A FEW EARLY-SEASON NOTES....

The second Sunday of the season is now past, giving us our usual "magic 11 games" worth of data that we've been known to breakout (actually, for most teams, Sunday makes it an even dozen, but who's counting?). So let's just examine a few interesting (and for the very most part, not very meaningful) developments.

AMERICAN LEAGUE

The Yanks seem to have gotten this Vernon Wells
instead of the one we know...

The Yankees, despite missing A-Rod, Granderson and Teixeira, are still hitting HRs at a better clip than just about anyone in the AL. (OK, yes, they're missing Jeter, too, but let's face it, it's not the long ball that makes chicks dig Derek--it's the gift baskets.) Only the A's have more HRs than the Yanks, what with Lazarus seemingly having an in-body intervention with Vernon Wells. Even Ichiro! has one (!!).

The Red Sox are getting great pitching thus far, with only the Rangers outperforming them. Their hit prevention has been stellar, just a tad better than the Royals.

Slow starts from Josh Hamilton and Mike Trout have hampered the Angels, but it's the Halos' starting staff that has really put the team behind the eight-ball thus far. Jered Weaver's absence isn't going to help things much...only the Mariners have given up more HRs thus far in the AL.

Are we ready to get on Marwyn Gonzalez's bandwagon? No, not really, especially seeing how his first name is an unfortunate collision of the names "Marvell" and "Wynne," which is a most unwelcome mnemonic. The Astros will need another SS to help get them out of what's likely to be a deep hole in the AL West.

The makeovers for the Blue Jays, Rays and Mariners haven't jelled. It's Masterson and Santana in Cleveland, and little else so far.

What starts for Chris Davis and Prince Fielder.

We are happy to see that Lance Berkman took our advice, didn't retire, signed with the Rangers, and is doing just fine thus far. Stay healthy, LB, and crank out a great age-37 season to contradict those folks who've decided that anyone over the age of 32 is ready to be put out to pasture.

NATIONAL LEAGUE

Good Lord but the Braves are getting some outrageous pitching thus far. It'll never last, of course...

The only finger in this picture (of the man who will not be running for
Mayor of Mia[s]mi) that counts is the one located above his glasses...

And forget about what Dodger fans might have done to Carlos Quentin had he played in Los Angeles this coming week...what about what Miami fans might yet do to their owner, Jeffrey Loria, whose embattled team has now scored 20 runs in 12 games, a pace that would produce 270 runs scored for the season.

The Pirates are thankful for the floundering Fish, because they've once again stumbled out of the gate with hitters just about as cold as it's possible to get. They did have quite a closing kick today, however, scoring ten runs in their final two times at bat to upset the Reds, but they still have three hitters (Russell Martin, Gaby Sanchez and Pedro Alvarez) hitting under .100.

The Mets leading the league in RS/G? Take a snapshot of that for posteriority, please. 

Good bullpens thus far: ATL 1.35; PIT 2.15; ARZ 2.34. Bad bullpens thus far: WSN 6.06; MIA 5.79; STL 5.52.

It would be fun to stop the season now to see John Buck and Dexter Fowler near the top in HR. Both have hit six...

Who will have a better career--the Nationals' Bryce Harper or the Angels' Mike Trout? 

From "phour aces" in 2011 to "phour flushers" in 2013: the Phillies' starters have a combined ERA of 4.91 (and that's after three games with the Fish!).

Slow starts for the Cardinals' hitters but their starting pitching has been wonderful...their bullpen blew another one for them on Sunday.

DON'T LOOK NOW...

...but the National League is more than holding its own in the new, expanded and "improved" version of interleague play.

The New York Mets' 16-5 drubbing of the Minnesota Twins yesterday was the seventh win in ten interleague contests for what used to be called the Senior Circuit. (Anyone who calls it that now is clearly some kind of "Senior" in his or her own right.)

Now, of course, it's very early, so we won't get all warm and gooey as a chocolate chip cookie left out on a Savannah street corner...but it's worth at least getting the fact out there, because you might simply forget about it otherwise now that interleague play has been transformed into something resembling a slow drip.

