin and Biggio. It signals that the BBWAA is cognizant of positional difference and that they'll take it into account. Larkin is positioned to sneak over the line in 2012 as a result.

Biggio has an important ace up his sleeve that no other candidate can bring to the table--3000+ hits. It's one of two things that will make him a first-ballot inductee. (The other is his ability to successfully play two other positions on the left side of the defensive spectrum--catcher and center field. It makes him a unique player.)

The Hall of Fame history of 3000+ hit players is a strong indication that Biggio will come in at around 80% of the vote.

Even though in this rare collection of players (only 28 in baseball history) Biggio is down near the bottom of the group (as measured by hits, OPS, OPS+), he gets a big boost from the fact that out of 25 players eligible for the Hall of Fame with 3000+ hits, 96% of them are in Cooperstown--and 76% of them were inducted on the first ballot.

And the only reason that three of the other members of this group weren't inducted on the first ballot was because they happened to be on the "first ballot" in 1936: Nap Lajoie, Tris Speaker, and Eddie Collins. Lajoie and Speaker went in the second year (1937), along with Cy Young; Collins was inducted in 1939.

Twelve of these players received 90+% of the vote when they went in.

Oddly enough, when we average all of these players' first-year voting percentages (even the three 1936 players, the odd anomaly of Paul Waner, who was part of the late 40s confusion that hampered the Hall of Fame for the better part of a decade, and the scapegoated Palmeiro) we get an overall average of 80% for this group. That looks about right for Biggio, who has more similarity with players like Robin Yount and Lou Brock--career longevity and several moments when he was seriously mentioned as the best player in baseball.

(Interesting fact: Forman et fil's intriguing Elo-Rater system has three second basemen piled up together in slots #64-#66: Biggio, Ryne Sandberg, and Alomar. While it's not "scientific," it's a solid little tool--and the other two guys are in the Hall. Neither of them played catcher or center field.)

It's silly of us to post a speculative scenario for how the Hall of Fame vote will proceed over the next four years, but--what the heck, we'll do it anyway. You'll be able to see where the assumptions are, and how those have more than a small chance of coming unglued. What we expect to happen in the upcoming vote is that Larkin will get inducted, Jack Morris will max out a bit lower than what other folks expect, and Bagwell will actually slip past Jack. Why will Bags get a boost? Someone has to, and there's no one else on the ballot with numbers remotely like his.

Someone will remind his pals that Bags had a helluva lot of RBI per game, and that of players with a moderate length career (2000-2200 games), he ranks fourth (behind Lou Gehrig, Harry Heilmann, and Joe DiMaggio). The ones who've cottoned up to on-base percentage will note that Bags is 21st lifetime (.408). They'll note that he had a lot of round-number seasons (nine seasons with 100+ runs scored, eight with 100+ RBI, seven seasons with 100+ walks, and six seasons where he did all three in the same year). They'll notice that in addition to winning the MVP (in 1994), he also finished 2nd and 3rd, and was in the top ten of MVP voting six times. And they'll note that while he didn't manage to lead the league in HRs, he hit 30 or more in nine seasons.

The breadth of these accomplishments will rub off on voters--in part because there is no one else to focus on in 2012--and Bags will move up. (He will be more evidence that the scurrilous folk who toss around baseless accusations of PED use are not going to poison the jury pool any more than has already been the case--we are on the downslope of all this, and pond scum such as Jeff Pearlman will suddenly discover that they no longer have working vocal cords.)

With Biggio on the ballot in 2013, the memory of the "Killer B's" will be just enough to bring them over the line. It will be a massive PR coup for Cooperstown. The "Schadenfreude crew" will be conflicted--torn between a sense of relief and a lack of satisfaction over the dimming prospects of the Fallen Sky Scenario.

The chart shows how we think it will play out...with Larkin, Biggio and Bagwell voted in, the logjam is lessened, and The Perfect Storm can remain a lugubrious, inauthentic film.

What we find out in 2013 is that the moralizing bloc will not be able to crush Bonds and Clemens to the extent that they did with McGwire and Palmeiro: these two guys were just too great for too long to be completely trashed. They'll get around 30% of the vote, and it will be more loyal and tenacious on their behalf because these guys were really and truly inner circle players.

Mike Piazza, also on the ballot in '13, will draw down a solid percentage that will be off by around 6-9% from what Yogi Berra polled in his first year on the ballot (67%). He will be in position to go in on the third ballot in 2015.

The reason he won't make it in 2014 is that an exceptionally strong crop of candidates will debut that year, with Greg Maddux, Frank Thomas, and Tom Glavine all crashing through in their first year. Jack Morris, in his last year of eligibility, will go out with a semi-quaver as two 300+-game winners will be inducted in the same year for the very first time.

In 2015, we'll have two more all-time pitchers in Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez, and Piazza will join them for the second consecutive troika on the Cooperstown dais--something that won't have happened since 1937. Bonds and Clemens will be joined in their 30s holding pattern by Gary Sheffield.

The BBWAA will steam through this purported Perfect Storm without a glitch, but it won't gain them much respect. Basement dwellers will still be miffed about Raines; some of us will still be venting about Edgar Martinez; and there will be a series of splinter groups mouth-foaming about Bobby Grich, Lou Whitaker and Rick Reuschel.

In short: life will return to normal.

It will just be another cataclysm that didn't happen that we won't talk about even though we still think we can see it coming in the rear-view mirror.

HALL OF FAME REDUX: 1936

2011-12-15T23:48:00.000-08:00

This cap (with its seven-layer burrito rendition of
"fame as in Hall of...") is not yours when you
cast your vote in BBBA's Hall of Fame Redux...

A couple of years ago we suggested to the folks at the Hall of Merit that they extend their efforts by following the strictures of actual history and select potential Hall of Fame inductees according to the original rules:

--Vote for 10 players;
--75% of the votes produces enshrinement;
--Eligibility rules as in existence for each year in question, with the exception of Gehrig (presumed inducted via special vote in 1939).

So far the Hall of Merit folks have not taken us up on this idea. That's fair enough: they have their own activities and approaches, and we can all applaud their alternative take on the best ballplayers in baseball history.

But we remain fascinated by the prospect of having a more sabermetrically-engaged membership take on a "Hall of Fame Redux" where the first ballot begins precisely when it did in 1936, using the exact parameters that the BBWAA faced (and continues to face seventy-five years later).

So here's our pitch. If the good folks at Baseball Think Factory will see fit to link to this post, thus creating a thread where anyone who is interested can vote, we will tabulate the votes after a five-day voting period, announce the results, and continue with weekly posts moving through the years toward the present.

We'll also create an ongoing comparison chart of the BBWAA inductees and the BTF-HOF inductees which will be updated with each weekly result.

For the eligible players, refer to the link provided to Baseball Reference's useful Hall of Fame voting results page for 1936. There is a great deal of useful data summarized there that will help you make your picks.

Lou Gehrig will, alas, sit out this election and all the others, but will
be inducted in 1939 just as was the case when it actually happened.

Here is our vote for the 1936 election (in alphabetical order):

1. Pete Alexander
2. Ty Cobb
3. Eddie Collins
4. Rogers Hornsby
5. Walter Johnson
6. Nap Lajoie
7. Christy Mathewson
8. Babe Ruth
9. Tris Speaker
10. Cy Young

Vote early, vote once only, and let's see how many players can receive 75% or higher in the vote count. Five players made it in the actual BBWAA election; we're thinking that it might be possible to elect seven or eight in the Redux version.

We look forward to your participation...

YU. YU. YU.

2011-12-09T17:44:00.000-08:00

As we suggested awhile back, Yu Darvish will emerge as the most pivotal chip in the major league baseball post-season when the Nippon Ham Fighter ace becomes the most-talked-about Japanese baseball player to be "posted" for acquisition by American MLB clubs.

Yu Darvish: possibly a bit too ready for his close-up...

Darvish, who turned 25 in August, had his best-yet season in 2011 for the Fighters (18-6, 1.44 ERA, 276 K's, 10.7 K/9). His lifetime record is 93-38 with a 1.99 ERA--in short, the best JPPL pitcher ever eligible to make a transcontinental trek.

Bloggers (particularly those within a certain radius of the Bronx) have been trying to contain themselves in the manner of Internet porn users working hard not to go one stroke over the line, but Sweet Baby Jesus it's almost impossible not to have a mass relocation of blood flow when contemplating the figure and form of Darvish. With C.J. Wilson opting to go west, the Yankees would seem like the logical folks to be priming the pump for an infusion of stud-muffin pitching power.

Let's face it, the Yanks got by with a whole lotta smoke and mirrors in the starting rotation last season, and odds are not short that they can pull a repeat with what they're currently projecting to put out there behind C.C. Sabathia.

Where else could Yu go? The Red Sox are paying two pitchers (John Lackey and their earlier "Big in Japan" investment Daisuke Mastuzaka) some serious coin to heal in 2012, and new Boston GM Ben Cherington is downplaying his team as contenders for Darvish.

Big dollars have already flowed in Miami and Anaheim (oops, sorry: the Angels still want us to think they are actually based in Los Angeles, don't they?), so it would be even more astonishing if either of them decided to enter the fray.

Of course, we are rooting for some kind of totally counterintuitive result from all this. We're firmly convinced that baseball, now that MBAs have taken charge from top to middle to Yu's-soft-as-a-baby's bottom, is about to enter its most virulent phase of meta-collusion to date, a barely-hidden travesty that will only become more overt in the next several seasons as we transition from the reign of Budzilla to the MBA's version of David Petraeus. The anarchic environment within the industry is gaining steam; in such a context, meta-collusive transactions are becoming likelier and likelier.

In that spirit, examine these possible counterintuitive locations for Yu:

1. San Diego. Sure, Jed Hoyer is gone, but the moles that Jed and his new-old boss in Chicago, Theo Epstein, have implanted within the Padre organization could pay off with a stutter-step maneuver that brings Darvish to the West Coast as a short-term "rental" followed by a pass-through to the Cubs in 2014 or 2015 when the Cubs are ready for the final piece of their "break the curse" puzzle. (Of course, that assumes that Theo and Jed really are going to lead the Cubs out of hibernation.)

Chances are higher than usual that Darvish is going to get an opt-out clause in his contract...whether this is for everyone's mutual benefit or to establish as many pass-through options as possible will just have to remain to be seen.

2. Philadelphia. Hey, why stop with Phour Aces? They have the money.

3. Seattle. Actually, not so counterintuitive. A good ballpark fit, with similar weather.

It's just a question as to whether Jack Z. can convince his bosses that Darvish can get the M's back on track when they have so much more left to do in order to be competitive.

4. Kansas City. (Hey, you knew this was coming.) The Royals need to go for it now--and what would better symbolize the breathless abandon of a long-dormant but suddenly heel-swingin' franchise than the acquisition of an actual, bonafide whirling Darvish for a team in need of an even newer twist?

Plus it would give Joe Pos something to get extra creamy about.

Actually, only 1) and 4) really provide any likelihood of pass-through or meta-collusive scenarios, but the fact that it's a 50-50 proposition should tell you something.

• •

Wherever Yu winds up, though, the perfect American theme song awaits him...

Little girl lost Lauren Hillman, moving her way through to synth-pop resurrection via a crossbred tune mashing up The Beach Boys and Enya, gives Darvish an angelic, Kotomi-esque chorus. And why not?

Well, because Yu will almost certainly wind up in New York, and they'll probably decide to make him into a Metal Man. Big mistake, Ninja guy: power pitcher needs ethereal girl to achieve grace and balance. Wherever you go, make this your theme song, and America will be at your feet.

RON SANTO: TEARS OF JOY, TEARS OF INFINITE SADNESS

2011-12-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

One very large slight in the Hall of Fame voting results was at long last rectified today. Ron Santo, the fourth key member of the 1960s Chicago Cubs--the most star-crossed franchise of that decade, the one with absolutely nothing to show for itself--was finally admitted by what seems like the four hundredth incarnation of the serially dubious and excessively bureaucratized Veterans' Committee.

Sadly, though, this vote was (unnecessarily) too tardy to permit Santo (who passed away almost exactly one year ago) to enjoy this honor while still alive. And it sends a signal that in an age of accelerating cultural and economic factionalization, public institutions such as the Hall of Fame will be increasingly forced to take these types of mincing steps only with the convenient impetus of dead bodies.

For some reason, we are faced with the paradox that as the life of the world becomes more accessible to us, it is more and more necessary to not engage in any type of official judgmental activity unless those involved are already dead and gone.

This is a terrible and unfortunate trend, and it sends a tragic message to an entire series of aging ballplayers who are as deserving as Santo, but whose mistake (or so it would seem) is that they are still alive.

It is not fair to Santo to point out the series of reasons why his honor was so long delayed, but we must do so. His supporters, who naively believe that his enshrinement is part of a larger cultural-economic-rationalist "movement" to save baseball from a dark, protracted age of insiderist myth-mongering, have spun a narrative that Santo was merely an overly enthusiastic "yokel" whose on-field braggadocio was essentially harmless and homespun. When this is done in the mainstream media, it is known as "whitewashing."

Santo was no saint. He was not a pleasant man. He was a bully. He was also a great baseball player, an excellent third baseman, a hitter with power and strike-zone judgment--and a man who overcame a serious medical condition (diabetes). He also had the great good fortune, however, to play in a ballpark (Wrigley Field) that aided hitters the most of any during the time frame (1960-74) in which he played.

And, as the data shows, Santo took advantage of it more than anyone. The current "advanced metrics" which have become part of the long drumbeat on his behalf have conveniently cast off the constraining reality of these park effects and what they can tell us about Santo's actual level of offense.

This inconvenient truth does not mean that we are concluding that Santo is not deserving of induction. We suggested back in 2002, when we were writing a column for the Baseball Think Factory, that in a gesture of sabermetric and cultural healing, Santo and Dick Allen be inducted in the same ceremony. Such a concept was always naive and sentimental, because while Santo had been snubbed by a coterie of sportswriters who'd found him to be less than couth, Allen had come to symbolize far greater levels of hubris and social leprosy.

But with our lenses tinted to the maximum value of rose, we fearlessly suggested such a redemptive scenario. And it is to the eternal degradation of American culture, as embodied in the little world of baseball, committed both by those with the power to have made it happen, and those whose voices could have created a narrative to give it some real impetus, that this did not occur.

It is a blemish that will never go away.

We harbor no illusions that Dick Allen--clearly no saint, but a far greater hitter than anyone of his time who's not already in the Hall of Fame--will ever be enshrined while he is still breathing. After all, if the various editions of the bureaucracy could not manage to do so for Ron Santo, how can anyone in their right mind expect that for Allen?

And, likewise, we feel nothing but pity and regret for Minnie Minoso, a member of the first generation of black ballplayers to play in the major leagues. Minoso is in his mid-to-late 80s, and while his achievements are arguably more modest than those of Santo or Allen, the combination of his talents and personality are more than sufficient for such an honor.

We know that there are legions of "numbers folk" who have become comfortably numb with respect to Dick Allen. We can only shake our heads at their inconceivable certainty, and be saddened by their incalculable cultural cowardice. They were led by a series of terribly unfortunate slurs written by Bill James in a sprawling, dyspeptic, often downright nasty book originally entitled The Politics of Glory. Bill has recently recanted those words, but he did so in a backhanded way that was too little and too late. (It was the equivalent of a retraction of a libelous comment buried somewhere deep in the classified ad section.) His influence was much greater than he knew, and it remains infinitely more damaging than that.

Allen and Minoso must take solace in their enshrinement by two smaller but infinitely more cogent institutions--the Baseball Reliquary and the Hall of Merit. The former has an actual concept of American culture; the latter has an actual concept of the true on-field value of baseball players. This is better than nothing, to be sure. But we are left with the ugly residue of a series of cultural clashes that played out in the middle part of the twentieth century that, apparently, we are still centuries away from successfully resolving. (If we make it far enough.)

So, while there are tears of joy for Ron Santo (particularly for his family, who know more than any of the rest of us how much Santo recognized his own personal shortcomings and worked to ameliorate them during his post-baseball life), there are only tears of infinite sadness for the lost opportunities to rectify so much more than one great ballplayer who had unfairly been on the outside looking in.

