I Blame the U.S. Treasury Department

Okay, so that last little simulation was fun, wasn’t it?  What’s that you say?  Well, yes, I suppose that’s true — while it may have been fun (or not), it was also totally inaccurate:

PREDICTION: Angels in 5 | ACTUAL: Red Sox in 4
PREDICTION: Rays in 4 | ACTUAL: Rays in 4
PREDICTION: Brewers in 4 | ACTUAL: Phillies in 4
PREDICTION: Cubs in 4 | ACTUAL: Dodgers in 3

Blech.  Though the quarter has John Lackey’s approval, it gets very little support from the rest of the baseball world.  The Cubs winning in October?  And those sad Brewers past the Phillies?  What was that coin THINKING?! One series correct as far as the team was concerned, and two series correct as far as the number of games were concerned.  The chances of nailing each advancing team was 1/16, while the chances of getting each number of games correctly was 1/81 (each series has two possible team outcomes – Team A or Team B – and three possible games outcomes; 3, 4, or 5).  Coincidentally or not, we probably could’ve done better by using what we (apparently) knew about the teams: the Angels can’t beat the Sox in October, and the Cubs can’t win in October period, for example.

Let’s quickly try this again, shall we?  We have better odds here, especially of just correctly picking the two World Series teams: 1 in 4.  Our odds at nailing the correct winners AND the number of games for the remainder of the postseason?  1 in 512.  Yikes!  And finally, our odds at picking the winner of every single game correctly for the rest of the season?  Less than one in two million.  And you thought this would be easy.

ALCS: Red Sox (96-67) vs. RAYS (97-65)
HHHTH: Rays in 5

Your new classic AL East showdown: the upstart Rays versus the stalwart ‘07 champs.  The Rays take the first two games at Tropicana behind Shields and Kazmir, but Lester (who else?) gets the Sox right back in it with a Game three victory as the series returns to Fenway.  The euphoria is short-lived: Wakefield proves ineffective in Game 4 (Longoria puts one over the monster that takes about 45 seconds to land), and when the Rays return to the Trop with a chance to clinch it, they do so, waiting out Matsuzaka’s wildness to earn a trip to the big dance.  Evan Longoria’s your MVP.

NLCS: Dodgers (84-78) vs. PHILLIES (90-72)
THTTTHH: Phillies in 7

The superstar series of the postseason, this one has it all: two historic franchises, each with superstar offensive players, knuckle up and give the people seven memorable games.  Manny Ramirez!  Ryan Howard!  Russell Martin!  Chase Utley!  The Phillies actually go up 3-1 in the series, including a gutsy Jamie Moyer victory, but let the Dodgers even things up by Game 6 at Chavez Ravine.  Cole Hamels, pitching without his full alotment of rest, keeps his team in the game, but this one comes down to the bullpens.  The Phillies go up late and hold on for the victory.  Shane Victorino gets the NLCS MVP nod.

World Series: Phillies (90-72) vs. RAYS (97-65)
THHTTH: Phillies in 6

The series is tied 2-2 after 4 games, but a crushing Game 5 loss at the home spells disaster for the Rays, who can’t recover in time to prevent the Phillies winning the world series for the first time since 1980, much to the chagrin of everyone outside of Philadelphia.  The Rays have established themselves as serious perennial contenders for the postseason, and leave little doubt that they’ll be back in the thick of things in 2009, but this one goes to Utley’s bunch.  Brad Lidge closes out three of the four Phillies wins after a rather sketchy NLCS, and takes home World Series MVP.

Finally, I’ll briefly explore the idea of simply picking the two World Series teams.  The odds of doing so “randomly” are 1/4, so if we do four simulations, maybe we’ll have one of them prove right.  Home teams are still heads:

1. HH (Rays/Phillies)
2. HT (Rays/Dodgers)
3.  HH (Rays/Phillies)
4. TT (Sox/Dodgers)

The only combination we didn’t get was TH, or Sox/Phillies, while the one we got twice was HH, Rays/Phillies.  Our odds are pretty good here: we’ve got a 75% chance that the World Series matchup appears on that list.

Do you know something the coin doesn’t know?  There IS a comments section: see if you’ve got the smarts to beat the coin flip for the rest of the postseason.

 

Playoff Prognosticating: George Washington Edition

Playoff time tends to turn baseball on its head a little bit.  After an arduous marathon of a season where the league’s most talented teams usually filter to the top, the best-of-the-best suddenly are decided by short five and seven game series.  The Blue Jays and Orioles may play each other 18 times a year, but when it comes down to deciding if the Phillies are better than the Brewers, hell, let’s just play five and move on.

I’m not suggesting any sort of change, of course.  Not only is there no practical way to “reform” – if such a word is even proper – the system of deciding who’s the best, but there also really isn’t even a need for it.  For all of the logical appeal of tests which are long and thorough, there’s something to be said for the fact that if you’re really the best, you should be expected to be able to summon the skills that brought you there when you really need them the most.  There’s always flukes (see: 2007 New York Giants), but for the most part, the logic holds.  It’s the playoffs: put up or shut up.

Still, there’s always the thought that anything could happen: someone gets hot at the right time, a key player is banged up, and voila, the Wild Card team is standing in the winners’ circle.  The trophy’s not given to the team with the best regular season record, it’s given to the team that wins a few short series against the best teams in the game.  With such a small sample size, there’s an indisputable element of chance – some might say randomness – in how this sort of thing is decided.