In a way, this daily dose is preferable: it's more of a manageable condition that one lives with as opposed to a siege of incapacitating illness as the old "regime" had been. No one seems to be keeping track, no one seems to be highlighting the fact that we now have this "daily drip" (a search of the Internet does not reveal a list of the games broken out unto themselves), it's all very....how shall we say...."clinical."

Yes, that's exactly the right word. And is that, by any chance, a blurred image of Bud Selig standing back there in hospital gear? Interestingly enough, an internet search combining Bud's name with "intravenous drip" returned an article discussing the best delivery method for a lethal injection. Coinkidink? We think not.

QUENTIN SHOULD NOT PLAY AGAIN UNTIL GREINKE DOES

Letting the high-priced boys duke it out on the field doesn't work, and we've just witnessed another example of that fact with last night's Carlos Quentin-Zack Greinke fiasco.

There are enough injuries in baseball already. A deliberate act of violence against another player while on the playing field can simply no longer be condoned.

And that is what charging the mound after being hit by a pitch is--a deliberate act of violence. It should not be punished with a slap on the wrist.

Most (if not all) batters who charge the mound after being hit by a pitch have not been injured by the ball that struck them. If they had been--and getting hit by a pitch is an unavoidable risk that cannot in any way be compared to willfully running from the batters' box to the pitcher's mound--they would most likely be writhing in pain.

That was clearly not the case last night. Carlos Quentin was unharmed by the ball that hit him. His actions, however, led to Zack Greinke's broken collarbone--and put two teams' worth of personnel at risk for injury.

What's needed in this instance is a Biblical approach to how justice is meted out. Quentin is responsible for Greinke's injury, which will keep the Dodger righty from pitching for awhile (at this point the estimate is 6-8 weeks).

Therefore Quentin should not be allowed to play until Greinke can.

Nothing less--and nothing else--is fair. And, as others have pointed out, anything less will only lead to further ugliness between the two teams, which could result in additional injury.

Bud Selig needs to put his money-counting machine aside and grow a spine on this issue. Yeah, yeah: we know. But we can hope, can't we?

Anyone charging the mound (even with a legitimate beef) should draw an automatic 10-game suspension. But if anyone on either team is injured as a result of such an action, the instigator should sit for as long as those players cannot play. (And, in fact, that should be the case if the only player or players injured are on his own team. Teams will howl at this, but they have to reinforce the idea that charging the mound is absolutely verboten.)

It is long since past time that MLB put a stop to this shit. Needless to say, we are not holding our breath--and neither should you.

[UPDATE: Quentin received an eight-game suspension...which he is appealing. That "thhpppttt" noise you're hearing is the sound of Bud's money-counting machine, pushed up one speed setting.]

[[SON OF UPDATE: Quentin has, wisely in this case, we think, dropped his appeal and will reportedly stay away from Los Angeles while he is serving his suspension. While certain born-again neanderthal types like Thomas Boswell, who penned a ludicrous defense of Quentin's actions, will be disappointed and likely brand him as a born-again coward, we can only be thankful that some set of cooler heads prevailed and guided Quentin to what is unquestionably a prudent decision. Let us recall that a Giants fan was shot in the Dodgers' bleachers not so long ago, without anything like the specific inciting incident that is in play right now.]]

DOUBLE THE TRIPLE PLEASURE

OK, we warned you that this was coming, so if you're inclined to pull a "Hello, I must be going" kinda thing, your opportunity to do so should be taken now...

The big honking table that you see at your left (for a copy that might actually be readable, click on it...) captures two pieces of vital information for anyone interested in having a version of baseball that transcends the TTO travesty that we've been enduring in one form or another for the past half-century (amplified by the imprudent acolytes of "run scoring theory" who've pushed their brand of bull-in-a-china-shop science at us ever since Bill James sat on his wand).

It displays every player who has either:

--Had two or more games with two (or more) triples in a game during a single season, from 1916 to the present day;
--Had three triples in a game during that same time span.

Triples are the rarest of all offensive events wherein a batter makes contact with the baseball using his bat. As you all know, this wasn't always the case, but the game has evolved to such a state, and it's been that way for so long that few see this as something other than "just the way it is." It's more than that, of course, but prophets are also not without honor save in their own country, and one man's prophet is a crackpot to the mobocracy.