THE 1-0 MIRACLES OF THE '69 METS AND OTHER ANOMALIES

2011-12-03T23:06:00.000-08:00

What a coincidence that 1-0 games are back to 1969 levels (well, not quite: there were 112 1-0 games in both 2011 and 1969, but there were more total games played this past season, so the percentage of 1-0 games was still higher in Ye Olde Year of the Moon Landing and the Miracle Whip™ Mets), but it's close enough for government work and our Curler Boy® Chart (below).

There are so many wacky things that were part of the Metsies' improbable run to glory that year (Nixon, war protests, Weathermen, the invention of heavy metal, etc., etc.) that it just makes the blood run cold while The Wind Cries Mary (sorry, axtually released in 1967), but we'll stay on point and remind you that the Mets kept the echo of 1968 alive in baseball's most expansive year ever with 14 1-0 games and a full half-season's worth of contests in which both teams combined to score six runs or less.

The starting pitching was righteous, all right--and those former hapless denizens of Flushing went 9-5 in the 1-0 games and went 53-28 in those low-scoring games, ratcheting up their record over the last two months of the season with hellacious hurling from such unlikely stalwarts as Jim McAndrew and Don Cardwell.

As our chart at left indicates, the Mets reached a crescendo of run suppression in August and September of '69, following up a 13-6 mark in August with a well-nigh unconscious 15-2 record down the home stretch.

Let's face it, winning 24 of 34 games (.706 WPCT) in which both teams score a total of 3 runs or less is a pretty astonishing feat. The only other teams to win at least two-thirds of such games with such a quantity of games during the season were deadball-era teams (the 1913 Senators were a mind-boggling 26-4 in such contests) and the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals (26-13).

Part of the incandescence of the Mets came from their 1-0 wins, in particular the legendary double 1-0 wins in Pittsburgh on September 12th behind Cardwell (game two) and Jerry Koosman (game one). Adding spice to the proceedings was the fact that in each game, the only run was driven in by the pitcher.

Three weeks earlier, the Mets had won a 1-0 game in which rookie Gary Gentry battled the Giants' Juan Marichal to a draw, leaving after 10 innings in a scoreless tie. Later in the game, the Mets employed a four-man outfield against Willie McCovey: in a bizarre and miraculous variation on his ill-fated line drive in Game Seven of the 1962 World Series, McCovey drilled a ball that no three-man outfield could have possibly caught.

With four outfielders, however, Cleon Jones was able to be in position to make a leaping catch to keep the ball in the park. The Mets would eventually win the game, 1-0, in the sixteenth inning.

Koosman was the man who was in the most of these 1-0 games, turning up in a total of five of 'em.

You may have noticed the (parentheses) for some of the games, which depict doubleheaders. More than anything else, the biggest difference between 1969 and 2011 is the number of doubleheaders played during the course of the season. The Mets played 22 doubleheaders in 1969. That total of 44 games represents more than a fourth of the season. They went 30-14 over this span of games.

What the breakout by pitcher shows is that Tom Seaver and Koosman were simply 1-2 dynamite for the Mets, combining for a 13-2 record when they pitched in doubleheaders. Right behind them, however, is McAndrew, who didn't get the run support that the two aces received and went only 3-3 in these games. And Cardwell wasn't exactly chopped liver, either.

Another serious difference has to do with how relievers were used. Tug McGraw was a combination long-man/closer, averaging nearly two innings an appearance and not so occasionally pitching much longer (and we're not counting his four early-season starts).

Jack DiLauro

As Leonard Koppett suggested forty years ago, however, the Mets' most pivotal game in 1969 may have occurred in their very first doubleheader of the year. Having lost three straight to the Cubs in their first meeting of the year--including a blown save from ex-Cub Cal Koonce in the first game of their April 27th doubleheader at Shea Stadium--the Mets found themselves in a scoreless game with two-game swing in the standings dependent on the game outcome. McAndrew, who'd been pitching terribly in the early going, inched his way through five innings. McGraw threw four innings of scoreless relief and the Mets won on Jones's three-run walkoff HR. It was the game that stemmed the tide and, according to all who were around at the time, gave the Mets the confidence that they could play with the mighty Cubs.

This was a 3-0 win, however, and is a bit off-point...the early-season 1-0 game that gets the most ink is the one on June 4th, as the Mets were in the midst of what would become an eleven-game winning streak.

Obscure lefty Jack DiLauro, obtained from the Tigers over the 1968-69 off-season, made his first big league start in this game--and proceeded to shut the Dodgers out for nine innings with stuff that wouldn't have blown over a feather. It took the Mets six more innings to finally push across a run, but DiLauro had come out of nowhere to fuel the improbable rise of a franchise still living on the fumes of these distant memories.

These may be too distant to bring Gil Hodges a slot in the Hall of Fame (the new version of the Veterans Committee will convene next week, with the fate of several notables hanging in the balance), but the Mets could use a little something to lift their spirits. No one ever did so much with so little: here's on ya, Gil.

LATE-BLOOMERS, THE HOF, AND THE AGE 32/33 DIVIDE...

2011-11-27T21:23:00.000-08:00

We will now officially "cherry-pick" from BTF (Baseball Think Factory) the way they do from everyone else.

The fugitive world of baseball statistics is fast becoming meta-parasitic anyway, and the handy chart compiled by the embedded insurgent renegade group RBI, showing how the types of parasitism in baseball discourse have operated over the past few seasons (with an entirely new strain emerging in the past year), is a telling indicator of the (apparently) inevitable direction that things are taking.

So, when in a Petri dish...

Actually, we are stealing our own list out of a thread that has grown as frayed and brittle as many of them do over at the Shrink Factory, where fabric softener is no longer an optional product. The list came from a bit of business following up a slice of commentary at Bill James' web site, where registered site visitors can engage Bill in questions and comments, sometimes about baseball, sometimes not.

In this case, it was a set of related questions about the Hall of Fame likelihood for two highly regarded late-blooming infielders, the Phillies' Chase Utley (right) and the Red Sox' Kevin Youkilis (left)--who are both turning 33 prior to the start of the 2012 season, and who are showing some signs that they might not be able to sustain the career momentum necessary to power their way into Cooperstown.

Both players have a 127 OPS+ going into next season, but there's a difference in their number of career games played--Utley (1109) has about 200 more than Youkilis (911). James noted the small number of players in the Hall with less than 1,000 games at the age of 32, and pretty much consigned these two also-ran status.

That got us thinking about the players who were like these two--as good or better--who'd come up late and had somewhere between 911 and 1109 games in their careers at age 32. How many were there? How many of them have made it into the Hall? Are there other late bloomers who've been overlooked in terms of the Hall due to short careers?

We went to Forman et fil and created a list of players in what we might call the "Utley-Youkilis Gap." It turns out there are 29 of them. We've sorted them into the list below at right, and will now proceed to explain (as best possible) what all the freakin' color-coding means.

First, the players in "hard orange" are the four who beat the odds and made it into the HoF--Kiki Cuyler, Bill Terry, Earle Combs, and Earl Averill.

The rest are color-coded by the number of games they played from age 33 on. The guys with 800 or more games played from age 33 are listed in two different color schemes (we'll explain the reason for this later--three (Ken Williams, Edgar Martinez, Bob Johnson) are in light orange, while two (Brian Giles, Rico Carty) are in pink.

We did the same thing with the guys with 600-799 games played at age 33 on. Two (Jack Fournier, Dolph Camilli) are in yellow; one (Cliff Johnson) is in blue. (Can you figure out why the reason for the subcategorization?)

The players with 400-599 games (actually 598, we cheated to get Camilli on the earlier list) are coded in dark green; those with 200-399 games are shown in light green.

Everyone with 0-199 games is shown in light blue.

Edgar Martinez

The separation of the top groups into two separate color codings is to differentiate the players whose OPS+ averages actually increased in their 33-year and up seasons. Five players did that: Williams, Martinez, Bob Johnson, Fournier, Camilli. Only three of these guys saw their OPS+ averages and their WAR totals increase: Williams, Martinez, Bob Johnson.

And those are the three guys who, in our estimation, deserve to be in the Hall of Fame.

They beat the odds. Everyone lost fifteen points off their OPS and saw their WAR total drop 60% in the 33+ age window.

These guys went the other way--and actually played more games from age 33 on than they did through age 32.

"Indian" Bob Johnson

Edgar, of course, is the current case--and we're just going to have to hope that the BBWAA gives him a full ride over the ballot process. This next vote will give us a much better sense of how things are going to go--with any luck, Edgar will go up into the mid-to-high 40s due to the lull in the coming "perfect storm" of HoF candidates that will arrive beginning in 2013.

Johnson and Williams are going to require a lot of proselytizing--and it won't be a walk in the park, even compared with the arduous efforts expended on behalf of Bert Blyleven. However, it's easier to convince a VC body than the full BBWAA, so educating folks as to just how rare it is to beat your "decline phase" is something that's possible with such a small group. Or so we can hope.

We wouldn't give much for either Johnson or Williams' chances. But both did a wonderful job of defying time, and this is a very rare achievement worthy of recognition.

(BTW, the numbers for "UTLEY" and "YOUKILIS" on the big chart are not for the individuals, but for the groups broken out by the thick line between Riggs Stephenson and Earl Averill. The "Utley group" is above (more than 911, less than 1109 games at 32). The "Youkilis group" is below (less than 911 games).

Ken Williams

It's going to be harder for Utley to play more games after 33 than through 32 than it will be for Youkilis, but if he could do so, it would probably mean enshrinement (especially if he can manage to stay a second baseman well into his late 30s). Chase is farther advanced WAR-wise than anyone else on the list (Terry gives him a very close run for his money, but Bill is one of the ~30% of these guys who had a better year at 33 than at 32. Utley really needs to do the same: he's going to need to shake off the injuries that have slowed his meteoric rise.

Youk made a successful move to third base last year, but his body type is such that it doesn't seem plausible for this switch to be viable for more than a couple of more years. He needs the Red Sox to decide that he's indispensable in their lineup: he's got about a 14% home park advantage at Fenway, which is exceptionally well-suited to his doubles-centric batting style. If he tries to jack up his HR totals, it might backfire on him, causing his BA to drop too much to keep him in MVP contention.

What did the "Gang of 29" do in their age-32 and age-33 years? Their aggregate OPS+ dropped from 134 to 119. They lost about 18% in WAR, a shade under 12% in OPS. Career-wise, they plated just over half the number of games they'd managed through age 32 from age 33 on.

I expect Utley and Youkilis to beat that 50% figure, but they probably won't break 70%. Clearly, the higher this percentage, the greater chance they'll have for Cooperstown. Utley has the better shot, given his head start in games and the fact that he's been playing the tougher defensive position.

What's also clear is that this group of late-blooming players is quite interesting unto itself. They still need a shortstop and a catcher to be able to field a full team, but they'd be an awfully solid hitting unit if they could do that.

A FLUKE FOR ALL TIME, or: QMAX AND STARTING PITCHER MVPs

2011-11-22T22:18:00.000-08:00

We weren't quite expecting Justin Verlander to become a double award winner this year, but the BB-WAA has had its way with us. Rather than remain doctrinaire, we figured it might be worth using the Quality Matrix (QMAX) to examine Verlander in the context of those starting pitchers who've won the MVP award.

In our previous entry we showed how closely bunched four NL pitchers (Clayton Kershaw, Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Cole Hamels) were in the QMAX data. Given that QMAX is a 7 x 7 bidirectional matrix, it's probably not surprising to you that the aggregate average in any given year is somewhere around 7--which is right at the dead center of the matrix chart. As offensive levels change, that average fluctuates up and down--from a low of 6.81 in 1968 to a high of 7.59 in 2000.

So you can see that scores around 5 are excellent and usually match up well with an ERA+ between 145 and 160. The fluctuations in ERA+ generally have to do with individual factors--flukes of clutch pitching, or extremely low distributions of extra-base hits, etc.--that pull away from QMAX's large-scale probabilistic centrifugal force.

OK, enough of that, let's try to contextualize Verlander using QMAX. How does his season compare to the other starting pitchers who either won both the CYA and MVP, or won the MVP prior to the creation of the CYA, or who won the CYA and were strongly ballyhooed for the MVP?

Let's cut right to the QMAX value chart, the basic QMAX average and the Quality Winning Percentage (QWP).

Don Newcombe in his heyday...

We can see that while Verlander ranks seventh in the overall QMAX score and sixth in QWP, his "T" score of 4.92 and his .725 QWP is well within the range of performance where pitchers have been awarded MVPs as well as CYAs. (Don Newcombe, the first pitcher to win a CYA, and who also won the MVP award that year in large part due to his winning 27 games, has the lowest QWP of any of these pitchers.)

Verlander's 2011 season, from the basic QMAX data, looks like pretty much a dead ringer for Roger Clemens' 1986 season.

But this is where we can bring in QMAX's "shape" component to add context to the basic data. The QMAX range data is extremely suggestive in providing us with a series of percentages for performance criteria within the expanse of the QMAX matrix chart.

We want to look at the ranges within the QMAX chart that seem to have the greatest "range" (distance from the best score to the worst from among pitchers in this most distinguished sample). When we examine the QMAX range chart, we can see that the range categories that show the most fluctuation are the "Elite Square" (ES) and the "Hit Hard" (HH) sector.

We can see that with respect to those stats, Verlander is again down in the pack a bit. His ES score is seventh best and his HH percentage, while excellent (the average AL pitcher was hit hard in 30% of his starts during 2011), is tied for sixth in this rarefied company.

We follow with a whole series of QMAX charts for these pitchers, and we will conclude by adding the QMAX data for three pitchers not on the current list--Ron Guidry and his storybook 25-3 season with the Yankees in 1978; Pedro Martinez' best-ever season in 2000 (even though most would expect us to be looking at 1999 instead, when Pudge Rodriguez beat him out for MVP); and Zack Greinke in his much ballyhooed 2009 campaign.

What these charts mostly tell you is that great pitchers have very similar success patterns. They may flip-flop on their top hit prevention (S12) games--some have more in the "1" (most dominant) area, some have it in "2", but these games constitute at least 50% of all their starts. In the case of Bob Gibson and his legendary 1968 season, that figure breaks 75%.

Denny McLain isn't really given all that much credit for his achievements in 1968--the modern low point in run scoring has become a bit exaggerated, and the campaign against the value of wins has also caused many to put aside his 31-win season. (It's now been longer since McLain achieved this feat in 1968--forty-three years and counting--that it was between McLain and Dizzy Dean, who did in 1934. It will probably be a whole lot longer before anyone does it again.) He also suffers in comparison to Gibson's incredible achievement.

Bobby Shantz--a true "pocket ace" in 1952

Of the three pre-1960 pitchers on this list (Newcombe, Bobby Shantz, Hal Newhouser) that we chose to include, it's Shantz' season that is the most notable--if only for the fact that Bobby was one of the tiniest aces in baseball history. (Forman et fils lists him at 5'6" and 139 lbs.--now that's not just tiny, that's virtually nonexistent.)

A look at Shantz' game logs in 1952 shows that he was on his way to a sub-4 QMAX season as late as August 22nd (when his record was 22-4, 1.81), but he just didn't have the stamina to sustain such an effort over a full season and he faded badly in September. (Five of the seven games that Shantz had in the "HH" category came in his last ten starts of the season, a sign that the little lefty was simply gassed. And, of course, he never came close to duplicating his 1952 performance.)

That leads us to the three might-have-been MVPs--Guidry, Martinez, and Greinke. When we look at the basic data, we start to get a sense that something is out of order with one of these guys. Whereas nobody in the original CYA/MVP list shows up with a "T" score higher than 5.1 or a QWP lower than .680, all of a sudden we have one "legendary" season--Greinke's 2009--that looks more than a little pekid.

We'll get back to that in awhile. What's clear from the rest of the data above (and in the associated QMAX range data) is that Guidry was right in the pocket for the double trophy.

Pedro Martinez: in 2000, that upwardly-pointed finger
gave him direct access to whatever celestial deity
floats your boat...