With that, I thought it’d be a fun exercise to do a playoff forecast using the sturdiest decider of outcomes known to man: the coin.  For each postseason game, I flipped a quarter, Heads representing the Home team and Tails the Away team.  It’s about as simple a simulation as you can come up with, and while it is decidedly brainless in nature, if it’s truly the case that any of these teams could win, flipping a coin may in fact be a somewhat reasonable prediction tool.  Probably not though.

As a refresher, four teams from each league make the playoffs.  Division Series are best of five (2-2-1) while Championship Series and the World Series are best of seven (2-2-1-1-1).

Here’s how the miniature World Series shook out in my living room:

ALDS: Red Sox (96-67) vs. ANGELS (100-62)
THTHH: Angels in 5.

Despite winning Game 1 on the road behind an impressive start from Jon Lester – who furthers his credentials as a post-season ace – the Boston offense sputters absent meaningful contributions from Drew and Lowell, who appear gimpy.   The Angels win a crucial Game 3 at Fenway Park against a less-than-100% Josh Beckett, and clinch an ALCS berth with a Game 5 win at home, ending a series that many consider somewhat boring.

NLDS: Brewers (90-72) vs. PHILLIES (92-70)
HTHH: Brewers in 4.

Another year, another disappointing postseason for the Phils: after being swept out of contention by last year’s NL Team of Destiny, they fall victim to a similar fate in 2008.  Cole Hamels beats Yovani Gallardo in Philadelphia as the series kicks off, but Sabathia evens the series in Game 2 before the Phillies’ rotation depth proves inadequate and the Brewers win both games at home, carried by the red-hot Ryan Braun.  Jimmy Rollins, who finishes the series 2-13 (two singles), is pilloried by the local media.  Brad Lidge never sees a save situation, but pitches well in his spare innings of work.

ALDS: White Sox (88-74) vs. RAYS (97-65)
HTTT: Rays in 4 .

Hardball pundits spin the White Sox’ road to the postseason as a negative, an extra-harrowing journey that may have extracted a bit too much energy from the Southsiders.  They’re right.  The rotation is all out of sorts, and despite a Game 2 win (Kazmir pitches well, but the bullpen coughs up an L), the White Sox can’t really put any momentum together at all.  Carl Crawford’s return gives an added boost to the already-potent Rays lineup.

NLDS: Dodgers (84-78) vs. CUBS (97-64)
HHHT: Cubs in 4.

After Lowe and Dempster post matching solid starts, Game 1 goes into extras, where the Cubs score a huge walk-off win at home behind an Alfonso Soriano homer.  The loss rattles the Dodgers, who are totally shut down by Carlos Zambrano in Game 2.  The Dodgers score a win at home in Game 3 once Harden is out of the picture, but lose a close Game 4, as Ted Lilly gets the job done in spacious Dodger Stadium.

ALCS: Rays (97-65) at ANGELS (100-62)
HTTTTTT: Angels in 6.

The Angels eat Kazmir up in Game 1, but the Rallyin’ Rays come right back the next day and even the series at one apiece.  Heading back to Tampa, the young Rays suffer two crushing home defeats, unable to mount comebacks off a lights-out Angels bullpen that has all the answers to Joe Maddon’s lineup changes. Mark Teixeira and Vlad Guerrero team up to hand Kazmir his second loss in as many tries against the squad.  A Game 5 victory gives the Rays hope (Evan Longoria provides the dramatics), but they lose Game 6, tragically going 0-3 at the Trop to end a storybook season and a wild series in which the away team won all but one game.

NLCS: Brewers (90-72) at CUBS (97-64)
TTHH: Brewers in 4.

Cub Clobberer?  The Cubs line Zambrano up to start Game 1 at home, but the Brewers lead the game off with back-to-back bombs; frustrated, Zambrano loses his cool and can’t regain composure.  CC, on the other hand, seems born for the limelight, shining on the national stage in The House that Banks Built; with the sweep, he only needs one start here for the Brewers to advance.  The Milwaukee offense is humming at this point, and nothing the Cubs can throw at them – Rich Harden, Ryan Dempster, Kerry Wood – seems to be able to stop the bleeding.  J.J. Hardy homers four times in the series and is named NLCS MVP.  To the eternal chagrin of Cubs fans, they’re sent home after the four-game sweep, left to talk of curses while the Brewers head to the World Series.

WORLD SERIES: Brewers (90-72) at ANGELS (100-62)
HTHTTH: Brewers in 6.

John Lackey hurls 8 shutout innings and the Angels muster enough offense to squeak out a 2-0 victory against Sabathia in Game 1, but Yovani Gallardo strikes out 11 batters in 6 innings the next night and the Brewers are right back in the series.  Back in Milwaukee, the Angels win Game 4 behind another sterling effort by John Lackey, the Angels’ media darling on the mound, but lose Game 5 in Anaheim to Sabathia, given an “extra” days’ rest after losing Game 1.  The Series heads back to Milwaukee for Game 6, where the Brewers throw Yovani Gallardo against Joe Saunders.  The Brewers pound Saunders, who is removed before he can get out of the third inning.  It’s too late to stop the bleeding, though: the Brewers win 9-5, Salomon Torres closing out the victory in a non-save situation.  Before an exuberant home crowd, the Brewers storm the field, as cameras follow CC Sabathia tossing his teammates around in celebration like so many rag dolls.  Sabathia pitches well but goes 0-1 in the World Series; the MVP goes to Ryan Braun, who finishes 11-23 with 2 homers and 8 RBI, becoming a household name in the process.