And so we have one of the great dilemmas of civilization and polity summed up in this scenario: there is often a disconnection between recognizing scarcity and preserving or reversing it, which often leads to either limbo or extinction. (The fact that scientists now have the capability to re-create extinct species adds an intriguingly macabre twist to the discussion: once we start doing that, we lay ourselves open to all sort of religious/philosophical objections--some of which, in their own strange way, apply to rule-tinkering in baseball.)

But let's only digress long enough to get us past the bottom of that big honking table. Based on the data we have handy from Forman et fil, we have 1635 instances where a player has hit two or more triples in a game. Over the course of 97 seasons, that would average out to about 17 per year.

Just for the sake of comparison, the number of times where a player has hit two or more doubles in a game is 35,489. That's about 22 times more often than is the case for two or more triples in a game. Back in 1920, when the number of 2+ triples games peaked (we'll deal with the nineteenth century some other time...), the ratio between these two events was more like 5 to 1 (261 2+ 2B games vs. 49 2+ 3B games). In 2012, that ratio has ballooned to nearly 80 to 1 (556 2+ 2B games vs. just seven--yes, 7--2+ 3B games).

That's mirrored in the chart at right, which shows the decline of 2+ 3B games as measured by the number of such games per team over the course of the data sample (1916 to 2012). Every once in a while there is a blip in the system--a player or two will come along and defy the extinction pattern, but--as the big honking table demonstrates in the big gaps between incidences of three-triple games. (It should also be noted that the identity of those players who hit three triples in a game used to include Hall of Famers who hit for power as well as speed; that stopped being the case nearly fifty years ago.)

We know that the triple will never become completely extinct, but its potential for blending speed and power has been permanently crippled by various factors that have brought us an increasingly two-dimensional game (and this has been in place for quite some time, in fact, as the chart shows: for the game to have the optimum balance in terms of speed vs. power in hitting, one would need to at least get this ratio back to 1:1, and optimally back to around 1.5:1).

And so we continue to proselytize, even while some of our friends can be seen edging their way nervously toward the door with a furtive expression on their faces, for a rule change that will, if adopted, certainly create chaos and mayhem on the playing field--but will produce about five times as many triples as is currently the case. It will happen without the big moguls having to restructure their stadia and de-optimizing their profit models. It will happen without disrupting any of the other trends that seem to be so wildly popular even as the game gets more two-dimensional.

Quixote: not a fan of those
who would bypass third base...

If you've been reading here already, you'll know what that "modest proposal" is. If not, you are invited to puzzle it out for yourselves before you go searching for it in the prior posts here at this little ol' island of hokum in a sea of fatuity. Getting more triples back into baseball doesn't solve the strikeout problem or the structural/aesthetic flaws that have been in place for some time but are now magnified by the emphasis on power--power hitting, power pitching: things that are clearly going to be with us in one form or another but are now unbalanced--but more triples, by hook or crook, is one way that we can live with the unshakable tendency for science to destroy anomalies rather than preserve them, thus permitting (and often even encouraging) genus to swamp species.

Jeremiah: not a bullfrog, but a
 man who knew how to make
woo with woe.

No one who lived through the offensive surge in the 1920s would have expected the triple to become such an endangered element; but improvements on defense, incremental increases in size and strength, and slavish uniformity in ballpark design, ushered in during the 60s and tilted further in the 90s have brought about a state of semi-extinction. And it has been done in a way that nothing other than the type of rule change we are advocating (simultaneously in the spirit of Don Quixote and the prophet Jeremiah...) can now possibly address the problem.

On a merely topographical level, the 20s provide us with the kind of event-driven interest that can only add to the enjoyment and pleasure involved in following the game on a daily basis. Consider that in 1920, there were two days--August 3rd and September 17th--where three players each hit two triples in a game. (This seems to have happened for the last time on August 9th, 1930.) On that same September 17th, two of the players who hit two triples did for the same team in the same game. The closest thing to that type of rarified excitement for us in the post-modern "chicks dig the long ball" age is when Carl Crawford had a couple of two-triple games within five days of each other in June 2004.

Now you are free to scoff at all this, but those who have never seen or who haven't bothered to envision the type of game where the triple had more significance shouldn't be so hasty to judge that the aesthetics of baseball is not suffering mightily from its absence. The names of the players who have the most 2+ 3B games in their careers (in the chart at left above) include a boatload of Hall of Famers, but the last one of those was George Brett--and he's likely to be the last one for all time, since the direction that the game has traveled since he retired is making it impossible for the type of hitter who makes the Hall of Fame to wind up on a list like this one. (While there are four active players on this list, none of them is likely to receive a plaque in Cooperstown.)