And Pedro's 2000 season, despite being lower in wins (18-6 vs. 23-4 in 1999), is the truly killer year for him, with only Gibson's 1968 being in its gunsights. He holds the record for all of the QMAX range categories (save the "TJ" and "PP" ranges, shown in green because they are most descriptive and not a direct measure of performance).

Now you may be wondering why Pedro's basic QMAX score (3.79) is higher than Gibson's (3.68). The answer is that there's a difference in the winning percentages for each QMAX cell in 2000 than in 1968. That difference across the entire matrix means that the value of a 1,1 game is a few points of WPCT higher in 2000 than was the case in 1968. Thus QMAX is also era-adjusted (taking away another of the original objections that surfaced when this method was introduced in the mid-90s). While the basic S, C, T numbers do not change, the "win values" for the cells do fluctuate from year to year. The effect is not as striking as some of the other "sabe-centric" adjustments that have become popular, but it does correct for run-scoring levels appropriately.

But let's get back to Greinke. This is a guy whose 2009 season has been spoken of in hushed tones by an large coterie of baseball folks. An adjusted ERA (ERA+) of 205, for Crissakes. How can he be showing up so poorly in comparison to the rest of these guys? Surely that means that QMAX is full of it, nicht war?

Sorry, the answer is "nein." Remember that we've always pointed out that QMAX is a probabilistic system. While it does correct for XB/H in the "S" value, it doesn't attempt to be as precise as what all the other systems do when they simply start with runs. What QMAX does is tell you with all reasonable conditions controlled for and with baserunner strand rates assumed to fall within relatively narrow range parameters, this is what you can expect from the hit and walk prevention figures that it computes.

So why does it vary so much with respect to Greinke? Well, there are some odd aspects to Zack's 2009. It turns out that Zack had an incredibly hot start (0.94 ERA and 8-1 record in his first ten starts) and a blistering finish (5-0 and a 1.29 ERA over his last eight starts). In between those two streaks, however, he was just about a league average pitcher (3.66 ERA and a 3-7 record).

Let's look at the QMAX range data for Zack as it maps out for the 18-game "Buddha" period in 2009, and for the 15-game "Bubba" period. Remember, Greinke has a 1.29 ERA in that first group, a figure that should by all rights be producing a sub-4 QMAX "T" score a la Gibson and Pedro, but instead is coming out in the high 4's--great, but nowhere near the "godhead" level.

In the other 15 games, he's a very hittable pitcher with good control, and he's just barely more than a .500 pitcher. This evaluation is supported by the range data, which shows that Greinke had 55% of an historic season in 2009, and 45% of a season where he was--in the immortal words of Zbigniew Bzrezinski: "Meh."

The Bzrezinskian "grand chessboard" might be an excuse for the
strategic deployment of dirty bombs, but it's no match for the geopolitical
pitching intricacies as they are laid out in the QMAX matrix chart...

But so what, you say? The adjusted ERA is what matters, right? And the fact that his other measures--his BABIP, for example--doesn't point to great luck? Who cares? You don't even want to use runs in this crazy system!

Ah, but that's the point. A counter-intuitive system needs to have something that it uses as a fulcrum. FIP-based stats use BABIP as that fulcrum, pretending that it's random enough to operate that way, preferring to believe that the slice of data that it uses is somehow sufficient to leach out all the "fielding luck."

In QMAX that fulcrum is the strand rate, which can either be measured directly or can be simulated (just as BABIP acts a proxy in that system for focusing only on balls in play) by looking at the difference in batter vs. pitcher OPS in general and a key subset of that measure--batter vs. pitcher OPS with men on base.

You want to argue as to which one is more "valid"? Are any of these measures necessarily more "valid" than any others? Take a shot at it. Take your best shot. What might just be mind-opening is to take a look at the deviation in those two batter vs. pitcher OPS figures and see if they point in one particular direction, and whether Greinke might just have had one of the most aberrantly brilliant seasons in baseball history.

The chart at right shows those figures for the twelve pitchers we've looked at in this study. As you can see, while there are some differences, the major trend for these pitchers with respect to batter vs. pitcher OPS is for that figure to rise when men are on base. There are three exceptions to this: Guidry, Pedro, and--

Oh my god. Look at that outlier for Greinke. The average differential for this comparison over all of MLB in 2011 is -3.4% (.780 OPS with men on vs. .754 OPS overall).

Greinke's batter vs. pitcher OPS with men on base in 2009 was about 20% better than it was overall.

That is how his ERA ended up being so low for the year. It was a year of pitching unconsciously when men were on base. This is the textbook extreme of how one maximizes performance elements into a season of overachievement.

Sure, we can give Greinke credit for his great and sustained clutch performance over 2009. And let's face it, the fact that he was in Kansas City that year made it certain that he would get adulation from the sabe-centric world. Joe Posnanski, maybe the key fence-straddler in the mainstream media with his ties to Bill James and his folksy, aberrantly experimental writing forays--and his unique access to the socially challenged Greinke--made absolutely sure of that. Quirky anti-folk hero? Check. Struggling small market team? Double check. All "sympathetic trope systems" were "go." Pos's brilliant proselytizing for Greinke, timed to the tail end of his first hot streak, opened the door for many other sportswriters, and there was undoubtedly a domino effect when it came time for the CYA voting. Zack didn't hurt his chances by getting white hot down the last six weeks of the season, either.

Greinke in 2009: a dominance created by a fast start,
historic clutch pitching and a brilliant tout
from Joe Pos...not from his hit prevention!

But what QMAX tells us is that it was a glorious fluke season of overachieving greatness, propelled by a stat that's much more of an outlier than any of the BABIP data in the "fielding independent" cigar box.

And you will note that Greinke has never come close to doing that again, either before or since.

In fact, usually the greater the pitcher, the closer these two OPS figures cling to one another.

QMAX assumes that this will be the case. Therefore, it stubbornly--and correctly--suggests that Greinke's true value in 2009 was a good bit lower than what the ERA/ERA+ (and WAR data) suggests..

Now this isn't going to help get QMAX accepted in the little sabe-centric world. They like their myths, especially when the myth looks empirically, walks empiricially, and talks empirically like a duck. After all, that 205 ERA+ is real: it really happened. The fact that it may be part of a different type of illusion, one that has yet to recognized, is unlikely to register at this time. The underlying feeling from this piece for many will be that we're trying to "take down" Greinke--who, having moved to another midwest franchise that actually made its move into the playoffs, is still benefitting from the original halo effect. And that's not going to sit well.

But keep in mind that Greinke has never come close to that season. His next best ERA+ to that 205 in 2009 was 126 the previous year. The fact that his QWP was actually only .640 in 2009 tells us that he really hasn't fallen as far from his "peak" has is commonly thought. His .566 QWP in 2011 could well be his true level--unless he goes unconscious with men on base again.

But chances are that he'll always be thought of as someone who showed a singular glimpse of unalloyed greatness. After all, that's kinder and gentler (and more in keeping with this most emprirical of myths) than calling it a "fluke."

How about we just agree to call it the "greatest and grandest fluke in the history of baseball"? That sounds more positive, to be sure--and it also happens to be the stone cold truth.

NL QMAX UPDATE: HAMELS AND LINCECUM

2011-11-18T08:42:00.000-08:00

Cole Hamels defenders have a right to be wondering the following:

--Why he finished fifth in the NL CYA behind Ian Kennedy;
--Why we left him out of our earlier discussion.

Our conjecture concerning the former is that voters (who are political as much as they are analytical) simply didn't want to have a monolithic vote for Philadelphia pitchers.

That's understandable, but not necessarily condonable.

We simply got so caught up in Phase I of the hand-to-hand combat over Clayton Kershaw that we simply neglected to run the numbers for Hamels. (And, sure, we were occupied sharpening our knives.)

When we run the QMAX numbers for Hamels, we discover that there is a fourth pitcher who deserves to be in the thick of the discussion. According to our numbers, he is just a razor's edge behind Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee and the difference is slight enough that it's clearly "throw a blanket over 'em" time.

Hamels' QWP is .667, just a tad under the other two Phillies aces. (Note: we do not include Hamels' relief tune-up performance on the final day of the season in these calculations.) His top hit prevention percentage (S12) is 52%, comparing favorably with Lee (50%) and just under Kershaw (58%) and Tim Lincecum (55%).

Another reason why Hamels may have been downgraded to fifth is that the lessons of last year (King Felix's AL CYA win despite a 13-12 record) have not quite percolated down into the lower levels of the ballot process. Again, understandable but not condonable. Hamels had the least number of wins out of the great Philly troika, but a strong case can be made that these guys finished in a dead heat.

Here are the expanded QMAX rankings and range data lists, which include Hamels and Lincecum, who finished sixth on the ballot. Rob Neyer is once again overreacting with a strange variant of the Stalinism that seems to infect those who wrap their lips around the Fangraphs exhaust pipe, excoriating the stray voters who picked The Freak over Hamels or Kennedy, but these votes may well have come from a different impetus.

Lincecum had the worst run support of anyone in the NL last year. The Giants scored an average of 2.81 runs in his starts. Quite possibly these were sympathy votes: possibly a bit more condonable than missing the true level of Hamels' achievement.

QMAX suggests that the voting order for the NL CYA is Kershaw, Halladay, Lee, Hamels, Kennedy. If that gets us excommunicated from the little world of sabermetrics (wait, didn't that already happen at least once??), then so be it.

QMAX SMOKES OUT THE CYA--NL & ELSEWHERE

2011-11-18T01:42:00.000-08:00

That skunky smell you may be noticing is emanating out of the virtual cubicles at SB Nation, where BMOC Rob Neyer is wasting no time in proving our point about the vagaries of sabe-centric dogmatism, as referenced in our most recent post (!!), where we alluded to:

"the strange intractability inherent in the war over WAR, the guerrilla infighting, the race to phantom regions of moral rectitude..."

Now Bill James really is to blame for all of this--it was his high moral tone in the midst of his long-term, intransigent gadfly-ism that set the bar for the knee-jerk "us vs. them" mentality that Neyer and others have absorbed through the pores. Consequently it has made a quest that should have been conducted from the cerebrum into something that continues to be ruled by the cerebellum, despite all of the metamathematical anathemas that the Whole Sick Crew has been conjuring for better and worse in the neo-sabe Iron Age.

Rob is currently tilting windmills over the selection of Clayton Kershaw as the 2011 Cy Young Award winner. He and his former ESPN colleague, Keith Law, seem to have decided that they know best with respect to which version of WAR (Wins Above Replacement, for those of you still break bread with a Visigothic splinter group...) is the one to apply to the task of ranking Cy Young candidates.

To say that this is a decision made based on factionalism and politics as opposed to any demonstrable technical knowledge on the part of these two is perhaps more bold a statement than we should make, given that these two are now BBWAA members (and, unbeknownst to themselves, have jumped the shark.) But overly bold as it might be, it is the plain and ugly truth.

The plain fact of the matter is that the war over WAR is a pointless one, and the idea that anyone could cite one or the other of the competing formulae as definitive is both insult and injury. Both versions--the one at Forman et fils and the one at Fangraphs--are flawed. Just how flawed is one of the murky embarrassments of the field, because rather than working to clarify the issues involved and possibly leapfrog past the limitations and distortions, we instead have careerist insiders using these tools for their own agendas.

It's ironic that Bill James just wrote an eloquent rejection of the notion of "expertise" as a claim for methodological superiority, only to witness the exact type of behavior he is critiquing rear its head.

It's ironic, but it's not surprising, given the track record of the two men in question. This is what happens when the quest for knowledge gets compromised by careerism.

The idea that Clayton Kershaw's selection as NL CYA is any kind of a blot on the award process, or on sabermetrics, or any similarly phrased journalistic exercise in misdirection, is beyond silly. (We'll address this question in greater detail below.)

Apparently our heroes think that because one version of WAR incorporates BABIP into its calculation and it creates distance between Kershaw and Roy Halladay, this is proof that we have all gone right back down the rabbit hole that we all just climbed out of when Felix Hernandez was awarded the AL CYA last year.

There are a few interesting conceptual problems about BABIP and how it should be adjusted for in a WAR statistic that rarely--if ever--get addressed. The one that seems to elude most of its practitioners is that its slice of pitching statistics is both incomplete and based on half-truths. (For one thing, it's highly ironic that a stat based on batting average has become so pivotal in a field that continues to insist that BA is a woefully inadequate tool.)

Another, possibly more devastating problem is that other slices of pitching performance that may more accurately depict the way in which pitchers prevent run scoring--such as situational pitching--are completely ignored and discarded in the mad rush to a so-called "fielding independent" perspective. Each of these constitutes subsets of data, but one has become inordinately privileged as a result of a series of assumptions that are nowhere near being verified.

On second thought...maybe not.

In the continuing absence of a definitive solution to the war over WAR, there is a need--now more than ever--to revisit other probabilistic modeling methods, particularly for pitching. We've been doing just that here for awhile with the Quality Matrix, which--yes--was invented here so many years ago. Rather than simply sum up and perform adjustments on run prevention, it provides a probabilistic basis for winning percentage by creating a bidirectional performance grid that is tied to actual game results.

What's different in QMAX is its willingness to throw away the runs to get at the probabilities of the combined components that result in runs. Its indirectness is upfront, as opposed to the indirectness in the application of WAR for pitchers, which makes a series of murky assumptions about what the "replacement level" of runs allowed is for each individual pitcher. You will chase your tail in trying to reconcile how those replacement level figures are calculated.

You don't have to bother with that for QMAX, because the runs are removed and probabilistic winning percentages are calculated from the thousands of individual games played in each season. BABIP-based systems really slide over the sample size issues in their calculations, figuring (conveniently) that the details of run-scoring don't really matter--their regression model is supposed to handle it all. There is increasing evidence that it doesn't.

Each of those QMAX cells has hundreds-thousands of games represented, with probabilistic winning percentages that are linear in their descent from the best games (at the top left of the matrix) to the worst (in the lower right). Let's see what QMAX has to say about the 2011 NL CYA.

First we'll look at four QMAX matrix boxes--for Kershaw, Halladay, Halladay's illustrious teammate Cliff Lee, and Ian Kennedy of the Arizona Diamondbacks. These are the four best starting pitchers in the 2011 NL according to QMAX. The other benefit with this tool is that it gives a graphic presentation of the quality pattern of the individual pitcher.

The measurements on the "S" (hit/XB prevention) and "C" (walk prevention) create a "shape" function that can't be found in other pitching statistics. We'll look at the "shape data" for these four pitchers and what it tells us as we go along.

Remembering that the charts depict the best in the upper left and the worst in the lower right, we can see that these four pitchers had very fine years in 2011.

What's clear from the matrix boxes is that Kershaw and Lee had many more games in the very best area of the QMAX chart, the yellow-shaded area that we call the "Elite Square," where 83% of the games in that region wind up as wins for the team whose starter inhabits it.

What's also clear is that Kershaw and Kennedy were both able to avoid getting "hit hard" (the region on the chart that's shown in orange) to a far greater extent than the two Phillies' aces.

These two veterans inhabit what we call the "Tommy John" region of the QMAX chart (the box at the lower left) with much greater frequency than the two younger pitchers. These are games where hits are plentiful, walks are scarce, and runs saved over probabilistic expectation can be achieved.

We can't simply read the QMAX chart to know which of these four had the best season; we need to compile the QMAX range data to see how the candidates compare. The range data creates totals for each of the regions defined on the chart--the aforementioned "Elite Square", the broader "Success Square" (which many folks have already pointed out, thank you, is not quite a square), the counterintuitive regions in the upper right and lower left (the "Tommy John" and "Power Precipice" regions--that last one may be familiar to you from our look at Jonathan Sanchez recently), and the deadly box in the lower right, the "Blown Start" region (not much in play for the four pitchers here).

The range data shows how well these guys really did. "Success Square" percentages in the 60s and 70s; "Elite Square" numbers in the 20s through 40s (Lee had a magnificent run of these games in the second half of 2011 and wound up at 44% in this category, one of the highest totals in recent memory). Kershaw excelled at avoiding "hit hard" games, with only 6%; Kennedy was very good as well (15%), while the two Phils were much closer to league average in this stat.