 

Tim Lincecum and the Doomsday Argument

In the first half of the 16th century, Renaissance polymath Nicolaus Copernicus published what was perhaps the most important idea in the history of man’s study of astronomy: the earth is not the center of the universe.  It wasn’t until Galileo (and his telescope) began popularizing Copernicus’ theories that they really became explosively controversial, but by then, no amount of biblical repudiation could stop the tidal wave of scientific revolution.  The earth was no different from the sun’s other satellites: we did not stand at the center of the universe.

This discovery was subsequently spun into what is now popularly referred to as the Copernican Principle.  One of the fundamental tenets of modern physics, it holds that there are no special viewpoints in the universe, especially where humans are concerned: neither earth nor man has any special, unique, or privileged vantage point from which to watch time unfold.  In 1993, John Richard Gott III – now a professor at Princeton – formally argued that the principle applied to instances where nothing about any entity is “known” to be certain.  Dubbing his idea the “Copernican Method,” he stated that for any observable thing, there is a 95% chance (for example) you are seeing it in the middle 95% of its lifetime, and not in the first or last 2.5% (1/40th) of its lifetime.  This effectively means that the future longevity is 39 times as long as its past longevity (since 1/40th has passed, 39/40ths remain):

(1/39) time past < time future < (39) time past (P = 95%)

Gott has popularized the method by successfully predicting the longevities of scores of politicians, broadway plays, and the like.  He’s even applied it to the existence of the human race, a concept now referred to as the “Doomsday argument.”  Bizarre though it sounds, it is a straightforward mathematical concept: everything has a lifespan, and it’s entirely likely that nothing about your point of observation is unique in any way.  If your theory requires that an observer has a priveleged place in the universe, well, it’s garbage.

The lot of us are, in a very natural sort of way, always observing this or that.  We’re surrounded by people and animals and buildings and governments and social institutions.  They all began at some point, and so too must they end.  This is a concept very much in keeping with the careers of baseball players.  Some may last one game, some may last over a thousand.  The majority of the current careers of baseball players will meet neither of these extreme criteria.  Some will, though.  There’s a lot that can end a player’s career way before its time.

Tim Lincecum has thrown 354 innings in his brilliant young career, a figure which would remain unremarkable were it not for the fact that he’s 24 years old and his average start is a seven inning, 106 pitch affair.  Baseball Prospectus’ Pitcher Abuse Points – a system which uses pitch counts to create a metric by which to measure how heavily a pitcher’s arm has been taxed – grades Lincecum as the most overworked pitcher in the majors, and it’s not even close: the second-place arm, C.C. Sabathia, has 40% fewer abuse points than Lincecum, and he’s got over double the Abuse Points of the third-place contestant, Roy Halladay.  In 30 starts this year, Lincecum has thrown over 100 pitches 24 times, a usage pattern which is remarkably insane given the pitcher’s age and importance to the rebuilding franchise.  The Giants are a 68-81 ballclub, and Bruce Bochy is throwing pitch counts out the window: his last start was a complete game shutout of the Padres in which he threw a staggering 138 pitches, the most by any Major League starter this year.  Bochy later said it was time to “let the leash off,” and that he didn’t want Lincecum’s lack of a complete game to weigh on the minds of Cy Young voters.  It was Lincecum’s 17th win and the Giants’ 67th; the young rightie lays claim to over a quarter of the team’s victories.

What does the Copernican Method say about Lincecum’s career?  Easy: before he’s out of the league, we can say with 95% certainty that he’ll throw between 10 and 14,976 more innings.  If there is nothing unique about this specific moment in his career, we can be pretty sure that he’ll prove the Copernican Method correct in the last two weeks of the 2008 season.  There’s two ways he’ll reveal to us that there was something off about our observation: either he’ll suffer some catastrophic injury by year’s end, or he’ll pitch about 76 more seasons.  Most fans would tell you that neither is terribly likely, and they’re right, philosophically and mathematically.  There’s a one in 40 chance that Lincecum’s arm doesn’t make it through the season.

One can’t help but worry about Bochy’s probing of those lower limits.  Last month, I mentioned that Tim Lincecum deserved, but probably wouldn’t get, serious Cy Young attention.  Since then, he’s been vicious and has forced his way not only into the argument, but into (in my opinion) the winner’s circle.  Webb’s got the 20 wins, but Lincecum’s got him by 70 strikeouts and a half-run in ERA.  He is the best pitcher in the National League, leads the majors in strikeouts, weighs 170 pounds, and right now is the most exciting pitcher in baseball.  Anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.  His delivery is pure poetry.  Peering at the batter from over his left shoulder, he rocks on his left leg and fiendishly curls his lip before cocking back and unwhorling into a startlingly explosive stride that, according to a Tom Verducci article, is seven and a half feet in length.  When threatened in the wild, many species of animal will adopt bodily postures and behavior that make them appear far larger than they actually are: this is what Lincecum does on the mound, only he has the poison to back it up.  He is less pitcher and more wunderkind trebuchet, his hips and shoulders flying through his motion and exploding towards home plate; when George Plimpton wrote his infamous Sidd Finch piece, he had no idea that the real-life version of the pitcher he prophesied had been born the summer before in Bellevue, Washington.  Taught by his father to pitch at an early age, Lincecum doesn’t believe in icing his arm after starts and has kept the same basic mechanics since he was five years old.

If he pitched for a contender, especially someone in the East, he’d be a national phenomenon: as it is, there’s multitudinous serious East Coast baseball fans who couldn’t pick the kid from a lineup of college juniors under six feet tall.  He’s esoterically mesmerising enough to be name-dropped in Asher Roth songs. If you’ve somehow never seen him pitch, please, do yourself a favor and look him up.  Watch his highlights, check out a game on MLBTV.

