Nationals Arm Race

I was reading Zuckerman’s blog posting today and the subject of “batter protection” came up in the comments.  Specifically, a reader rather forcefully said that “lineup protection is a proven myth.”  I know there are some reports out there (Bill James) that claim it is a myth (here’s a link to an article with 3 myth-proving reports).  But I counter instead that “baseball protection is so difficult to really measure that hard core statisticians end up discounting it.”  Here’s a “protection exists” link for comparison purposes.

My thoughts are these: You can’t just look at pure baseball outcomes, compare them to the quality of the following hitter, and make a blanket judgement like this.  You can’t measure a pitcher being “careful” and you can’t measure a hitter purposely trying to make something happen knowing that he’s being pitched around.  Will Carroll at BP did a study of Matt Kemp‘s at bats before /after Manny Rodriguez providing protection and found that the number of fastballs and strike zone pitches were the same … but then concluded somehow that the significant change in the number of curveballs faced was somehow NOT a result of the hitter but instead was just the vagarities of the pitchers being faced.  Really?  You don’t think somehow that the same hitter suddenly getting a ton more curveballs (which are more difficult to adjust to and drive for most hitters) is meaningful?

You also can’t tell me, as baseball fans, that a #8 hitter hitting with two outs and with the pitcher to follow is going to get ANYTHING decent to hit.  The opposing pitcher is always going to be willing to pitch carefully to the batter, force the batter to hit the pitcher’s pitch, expand his own strike zone knowing that you have a 50% chance of a punchout (and usually about an 85-90% chance of an easy out in general) sitting in the ondeck circle.

I have two supporting pieces of evidence right here on the nats.

1. Ryan Zimmerman hit for an OPS+ of 107 and 102 the two years prior to Adam Dunn‘s arrival.  Once Dunn is hitting in the 4 spot, Zimmerman’s last two year’s OPS+ are 133 and 150.  In 2008 Zimmerman’s cleanup hitter/protection was usually Austin Kearns or Lastings Milledge, not the 40-homer hitting Dunn.

2. Look at Ian Desmond‘s splits hitting in the #2 hole versus #8.  .Hitting #2 he’s *significantly* better than hitting #8.  Why?  You think maybe its because he’s got boppers behind him at #2 but a pitcher or a cold pinch hitter behind him at #8?

Sports writers and baseball analysts have been beating the drum for years for some sort of payroll system modifications in baseball.   Especially in recent years with the dominance of the Yankees and Red Sox, who have been 1-2 in total salary for a while and have both made the playoffs more often than not in the past decade.  Last year was especially bad, when most of the playoff spots went to big market, big teams.  Great for playoff rankings, bad for most of the teams in the league.   The Yankees spent nearly SEVEN times as much in payroll entering 2010 than Pittsburgh; how can that be equitable?

Well, don’t look now but if the season ended today, as pointed out in this USAToday Article, only two of baseball’s top 10 salaried teams would qualify.  Most of baseball’s current 8 playoff teams are from middle-of-the-road payrolls.  There are two notable outliers: Texas comfortably currently sits atop the AL West with the 27th largest payroll and San Diego, with the 2nd LOWEST payroll in the majors, leads the NL west.  (See this google xls I put together briefly to show teams by record rank, playoff position and salary at the beginning of the season).

Each time a team like Tampa, San Diego or Texas competes well with the big boys, it makes it harder to implement some sort of reform.  Especially since you can look at each of the top tier payroll teams that are NOT in playoff contention right now and excuse their season.

• #2. Boston: still have the 5thbest record and would be leading most any other division.  Lots of injuries, transition year away from expensive older vets like Ortiz and Lowell, $10M in dead money.  Theo keeps talking about a transition year; he’s biding his time before he can re-do the team in the image of the 04 and 07 teams.
• #3: Cubs: over paid for Soriano, Zambrano underperforming, Fukodome bad signing.  Just not well constructed team.  Hendry on the GM hot seat.
• #4: Philadelphia: great team, killed by injuries and inconsistent pitching.  You wonder how badly the Lee trade bungling will hurt them in years to come.  I still think they’ll overtake Atlanta, especially now that Chipper is done for the season.
• #5: Mets: how does Minaya still have a job?  They seem to spend money because they have it, not because they acquire good players.  Oliver Perez, Jason Bay god awful signings, and just Santana and Beltran cost more than the San Diego Payroll annually.
• #6: Tigers: you have to hand it to the Tigers owner, who purposely over spent b/c his town was so badly hurt in the economic crash.  But he has some very expensive players tied up (Cabrera, Verlander, Guillen) for a number of years and their role players aren’t good enough.  Dark Days ahead for Detroit.