In terms of top hit prevention games (measured in the top two rows of the QMAX diagram, the ones referred to as "S12"), Kershaw and Lee had excellent percentages, while Halladay and Kennedy were merely above average.

We can rank these for each pitcher relative to the others, assigning points to the relative values: the bright orange worth three points, the pale orange two, and the yellow one. That adds up to what we call the "Quality Range Score" (QRS). It's just a crude indicator, but it might well be suitable for breaking a tie or moving a close contest in one particular direction. Kershaw has the advantage here.

The summary stats for QMAX are the "S" and "C" averages, which add up to a total ("T") ranking. (The lower the "T" score, the better--just like ERA.) By using the probabilistic win percentages or values assigned to each cell in the matrix (these are called QWVs), we can calculate the pitcher's overall quality value, his Quality Winning Percentage (QWP).

Remember, we are pushing back against actual wins and losses here, as represented in the linkage between each performance cell and the historical results in that cell. What is lost by ignoring questions of "fielding independence" is offset by a grounding in both probability and reality.

The result is "abstract," but so is FIP. We can adjust the "T" value to an ERA construct if it makes you feel more at home, but we haven't bothered. What you need to know is that any "T" score below six is an ace, anything below five is an historic season. (Pedro Martinez scored 2.00 "S", 1.90 "C"/3.90 "T" in 2000, which was pretty darned historic.)

What QMAX shows us is a narrow lead for Kershaw in both the "T" score and in the QWP. What it does is reinforce the largely-held impression by intelligent folks (those who are undraped in questionable "expertise" and sportswriterly posturing) that the race between Kershaw, Halladay and Lee was extremely close.

Notice that we are not discussing pitching triple crowns here, or any other stats. QMAX is agnostic concerning strikeouts. Based on the down-at-the-game level probabilities, and without recourse to any of the ideological puffery of a Law or the grandstanding bully pulpit of a Neyer (OK, we're partially guilty on that one...), we figure that it's actually OK to vote for Clayton Kershaw with a (relatively) free conscience. (The relativity has more to do with what else you've been up to.)

We sincerely wish that our two fine feathered "friends" would quit leading us on a wild goose chase. However, it is migration season and the skies are pretty crowded. No one would blame you if you hauled out the shotgun and took aim at the sky. Just don't take aim at our two friends here, who seem to think they are flying high up in the air, but are actually stuck on the ground.

THE AWARD YOU DON'T WANT TO WIN

2011-11-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

A socio-linguist studying the sabe-centric world might well have a tough time picking out the most prevalent (read: privileged) jargon--what H. L. Mencken (channeling his inner Victor Hugo via Thorstein Veblen) would have dubbed "the argot of the analyst class."

"Sweet Jehosaphat, Ann, every week our relationship regresses
to the mean!!"

There are so many to choose from...

--But let's not dwell upon this, as such a discussion simply revisits the peculiar intractability inherent in the ongoing war over WAR, the guerrilla infighting, the race to phantom regions of moral rectitude, the shameless borrowing of social science concepts for the sake of intellectual carpet-bombing, etc.

Whatever lists of involuted supercalifragilistic expialadociousness are compiled to tourniquet the machinery of the "meme" as it has spread across the little world of baseball analysis during the past three decades, there is one phrase that's almost certain to be at the top. What is it? No, it's not that girl, it's...

Regression to the mean.

Fuggedabout that girl...this girl has got the stuff. While her affinity
for upscale malt liquor is elevated, there's no truth to the rumor that
she'll be naming her new band LoLo and the Suds...but, hey, if
Lauren Hillman keeps writing songs like "Young Love," she can
do whatever she wants....

This is the allspice of sabermetrics, even seems to not eff up the taste of ice cream when you accidentally take off the top and dump instead of sprinkle. Of course, tastes differ, but this explanation of events seems so ladled with preservatives that you can not only leave it on the bedpost overnight, but you can leave it out for decades...aeons...and it won't spoil or--worst of all--get clumpy due to prolonged exposure to the air.

And that's just what we need in a phrase that combines precision and puffery, rigor and mortis, warp and woof.

Now it turns out that there is one post-season award that exemplifies the actual principle within the phrase "regression to the mean." It's an award whose trophy should contain--or possibly simply just be--a double-edged sword.

"Managers of the Year" by Francisco Goya...

What's that award?

It's called Manager of the Year. Today, two fine fellows will get honored for their work in the dugout. Next year, they will almost certainly get buried.

Think I'm off my rocker? (It's OK, national polls favor your position.) Here are the facts: the winning percentage of managers in the years they win the MoYA (rhymes with Goya, so...) is .591. Their winning percentage in the year after is...

.511.

That's an eighty-point drop. Teams win 13.4% fewer games in the season following a year where the manager has been a MoYA.

There have been fifty-four managers who were MoYA and managed again in the next year. (We tossed out Bobby Cox, TOR, 1985, and Davey Johnson, BAL, 1997, because they didn't manage in the following season). Out of this group of fifty-four managers, only four of them (7%) had a better winning percentage in the year after they won the MoYA. Those four managers who've beaten the odds are: Jim Leyland, PIT, 1990; Bobby Cox, ATL, 1991; Gene Lamont, CHW, 1993; and Joe Torre, NYY, 1996.

Everyone else on the list (and it's reproduced for you at left) has, to some degree or another, taken it in the tukus. As is usually the case, Tony LaRussa is prominent on this list, and just might walk off with the record for the longest span of MoYA, having gotten his first in 1983 (and winning 25 fewer games the next year). We all know that Tony is singular, and so it shouldn't be surprising that he is the only manager to win the World Series in the season following a MoYA: 1989. The A's did win fewer games in '89 than in '88, but Tony is, as always, at least a partial anomaly unto himself.

This partially explains why it is so rare for anyone to be MoYA in successive seasons. Over the past twenty-nine years, this has happened only once, when Bobby Cox won in both 2004 and 2005.

Who had the greatest percentage drop from one year to the next? Until the conclusion of the present season, the cruel fact was that the MoYA who crashed hardest was--you guessed it--someone who worked for Kansas City. Tony Pena, who also holds the record for winning a MoYA with the lowest seasonal WPCT (.512, 83-79), watched in Goya-esque horror as his team tumbled into Boschian regions (Don or Hieronymous, take your pick...) the next year, going 58-104. That amounted to a 30.12% drop in WPCT.

As we said, until this year. Ron Gardenhire has taken Pena off the hook with an even more fearsomely prodigious swan dive, one that represents a drop of 32.98%.

Tony LaRussa managed to have two follow-on MoYA disaster years--1984, noted already (a 25% drop) and 1993 (a 29% drop). One suspects that Tony knows all this, and here's yet another reason for him to ride off into the sunset in case the BBWAA hands him another double-edged sword.

Looking from the insider perspective, the one where the folks involved actually put on the jockstrap, there's a phrase that resonates with the concept of "regression to the mean." That phrase, uttered on behalf of Sandy Koufax by the great sportswriter Ed Linn (the ghostwriter of Sandy's 1966 autobiography), goes as follows:

"This game can't wait to humble you."

That apparently applies to managers even more than players.

So congrats to the 2011 MoYA winners [UPDATE: Kirk Gibson and Jumpin' Joe Maddon]--and...

Condolences.

PAPELGONE

2011-11-13T13:01:00.000-08:00

While he isn't a signature feature of the recently-departed EJE (you know, the Epstein-James Era, whose true icon is David Ortiz), Jonathan Papelbon was a lightning rod for the Boston Red Sox and their many mouthfoam-infested fans, a nation of harsh accents that has been (temporarily) quieted by a Month From Hell.

Apropos of September 2011:
an antithetical,
unpalatable mix of
otherwise harmonious
ingredients...

They won't have Jon anymore to kick around, to champion, to fixate upon--he and his kewpie-doll face have moved to Philadelphia, the true big leagues of bad fandom. It's a classic out-of-the-fry-pan-into-the-fire scenario, but the Big Payday™will buy several tons of aloe to soothe the burn.

Before we let him scowl off into that good night, however, we thought it would be fun to commemorate a key subset of his 6+ years with the Sox. What's that nutty, nougaty morsel of Papelbon's often anxiety-producing performance? Why, nothing other than his game-by-game record against the Red Sox' arch-rivals, the New York Yankees.

That game-by-game record can be accessed by this link at Forman et fils (which seems to be downsizing to "Forman et fil" despite--or possibly due to--a massive sticker-shock phenomenon that's gone viral on their pages). The yearly summary of that performance can be found below:

That's correct. Papelbon never won a game against the Yankees. (Reliever wins are not a big deal, of course, but there it is anyway.) Jon's BB/9 in these games (4.9) is more than double his lifetime (2.4). His home run rate is elevated; his WHIP is about 30% higher than lifetime (1.306 vs. 1.016).

You could say that is what happens when a good reliever is pitted against a franchise that is, year-in and year-out, the best (or near-best) team in the game.

We'll leave it to others to anatomize the single-game details of Papelbon's bateau ivre odyssey against the Evil Empire. As a footnote, we thought it might be instructive (or at least interesting) to examine the record of Jon's mysterious rival from the Bronx, Mariano Rivera. How did the man who's likely to be remembered as the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history do when he faced the Red Sox?

We are limiting our direct comparison to the years in which Rivera and Papelbon overlap (2005-2011), but let's note before we proceed further that Mo's lifetime ERA against the Red Sox is 2.82 and he has saved 54 games against them. His won-loss record over that time span: 12-7.

Here are Rivera's year-to-year stats vs. the Red Sox from 2005 to the present:

Mo is giving up a lot more hits per nine against the Sox (8.6 vs. 6.9 lifetime), which makes sense given Boston's consistently strong offense. His BB/9 is also up (2.8) but not all that much from his lifetime (2.0).

This is the difference between a Hall of Famer and a guy who's sidling up to "close but no cigar" status. (But don't let our picture fool you as to who fits which category!!)

So what about head-to-head competition between these two guys? Is that a contradiction in terms given the logistics of bullpen usage as it's evolved? Does the fact that the specialization inherent in the closer role has made head-to-head appearances between relief aces a mutually exclusive proposition?

Take a moment and ponder this--and then take a guess as to how many times Papelbon and Rivera have appeared in the same game...

The total number of appearances that the two of 'em have made in the Yankee-Red Sox games from 2005-2011 is 98...that's 52 for Rivera, and 46 for Papelbon.

How many of those games do they have in common, and what happened in those games?

The answer is eleven. Here's a quick synopsis:

May 10, 2006 (Yankee Stadium): Papelbon works the eighth in a "get some work" outing (the Yanks win 7-3). Rivera works the ninth in a non-save situation.

May 11, 2006 (Yankee Stadium): Rivera pitches the ninth with the Yanks down 4-3 and gives up a run. Papelbon enters in the eighth, relieving Keith Foulke with what was then the tying run at third, fans Miguel Cairo to end the threat, and retires the Yanks in the ninth for his first save against them.

May 23, 2006 (Fenway Park): Papelbon enters in the ninth with the Red Sox trailing 7-5, keeps it close by retiring the side with 2Ks. Rivera enters with one out in the eighth, leading 7-4, allows an inherited runner to score, but that's all the Sox can get: Mo gets the save.

June 3, 2007 (Fenway Park): With the score tied 5-5, Papelbon gives up a ninth-inning HR to Alex Rodriguez. Mo, who hasn't been pitching that well thus far (5.11 ERA going into the game) works the bottom of the ninth and fans two (Manny Ramirez and Mike Lowell) to nail it down for the Yanks.

September 14, 2007 (Fenway Park): The Sox are cruising to a division title, but the Yanks know how to make things interesting. Trailing 7-2 in the eighth, they rally against Hideki Okajima. Papelbon enters the game with one out, two on, and the score 7-4. Boom, boom, boom: Jeter singles, Abreu doubles, and A-Rod singles. It's suddenly 8-7 Yanks. In the ninth, Rivera gives up a single to J.D. Drew, but he gets out of it. Mo gets the save, Papelbon gets two kinds of pain: a blown save and a loss.

August 28, 2008 (Yankee Stadium): A close, well-pitched game on both sides--a rarity in this rivalry: the game is tied 2-2 in the ninth. Rivera is brought in and works around a Jeter error (!!) to retire the side. Justin Masterson begins bot-9 for the Sox, and things slowly get complicated: a single, a steal, an intentional walk, and a 3-2 walk to Ivan Rodriguez loads the bases with one out. Paps comes in, gets two quick strikes on Jason Giambi, then--boom! Single to center. Mo gets the win, Masterson winds up in Cleveland.

April 24, 2009 (Fenway Park): The Yankees take a 4-2 lead into the ninth, but Mo (who'd been brought in during the eighth to quell a Red Sox rally) gets tagged for a two-out, two-run, game-tying homer by Jason Bay (soon Mets-bound, where he'd hit half as many homers over two seasons as what he hit in '09 for the Sox). Paps comes in for top-10, has an adventurous inning, but strands two. He's replaced by Ramon Ramirez in the eleventh The Sox push over a run in the bottom of the inning to win, 5-4. Blown save for Mo.

Talk about a transgressive rivalry!!

August 7, 2009 (Yankee Stadium): Probably the best-pitched game on both sides during the 2005-11 incarnation of the rivalry. The Yanks win, 2-0, when A-Rod hits a walkoff homer in the bottom of the fifteenth. Josh Beckett and A.J. Burnett, former Florida teammates, are each unhittable for seven innings. Mo works the ninth, Papelbon the tenth.

April 7, 2010 (Fenway Park): As the yearly totals above will attest, Papelbon had a very rough year against the Yankees in 2010. It began with this game, where, after pitching a perfect ninth, he was sent out for a second inning by Terry Francona and immediately surrendered a homer to Curtis Granderson. He K'ed Nick Swisher, but got wild and had to be relieved--and it was already over: the Yanks wound up winning 3-1. Mo came in for the bottom of the tenth and picked up the save.

August 7, 2011 (Fenway Park): The Sox, still in high gear at this point in '11, were pushing their way past the Yankees for the AL East lead, and it was all working for them here--trailing 2-1 in the ninth, they pushed over a run against Mo (blown save!) to tie the game, then won it in the bottom of the eleventh against Phil Hughes. Paps pitched a scoreless ninth.

September 25, 2011 (Yankee Stadium, second game of DH): Firmly in the grip of collapse, the Sox won their second-to-last game in 2011 by rallying from a 3-0 first-inning deficit, taking a 4-3 lead with two in the seventh. The Yanks tied it up and the game went fourteen innings before Jacoby Ellsbury took it to Aaron Laffey, hitting a three-run homer to pull out a 7-4 win. Mo pitched the ninth; Papelbon saved the game in the ninth by striking out Austin Romine with the bases loaded, then threw two more scoreless innings. It was his longest (2.1 IP) and most successful appearance against the Yanks.

The head-to-head record:

Rivera: 1-0, 4 Sv, 2 BSv, 2.92 ERA
Papelbon: 0-3, 1 Sv, 1 BSv, 3.65 ERA

The Yankees won seven of the eleven games where both Mo and Paps appeared.

LAST PLAY AT SHEA

2011-11-12T10:14:00.000-08:00

Combining the life stories of Billy Joel and Shea Stadium with a minor-key glimpse at the relentless, Robert Moses-driven suburbanization of Long Island, Last Play at Shea captures a moment of bittersweet transition that valiantly attempts to valorize a world that is falling apart. (In the case of Shea Stadium, of course, this is literally true: within six months of Joel's two concerts there in July 2008, the facility would be demolished.)

Though we were steadfastly resistant to Joel's music during its heyday, the passage of time has softened the edges of his work: like Elton John (with whom he began touring after giving up songwriting in the 90s), his gift for melody ultimately forgives many sins. If one had to knock down Shea Stadium, Billy was indisputably the man to give it its sendoff.

The filmmakers knew they were creating too many narratives for their film to escape a feeling of it being neither fish nor fowl, so they found a fourth strand that gives it a semblance of narrative drive--they relate Shea Stadium's history to the iconic event of its youth, the 1965 Beatles concert.