Unless your name is Kevin Kennedy, you don’t get to be a coach in the majors by being massively stupid.  One would hope that Bochy has some understanding of what he’s doing when he lets Lincecum throw that many pitches in “meaningless” games.  It’s Bochy’s contention that Lincecum is such a freak of nature (amongst his athletic talents are the ability to walk on his hands and do standing backflips – no, seriously) that the gloves which handle normal young pitchers aren’t to be worn with him, that he’s the rare type of physical specimen around which the conventional laws of the human body cease being applicable.

“The chance to get a shutout is big for a pitcher. His nickname is The Freak. He’s never had any arm issues,” Bochy said. “There’s no question we’re going to give him a chance to get the shutout right there. But I’ll tell you now. He won’t get a chance to do it next time.”

Tim Lincecum is on the precipice of moving into National Treasure territory, and his season is one that deserves far more acknowledgement than it’s getting.  With any luck at all, he’ll have a healthy career (his father claims to throw in the high 80s, even in his fifties) that will last well into the next decade.  Bochy’s decision to let him throw 138 pitches in his last outing whipped up a very minor media tongue-clucking session, due mostly to the fact that a) no one really knows who he is and b) those who do know him think that maybe, just maybe, this kid’s unbreakable.  Maddux mixed with Martinez, a rubber-arm for the ages, a product of the finely-crafted methodologies of a diminutive family of heady pitchers.  Pay attention to Tim Lincecum, and for the love of the infield fly rule, hope that the little guy’s body delivers on his infinite promise.

 

The One Where He Knows Time’s Up

There is no guarantee in this game of ours that innate talent will be the ultimate measure by which a players’ legend is defined.  Some men, the sport reveals to us, simply cannot coax their bodies into allowing them to be the players that, with a stronger meniscus here or a more resilient brachioradialis there, they would otherwise be capable of becoming.  The baseball athlete is a quirky breed.  The long years and highly specified skills involved ensure that seasoned decathletes stand no better a chance of enduring a season than David Wells does.  Fitness and athleticism undoubtedly help, of course, but ultimately, the sport will tell you whether or not you’re genetically cut out to handle it.

Young uber-achievers like Rocco Baldelli know this fact just as well as the Dmitri Youngs do.  Ever seen Gabe Kapler without his shirt on?  How about Kevin Youkilis?  Sure a defensive back looks different than a nose tackle does, but few physical endeavors are so diversely populated than the acts of hitting, pitching, and fielding are.  You don’t really need muscles to drive in 100 runs.  There’s no way around it.  Over thousands of at-bats and innings played, you are what you are.  Thanks for the bench-presses, though.  Really.

This reality ensures that the annals of baseball history will be dotted with guys like Mike Sweeney.  A 14-year veteran of the game, Sweeney has just 4,794 at-bats, or an average of 343 per season.  This is not due to a lack of skills: you don’t hang around the majors for 14 years on luck, and Sweeney’s got a career OPS+ of 119 and almost as many walks (491) as strikeouts (561).  The man simply can’t stay healthy.  From 1999-2002, Sweeney hit .324 with 104 HR, averaging 96 runs and 108 RBI over those four seasons.  All the more impressively, he walked 250 times over that span while only striking out 225 times.  In 2008, only two players are on pace to finish the season with a BB/K over 1.00 and an ISO over .200: Chipper Jones and Albert Pujols (they both did it in 2007 as well, as did Guerrero and Ortiz).  Sweeney didn’t quite have their credentials, but that gives you an idea of how good he was in his prime, brief though it may have been.  Hell, he even stole 33 bases over that time.

He was a five-time All Star, and though he played for a number of bad Royals teams from 1995-2007, he wasn’t ushered in on the back of the one-player-per-team rule: he was simply an All-Star caliber player.  He drove in 144 runs (29 HR) in 2000, and in 2002, finished sixth in the league with an OPS+ of 148.  In July of 2002, he hit the disabled list for the first time in his career, falling victim to a lower back/hip strain.  He’d never reach 2002’s total of 471 at-bats again.  Back tightness.  Groin strains.  Hamstring pulls.  Now, doctors tell him that he needs microfracture surgery on both knees.  He barely latched on with the Athletics after earning a minor league contract with the team this past spring.

Having played in the Royals organization for 17 years (he was drafted by the club in the 10th round in 1991), Sweeney will probably have his #29 jersey retired in Kansas City in due time.  He is, by all accounts, one of the nicest players in the game today: an devout Christian and fluent speaker of Spanish, Sweeney is involved in numerous charitable and social organizations, many of his own creation.  In his final game as a Royal, he purchased 500 tickets for local military personnel, and during his recent minor league rehab assignment for the Athletics, Sweeney purchased the minor leaguers post-game spreads for their clubhouse.  The day before Sweeney was activated, his AAA teammate SP Josh Outman was recalled by the A’s, and Sweeney told him that he’d be required to wear dress shoes on the road trip; when he showed up in tennis shoes and told Sweeney he couldn’t afford dress shoes, Sweeney purchased a pair for him.

As it happens, of course, many people will recall Sweeney not for his affability, but for uncharacteristically charging then-Tigers starter Jeff Weaver in 2001, hurling his helmet at the pitcher before bodyslamming him to the ground and inciting one of the most memorable on-field fracases of the past decade.  Sweeney has expressed some modicum of remorse for the incident, though if anything, the brawl should make people wonder just how big of an asshole Jeff Weaver is for teasing that kind of reaction out of a man like Sweeney.  The incident proved that he was no cream-puff, though, as did his 1997 appearance on Saturday Night Live alongside then-stars like Todd Hundley, Mark Wohlers, Marty Cordova, Jeff Fassero, Todd Zeile, and Rondell White in which he was shown parading a keg around a room.