For goodness' sakes, kiddies, let's face facts: the game is getting two-dimensional, and something needs to be done about it. Hell, when there's an issue where we are actually in agreement with Rob Neyer, you know that this signals a planetary alignment of superhuman proportions...

Enjoy the baseball season, but keep this quixotic jeremaid in the tilted windmill region of your frontal lobe as the year progresses and try to imagine how much more than double the pleasure would be the case if we could at least double the number of triples in each and every game.

SUBSTITUTE!!! A COMPROMISE NOT ROTTEN, JUST OVERRIPE...

Lindsay: one too many "designated hits"....

The propaganda peddlers are suddenly out in force, nattering dia-nabobically about the DH rule and how it needs to be unilaterally imposed upon a public whose level of discourse on the subject is now more wedgie than wedge issue...while we were brewing up another dreamscape-rant about triples to send your minds into a reverse spin cycle, the sudden proliferation of this piffle reached critical mass and just cannot be ignored--and so we are here to take it on, take it down, and take it away.

The DH is a blight upon the original conception of the game, but it's been in play for forty years and there are too many forces in place supporting it for it to disappear. However, that doesn't mean that other solutions aren't available to counteract this suddenly pressing criticism that seems to fuel this hyper-urgent surge of "here's my big dick of a DH rule and you, ignorant slut, are going to have it crammed down your throat and you vill like it!!" meta-Nazification (and fear not, we won't be "illustrating" that last image, primarily because Lindsay Lohan blew us off for the little variation of the Carls Jr. commercial she was going to shoot for us).

Anyway, there is middle ground in all this muddle. The powers that wannabe who clamor for fewer at-bats from pitchers can be held off with pitchforks via a couple of simple changes in the substitution rules that will apply to the NL only. (The AL can keep the stinkin' DH, but it will be able to use these new substitution rules when they play interleague games in NL ballparks.)

Ready? Here goes:

A starting pitcher can be batted for on one occasion without forcing his removal from the game. One, and only one time, at the manager's discretion.

That hitter will be allowed to be used a second time in the game as a pinch-hitter, but he can't bat for the same pitcher twice.

Got it? The use of pinch-hitters will be made more tactical than before, because managers will have to decide how to get their best hitter who's not in the starting lineup up to the plate as many times as possible, and how to get that hitter up in spots where it can do his team the most good.

There would need to be some fine print to keep the Joe Maddons of the world from trying to bend the rules. A situation where a pinch-hitter is announced but batted for as a result of a pitching change that addresses the platoon advantage will still apply as if the first announced pinch-hitter actually batted.

So if you sandbagged by trying to put a somewhat weaker hitter up in the first place, anticipating a pitching change where you could then bat a stronger hitter against the new relief pitcher, you wouldn't be able to keep the second pinch-hitter in the game. Sorry, Joe: we're not going to let you be any slicker than you already are.

THERE you go--a substitution rule that adds some intriguing wrinkles to the game without forcing the NL to adopt the DH, that promotes strategy/tactics and that will give AL managers some additional leeway in deploying their bench hitters in the absence of the DH during interleague games in NL ballparks.

Best of all, it preserves some aspect of baseball tradition, which deserves to be honored, instead of discarded, trampled, folded, spindled, etc.

We suggest that the NL adopt this rule as an "experiment," just the way the DH was adopted in 1973. Let's test it out, and see how we like it.

ESCAPE FROM NEW ORLEANS

Speaking of "trampling out the vintage"...

Now these sprightly-but-soon-to-be-soused young'uns don't seem all that interested in high-tailing it off Bourbon St., but some of these yokel locals who are practicing the art of mental liquidation will sometime soon take a left turn to Metairie, where the New Orleans Zephyrs (AAA franchise for the Miami Marlins) play their games. It's a pleasant place, filled with music and--most significantly, perhaps--a right-field beer pavilion.