This fourth layer provides a musical link between Joel and the Moptops, and injects suspense into the unfolding story: will Paul McCartney find a way to appear at Joel's farewell to Shea? Will things come full circle before the wrecking ball?

As one watches the contrasting visuals at Shea--we're talking daytime and nighttime imagery--it is still astonishing to contemplate how divergent one's response could be to it. In the daytime, in the non-descript "garbage dump meadow" that Robert Moses hand-picked as the location for the Dodgers (and caused them to flee to California), it was nothing other than a dump. All that "multi-purposeness" and the attenuated circular design seemed underwhelming, particularly since its best spatial representation was clearly not from the fans' vantage point, but from the players'.

But at night--especially when the camera at the Joel concert looks out into the audience from the center field stage--Shea Stadium (surely the only major league sports facility named for a lawyer...) takes on a good bit of the classicism inherent in its design. The interplay of light and shadow actually transformed it into--OK, a beautifully-lit dump, but a classy dump. With this added resonance, and bathed in a parallel glow of hard-edged nostalgia, Shea finally achieved a long-withheld dollop of grandeur as it moved inexorably toward its extinction.

Our own favorite memory of Shea was a doubleheader attended there in 1984, a point in time when the Mets were coming back into prominence under manager Davey Johnson, while Shea Stadium itself looked shockingly unkempt. The fans around us seemed to draw a peculiarly venomous level of disdain from these surroundings, already deep into the vitriolic recesses of what Billy Joel had termed the "New York state of mind."

Much of this barely-contained rage was directed at Darryl Strawberry, the march-to-his-own-drummer kid from the wrong coast (Crenshaw High, Los Angeles). At one point during the doubleheader, when Strawberry overran a hit in right field, allowing the Padres to score an extra run, one particularly terse New Yorker summed things up with a brutal flourish: "This ain't love/hate, you stiff--this is HATE/HATE!!"

Despite the fact that Strawberry hit homers in each game (including one in the second game that capped a five-run, two-out rally that gave the Mets a lead they would never relinquish), the fans still seemed more inclined to drop Darryl into a tank of water filled with piranhas. Shouts of "Stiff! Stiff!" resounded when Strawberry struck out in the first inning of the opener, and left a couple of men on base by grounding out in the third.

In the fourth, with a grouchy fan base in mid-grumble, Darryl slammed a long home run off the Padres' Andy Hawkins. As the stadium transformed itself into deafening cheers, two wise guys behind us were overheard to hear even as they applauded: "Eh, y'know...he's STILL a STIFF!!"

Which, in some way, makes us savor the closing image here--one that, in an odd way, visualizes the divided consciousness of the New Yorker. Especially those who, like Billy Joel, were exiled from the mean streets, but needed to feed on them vicariously in order to have an identity. Those who found it both easy and difficult to jettison the past while still yearning for it.

Did Paul McCartney show up? Does the documentary reveal that the concert really wasn't the "last play at Shea," given that it was held in the summer of 2008, a few months before the Mets completed a late-season collapse that was a replay of the previous season and a weird premonition of the financial meltdown that is itself strangely captured in this image?

You'll just have to watch it for yourself to find out.

KING OF THE POWER PRECIPICE

2011-11-08T19:29:00.000-08:00

Before we spend time and bandwidth befouling and buffaloing you with the QMAX esoterica that can be ladled onto the just-traded Jonathan Sanchez, let's just shake out heads at the sabe-world's continuing fixation with Kansas City.

The Royals really are no more inept than the Pittsburgh Pirates, but the godfather of sabermetrics didn't live and die with the Buccos during the formative years of the snark-crackle-pop of the sourest science this side of a stale SweeTart.

Rob Neyer, in a feeble attempt
at misdirection...

It's been twenty years since either team was worth a pitcher of warm spit.

Bill James moved on, but replacement-level fixationists such as Rob Neyer and Rany Jazayerli have maintained the tradition in ways that were more shrill and more dim all at once (a testament to their unique talents).

Theo as St. George...
St. George as Theo
(hmmm...might be time to
let that hair grow out).

Thanks to these chimps, there continues to be enough buzz about this frabjously forlorn franchise to drown out a good bit of the bittersweet buzz that swarms around the Chicago Cubs (until Theo Epstein, proving himself to be the ersatz Joseph Campbell of baseball executives, decided to take his horse and his suit of armor to that other hotbed of boutique nostalgia).

Thirteen years ago, the buzz was all about the Florida Marlins. They'd slain all of their high-priced dragons, and they were about to prove how creative destruction would yield a new paradigm for how to ascend the ladder of success. For five years--1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002--this was the word as handed down from the Baseball Politboro: it really did have an odd Soviet feel to it.

The Fish fizzled in the pan for five years, getting about 45% of the way to the Promised Land. The A's stole their thunder, and helped to launch a perfect-storm collision between mythology and economics. Once they were abandoned by the best and the brightest, they made a couple of (seemingly) counterintuitive trades, and had a much belated (yet shockingly swift...) Miraculous Moment.

Eighty percent of all franchises have been in the post-season since 2003, but of the six who've been on the outside looking in, it's the Royals who get the most buzz. (For the record, the descending order of attention for the other perennial doormats: Toronto, Seattle, Washington, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh).

By whatever measurement system one cares to apply, the Royals are the recipients of more attention per neuron-above-replacement than any team that hasn't been to the World Series since the Marlins made it. Though they ranked 30th in WPCT from 1995-2005, and 28th from 2006-2011, KC is about sixteenth in sabe-centric media coverage. This is all due to the lingering effect of the corps of writers who were able to gain a foothold in the national consciousness.

Consequently, the trade that sent our old pal Melky Cabrera (!!) to the Giants and sent Jonathan Sanchez to the Royals has created so much buzz in the past day that even we can't ignore it.

Of course, the two players involved are archetypes in and of themselves as these have developed in the neo-sabe age--players whose archetypal status creates and reinforces a pattern of privilege and taboo. The rat's maze of science and myth in the field as it's presently constituted is both as simple and elaborate as what Joseph Campbell et al have mapped out for us in the nether regions of hero worship.

• •

Jonathan Sanchez, contemplating Kansas City...

Ergo Jonathan Sanchez. Understand from the get-go that if J-Boy had been traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates, the amount of discussion produced by his relocation would have been roughly one-tenth of what's spread across the Internet in the past thirty hours or so.

While the Royals are clearly part of that (the sabe-centric world needs to bring this team out of its seemingly endless assignation with the underworld--it buttresses their belief system and honors their distant, curmudgeonly father), there's an added component that revs the scrutiny into overdrive.

And that's Sanchez' particular set of characteristics. He's a wild-ass lefty with enough raw stuff to make the mostly dormant codpieces of the sabe-set (vacant in large part due to the demise of the slide rule...) bulge with anticipation. During the Giants' annus mirabilis in 2010, Sanchez seemed to be on the brink of becoming. (Yes, that's a complete sentence...we are talking about sabe-centric myth, not the actual outcome whereby a wild southpaw occasionally turns into a Hall of Famer.)

Cain, Lincecum, Bumgarner: the three remaining "Steampunk amigos"
give their wayward brother a muted but wacky farewell...

In 2011, however, he regressed. He got injured. And his protean personality appeared to grate on those who'd been able to ignore it in 2010.

All of Sanchez' potential, which remains writ large in the minds of the sabe-set due to the symbolism of his 2009 no-hitter, has been transferred to a team (the Royals) in need of a psychic renewal--one that's been receiving a kind of pre-emptive, repetitive prophecy for about four years now.

Yes, it's true. Sabermetrics has gone steampunk.

Obligatory, obfuscatory babefication...

All of which means it is a perfect time to dig deep into the QMAX bag of tricks in order to anatomize Jonathan as he goes off to meet his fate in the midwestern underworld. What makes Sanchez so much fun is that he embodies the most dramatic sub-region in the QMAX continuum--the dangerous, maddening, ex-PreRaphaelite zone known as "the Power Precipice." This is where wild-ass lefties are born--and where most of them die.

That right side of the QMAX matrix box is a thrill ride in the abstract and a nightmare in the concrete, pitch-by-pitch world. Watching some of these guys going through their motions will drive a reformed smoker to light up an entire pack all at once--sort of Beyond the Valley of the Full-Pack, if you get the drift.

It is a way-station, a place that is either passed through or buried within. Some of the greatest pitchers in baseball history began their careers here--and for many of them it was touch-and-go as to whether they would survive to make the rest of the journey.

We begin with Sanchez' 2009 season, because until he threw that no-hitter against the Padres on July 10th, virtually no one was paying attention to him--he had a 5.54 ERA and was probably a start or two from being demoted to the minors.

His next ten starts, however, got folks intrigued. He was still a bit wild (3.9 BB/9), but his K/9 was through the roof (11.4) and his ERA for all eleven games (including the no-hitter) was 2.75. For the first time in his career, he strung together five solid starts. By the end of the year, he was looking like an actual project.

The Power Precipice is that box enclosed within the QMAX diagram at the upper right. It overlaps with what we call the "Success Square" (a term we've chosen not to rename despite its unfortunate rapprochement with Jonah Keri's regrettable "Success Cycle", which was actually more akin to a money laundering operation). It's not an area where a "garden-variety" pitcher resides; the ones who do are usually called "hurlers." With ten such games out of 29 starts, Sanchez clearly was doing a lot of hurling.

Things seemed to get better in 2010, especially down the stretch, as all of the Giants' starters became Zen-like (except the original King of Zen, Barry Zito, a lefty making a mis-timed trek back into the Power Precipice). Sanchez posted a 2.48 ERA over his final eleven regular-season starts, including a classically rare 1,7 QMAX game (one in which the pitcher is literally too fast and wild to be hit, giving up virtually no hits but issuing more walks than innings pitched).

As you can see, there was some leftward shift in Sanchez' 2010 QMAX chart. (A leftward shift, despite what you read in the media, is always a good thing.) He actually managed to have a couple of starts land in the "Tommy John" region--sort of the "white dwarf" alternative world to the "red giant" apocalyptico of the "Power Precipice."

There are twice as many games in the "TJ" region than there are in the "PP" region: the "backwards" pitchers with the opposite ratio, like Sanchez, are usually euphemized with the word "colorful."

In 2011, the slippage is interesting (and worrisome). It isn't so much a regression to wildness (though that is clearly there, with a large jump in BB/9) as it is a decline in hit prevention.

Basically there are a bunch of games that used to be in the Power Precipice (where the probabilities of winning remain high) that have slipped into a more problematic region. That "3" zone, as measured horizontally across the QMAX diagram, has the greatest percentage drop in expected WPCT from left to right of any row in the matrix.

When we add up the range data and break it out into percentages for the three years (below left), we can see all of this with added clarity. Sanchez' top hit prevention games (the top two rows of the QMAX diagram) and his "Success Square" games are highly correlated despite being a different sub-set of games--normally a pitcher will have more "Success Square" games than "top hit prevention" games. To have such a pattern is to exhibit several different ways of being effective. Sanchez doesn't have that pattern. He's got a narrow bandwidth in which he can pitch well.

And the data shows that he is losing ground even in the portion of his game that's been his strength. The 2010 uptick in the "Elite Square" (the very best games, inhabiting the smaller yellow box at the upper left in each QMAX diagram) should have been followed by a push upward in the overall "Success Square" in 2011. That's often what happens when a sequence such as the one Sanchez had from 2009 to 2010 occurs. But it didn't happen here. That's not a good sign.

What's also possible when integrating the QMAX data with more mainstream stats is to project a "top performance ceiling" by taking the best consecutive starts from adjacent seasons and doing what Bill James used to call "game line assembly." We use eleven consecutive starts and assemble them from three consecutive years, which approximates a full season at what was the best from each year. The "Top 33" QMAX data shown in the table above (in green) is the assemblage of these "best starts" into a projection of a "peak season."

The diagram at right provides all of Sanchez' starts in these three subgroups, and provides the ERA for each eleven-game unit, along with the QMAX "S" (hit prevention) and "C" (walk prevention) averages. We sum up the data from the three years to show what the projected stat line would look like for this "peak season." We also see the raw totals for each subgroup.

What we also toss in, to add a little more spice to it, is the projected total stats at the same projected number of IP for each yearly group of eleven starts (in the grouping labeled "EXT"). What shows up strongly here is the decay in Sanchez' peak during 2011--a slight decline in hit prevention, the marked increase in walks, and the decay in strikeouts.

Back in the range data table we had a line marked "PROF"--that stands for "Profile." It's the aggregate QMAX range data for pitchers who average 61% of their games in the "Success Square." We put this in to compare the averages for all the other regions to the projected peak season shape that is created when we do the "game assembly." What we see there is how different the shape of Sanchez' projected peak is when compared to the average pitcher with this level of success. In order to be that successful with the type of raw numbers shown in the three-year summary diagram, Sanchez is pitching in the "Power Precipice" even more often than he is in real life (36% as opposed to 28%). He's got to reach historically low "Hit Hard" percentages (just 6%, about three times lower than the average pitcher in this range). His "QR ratio" (the percentage of good games where the pitcher exhibits excellent control) is impossibly low.

Tommy Byrne, taking dead aim between
Row A and Row Z...

The type of effort involved in pitching this way is virtually untenable. There are a precious few over the history of baseball who've pitched like this for more than just a few years--most notably our old pal Tommy Byrne, the true "King of the Power Precipice."

But Byrne played at a time when many pitchers in his league (the AL of 1946-55) had profiles that at least approached his; he's less out of whack with the AL norms for most of these seasons than Sanchez is in the present day.

The monomyth that Sanchez embodies is the wild-ass lefty who emerges from the underworld with 90+% of his stuff and 200% of his control. Pitchers who fit this profile are few and far between, but they are gods--Sandy Koufax, Randy Johnson. They can probably be counted on Three-Finger Brown's pitching hand.

But the urge for the myth--tied to the sabe-set's need to untie the Gordian knot, to slay the Minotaur, to bell the cat, to sleep with a string of supermodels--is so strong that it can't be left unheeded. Especially when it's tied to the equally centrifugal force emanating from a parallel need to predict another underdog franchise resurrection--the desire to return to the amniotic fluid of sabermetrics itself, the ovarian waters in which the Royals have been dog-paddling for what seems like an eternity.

Like the umbilical cord itself, it's hard to let go of--even when you are unaware of its existence. These are deep, deep desires, and while we like to trifle with them here, to chide those who prefer to believe that they are simply men in lab coats, we do understand what's really at stake. One can only be buried alive for so long before one is simply buried.

POST-SEASON ERA, INTENTIONAL WALKS, TONY's 2-STEP

2011-11-02T10:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a curious fact we reported on elsewhere (though if you'd blinked you would have missed it.) The aggregate ERA in the major leagues during the 2011 regular season was 3.94, the lowest it's been since 1992.

However, the aggregate post-season ERA, issuing from games where the teams have significantly better won-loss records, leading one to surmise that it would be lower than the regular-season value, was almost seven-tenths of a run higher, at 4.63.

Interestingly enough, the aggregate post-season ERA over the previous eleven years (2000-2010) was 3.94. In 2010, the overall post-season ERA was much lower--3.33--though it was about as schizoid as it's possible to get: the AL teams posted a 4.27 ERA, while the NL teams combined for a 2.34 ERA.

Note, however, that the AL performance in 2010 was still a good bit lower than the overall ERA in '11. The table at left shows the post-season ERA since 2000.

What's the reason for that? Part of it is just random fluctuation, due to the fact that in some years, the better hitting teams manage to prevail in the post-season. That would seem to have been the case in 2004, 2007, and this season.

While a more complete anatomization of this phenomenon would doubtless be interesting, the small sample size of games in each year (less than 70 per post-season) makes any additional conclusions concerning the discrepancies and fluctuations into mere speculation. (One thing we might look at--maybe around this time next year--is the difference in starter/reliever ERA in the post-season. From 2000-10, the difference is about half a run: 4.14 ERA for starters, 3.58 ERA for relievers, which is more pronounced than the difference between the two pitcher classes in the regular season over that time frame. There may be some trends there that, while in no way changing the course of human events, will nonetheless be noteworthy.)