The DH/1B has recently admitted that there’s a real possibility 2008 is his last year in the game.  At 35 years old, Sweeney has little left to prove between the foul lines: his body can’t handle the rigors of the season, and though he never played in a single post-season game, he’d have little chance of latching on with a contender in ‘09.

“There’s probably a better chance of me not playing next year than there is of me playing,” Sweeney said. “And if this is my last 30 days, I wanted to sprint to the finish line.”

Michael John Sweeney, hailing from Orange, California is the owner of a .299 lifetime batting average.  While such a figure may seem poetic to some and for all intents and purposes is no different than .300, by golly, I’ll be cheering for the man to get that measly point and ride off into the sunset with his perfectly fitting badge of achievement.  For anyone following along, here’s the very least of what he’ll need to do over the rest of the year to get there.  It won’t be easy:

ABs	H	AVG
20	9	.450
30	12	.400
40	15	.375
50	18	.360
60	21	.350
70	24	.343

He was hitting .292 before his latest DL stint, and the above figures, of course, round up.  I don’t think there’s any shame in .2995 though, and I doubt Mr. Sweeney does either.  And yeah, maybe he’ll be back next year, but it’s so much more romantic to imagine this being it.

He’ll hit his last home run soon.  Maybe he’ll steal one more base, or get plunked by another fastball.  He’s made his mark on the game, and will be content riding out his legacy, however small it may be outside the great state of Missouri.

Those at-bats will be tough to come by.  Good luck out there, Mike.

 

The Road to the Jensen Lewis Era

After parting ways with closer Bob Wickman during the 2006 season, the Cleveland Indians, in the midst of a season in which their +88 run differential resulted in only a disappointing 78-84 fourth place finish, needed a new closer. At this point, the Indians had established a recent history of getting saves from wherever they could.  Although Bob Wickman had been The Man in Cleveland for most of the last few years, and notched an impressive 45 saves in 2005, the Indians got four or more saves from four different pitchers in 2004, and no more than 25 from a single reliever in 2002 or 2003.

As such, the last couple months of 2006 served as something of a tryout period.  The Indians, in a division where three teams ahead of them would go on to win 90 or more games, weren’t playing for anything, and one of their goals in August and September was to find someone who could fill the large hole that Wickman had left at the back of the bullpen.  The results were disastrous.

Wickman pitched his last game for Cleveland on July 19 before heading to Atlanta. It was July 30 before the Indians played a game in which a situation arose where their new closer ought to be used; it was 3-3 heading into the ninth inning against the Mariners, and Eric Wedge called on Fausto Carmona to pitch the top of the inning.  Three hits, two walks, and four runs later, the Mariners were up 7-3 and on their way to a victory.  Still, the appearance wasn’t even a genuine save opportunity, so Carmona was called upon the following night in Boston, when the Indians took an 8-6 lead into the bottom of the ninth.  With one out and two on, David Ortiz launched a shot into the Fenway stands that ended the game with a 9-8 Boston win, and also launched an unbelievable run of 9th-inning ineptitude for Carmona.  His next two appearances came in one-run save opportunites, which he turned into walkoff victories for Boston (again) and Detroit, respectively.

All told, Carmona’s four-game run of ‘closer opportunties’ resulted in this line:

0-4, 2.2 IP, 8 H, 11 ER, 4 BB, 4 K, 2 HR, 37.13 ERA, 1.682 OOPS

Is it any wonder that those of us who had him on our fantasy teams during this stretch were initially a little skeptical at his success in the starting rotation a year later?

While the rest of the Indians’ experiments at closer that season weren’t as epicly bad as Carmona was, they certainly didn’t find anyone they had any confidence in heading into 2007.  After eight impressive innings from C.C. Sabathia on August 18, Brian Sikorski and Jason Davis combined to blow a 5-3 lead to Tampa Bay, resulting in yet another walkoff loss.  Tom Mastny briefly looked like he might be the solution, recording saves in five straight chances between August 19 and September 2. His last two save opportunties of the season, however, resulted in a walkoff win for the White Sox and then a blown save vs. the Twins.

Clearly, a solution was needed.  The Indians, despite their tough division and their disappointing 2006 win-loss record, were poised to be a dangerous team in 2007.  And, in fact, much of that unsatisfactory 2006 record could be attributed to the their bullpen, which compiled a 4.73 ERA, including an unsightly 5.62 ERA in save situations.

That solution, as it turns out, was Joe Borowski.  Signed for a one year, $4.5 million deal in December 2006, Borowski was coming off a solid, if not spectacular, season for Florida: 33 saves with a 3.75 ERA.  No one in Cleveland thought he was among the league’s elite firemen, but surely he’d fare better than the rookies and journeymen that the Indians were throwing out there in the ninth for the last half of 2006, right?

Well…. the answer to that question is debatable.  Borowski ended up blowing eight saves.  But he also racked up 45 of them.  But he did so while putting up a 5.07 ERA.  The most important thing he did in 2007 was managing to keep the closer’s job from the first day in April until the Indians were eliminated from the playoffs in October.  The fact that Borowski was able to maintain the job and put up as many saves as he did with such ugly peripherals (a 1.43 WHIP to go with that 5.07 ERA), resulted in his being immortalized, following the season, in two separate ways:

1. Fantasy baseball pundits, in arguing that saves were saves, no matter what ERA and WHIP figures were attached to them, were able to point to Borowski as the quintessential example of this.  No need to trot Todd Jones’s name out there anymore!