For some folk, however, escaping Nawlins is part of a professional code. Three veteran players ripped it up for the Zephyrs in 2012--outfielder-third baseman Mike Cervenak (now 36); second baseman-shortstop Nick Green (now 34), and shortstop-second baseman Gil Velazquez (now 33).

Nick Green: possibly a favorite at the Little Gem Saloon...

Of the three, Green has had the most major-league exposure, with a bit more than a thousand plate appearances for eight teams in part of seven seasons. Even though he pummeled PCL pitching last year (.340, .996 OPS in 63 games), Nick is a marginal hitter at best against big leaguers.

Mike Cervenak: not quite the second coming of
Steve Ontiveros...

We'll never know what Cervenak might have done, for he spent the best part of his youth not in New Orleans but in Norwich, CT, where he didn't develop fast enough to be a serious prospect. By the time he made it to AAA with the Giants, he was 28 and even the bedraggled 2005 team, without Barry Bonds for most of the year, was unable to find room enough to give him a cup of coffee. That didn't happen until he'd bounced from the Giants to the Phillies via the Orioles (insert your favorite billiards shot description here).

Bereft of enough HR pop and just not as physically imposing as someone like David Freese--and always just shaky enough at third to cause some concern among baseball fundamentalists--Mike just couldn't get over the hump. He did some nice humpin' in Nawlins last year (344, 912 OPS) but the problem is that he's pretty much a first baseman now. He was let go, and didn't hook on with anyone.

Velazquez: New Orleans Miami...unreal.

Velazquez, big and rangy, was drafted higher (14th round) than either Green (32nd) or Cervenak (43rd). Drafted out of high school, he simply didn't hit a lick for the Mets, who gave up on him in 2004. He became another guy who was freely available in the minor league free agent pool. It wasn't till he got to Salt Lake City, a hitter's park, in 2011 that his bat showed any real signs of life--but the Angels weren't impressed, and cut him loose. He hit well at Nawlins (.312, but still no power), and the Fish brought him up in September, but he didn't impress with the bat and was released over the off-season.

All of these guys will be back in AAA, and probably all of them will have "escaped" New Orleans, despite having played extremely well there in 2012. (Green might be back: he was cut by the Fish but the engaging infielder, who does a passable Brandon McCarthy imitation now and again on his Twitter account, hasn't yet let it be known what he's going to do.) For most of us, such a Darwinian swirl could push us toward an assignation with Bourbon St., but these guys have just kept at it, fighting the odds, trying to turn back a ticking clock that is working inexorably against them. All you teenage tipplers still stumbling around down in the French Quarter (where spring break is almost as long as the baseball season...) should tip your glasses to these three, who deserve a toast for their tenacity.

"BARREN MONTH" ENDS...TWO-YEAR HR LEADERS

A new low for posts-in-a-month, we are still cranking on our Don Murray film...will provide more info about it and the web site that will shortly be up for it, in case you are interested. Spring training is best spent in a daze anyway, and this year you could call it a blur (our old nickname at the Post Office, in fact).

April will be better, or at least more plentiful (and when we say that please remember T.S. Eliot's line about April in Four Quartets). But to get back in practice, and to provide a soupçon of historical perspective with which to goose you into the 2013 season, kindly peruse the following chart, which shows the 55-year data pattern for most homers hit over a two-year span.

Note that in 1973-74 the two-year leader hit fewer HRs than Mark McGwire hit in 1998 (or, of course, Barry Bonds three years later...Barry would never speak to us again if we didn't remember that he holds  the record that's keeping both recent record holders out of the Hall of Fame). Ignore 1981-82, of course, because of the strike season (the "7-10 split" season known as Bowie Kuhn's Folly). But note that in 1988-89, while both Big Mac and Barry Big Head were in their formative major league years, the two-year HR lead again skidded down to just 70.

As Bill James noted, we're getting back to "normal" in terms of most offensive numbers (except strikeouts, which are offensive in a different sense of the word...). That spike (shown in the area shaded in black) is spectacular (and remains highly suspicious to some). The 2011-12 leader, Curtis Granderson, had "only" 84 HRs over the two years in question. That's actually below the 55-year average for the two-year leader, which is 90.

Grandy is not likely to be the two-year HR leader for 2012-13, but he had a ten-HR lead over his nearest rivals (Ryan Braun and Miguel Cabrera). Our money, if we were wagering it, would be on Giancarlo Stanton.