• •

As is always the case in the post-season, managerial decisions get put under a highly distorted lens. The nature of the post-game series, with the heightened value of each game in comparison to the regular season, creates some shifts in managerial behavior that simply don't get accounted for or accepted by the various cliques of armchair analysts. Let's take one example that has been talked to death in the aftermath of the 2011 World Series...

Let's face it, no one can "inject" controversy into a blog post faster than ol' BB...

In post-season games from 2000 to 2010, intentional walks were 12% of the total walks issued. During that same time frame during the regular season, intentional walks were 8% of the total walks issued--and that sample includes a season (2004) where Barry Bonds set an IBB record that's arguably the single most unbreakable record in the history of baseball.

So IBBs generally go up 50% in the post-season, quite probably due to the fact that there is at least a perceived need to over-manage in tight situations since wins are so precious and losses are so fatal.

That said, the record of post-season teams who've issued three or more intentional walks in a game is 7-33. This means it's a play that ultimately results in a win 17.5% of the time. (That figure is slightly higher in the regular season: since 1995, when the IBB was first tracked, teams who've issued three or more IBBs in a game have emerged victorious in 19% of the games in which the tactic was employed.)

The post-season figure quoted--17.5%--includes Game Five of the 2011 World Series, where Texas manager Ron Washington issued four IBBs--and won the game.

Washington issued nine IBBs over the seven-game series, prompting various critics to do their best in "ripping him a new one." Without passing judgment on Washington one way or the other, it would be reasonable to assume that since he'd used the extreme strategy in one game and it resulted in a win, he would then have concluded that it was a viable approach to use when his team got within one win of a World Series title. He may or may not have known that such an approach (one that worked in Game Five) was such a large odds-buck.

In Game Six, however, both managers issued one--and only one--intentional walk. Washington's came in the tenth inning, when the Rangers were up 9-8 and Albert Pujols was scheduled to bat. Data from 2011 in games where teams were up by one run in the late innings shows that the IBB here is only about a 50-50 proposition, but the pressure to "not let the big guy beat you" is so strong that Washington really had no choice. Currying favor with sabe types when you are one out away from a World Series win is not going to play well in a major league clubhouse--not now, and possibly not ever.

The problem for Washington was that the next hitter was Lance Berkman, who punched out a two-strike single to tie the game.

Now he might have ratcheted up the tension even more by walking Berkman intentionally, but conventional wisdom would have hated that as much as the sabes, in that it would have put the winning run in scoring position. But despite that danger, Washington would have given his pitcher (Scott Feldman) a platoon advantage against the next hitter (Allen Craig), a lesser hitter than Berkman.

Ron Washington's nightmare: "But...but walking the bases loaded is something that Tony
does and it works for him!! C'mon guys, come back!!!"

Of course, if this hadn't worked, Washington might well have become the first manager since Dick Williams to be fired during a World Series.

Now, such extremity might have flown if it had come from the restless mind of Tony LaRussa. TLR's intentional pass in Game Six came in the fifth inning, when he bypassed Mike Napoli with a man on third and two outs. That was to get to Craig Gentry, who was pinch-hit for with David Murphy--who walked to load the bases. This is the spot in the game when many urged Washington to send up another pinch-hitter, but one can counter-argue that it'd have been unwise to deplete the bench too early. (No matter one's opinion regarding this decision, not pinch-hitting here didn't prevent the Rangers from taking a 7-4 lead going into the bottom of the eighth.)

Would it have been interesting to see what would have happened had Washington brought up his other lefty threat, Mitch Moreland, in that spot? Absolutely...would TLR have gone to a lefty at that moment? He didn't have to use all of his LOOGYs in Game Six, so having to bring in one to face Moreland would not have been impossible. Then the question would have been: do you then bat for Moreland, since he's a certifiably lousy hitter against LHP (.581 lifetime OPS)? Washington would have X'ed out more of his own options than TLR, and that argued for not going down the over-managing superhighway.

Ultimately, we come up against the fact that there are just some things in the game that are a crapshoot. The post-season magnifies all this, and the post-season clearly induces more reactive behavior as a result. And it results in a great deal more second-guessing, most of which is hot air.

• •

And sometimes the gods just smile down on someone. TLR let Daniel Descalso stay in Game Six after the utility infielder pinch-hit in the 8th. He pulled his starting shortstop (Rafael Furcal) when he didn't really have to do so in favor of keeping his UT guy in the game, mainly to push back the next pitcher's batting slot as far as possible.

TLR had depleted his position player options at this point, but the gods gave him a break when Descalso got another hit to start the tenth and Jon Jay (cold as a witch's tit and 0-for-the-WS when he came into Game Six) did likewise.

But at this point, he had no choice but to bat a pitcher, meaning that his strategy was 1000% transparent. Kyle Lohse, the designated "pitch-hitter," executed poorly, but the gods smiled down again: Adrian Beltre charged too hard and he was in too far to catch the pop-up. If Beltre hadn't charged so hard, you've got yourself a Texas double play for sure--possibly a game-ending (and WS-ending) triple play.

But the gods had decided to smile down on TLR and the Cards. The ball dropped, the sac hit worked, and the game was eventually tied and won on the walk-off homer by David Freese (a man who clearly was not cold as a witch's tit).

TLR--a vain but honorable man, a baseball mind both overrated and under-appreciated, an on-field nobody who transformed himself into a dugout somebody--was both intelligent and intuitive enough to realize what a gift had been bestowed upon him and his team.

Given such a reprieve, he and his team got things done the next night, and TLR--in arguably the most brilliant move of his entire career--decided to walk out into that night, with a blaze of light that, as a result, will be inextinguishable.

Unless he makes a mistake and un-retires, that is. Don't ever make a two-step into a three-step: that's how the damn Coyote ends up over the cliff, every time. Buona sera, Signor La Russa.

THE PTOLEMAIC MVP METHOD PART 3: THE AMERICAN LEAGUE

2011-10-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

Some comments on the World Series a bit later, we have some unfinished business before we slip into "Awards Season" in November.

We'd discussed the Ptolemaic MVP Method earlier in the month and laid out the method in detail back in Part 2, which you can access here. We're going to move through the American League data rather swiftly here, but will try to refer to some of the points raised earlier.

Briefly, each two month "epicycle" (see Part 2!!) awards points to players who excel in OBP, SLG, OPS, HR, and RBI. (The latter two are concessions--you can call them "sops" if you wish--to the "mainstream" world. While the sabe folks have made strides, it's also true that they tend to make it harder to drag the rest of the unconverted along.)

These get added up over the course of the season from five interlocking two-month-long snapshots of hitter data (we'll address the issue of pitchers and the MVP below).

What's interesting to note here is that two-month snapshots seem to prove that a third of a season is a sufficient "leveler" of achievement that you don't have a slew of fluky achievements in any of the stats being measured. We don't have six guys with 1.200+ OPS in every two-month snapshot (at least we didn't in 2010--it might be different back in 1996--we'll go back and check that out one of these days.)

Let's get to the data. (Before we do that, however, let's note that the data here is courtesy of the extremely useful Day-By-Day Database that's available to all for free at David Pinto's Baseball Musings site. Here is April-May:

Brings us back to that blissful moment in time when Jose Bautista gave all of us another reason to realize why Keith Law was such a problematic choice to be the "pioneer" inside a major league front office and a dubious selection as a BBWAA member. Semi-cheap shot aside, there's still time for the overall deal that the Blue Jays (ironically enough, Law's old employer) made with Jose to turn out a net negative, but after Jose's 2011 season, odds are about 1 in 100 that this can happen.

What a two-month period it was. And it shows us how we award extra points. They are awarded when a player exceeds a .500 OBP and a .700 SLG over a two-month period. Bautista is the only hitter in 2011 to be awarded these bonus points. [EDIT: there's an omission in the chart...Mark Teixeira should be awarded a point for his 15HRs. We'll fix that at the end: it will have little or no impact on the final results.]

On to May-June:

By the end of June, the Red Sox were firing on all cylinders (before Kevin Youkilis began to give ground to nagging injuries). And we haven't yet seen the rise of Dustin Pedroia and Jacoby Ellsbury, either--that's coming. [EDIT: Mark Teixeira again shows us another area where it's possible to add bonus points, that area being in isolated power. His .300 ISO despite a very indifferent batting average reflects his league-leading HR total for May-June. It's not included here because we applied only when the player didn't get points for HRs and RBIs in the "epicycle."]

Bautista is coming down to merely superstar--as opposed to superhuman--levels.

Look quickly, for this is the only appearance of Alex Rodriguez on these charts.

On to June-July:

As noted above, witness the rise of Pedroia and Ellsbury. In this two-month snapshot, the Red Sox have five hitters on this list--the most that any team was able to place in any "epicycle." (The Rangers have four in June-July--Josh Hamilton, Nelson Cruz, Adrian Beltre, and Michael Young. The Mike Napoli Era is about to begin...)

Another interesting thing to notice, though it's a bit off-topic here, is the difference in Adrian Gonzalez' walk totals this year, when he was surrounded by a very strong supporting crew in Boston, from what those numbers looked like over the past few years in San Diego.

Note the nice, but otherwise unnoticed two-month stretch from Nick Swisher.

Also notice how close the OPS values are for Jose Bautista and Mark Reynolds here. One an odds-on MVP candidate, and the other the "all or nothing" king of the breeze. In any "epicycle" there will be a few strange bedfellows...

Pedroia just misses bonus points for HR and RBI, which may cause some teeth-gnashing somewhere. We could talked into giving a bonus point for a 1.100+ OPS over an "epicycle," given that it's something that happened only four times during the season in the AL. But we didn't do it this time.

Now let's look at July-August:

A very good hitting epicycle, we cut it off at a higher level than in the previous snapshots. Bautista, after a slow (for him, at least) June-July, got back in the groove in August to challenge for the top spot in OPS. However, top dog here is clearly Mike Napoli (the man Mike Scioscia disinvited to dinner).

We see the late-season ascendance of Ellsbury and Ortiz, and here is the power surge from Curtis Granderson (a .328 ISO, just under Bautista's .336).

The sabe crowd will decry this idea, but should we give a point for a .350+ BA? It happened only ten times across the five AL epicycles in 2011. It's not part of the system at the present.

Finally, the "last epicycle" (August-September):

If not .350, how about .400? Miguel Cabrera is the only player in baseball during 2011 to have a two-month stretch where he hit .400+. We're inclined to think that we shouldn't bother with BA, but it's at least worth discussing. In a few of these years, such tiny point increments could make a difference as to whom the Ptolemaic system sees as the MVP. (If you're paying attention to the Tot column as it's been floating by, however, you'll know that 2011 is not going to be one of those years.)

We stuck Pedroia on here just to show how much his performance cooled off as the season moved toward its end. Surprisingly, as measured by OPS, Ortiz was the Sox' best hitter in August-September, despite Ellsbury's power surge.

Down in seventh place for the "last epicycle," we see Jose Bautista coasting home. We'd written back in August that we felt the race was a blanket-toss between him and Gonzalez and Granderson. Note that those two guys faded away more than he did.

Meanwhile, Cabrera and Napoli are charging down the stretch, and it's probably not that much of a coincidence that their two respective teams had the best records during September.

Should there be another point added for runs scored minus runs scored on homers? Do we want to credit someone for the spikiness of their ability to score in a concentrated portion of the year? The standard there might be 30 more runs scored than runs scored on HRs, with a minimum of 10 HRs hit over the epicycle. We would have awarded this eight times over the course of five AL epicycles. Ian Kinsler is the one who did it in August-September.

So, after all that, we add up the Ptolemaic points, factor in the rankings for OPS+ and WAR, add from left to right across your dial, and we wind up with the not-especially-surprising conclusion that Jose Bautista is the AL's 2011 MVP. If we'd had this method up and running in August, we wouldn't have suggested that we simply throw a blanket over Jose, Adrian and Curtis.

This (at left) would be the order of voting that we'd place on any MVP ballot that we were asked to fill out.

What about Justin Verlander, you ask? Earlier we'd suggested that the Tigers' ace could be a consideration in the voting if he was able to win 25 games, with his other stats remaining intact. That was a bit too simplistic. A pitcher really needs to have two factors going to crash into the MVP race, especially given that there is a separate award handed out for their achievements. They need to win a huge percentage of their games and they need to excel at all the other stats--not just leading the league, but doing so at a historically rarified level.

Sandy Koufax' 1963 MVP award can speak to some of these issues, though it will be controversial to some because his ERA+, as measured by the standard method for computing park factors, is too low to be considered dominant (though the WAR data, compiled from total runs allowed and a method that rewards quantity of work as well as quality, contradicts this conclusion).

Koufax won 20 more games than he lost--that seems like a good starting benchmark for letting a pitcher into the discussion. His team went 34-6 in his starts--that's a matter of luck (and good relief pitching), but it's something that needs to be given some weight when determining the point when a pitcher crosses over into MVP territory.

Verlander is right on the cusp in terms of personal wins, but his team was 25-9 in his total games. Great, but not historic. His expected winning percentage based on runs scored and runs allowed in the games he participated in is .747. His team's record in those games was .735 (25-9). Koufax' expected winning percentage based on runs scored and runs allowed was .806. That works out to 32-8 over the games he participated in. So the Dodgers did a little better than that projection (2 games), but it's not an outrageous amount. The Tigers came in just about right on Verlander's projection (about two-fifths of a win low, actually).

To crash into an MVP race as well as the Cy Young race, a pitcher should at least score .800 on his expected winning percentage using runs scored/runs allowed. Verlander had a great season--he's a Cy Young winner for sure. But he's just below the threshold of being let into the MVP discussion as we see it.

Is he a better candidate than many of the hitters at the top of the Ptolemaic charts? Absolutely. If the concept of separation wasn't something that we considered to be important, he'd at least be fifth on the list, and possibly as high as third. But we have an award for pitchers already, and we should really reserve crossover for cases that are historically unique, that are based on the context of the individual season.

The conclusion here is that we shouldn't consider a pitcher for MVP at all unless we can demonstrate that he should be voted #1. Koufax in '63 has a case to be made for that, while granting that some of his stats (especially when adjusted) can be used as counterarguments. Verlander only has his WAR total to make the case for him, and while that's impressive, it's not quite enough given the principles discussed above. Clearly, YMMV.

ANATOMIZING POST-SEASON MULTI-HOMER GAMES

2011-10-26T00:55:00.000-07:00

While we are holding our breath to see if the infamous BBBA "voodoo" will bring us a seven-game series, it's a good time to thank Tony LaRussa, whose overwrought genius has been in roadkill mode over the past week, taking his team from what could have been a five-game closeout into an uphill struggle requiring that magical (but increasingly elusive) seventh game. Perhaps this has been Tony's plan from the start.

But before we press on to the ostensible subject of this post, we also want to put forth our favorite pet theory concerning Tony. He's not known for his modesty when it comes to managing or much of anything else, but this year he showed a great deal of personal courage by coming to work looking like something from a Ed Wood horror film.

The theory is that it was all a smokescreen: this wasn't a case of the shingles. It was the aftermath of plastic surgery.

Swelling is not unusual with a face lift, especially one that's centered around the eyes. The amount of swelling that Tony had was extremely unusual, of course, but that's because he is the kind of singular fellow that anomalous events happen to with uncharacteristic regularity.

Such as his surreal managerial performance in Game Five, a classic case of someone's facelift being too tight and affecting the proper flow of blood in the brain.

(Hey, you gotta admit that it's a more plausible reason that the one Tony offered up after Game Five went awry...)

• •

Let's move on. Albert Pujols' three-homer game in Game Three received a lot of justified attention, with the usual back-and-forth on the quality of the feat in terms of that most favored realm of baseball--Eternity. (It's especially privileged during October, the month where the game swells up like a peacock, coming dangerously close to overstaying its welcome.)

We are not here to assess Albert's Arlington depth-charging in terms of such an eternal pantheon. We simply want to take a look at the entire event set--all 126 instances where a hitter has slugged at least two homers in a post-season game.