2. It led to a friend and I coining “The Borowski Rule,” which applied Eric Wedge’s school of bullpen managing to relationships.  The abridged theory: If a romantic interest was in a relationship with a Joe Borowski-caliber boyfriend, it wasn’t enough to be a Rafael Betancourt-caliber setup man (while Borowski was making Indians’ fans’ hearts race in ninth innings in 2007, Betancourt was posting an outlandish 1.47 ERA and 0.76 WHIP as the eighth inning guy). You had to hope that a few mistakes were made and saves were blown along the way, and even then, who knows how much loyalty that girl has to “Borowski.”

Of course, early in 2008, both of these arguments fell apart: Borowski’s injury-riddled season resulted in even worse numbers than 2007’s: a 7.56 ERA and 1.92 WHIP in 16.2 IP.  The injuries didn’t fit into the analogy of The Borowski Rule, and what Betancourt did when he was given a shot at the closer’s gig was unsettling for the theory, to say the least.  Meanwhile, even when he was able to pitch, Borowski was supplanted from the ninth inning, ruining that theory that fantasy experts were spouting.

And still the Indians couldn’t find their closer.  As mentioned, when Betancourt finally got his shot, he didn’t exactly live up to the expectations he’d established following his 2007 season; his first ten appearances after Borowski went on the DL resulted in the following line:

0-2, 8.2 IP, 10 H, 8 ER, 2 BB, 7 K, 8.31 ERA

Although he only blew one save opportunity, while converting four, and his WHIP suggested that he’d been a bit unlucky, his trial period was over.  Wedge was still managing, and his trigger finger had gotten a little quicker following the Carmona incident in 2006.  This led to a revolving door of closer candidates getting their shot in Cleveland this year.  Masa Kobayashi held the role briefly; Borowski got another shot when he was briefly healthy; Rafael Perez got a chance or two, but the team clearly feels that his left arm and ability to go multiple innings are more valuable in middle relief.

Which brings us to Jensen Lewis.

Jensen Lewis is not an elite major league pitcher.  He’s still young, having just turned 24 earlier this season, and as a third round pick in 2005, he has worked his way to the majors quickly.  It’s entirely possible that he could still develop into something like an elite major league pitcher.  But he’s just not there yet.  As recently as June of this year, he was in Buffalo, Cleveland’s AAA affiliate, sorting out issues with his velocity and control.  His stats this year are mediocre; a 4.05 ERA, 1.46 WHIP, and 41:22 K/BB ratio aren’t exactly what you want to see from your closer.

But this is Cleveland.  The Cleveland that made it to within one game of the World Series last year with Joe Borowski.  The Cleveland whose save leaders by season since 2000 have been Steve Karsay, Danys Baez, and Bob Wickman.  So when Lewis converts his first seven save opportunites this year, putting him, by the way, in the team lead for 2008 saves, fans get excited.  Thoughts of Tom Mastny fade away.  Eric Wedge starts suggesting that Lewis “looks outstanding” and is showing “a lot of moxie.”

For a franchise that has, perhaps astutely so, never shelled out big bucks for a top-notch bullpen arm, is there any doubt that, barring a September collapse, Lewis will begin the 2009 season as the closer?  Whether he’s The Man for the future remains to be seen, but right now he looks like Mariano Rivera to Indians fans, so they’re just enjoying it while it lasts.

 

Is Chase Utley worthy of MVP consideration?

Chase Utley is the best second baseman on the planet.  There are, dotting the rosters of major league clubs throughout the country, a number of very good ones.  Mark Ellis is a defensive whiz.  Dustin Pedroia is a sparkplug.  Brian Roberts is speedy, Brandon Phillips is toolsy.  Dan Uggla is strong.  Ian Kinsler is dynamic.  They’re not as good as Chase, though, and they know it.  Utley is a top-five defensive 2B (RZR: .837, FP: .984), and has become the premier offensive 2B of our time: his 127 OPS+ is highest among active 2B with at least 3,000 plate appearances (Chase himself doesn’t actually qualify for that list, but he likely will by the end of the season).  Plus, he’s “only” 29.  It’s ridiculously early to begin considering these things, but if he stays healthy, he could one day have a Hall of Fame case a la the incredible Jeff Kent, from whom Chase is grabbing the top 2B reigns.

2008, though, has been something of a forgotten year for him.  How much buzz have you really been hearing about the guy?  After jumping into the spotlight with a .309/.379/.540 line in 2006, Utley got better across the board in 2007, going .332/.410/.566 while earning MVP consideration (he finished 8th, but a lot of Rollins voters could easily have gone with him instead).  He’s currently at .281/.365/.554 and has slid backwards everywhere but the power category, thanks to what would appear to be an increased number of pulled “line drive” home runs: only three of his homers have been left of the second base bag, and the average apex height of his homers is 90.4 feet above field level this year, compared to 110.4 in 2007 (and an average of 100 for teammate Ryan Howard this year).  Utley’s Isolated Power figure of .266 (weighting doubles and triples equally) is a career-best and just behind Uggla’s .268 figure among all second basemen.  No one else is even over .200.