As we write this, the season has already begun, and last year's lowly Astros, winners of just 55 games in 2012, are alone in first place as April Fools' Day beckons to us. Justin Maxwell, tools player quasi-extraordinaire, gave us a thrill by slapping out two triples (!!) to help the league-swappers knock off their new in-state rivals (the Texas Rangers) by a score of 8-2.

We hope Bo Porter will not expect this to happen too often, but--hey, we'd take it, too.

NOLAN RYAN: THE POWER OF THE "POWER PRECIPICE"

OK, really swamped with non-hardball projects of late, so March has done more than half its lionizing thing without us...thus we'll give you something big, bold, brawny and arduous (you can pick up the internal association therein without our usual application of the sledgehammer, n'est-ce pas?)

We were struck recently (just a glancing blow, fortunately) by an off-hand remark about Nolan Ryan. The utterer attributed it to Bill James, though we've not had time to verify the reference. (No matter: despite what might otherwise seem to be the case, there's no intent in this essay to "bash" anyone...just making that clear in case someone erstwhile Jack Kruschen-type alerts Rob Neyer to the goings-on here.)

That remark, boiled down to its most prosaic formulation, suggested that when Ryan had his control he was unbeatable, and when he didn't he wasn't. Sounds like good advice (but that didn't stop Linda Ronstadt from loving some sweet-talking heartbreaker in a what seemed like an endless series of lachrymose ballads...) as well as a large dollop of early sabermetric common sense.

There were numbers in the formulation that went something like this: 5+ walks in a game, struggle; 3 or less walks, unbeatable. But as with many of the binary formulations that informed early efforts (and that are still, how shall we say..."psychologically influential" even today) to deconstruct baseball statistics, this one doesn't really stand up to a full sniff test.

But it does lead us into some interesting areas that aren't quite as settled as the heterodox orthodoxy would have us believe. (Cue up the music, folks...it's QMAX time again!)

It turns out that when we break out Ryan's career starts (all 773 of them, available one by one at Forman et fil), the idea that he was unbeatable when he had better control is roughly three-fourths true.

The data is all here, compiled into your basic counting stats, well-known rate stats (ERA, H/9), and then some variously recondite calculations (the basic QMAX "S" and "C" values; QMAX's ERA predictor--named QERA; and, finally, the fabled FIP value). A lot of intriguing stuff here, so let's get right to it.

First, there's the raw interest in knowing exactly how many games with various amounts of walks allowed--Ryan has been retired for twenty years now, but he's still one of the most indelible presences on the mound (even if he's nowhere near the level of the all-time greats).

It's amazing to find out that he had 232 starts in which he walked five or more batters; that he had only 27 starts (just 3%) where he didn't walk anyone. And it's very interesting to note that his ERA in games where he walked five batters isn't all that different from his ERA in games where he walked only three.

In fact, it's downright weird to discover that Ryan's ERA in games where he walked five or more batters is lower than it is in games where he walks three or four batters.

And it's very interesting to note the divergences in Ryan's QERA and FIP through this sequence of breakouts.

Now, we know (even before it's pointed out to us by our super-modeling brethren...) that QERA and FIP aren't attempting to measure the same thing. But the predictive qualities that are claimed for FIP (that its reliance only on the so-called "three true outcomes" to fashion a massaged model of ERA is a truer picture of future performance than anything else) run into a few thorny issues when we look at how it handles cluster of starts where the pitcher has high walks and low hits.

And there's no better place to examine that discrepancy between the predicted and the actual than in the region of the QMAX chart (as you'll see in the many matrix breakouts that show the shape of Ryan's start distributions by the number of walks/game) in the upper right corner.

That is what we've taken to call the "power precipice": the area where pitchers give up a good bit fewer hits than the league average per nine innings, and a good bit more walks than the league average per nine innings. It is a range that is shockingly close to the level of success that pitchers achieve in the upper left corner of the QMAX chart, where they have similar success at hit prevention and have lower than average walks per nine.

Nolan Ryan may be the king of the power precipice: we'd be extremely surprised if there is any pitcher (other than possibly Bob Feller) who has more starts in that region. His total of 184 "power precipice" starts represents just under one-fourth of his career total (24%, to be exact). That number encompasses five seasons' worth of starts.