So, the #1 payroll team has the best record and the #30 payroll team has the worst record.   But the teams in between aren’t acting like we expect.  Is this Moneyball re-incarnated?  Well no.  Billy Beane’s teams success in Oakland was less about his OBP-centric stats drafting and more about the three starting pitchers (Zito,  Hudson, Mulder) his teams were graced with (as pointed out in this excellent Buzz Bissinger article).  What it does point out is that good GMs (even the wealthy ones in NY and Boston) are starting to value the draft pick and the young player and are becoming better and better at drafting them.  San Diego and Texas both kept payroll low, traded away vets, accumulated draft picks.  Texas easily has the best farm system in the majors and now has a powerhouse team for very little money.  This is exactly the same blueprint practiced for years by Florida and Tampa, though Texas has shown they are not afraid to buy talent at the deadline (something the panhandle state teams never do and thus one of the reasons why neither team really has any appreciable fan following).

So, what should base ball do?

1. Should there be a salary cap?  Well, yes I think so.  I think the Yankees have a totally unfair player advantage over the rest of the league and it shouldn’t be possible to have 4 times the payroll of a team within  your own division.  But i have no idea how to implement it.

2. Should there be a salary floor?  Well, no.  Because teams like Texas, Florida, San Diego, Tampa and (in years past) Oakland have consistently shown that you can build great cheap teams by depending on player development, drafting and having an entire team of pre-arbitration or arbitration-eligible guys.  You can’t force a team to spend money just to achieve an arbitrary salary floor.  Plus you have to allow teams to blow things up and start over (essentially what Toronto is doing now) and try to build for the long run.

Droopy passed along a great trivia question; what four players have hit 400+ homers and have 10 gold gloves.  (the question was spurred on by one of the four answers, one Andruw Jones, having just hit his 400th homer this season and joining this exclusive club).  (The other three answers are at the bottom of the post).

But, it got me to thinking.  Andruw Jones is only 33, has 400 homers, 10 gold gloves and should be towards the end of his prime as a ballplayer.  Instead he seems to have basically forgotten  how to hit at age 30 and is bouncing from team to team to try to regain his swing.  Certainly Andruw is not a HoFamer at this point in his career, but if he was able to turn it around and become relevant again, even for a couple of seasons, and achieve some milestone numbers he very well may be.   I think the epitaph of Jones’ career will read something like, incredibly accomplished early in his career but inexplicably washed up by age 30.  Steroids?  Falsified age? Anything is possible.

Here’s a couple other test cases for HoF worthiness:
1. Johnny Damon.  Currently sits at 2527 career hits at age 36 and still hits well enough that you’d have to think he has an ouside shot at 3000.  Is he a hall of famer

if he gets to 3000?  The only guys who have 3000 that are NOT in the hall are:

• Rose (ineligible)
• Biggio (will be soon)
• Palmeiro (Roids).

Bonds retired with2935 (roids).  Jeter will get 3000 but i think he’s HoF material no doubt.  Harold Baines another test case; 2866 hits but isn’t getting close to induction on the votes.

My vote: nope.  Not an impact player, also an accumulator of stats over a long career.  He’s actually a worse fielder and hitter than Baines.

2. Jim Thome.  Currently sitting at 578 homers career and almost a lock to get 600 at age 39 and producing pretty well this year.  A number of years getting

MVP consideration but never finishing top 3.  5-time all star.  Some fo the hall of fame standards stat measurements have him just over the cusp.  My “standard” is always the stardom or fear factor test.  When Thome comes up, are you scared?  Are you on the edge of your seat?  Would you (as a visiting fan) see his team coming to town and think about buying tickets so you could see him (like Pujols with St. Louis for example).

My vote: borderline yes.

3. Adam Dunn.  (for the sake of argument you have to project his career to what it probably ends up at).  I’ll project him, sitting at 346 now but on pace to end
this year at 360 , to end up with right around 600 homers for his career. Analysis: give him 40-40-38-35-30-30 for the next six seasons, taking him to age 36 and sitting at around 575 homers.  Even if you trend those numbers down a bit, he’s still sitting in the mid 500s at age 36, and Thome has hit hearly 100 homers after that age.  Hell, if Dunn stays healthy and doesn’t precipitously decline in power (like Ortiz), he has an outside shot at 700 homers.  Unbelievable.

But you look at his career “accomplishments” and there’s NOTHING there.  To date he has made ONE all star team, finished 4th in ROY voting and in only two seasons
has even had an MVP vote, let alone come close to winning.  If Dunn reaches 600 homers is he a hall of famer?

My vote: nope.