While Utley’s power numbers have increased, his power probably hasn’t actually increased in any way this year.  His doubles have actually dipped a little bit (48 in 2007, currently at 33), so his slugging has basically stayed the same.  His 45-point drop in on-base percentage is due mostly to a significant decline in batting average, as his BB and HBP rates are just about the same.  He’s also posting the same strikeout rate (16.7%) as he did in 2007, which would indicate that his low batting average is a little unlucky.  This would appear to have some truth to it: his contact rate is the exact same this year as last (84.82%), but his BABIP has fallen an incredible 85 points over that timespan, from .368 to .283.  From 2005-2007, Utley posted a .340 BABIP, so he’s certainly better than his .283 average has shown, and with a 22.6% line drive rate, definitely deserves a higher season average.

Still, it’s practically impossible for Utley to be considered for the MVP with that ugly .283 mark (right?), which is why it was slightly surprising that his face was one of three (alongside Pujols and Sabathia) to appear on ESPN’s MLB front page pointing to a Rob Neyer-led MVP debate.  No NL player has won the MVP and had an average that low since Dale Murphy hit .281 in 1982 to lead the Braves to the NLCS.  In prefacing his recent ESPN chat, Neyer had this to say about Utley’s chances at the award:

If Utley hadn’t spent a [month] on the DL last year, he might well have aced teammate Jimmy Rollins for MVP honors. This year Utley’s missed only two games, and is probably going to shatter his personal bests in both home runs and RBI. If the Phillies beat the Mets again this year, Utley’s going to get more credit than anybody else.

At 30 home runs, Utley will probably surpass his career high of 32, set in 2006.  “Shattering” his personal best in RBI, though, is another matter entirely: currently sitting on 83, Utley is 22 back of his career best of 105 RBI in 2005.  At his current pace, he’ll need about 125 at-bats to match that total, or 3.39 AB/game for the rest of the Phillies’ regular season.  Chase is about as tough as they come, but with a reportedly balky hip, those at-bats are not guaranteed (though in the middle of a pennant race, the hip would have to be broken for him to take himself out of a game.)

Predicting RBI remains too complex a task to reliably do, but it’s worth noting that Utley’s production in that department has steadily declined as 2008 has gone on.  After driving in 47 runs between April and May, he knocked in 16 in June, 10 in July, and is sitting on 8 in August.  His current six game RBI-less streak matches his longest of the season; meanwhile, the Phillies averaged just under three runs per game over that stretch, going 3-3.

The Phillies currently sit a game and a half behind the Mets, and Neyer is right: he’s their most important player, and has a massive 1.072 OPS in Phillies wins compared to a .724 figure in Phillies losses.  That BABIP could actually end up working in his favor: if his strikeouts don’t increase, Utley stands a good chance of running into some better fortunes in September, where a high-profile pennant race could thrust him (and his theoretical mashing) into the spotlight.  He was a popular “should’ve been” pick for last year’s NL MVP, which could also work in his favor (voters will be well acquainted with him).  Plus, most of his offensive competition should be sitting at home this October (Albert Pujols is the best hitter in the NL, and it’s not close).

For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that the pendulum swings the other way starting tonight, and Utley gets extremely hot.  We’ll set “extremely hot” equal to his performance level this past April, where he batted .352 and cranked 10 homers in 108 at-bats.  We’ll also give him that 125 at-bats we talked about earlier.  What do Chase Utley’s final 2008 numbers look like in that scenario?

594 AB, 42 HR, 108 R, 107 RBI, .298 AVG, .590 SLG.

That’d be an incredible HR total, but his R/RBI numbers wouldn’t be all that crazy in terms of his career output.  The batting average would still be relatively low for an MVP candidate, but he would essentially be a .300 hitter with 40+ home runs as a second baseman.  His 42 home runs would actually tie Rogers Hornsby (1922) and Davey Johnson (1973) for the most ever hit by a 2B in a single season, and while he couldn’t match Hornsby’s .401 batting average if he was hitting off a tee for the rest of the season, he’d best Johnson’s .270, making it one of the greatest offensive seasons by a second baseman in the history of the game.  For reference, Johnson had 6 homers that August, and Hornsby… well, he played in 1922.  It’s a very unlikely accomplishment.

Still, should Utley reach something close to those totals, combined with his post-2007 MVP hype and a theoretical NL East pennant, he would unquestionably be a real contender for the award.  Much breath has been exhausted ridiculing the fact that MVP voters tend to favor players whose teams reach the postseason, so it’s really not necessary to get into it here, but the fact is that it would be a knock against guys like Pujols, who in 8 seasons has finished outside the top 4 in MVP voting only once (2007) but still has just one of the trophies in his case.

Middle infielders with penchants for dirty uniform pants naturally find it quite difficult to be hyper-productive in August: it’s hot, and they’re tired.  As such, it’s unlikely that Utley’s aforementioned season will be realized, but something like .287/35/100 is very reachable.  They’re just not really MVP-type numbers, so he’d need a significant qualitative boost from the voters if he were to make serious noise in that regard.  There will be plenty of guys in the NL who top those marks – a lot of them will just be OF/1B types (Chipper Jones, Matt Holliday, Lance Berkman) who play on bad baseball teams.  There are also, as Neyer suggests, pitchers to consider, like Brandon Webb and Tim Lincecum (okay, Lincecum is a bit outrageous, but he probably should be considered for every desirable award and honor in the country on principle alone).