In those games, Ryan's won-loss record is 101-57. (OK, you don't like won-loss records.) His ERA is 1.87--and this is happening in games where he's walking an average of nearly six-and-a-half men per nine innings! He's allowing just over four hits per nine innings (which works out to about three-and-a-half hits per actual start, since his starts in these games last about seven-and-a-half innings).

FIP's assumption that the variability in hits on balls in play is low enough to simply ignore the extremes in performance creates a situation where the method predicts that Ryan's ERA will be nearly 90% higher than what it actually is in these games (referring back to the big chart above: 3.55 vs. 1.87).

QERA suggests that Ryan has gotten some breaks in terms of what that ERA ought to be as well, but it's nowhere near that divergent. This is because QERA, using the QMAX "S" and "C" values to calibrate the relative importance of hit prevention and walk prevention, does not throw out ninety percent of the hits based on a modeling assumption or sixty percent of the outs that involve a fielding play.

FIP makes an assumption about how baseball works and applies it monolithically to a model that suggests that the weighted average of the "true outcome" events is sufficient to characterize quality. That is not without some value, but it's clear that certain combinations of those events produce serious discrepancies with the actual results in the games where those event combinations occur.

That doesn't completely invalidate it, but it points out that these mega-modeling methods are not nearly as robust or as granular as they have been claimed to be.

The chain of QMAX charts that have been running down the right side for awhile now give us a glimpse as to how the shape of performance is distributed across walks/game. Ryan proves a general rule that has been jettisoned in the FIP concept: the more walks a team draws, the fewer hits they will make. (Of course, there are clearly exceptions in individual games; but the available data for this is now vast and as you move rightward on the QMAX grid--even in those regions where the pitcher is being hit hard, in the 5, 6, 7 "S" areas--the hits/9 IP declines.

Ryan has one anomaly in his data: the 7BB/G group, where his H/9 rises. But the rest of the progression, once you get past the very small number of starts where he allows no walks at all, is linear.

The QMAX range summaries tell us a bit more in this regard. Note, for example, how consistent Ryan's "top hit prevention" (the S12 rows from left to right across the QMAX chart) are all the way across the walks/game spectrum. The fact that he gets into that range--even if it's over on the right of the QMAX diagram (and above you can see the rightward drift as his walks/game rises)--is what allows him to remain a successful pitcher even when he is having major control problems.

Note that Ryan is hit hardest when he walks three men in a start (24%). Note that his Power Precipice percentage jumps sharply in the 3-5 walks/game range--it increases nearly fivefold.

This is why Ryan's ERA in games with five or more walks per start is not dramatically different from his ERA in games where he walks three or fewer per game (3.29 to 3.03). FIP predicts that ERA to be a lot farther apart (4.15 to 2.85).

Finally, here are the ERA values for each cell on Ryan's QMAX chart. (This is for his entire career, all 773 starts). You see how there's a strong tendency for him to sustain success in the upper right corner, while he struggles more in the middling regions of the chart. He is clearly a below-average pitcher when he pitches in the outer reaches of the success square (the 3,3-3,4-4,2-4,3 area): pitchers with less "stuff" and more "control" have less of sharp break there. Also, he's only intermittently successful in the "Tommy John" region (the one at lower left, where control pitchers manage to thrive despite giving up more hits than innings pitched). When he's giving up hits, he's really in trouble, even in those areas of the chart where most other pitchers manage to be successful.

The other sharp break here is between "2S" and "3S." Ryan fades as badly in the rightward movement across the "3S" and "4S" zones as anyone we've seen.

So what's clear from all this? Pitchers like Ryan, who are hard to hit and who have an intermittent kind of wildness, can be just about as successful in the outer reaches of wildness as they are in their more conventionally "great" performances (the ones in the yellow four squares at top left, the region we call the "Elite Square"). Once Ryan moves into more conventional hit/game regions, he becomes much less effective when his control deserts him--much more like a normal pitcher. One of these days we'll put the FIP values up for a chart like this--and that might turn out to be the best way to spot-check the value of that highly-ballyhooed stat: we just might find that there's a pattern to what it predicts well in terms of actual results, and what it does not. Stay tuned.

YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE MITTEL-WEST, BUT...