There’s other great test cases out there (David Ortiz, Carlos Delgado, Jim Edmonds or Paul Konerko) with it comes to looking at “home run accumulations” for a career.  Perhaps another time.

ps: Trivia Answer: Andruw Jones, Ken Griffey Jr, Willie Mays and Mike Schmidt.  Al Kaline had 10 gold gloves but exactly 399 career homers.  Barry Bonds only managed 8 gold gloves before turning into a hulking left fielder on or about the same time he found steroids in 1999.

1. The Haren trade was highway robbery by the Angels.  I know Haren’s numbers aren’t great but to get a guy who nearly finished last season with a 1.000 whip and got Cy Young votes for a #5 starter and some random prospects is crazy.

2. Stark is reporting a possible 3-team deal;

• White Sox get Adam Dunn
• Nationals get Edwin Jackson
• Arizona gets prospects (from both teams potentially)

If the nats do this I will scream.  There is no way in hell Dunn is worth *just* Edwin Jackson.  Especially not the way he’s pitching right now, in a big ole pitchers park in Arizona.

boss

So, you’re the defending NL champs but you’re in third place in an increasingly tough-looking division and you’ve only gotten a combined total of about 100 games through the first 60% of the season out of your double play combo.

Plus, ont he same day you demote your #5 starter (kendrick) and you lose your #4 starter (Moyer) possibly for the season with an elbow strain (he’s 47 remember? I don’t think he’s bouncing back soon).

What do you do?  Droopy?
– will the phillies trade for Oswalt or Dan Haren?  Do they have enough in the minors to actaully get those calibre guys?

– Do you just make do with what you have, convert Contreras back to a starter, give Figueroa more starts?  Is Happ back yet?

– What do you guys have in AA/AAA in terms of starting talent?

At least Hamels has come back to reasonable effectiveness this year…

1. Atilano.  In 16 starts he’s now 6-7, 5.15 era, 1.49 whip.  The team is 6-10 in his starts. More telling: in 5 of his 16 starts now he’s given up as many earned runs as innings pitched.  That’s just not acceptable.  I realize there’s nobody really better (Chico?  Martis?) until one of Detwiler/Wang/Zimmermann/Marquis/Olsen recovers from injury but man.  Its brutal.

2. Leake.  Like this kid.  He looks a lot like Bronson Arroyo, even down to the stupid haircut. A ton of movement with a mlb-average fastball and decent control.  I know everyone is talking about the St. Louis rookie pitcher Garcia  but i like this guy.  Taken 2 picks before Storen; imagine if he had fallen to us at the #10 spot lastyear?

3. At what point in the season do we do what is obviously right for the team and stick Bernadina in center and Morse in right?  Morse is hitting .324/.375/.554 with 4 homers in 80 plate appearances.  That’s almost a 30 homer clip extrapolated out to a full season.  Have we found our right field solution by accident?  Bernadina is doing great; he has some power, hits for average, has some decent speed (7 sbs).  Maybe we stick him in center.  Morgan has easily the worst OPS+ on the team right now and has a .315 on base percentage at leadoff.  Unacceptable.  Even Guzman, he of the 4 walks in 600 plate appearances last season, has a better OBP this year.  And nearly as many walks as Morgan!

Nats currently on track for 69-93 season and the 7th overall pick.  And if we succumb to pressure and trade Dunn or Willingham or both, we may not score the rest of the season…

Before you read this article, here’s the question (the answer is in the article).

How many Major League Baseball players or Managers in 2009 had completed a 4 year college degree?

30 teams, 25 players on active roster plus 30 managers = 780 or so population base.

Screwing around at cnnsi.com while eating, here’s their list of top 10 most unbreakable baseball records:

1. Cy Young’s 511 career victories
2. Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak
3. Ty Cobb’s career .366 batting average
4. Rickey Henderson’s season SB record of 130
5. Babe Ruth’s career .690 slugging pct
6. Barry Bonds’ season record for walks: 232.
7. Nolan Ryan’s career Ks of 5,714.
8. Jack Chesbro’s season record for complete games: 48.
9. Ted William’s lifetime OBP of .482
10. Hank Aaron’s 25 career all-star games (somewhat aided by multiple games for several years, but he still played in an all star game in 21 of his 23 seasons).

Most of these I tend to agree with … but there are certainly other records out there that are in a similar vein to Cy Young’s career victory record.  Single season wins, single
season innings pitched, starts, complete games, etc all are basically obsolete benchmarks.  Hell, I’d be willing to wager against someone ever winning 30 games in a season ever again.

Not sure i’d say that a 56-game hitting streak is unassailable.  Yes it’s been a while since it happened, but it routinely gets approached.  You see 30, 35, 40 game streaks
with some frequency.
Plus, i think the stolen base is coming back into vogue.  Maybe not close to 118 or 130 in a season, but i think its just a matter of time before we start seeing higher totals.
There seems to be a dearth of quality defensive catchers these days.
anyway, random thoughts.