First, let's note that the reporters (99.9% of them) underreported the incidence of three-homer games in the post-season. They focused on the World Series, where legendary players have been the only ones to manage the feat--legendary figures who, until Albert dared to join the ranks, were all Yankees.

It seems only fair to report here that there are four other players who have hit three homers in a post-season game. Should we sweep these guys under the rug because they didn't happen to do it in the World Series? The post-season is now everything beyond the regular season, at least until Bud Selig's dying act as Kommisar serves to invert this relationship.

The other players to hit three homers in a post season game are:

--Bob Robertson, Pirates vs. Giants, 1971 NLCS
--George Brett, Royals vs. Yankees, 1978 ALCS (the only 3-HR game in a losing cause)
--Adam Kennedy, Angels vs. Yankees, 2002 ALCS
--Adrian Beltre, Rangers vs. Rays, 2011 ALDS

It's a more wide-ranging list, with one Hall of Famer (Brett), one possible Hall of Famer (Beltre), and two definite journeymen (Robertson and Kennedy).

So what would you like to know about these 126 multi-homer games? You can find out exactly who they are by plopping yourself over to the page singled out herein at Forman et fils.

As always, we start out with a chart that shows the basic frequency distribution of post-season HRs by decade. It's cheerfully noted at the outset that there is nothing especially electrifying here, given that the expansion of the post-season in 1969 and 1995 explains the jump in post-season HR. Still, it must be said that the jump is rather impressive despite this relativizing fact.

Next up is a table showing the leaders for most multi-homer games in the post-season. It's impressive to note that even with all of the expanded opportunities to have multiple homer games, the all-time leader in this category is still Babe Ruth. The Bambino did it four times.

The only other player to do it more than twice is our old friend Manny Ramirez. We miss ol' Manny, and harbor a not-so-secret wish that he could have found a way to hang in there with the Rays and made at least one more post-season.

The folks who've had two multi-HR games in the post-season are by and large a distinguished group, with the possible exception of a singular fellow named Willie Mays Aikens. Willie will certainly have his defenders: his lifetime OPS+ is 123, which isn't the worst of those players on this list. It's the cocaine and the prison record that makes Willie more than a bit infamous. The record that Willie might hold (this is one that Bill James probably knows, given his penchant for "popular crime") is the longest prison sentence handed out to a major-league baseball player (fourteen years). I'm guessing that it isn't the record. In any case, Aikens is one of only two players to have multiple-homer games in the same World Series: he pulled off this feat in 1980. Twenty-nine years later, Chase Utley became the second player to do it. Ironically, they both played for losing teams.

This might be a good time to toss in a tidbit about players having multi-homer performances in the same game. This has happened three times, beginning with the only teammates to ever do it. Wanna take a guess? Yes, that's right, it's Ruth and that other guy--you know, the one named Lou Gehrig. They did it against the Cubs in Game Three of the 1932 World Series.

The others? Troy O'Leary and Jim Thome did it in a game between Boston and Cleveland in the 1999 ALDS. Four years later Eric Karros and Chipper Jones did it in the 2003 NLDS, the one that pitted the Cubs vs. the Braves.

Care to know which team has had the most post-season multi-HR games? C'mon, you already know the answer to that question. (Hint: it ain't the St. Louis Browns.) Our chart of the multi-HR games by team spells out the obvious, but it also tells you how often the team with the multi-HR performance proves to be the winning team. The effect is massive, as a certain class of analyst might say: teams have a collective 98-27 record in games where someone on their team hits two or more HRs (a .784 WPCT).

The other thing that comes to light from perusing this table is the fact that the World Series still holds the edge in the overall number of multi-HR games (although that may be due to the head start that the Fall Classic enjoyed from 1903-68). Since 1969, the two rounds of division playoffs have accounted for 73% of the post-season multi-HR games: it's only a question of time before the non-World Series post-season will overtake the World Series in the overall list. After all, there are far more playoff games than World Series games.

Finally, for those who must know: the breakdown by position for players who hit two or more homers in a post-season game. Totals as follows: 1B 24, LF 22, RF 21, CF 18, 3B 17, 2B 11, C 7, SS 4, DH 3.

MEASURING THE DECLINE OF THE 7-GAME WORLD SERIES

2011-10-20T13:48:00.000-07:00

We don't want to disturb the Occupy Wall Street efforts or anything, but baseball has been squeezing its fans over the past thirty years in a way that, chart-wise at any rate, resembles the reprehensible efforts of the "trickle-down" crowd.

What's the beef? The decline and the downright dearth of seven-game World Series. There ought to be some Keynesian principle that could prop up this particular crisis--but, frankly, short of packing the Supreme Court we can't think of how to manage it.

The chart, which recycles our favorite motif in this timespan of the baseball season (the coin-flip), tells all. The golden age of 7-game World Series occurred in the first thirty years of the Boomer generation, and since then everything has gone into the crapper.

Little did any twenty-something know back in the mid-70s that the seven-game World Series would need to be placed upon the Endangered Species List along with big hair, bell-bottoms, and a metric ton's worth of other dubious cultural artifacts that Dan Epstein is still trying to turn into a reality series. (It seems as though big hair is not quite out of fashion, especially down on the Jersey shore.)

Some salient facts regarding this urgent crisis:

"Actually, it was all Bob Haldeman's idea!!"

--We have not had a seven-game Series since 2002, the same year that Dick Cheney became the sole member of the Trilateral Commission.

--The last time we had three 7-game series in a row was in 1985-1986-1987--a blatant effort on the part of the Reagan administration to divert our attention from Iran-Contra.

--Prior to that, the next trio of 7-game series, from 1971-73, was tied into the various phases of the Watergate break-in: the bungled planning, the bungled operation, the lack of concern on the part of a war-dazed electorate in the '72 election, and the invention of the designated hitter (first thought up by that arch-fiend John Ehrlichman).

--The great four-year run of 7-game World Series, from 1955 to 1958, coincided with the greatest as-yet-unrevealed covert operation in American history: the painstaking, systematic replacement of health-challenged President Dwight D. Eisenhower with a robot. (The robot exhibited a number of glaring speech deficiencies, but neither the public nor any of the various members of the branches of government were able to tell the difference.)

"Aw, sh*tf*ck, folks, there's no reason that
those Red Sox pitchers should lay off the Budweiser!!
After watching my Pilots play, I say: keep 'em comin'!!"

Conspiracy theorists are hard at work concocting lurid scenarios for the two other 7-game threepeats in 1945-46-47 and 1925-26-27, and we'll pass these along to you just as soon as these folks have been returned to the appropriate mental care facilities. (Wait, you mean to tell me that there are no mental care facilities for them to go to? Jeez, we know exactly what Joe Schultz would say about this!!)

The great run of seven-game World Series occurred in a twenty-four year period from 1952 to 1975, in which there were fifteen to-the-limit Fall Classics. That's fifteen out of a grand total of thirty-three. How could we know that we'd peaked as a nation?

Man those barricades, boys and girls!!

CAN LATE-SEASON HOTNESS TELL US ANYTHING ABOUT WS OUTCOMES? NAH.

2011-10-19T12:39:00.000-07:00

But let's look at it anyway. Sometimes you just gotta make charts, just as other recalcitrant, curmudgeonly types just gotta go do a numbers-numbing study. It's as natural as breathing through an iron lung.

So the question is: do teams that play well in, say, the last month of the season get any traction in the post-season? We must unfortunately limit ourselves to study such a question with more recent years, as the entire notion of the playoffs (and the odds of reaching the ultimate destination, the World Series) has been diminished thanks to the efforts of Bud Selig and a gaggle of massive media companies in various stages of meta-conglomeration.

We won't put you through the whole study--because unlike some folks, we know (yes, we really do!) when the data is pointing ominously toward randomness: real randomness, not the kind sometimes ascribed to pitchers with respect to balls in play. But the charts are kinda fun, and they will help illustrate the point being made in our title.

So here's the first one. We calculated the won-loss records for the final 27 games of the regular season for the eight 2011 post-season teams. These were placed into the post-season grid. The "heat mapping" here (not nearly as psychedelicate as what you'll find for batters and pitchers elsewhere) tells you whether the hotter or the colder team won in the particular round.

The data for 2011--not complete as yet, of course, since the World Series begins tonight--shows that in four of the six post-season series, the "hotter" team prevailed.

Of course we can all see the flaws in this approach right from the start. The Rangers-Tigers ALCS gives it to us in a nutshell right away. Does it make sense to characterize a team that went 20-7 as a "colder" team? 20-7 is a .741 WPCT.

It's kinda silly--among other things, the thought of it makes us long to see Ida Lupino slap "silly boy" Cornel Wilde around in Road House (before vamping him in that skimpy bowling outfit--and believe us when we tell you that there's nothing sillier than "bowling noir").

So we'll press on with a flawed concept, because it's preferable than bowling alone. And besides, the charts are kinda neat. We'll only bother to show you two more of these, however, since we know they are silly and flawed (just like that Mexican fire opal ring that Humphrey Bogart bitterly remembers giving to his murdered wife in Dark Passage, which leads to that paradoxical noir notion that you should never give a dame what she wants, because as soon as you do, she doesn't want it any more).

So here are the same "hot-cold" charts for 2010 (where you'll see that "hot" teams emerged victorious in six of the seven post-season series--now that's a factoid that was just begging to get some airplay on Fox Sports, nicht war?) and for 2006 (a chart that should probably be burdened with one of our patented irrelevant allusions, in this instance to a particular Miles Davis album--doubly, and evocatively irrelevant if one considers the style of jazz being played on that particular LP).

It's pretty clear that despite the pretty charts, the data here just isn't of much use at all. We would probably find it more interesting to discover if playoff teams exceed their seasonal winning percentages during the last month/last 27 games. What we see when we do that--or when we look at the ebb and flow of such percentages over time--is that this, too, fluctuates a good bit, with some years possessing playoff-bound teams that were hot at season's close, and others where they were less so.

We can do this data a different way--one that's more meaningful, but that will--alas--simply also point out the essential randomness at work here. We can look at the rankings of the eight teams in terms of their last-27 game WPCT, and look at the rankings of the winners and losers in the World Series. When we do that, of course, we see that the average ranking of the winner is only slightly better than that of the loser (4.3 to 5), which is all right in the old fair-to-middling range anyway--and the final screw-turn is that in the fifteen World Series since 1996, the team with the lower last-27 game WPCT has won eight times.

So even this very selective endpoint reinforces our coin-flip metaphor.

OK, there is one other possible way we can look at this to see if there is any type of hot-hand carryover into post-season results. To do that, we expand the number of games from 27 to 45--a little more than a fourth of the season.

And then we look at all the teams, from 1969 to the present, who played at least .667 baseball (at least 30-15) over that span of games. And we see how they made out.

How did they make out? First we need to remember that there are two eras of playoffs in need of defining here--the two-round playoffs from 1969-1963 and the three-round playoffs that began in 1995. (We've drawn a line in the chart to show where the first era ends and the second begins.)

One fact that comes out of this is that there have been 53 teams who have played .667+ baseball over the last 45 games of the season in this 43-season time span. So this happens almost every year, and we've had a run of multiple teams doing this in the same year for awhile now. There have been 23 such occurrences in the past fourteen years (1.67 per year), as opposed to 30 in twenty-five years during the two-round playoff era. There was only one instance of three teams being this hot over the last 45 games prior to 1993: that was in 1980, and--as the chart shows--none of these teams even made it into the World Series!

Fear not, felonious friends: if you click on Ye Olde
"Innocent Victim" Scarlett here, she'll get "bigger."

Of course, with the Wild Card in place, it's much more difficult to dominate down the stretch and be shut out of the post-season. It has only happened to two teams in the three-round era: the 1998 Blue Jays and the 2005 Indians.

Currently, if you play .667 or better in those last 45 games, you're a 90% lock to be in the post-season. In the two-round era, that probability was only 70%. So, as Scarlett Johannson and an army of Internet hackers can tell you, it pays to get hot!!

The odds of winning the World Series once you get into the Post Season are now 1-in-8; from 1969-1993 that was 1-in-4, so we are probably at or around a 1-in-6 shot at this point. Right now, nine hot teams out of 53 (just a bit over 1-in-6) have won the World Series. Texas can be the tenth. Fifteen hot teams made it to the World Series (just under 30%), and of those fifteen (would you please keep your eyes on the text, OK??) nine of them (60%) were winners.

So, after all this, let's figure that Texas is slightly favored to win, simply because they're...er...hot.

POST-MORTEM LIVIDITY IN BEANTOWN: OUR TAP-DANCE IN THE MINEFIELD

2011-10-15T14:47:00.000-07:00

Man Ray hits the bricks to monument a sadist...
the 18th century version of Larry Lucchino.

The theory of why the Red Sox have such dangerous allure is linked--more to the point, joined at the hip--to the writings of the Marquis de Sade and the great Internet pornographic psychologist Gert Martin Hald. Getting, er, deeper into the subject--that is, beyond the virtual unanimity of correlation between males and pornographic imagery--Hald and others note that a sullen exterior seems to induce the greatest amount of "arousal" amongst users.

"There must be an obstacle to overcome," Hald notes, with only the faintest trace of a smirk on his face, "especially for the sizable majority of males who do not possess a natural affinity for seduction rituals." And when one transposes this always-repressed urge to dominate from the sexual arena to other, seemingly less fetishized social rituals, the need to commingle submissiveness with arrogance--a variation of the Gnostic impulse toward ecstatic annihilation--is nothing more or less than an unstoppable force.

Ergo the Red Sox, who continue to occupy a role that is a weird amalgam of the feminine characters in medieval romance, but with a fatal twist. They are not Beatrice buoying a tattered but transformed poet through a mid-life crisis; they are much more like the maidens trapped in the tower whose suitors must climb perilously to their rescue. And all the feudal force of history forces them to climb with one hand tied behind their back: while their romantic-sexillectual zeal inspires their perpetual effort, they fail to take into account the presence of history's cruelest lodestone--the immovable object.

In the medieval tale, the knight only occasionally slays the dragon. And the dragon (best characterized, perhaps, as the force that keeps civilization from achieving utopia) has a nasty tendency to regenerate.

Charlie knows all about free-fallin'...

That immovable object? That won't-stay-dead dragon? Why, who else but the Yankees.

"Reversing the curse," like keeping the dark forces at bay, is only a temporary achievement. What one has to admire in the rich but frightening tapestry of Red Sox history is its instinct for extremity--which is why all this psychosexual connection is not simply a parodic description. Seven years after vanquishing an eighty-six year old dragon, four years after tempting fate by winning a second time, the Sox suddenly discovered that the earth wasn't simply moving under their feet, but that a giant, unavoidable chasm had suddenly, irrevocably, swallowed them up. Before anyone could do anything about it--before they could even sense it happening--they had reached terminal velocity.

Carl Crawford, late September 2011...

So...exactly how did the mashed remains that came to earth with a final, sickening thud in Baltimore just over two weeks ago get that way? Yes--of course--'twas a fall from a great height, but what pushed them out of the airplane? Who snapped the braided hair? Exactly what immovable object knocked them out of the sky?

Mythically, folklorically, it was the Yankees, to be sure (and we'll examine a curious possible "mythic" interpretation regarding that in a bit). But the great feudal pestilence from just under two hundred miles to the southwest had very little presence in the sacher-masochian September that the Red Sox (and their helplessly bound fans) experienced.

While the post-mortemizing has created both a figurative and literal lividity producing a level of corpse discoloration beyond any levels of measurement known either to medical professionals or mass media, what's clear is that the major systemic failure was the starting pitching. "Free-fall" was induced by a 7.08 September ERA from the starters, but what our first post-mortem table (at right) also shows is that the entire staff was infected with a malady best known as "pernicious strike deprivation anemia"--or, in laymen's terms, they all turned into wild-ass lefties. As the table shows, both starters and relievers were afflicted by the disease, but the severity of the problem was located squarely with those (purportedly, at least) beer-swillin', chicken-eatin' starters.

The 118 BBs handed out by the Red Sox staff in September was the highest monthly total in the AL during 2011.