...but you can't take the Mittel-West out of the boy. (In the little world of sabermetrics, this little homily is beyond truth.)

And we are reminded of this today, as we peruse Joe P.'s latest p(r)oof positive.

It's what we call "yack-at-her" (which is how you'd pronounce YACATR if you could actually pronounce it).

What is YACATR? It's "Yet Another Column About The Royals."

"Joe...the way you've been moving around lately, it makes me worry about your heart,
your kidneys, your liver...live now, pay later, Diner's Club!!"

Oh, yes. If our old pal Jack Kruschen (the great character actor who was Oscar-nominated for his role as Dr. Dreyfuss in Billy Wilder's classic The Apartment) were here, he'd be dusting off one of his signature lines:

"Mildred!!! He's at it again!!!!!"

This behavior on Joe's part almost...but not quite...makes us think that he's actually tuned in to our periodic chronicling of his woeful and increasingly wayward homerism.

What's his latest reason to keep that over-exposed sad sack team from the western edge of the Mittel-West in black type? Well, the Royals are on fire in spring training. They've won eleven in a row.

But, you know, the Mariners are 10-2 thus far in the spring. No one is using it as a reason to write about them in the sportswriting equivalent of soft-focus lighting.

As we noted in an earlier post, if it were the Pittsburgh Pirates (the Royals' NL doppelganger of decrepitude over the past two decades) who were doing this, good ole Joe (on his--what, fifth? sixth?--employer in the past fourteen months...) would have produced nary a squib about them.

Joe is careful at this stuff, of course. He readily acknowledges that spring training records don't have much correlation with regular season results. But he really wants to work himself up into a reasonable facsimile of a lather anyway. When all is said and done, this is simply an excuse to trot out some more hopeful hokum.

Now he could have done some research, just for fun, to see exactly how teams with excellent spring training records fared in the regular season. That would have provided a bit more of a smokescreen for what he was up to here. And it would have been a lot more interesting than what he wound up writing as well.

So, Joe, we'll do our part and provide a look at the last seven years' worth of outcomes for teams who've had at least a .625 WPCT in spring training games.

That data is in the table at left. There have been twenty-eight teams who qualify over the past seven years. Fourteen teams have had a better season than in the preceding year; fourteen have had a worse season. Six teams have made the playoffs (as shown by the "x" marking the spot) after having missed the post-season in the previous year; five have missed the playoffs after having been in the post-season the previous year.

The overall average change for these teams in the season during which they've played well in the spring  in terms of the previous year's performance: an improvement of slightly more than one game.

All types of teams are on the list, from 100-game winners to 100-game losers. The type of team that has improved in the season where spring was sweet is split evenly between those who leap up from sub-.500 ball and those who've played over .500.

It's an interesting list, even if it offers us no predictive clue. The Royals have two teams on the list already, from 2006 and 2011. They improved their record from the previous season each time, but they were poorer teams in the previous year than the 2013 squad's predecessors were last year. (In the case of the 2010 team, however, not all that much better.)

Joe would be better off looking at the road ERAs of James Shields and Wade Davis (when he was last a starter...), and remembering that even though the Royals have developed what looks like a solid bullpen, you still have to hand over the game to relievers while the games are within sufficient reach to really benefit from it (as was the case for the O's and A's last year).

The bad news for those with Mittel-West blood coursing feverishly through their veins is that the teams from their region have had a dismal regular season on the heels of their spring sproing: those ten teams have combined for an overall -51 over the past seven years. Now that's what we call a depressed region...

[EDIT: One of our readers pointed out that the teams on the above list who were under .500 in the previous season did markedly better than the overall results we reported. While that's an even tinier sample size, it's a good point and deserves to be mentioned.

We looked at the teams that played under .500 in the previous year (10 teams) and those that won 71-76 games, the range in which the '12 Royals reside (6 teams). The result was virtually identical in each case: these teams improved markedly in the next season after their solid spring. The average improvement: 11 games.

So, if the Royals should hit in the middle of that improvement range, they'd wind up with 82 wins at the end of this season.

We're sure that Joe and the cadre of Royals fetishists within the clique du nombre will be ecastatic with that. Should that happen, prepare yourself for what could be record levels of heavy breathing in the 2013-14 offseason. Stay tuned!]