To get a better sense of what was happening throughout the free-fall, we can turn to our old pal QMAX (Quality Matrix). Nothing is better equipped to characterize the shape of performance, and via looking side-by-side at the monthly starting pitching data through the QMAX lens, we'll be able to better see the exact shape of catastrophe.

Our charts compare the starting pitcher performance for the Red Sox in August and September. As you will see in the basic QMAX charts, the comparison couldn't possibly be more stark. The basic QMAX averages confirm that the Red Sox' starters had a control meltdown in September that was even more pronounced than their decline in hit prevention.

In terms of what was happening on a game-in, game-out basis, however, the contrast is much more dramatic. Simply looking at the location of the starts in the QMAX matrix grid (once you're oriented to know that the upper left corner is best, and the lower right corner is worst) will tell you the story.

The September chart is a depiction of the type of catastrophe that is usually reserved for that unfortunate individual who either has a major breakdown in pitching performance from previous years or is someone pitching for a perennial league doormat or its surrogate, the exceptionally hapless expansion team. What chills the blood here is that this represents the collective efforts of seven pitchers--Josh Beckett, Erik Bedard, John Lackey, Jon Lester, Andrew Miller, Tim Wakefield, and Kyle Weiland. It is really hard to get seven guys to pitch this poorly for an entire month. (Consequently, we searched in vain for a group portrait.)

The QMAX range data (at left)--the ones that provide percentages for the key performance areas depicted on the chart--shows that the "hit hard" games more than doubled in September. The loss of anything resembling control also resulted in a radical diminishing of "Tommy John" starts--the boxed area at the lower left of the QMAX chart, the region where pitchers can often be successful in spite of the probabilities inherent in the QMAX data, and where the Sox had a disproportionate number of starts in August. (Usually the highest percentage of "Tommy John" starts in a season for any individual pitcher is around 35%--it's highly odd to see an entire starting staff approach such a percentage, even in only a month's worth of games.)

Andrew Miller, witnessing yet
another unfortunate trajectory...

The Red Sox made a few decisions about their starting staff that look odd in retrospect. No, we're not talking about putting Tim Wakefield in for the injured Daisuke Matsuzaka. The first odd choice came when Clay Buchholz went down; instead of promoting Kevin Millwood, the Sox brought up Andrew Miller, one of their pet reclamation projects. Miller had been pitching well in AAA, but he reverted to his erratic ways once promoted.

Kevin Millwood in Pawtucket: in search of a Margarita
to waste away with...

The Sox were on a roll offensively at this time (they averaged a bit over 6.5 runs/game in July), so having some dike leakage wasn't costing them anything.

At the end of the month, however, they decided that they weren't going to give Millwood a chance at all, despite Miller's inconsistency. They shopped for a veteran starter who would allow them to play hunches with their fifth starter slot, acquiring Bedard from Seattle after a noteworthy volte-face on the A's Rich Harden. Millwood's time limit for promotion to the major leagues as specified in his Red Sox contract expired, and he wound up in Colorado (where he pitched a good bit better than Miller or Wakefield).

Bedard, well-known as a "fragile" pitcher--so much so, in fact, that teammates would caution him from sitting down too quickly in order to ensure that he might not suffer a freak mishap--managed to stay healthy for the month of August; but he put too much "wiggle" into a pitch on September 3rd, and while it didn't shut him down for the rest of the year, it probably should have. His last two starts, in the final grip of terminal velocity, had absolutely no braking effect for the Sox.

Tito: "A little early for that much snow, ain't it?"
Theo: "If we run, only one of us will get buried..."

But let's not get too deep into second-guessing, lest we wind up as sullen as the press, the fans, the owners, and quite probably the players themselves, who can't help but be fed up with being the pseudo-pornographic targets of an outside world fixated on the interminable forensic fetishizing with which the New York-Boston rivalry keeps foul odors flying (no matter how many exterminators are called). Many of them probably wish that they could simply skip town the way that Terry Francona and Theo Epstein are doing.

And, subterranean truth be told, it's probably Theo's fault--not so much for being so overrated, or for any of his actual (and very real) deficiencies. It was the hubris inherent in trying to upend the nature of the universe, baseball division. And that bravado extended all the way to the head-to-head matchups that the Red Sox had against the Yankees during the EJE (for those who've forgotten our fencing forays at the Baseball Think Factory with the potent, potioned, Parsifal-like Red Sox Nation, that's an acronym for the Epstein-James Era, which is now over).

The bruising, brawling yearly head-to-head competition was much closer during the EJE than at any other time in history, and while Theo can take pride in knowing that during his watch the Sox managed to eke out an edge over the Evil Empire (84-82), he might want to ponder the fact that such an occurrence seems likely to be one of the main reasons why the avalanche of misfortune came rumbling down the mountain a good bit ahead of snow season this past September.

The great forces of a mythic universal order, as manifested in the seedy grandeur of a game whose business bloat is at maximum volume level, are making their counter-moves. It is a humbling and wondrous experience, for when it comes, it spares no one. It would be best to keep this in mind, and--despite any and all desires to the contrary--to try to remember (try, try, try) this very cosmic, catastrophic September.

(BELATED) UPDATE: THE REVISED PENNANT RACE INDEX

2011-10-07T23:01:00.000-07:00

In the midst of wild card and post-season excitement, we didn't get around to updating the Pennant Race Index we formulated for you awhile back. We can thank the Braves and Red Sox for salvaging 2011 from what would almost certainly have been the most boring overall pennant outcome in the past sixteen years.

Even with the wild card madness on the final day of the season, 2011 still graded out as the fifth most boring pennant race over the time span--though possibly a better measure for the purposes of day-to-day involvement can be found in the shaded numbers which represent the number of "post-season slots" that were extremely contested in any given year.

When we do that, we see that 2011 didn't have a widespread set of close races as was the case in 2007, where five post-season slots were within two games of their closest rivals.

There have been 35 such slots over the past sixteen years, or about 2.2 a year. 2011 is just under that average, but far off the pace set in 2002, when no one was closer than 2 1/2 games.

As has been the case fully half the time (eight seasons out of the past sixteen), the NL wildcard race remained a nail-baiter, with only one game separating the post-season team from the "see you next year" squad.

It's mostly thanks to the NL Wild Card chase that the race for the fourth slot has proven to be markedly closer than the divisional chases. And 2011, with its collapsing "shoo-ins," produced the closest Wild Card average ever.

MISTER FISTER (or... QMAX and HIT TYPE: BEYOND THE SCIENCE OF ONAN)

2011-10-06T13:23:00.001-07:00

Mister Fister himself.

I'm here to tell you what you already know, which used to be a guaranteed way for making said practitioner rich and famous, but that's subsequently been outsourced to a distant realm beyond the ozone layer as a result of Internet intervention. (Who knows where all that extra money goes!!)

If you're following baseball at all, you already know that Doug Fister has been pitching extremely well of late (well, not quite so well in that weird, wacky "Game One" in the Yankees-Tigers series that baseball and the Great Media Conglomerate foisted off on us last week--but prior to that, at a level approaching unconsciousness).

Such a seemingly incongruous development is one of those cockle-warming stories that baseball is especially good at providing--transitory transcendence, long odds put through a threshing machine a la the scene in Border Incident where George Murphy is turned into fertilizer, and the strange-but-true relationship between the underdog and the urge for ululation (a topic that Jennifer Dziura, formerly the Princess of Bagels, is about to tackle while wearing nothing but cream cheese in her next one-woman show).

Funny, ain't it, how this "get yourself off" thingee looks
mysteriously like a jock strap...

Mister Fister's ascendance has a been this season's secret stroke of genius, unexpected but filled with potential for explication (though one would be wise to not wear the device depicted at left while attempting to do so). The tools we have at our disposal seem to indicate that the little world of baseball analysis just might be getting closer to taking its statistical data down to the level of an individual game (the point we made fifteen years ago, when we suggested that full acceptance of the precepts involved in advanced analysis would require some such form of "granular integration").

Which, come to think of it, just might be possible with the assistance of said "apparatus."

Of course, no one named Fister is likely to be much more than a flash in the pan, but, by Cracky, we can hope, can't we? Once we have dispensed with (most of) the childishness in the preceding grafs, an examination of various stats that examine the apparatuses (apparati?) that assist us in describing the shape of pitching quality (the ones that go beyond a mere re-casting of earned run average) will show that some potential for breakthroughs in this area are actually on the horizon.

Back in the little so-called "basement world," we have visual tracking aids (PitchFX) that can characterize the details of pitching. (In fact, these are boardroom tools, that point us toward the need for collectivization within the monopoly world of baseball--but that's a diatribe for a different day.) These tools make it possible to measure batter vs. pitcher stats (the BA/OBP/SLG suite of pitcher stats that finally emerged in the 90s as play-by-play data began its initial ascendancy) as a function of individual pitch type. That's why reforming Stalinist stathead Dave Cameron can utilize such data, rendered in somewhat dubious fashion as "Runs Saved by Pitch Type," as part of a Fangraphs post last month that suggests we do not underestimate the improvements that Fister had been making since being traded to Detroit at the end of July.

Hand in hand with this, we have hit type data, another breakout from an observational overlay on play-by-play data, that permits us to make a crude but promising set of categorizations. The key one, as Bill James and others have noted, seems to be the line drive, when, once we isolate it, seems to be an important trend line for pitcher effectiveness. (Actually, the data as it's being applied now doesn't quite rise to the level where it supports the previous assertion, but that's because it isn't currently being applied at the level of an individual game...it's being aggregated as part of the mostly misguided attempt to leach out "luck" via the BABIP/DIPS model.)

These two tools permit some more educated soothsaying, at least. Cameron was able to note that Doug Fister was mixing his pitches more effectively once he'd left Seattle for Detroit, and had improved markedly in using his change-up as an out pitch.

But what remains lacking in this is a framework that describes the quality in each start from a standpoint of hit prevention. Our original tool for this purpose, the Quality Matrix (QMAX for short), got lost in the stampede to the BABIP/DIPS model. It needed only some refinement in terms of overlaying extra-base hits--and a tie-in to the "hit type" data that has emerged in the past several years.

When we bring QMAX into the picture to look at what's been happening with Doug Fister in 2010-11, we can first see that his improvement this season preceded his trade to Detroit. The QMAX grid, focusing on hit prevention/walk prevention, distributes individual starts into the matrix categories, which possess probabilistic quality designations related to team winning percentage. The three basic charts, shown at right, show how Fister was making marked improvement even before he was traded. The fourth "shape chart," below at right, which provides percentage data for the key regions defined on the matrix chart, puts that data into numerical form.

The shape chart shows that Fister's improvement in 2011 was more dramatic than what any of the other available measures suggested to be the case in late July. While it could not predict that Fister's ability to prevent hits would undergo such a dramatic (and possibly short-term) transformation, it clearly pointed to the fact that Doug's actual quality level was significantly higher than the then-current conceptual consensus. In particular, his success at preventing hits (as represented in the percentage of "top hit prevention games"--the S12 category--and the percentage of "hit hard games"--the HH category) had already been transformed prior to the trade to the Tigers.

What's far more interesting than this, however, is the possibility that hit type data, when merged with QMAX, can give us a much better sense of the integration of performance variables. (The pitch type data has possibilities as well, but it may be limited by the fact that the distribution of pitches thrown may not produce a sufficient quantity of information for each individual pitcher--though it's too soon to be sure of that.) We can map hit type data--particularly the incidence of line drives--to the QMAX "hit prevention" axis. When we do that for Fister, we find out that the percentage of balls in play that are line drives goes up in a linear fashion across the axis.

Actually, the data is more interestingly suggestive than that--though we must temper any rush to judgment by noting that the results described below are likely more individualistic in nature, since Fister has a pronounced ground ball pattern.

The chart at left shows the traditional pitcher stat results filtered through the QMAX grid--or, more accurately, over key segments of the grid (figure below, at right): the "hit hard" section at the bottom; the "Tommy John" or "TJ" region at the lower left, where finesse pitchers try to strand runners despite giving up more hits than innings pitched; the "top hit prevention" region (top two rows on the chart); and the "elite square" (the four matrix boxes at the upper left corner of the chart, where the very best game performances reside).

What's extremely interesting in Fister's case is that the raw percentage of fly balls allowed (column in pink) in these various breakouts barely changes. It's the percentage of line drives and ground balls that fluctuate (look at the G/L column in orange). In his worst games, Fister gives up a bit more than twice as many line drives as he does in his best games.

Now, as we said, it's far from being this simple. Different pitchers will have varying relationships with respect to the hit types, and they need to be studied with respect to other measures (including the BABIP/DIPS formulations, which remain high-level regression-style modeling approaches, built under the assumption that we can't penetrate into the game level at all). But pitch types and hit types and QMAX may just take us there yet.

There are some other game-level fluctuations that need to be measured on a game-by-game basis. Currently we collect the hit-type and pitch-type data without looking at it in terms of individual games. Forman et fils seems to be of two minds about this data--giving us matchless breakouts of the batter vs. pitcher data for hit type, but at the same time giving us double-counted line drive and fly ball data that problematizes our ability to do any analysis with it.

What could help would be a series of hit type charts that go into the game at the inning by inning level. We would be looking for in-game changes in hit type ratios, and for fluctuations in result vs. the overall average result by hit type.

Some examples of these charts are shown on the right. The first one, which charts one of Fister's fine September performances during the Tigers' stretch run, shows that he induced nine ground ball outs over eight innings (we should number them for you, but the horizontal lines should give you the idea of when the innings change) without giving up a single hit.

He wasn't quite so fortunate with fly balls in this game, though the A's were only 1-for-7 (but the one hit was a homer). With line drives, it appears that Doug might have been a bit lucky: the A's were 2-for-5, but the average BA on line drives is around .700, so he dodged at least one hit, maybe two.

Let's contrast this with a game earlier in the year, when Doug wasn't so much in command of his game. (In fact, this is probably his worst start of 2011.) More line drives than ground balls--we already know that this is bad, and it was this way from the very beginning of the game. The White Sox were 8-for-9 on line drives! They were 5-for-9 on fly balls, with two doubles. We had to add a special column marked with an asterisk (*) to show all of the extra plays that entered into the game due to all the baserunners. (The red numerals, which unfortunately don't show well, indicate a hit where a run is scored.)

Note all that extra shading. The darker shades in each hit type show when the count has one or two strikes in it when the ball is put in play. Black areas indicate a ball put in play on the first pitch. Whole lotta data goin' on here...

Let's look at just one more of these hit type charts...this is the one for the "start" in Game 1 of the ALDS that Doug made on October 1st. This one is even more interesting because it shows the sudden shift from line drive to ground ball to fly ball that occurred over the course of the game.

Fister fights his way out of a jam in the "first" (it's actually the second), then cruises on grounders/strikeouts in the next two innings before he suddenly begins to elevate the ball and the Yankees start to hit him. In the final inning, things fall apart due to control issues, some bad luck (two straight ground ball hits) and, of course, the grand slam that was surrendered by Al Alburquerque right after Doug was removed from the game. The Yankees were able to do some uncharacteristic two-strike hitting (we added that breakout to show how much data can be assembled this way), going 3-for-6.

Everyone has observed this type of trend in a game without actually quantifying it before--a pitcher is effective doing one thing, then suddenly is unable to do that thing anymore, trouble comes in a cluster, and even a return to the type of pitching that was effective earlier doesn't work. As you can see in that final inning, Fister had two outs when the ground ball approach came back to bite him: such fine lines are hard to draw with mere numbers.

Mister Fister and the fist of Joe Louis, his reward from the
fans in Detroit for going 8-1 down the stretch.

The line drive-to-ground ball ratio of this game looks pretty good, but Doug gave up one more hit than he should have in each of the three hit types. We can start to quantify "luck" at the game level, instead of at the BABIP/DIPS "model' level.

So what will happen with Doug tonight? Your guess is as good as mine. But what we know is that he has improved a great deal in his second year, and he has a chance to be a very good pitcher for some time to come. I suspect even a smattering of Yankee fans--at least the male ones, at any rate--will find it hard to root against a man named Fister.