Though he hasn’t gotten much attention this year (he led all NL players in All-Star voting, but only hit 5 homers in the HR Derby and went 1-3 early in a long All-Star game), he’s had a very good season and has a small chance at a fantastic one. He’s an outside MVP candidate at best right now, but MVP races generally last through September, so voters’ minds remain plenty malleable.  After being swept by the Rockies in a devastating letdown NLDS last year, Chase would undoubtedly trade his chance at the hardward for another shot at a World Series title.  In a highly-competitive division, though, if the Phillies are going to be contenders for that honor, he’s going to have to play like an MVP anyways.

 

But What Have You Done For Me TODAY?

When teams suffer a (relatively) quick slew of hope-dashing defeats, the air about the club can turn overwhelmingly and almost irreparably negative. Losses become “expected,” while wins become “lucky,” even from season to season. Optimism is eschewed for compulsory bitterness. This is a very curious but altogether commonplace phenomenon. It’s really just a human coping mechanism. If we never hope for anything, see, our hopes can never be crushed.

To me, Mets fans kind of typify this behavior. The Mets lost a heartbreaking NLCS – on a goddamned curveball, no less – in 2006 and then were embarrassingly ushered out of the playoff hunt in 2007. It was no surprise, then, that when the team stumbled out of the gate in 2008, Mets fans were calling for the head of Willie Randolph and damn near wondering if Shea Stadium should be burned to the ground so that a virgin franchise could be created anew in its place.

Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic. But fast-forward to August, and while the organization has replaced Randolph with O.G. Jerry Manuel and currently sits just 2 games behind the first-place Phillies, Mets fans are still an extraordinarily fatalistic bunch. They’re not really sure that they like this team, not really sure that they can count on these guys to make them proud. Much of their Queensian vitriol has been spewed at the bullpen, and has been for years. This year – at least amongst my friends who are Mets fans – the hatred has been piled most notably upon one man: Aaron Michael Heilman. All the Mets fans I know totally hate this guy. All he does is blow games. He is the grim reaper in a baseball cap.

Naturally, I got curious. Why, in his age 29 season, has he become the face of ineptitude?

A lifelong Metropolitan, Heilman’s in his sixth season with the big club, and holds a 21-32 record in 290 games (25 starts) with 8 converted saves and 14 blown saves. Blown saves (and wins and losses, to that end) aren’t necessarily the most impartial way to judge a reliever’s success, of course, but the number certainly doesn’t look too good. Nor does the record itself, but such is relief work: you can’t win a game by yourself, but you can damn sure lose one.

He was born on November 12th, 1978 in Logansport, Indiana, a small town of about 20,000 people that sits at the junction of the Wabash and Northern Eel Rivers. Samuel P. Bush – great-grandfather of the esteemed U.S. President – cut his teeth there as a railroad mechanic, and Major League Baseball’s first commissioner, Kensaw Mountain Landis, also hailed from Logansport. Heilman attended the local high school and then went on to pitch for Notre Dame, where he compiled a 43-7 record with a 2.50 ERA in 4 years, including a 15-0 mark in his senior year. Only 14 other Division I collegians have ever won 40 or more games in their career.

Those impressive credentials got the 6′5″ 225lb Heilman picked by the Mets in the first round (18th overall) of the 2001 amateur draft (he’d also been picked in the first round in 2000 – by the Twins – but elected to return for his senior year). He spent only one full year in the minors before making his major league debut in June of 2003, getting a home start against the Marlins in which he was saddled with the loss (thanks to a couple Mets errors, including one by Heilman himself) despite surrendering just 1 earned run in 6 innings. The Mets didn’t finish very well that year (66-95) and neither did Heilman, who finished 2-7 with a 6.75 ERA in 13 starts. He bounced between AAA and the majors in 2004, and the organization began to sour on him as a starter thanks to massive amounts of inconsistency. Despite throwing a one-hitter against the Marlins in early 2005, the Mets made the decision to convert Heilman to a reliever and drop his arm angle to three-quarters rather than overhand. The move seemed to pay off: Heilman finished the year with a sparkling 2.18 ERA and 9.82 K/9 in 46 games for the club, surrendering just 1 home run as a reliever (to Shawn Green).

One of the Mets’ best relievers after 2005, Heilman decided to play winter ball in the Dominican in the offseason with the intention of getting his innings total up and working on his command. When he came back to the team for spring training, he got the impression from the organization that they didn’t really view him as a starter. While the club explored trade options for players like Danys Baez and Julio Lugo – many involving Heilman himself – Heilman dominated in spring training, pitching 17 innings and surrendering just three earned runs. The team stuck him in the bullpen anyways, opting instead to give rotation spots to pitchers the likes of Steve Trachsel and Victor Zambrano. Heilman was vocally upset with not being given the chance to start, but finished the regular season very well. He pitched well in the post-season too, but as fate would have it, he threw the pitch that Yadier Molina – who hit six home runs all season – homered off of to win the NLDS for the Cardinals and send them to the World Series.

Heilman had minor elbow surgery that winter and came to camp determined to start for a team, and the club again half-heartedly shopped him around. Heilman was neither traded nor given much of a shot to contend for a rotation spot, suffering further insult when he wasn’t given an assigned parking spot during Spring Training.

The right-hander quietly had another very good season in 2007 to wrap up a rather remarkable three-year stint as a reliever. From 2005-2007, Heilman pitched 239 innings and posted a 3.01 ERA, a 7.83 K/9, and a 0.53 HR/9. Quite simply, he was excellent. This can be used to argue one of two opposite points:

A) The Mets were stupid not to let him start over some of their other options
B) The Mets were right to put him in the bullpen where his skills were most effective.

Answering that question doesn’t do the team a heck of a lot of good for 2008. Making $1.2 million for the club this year, Heilman has put up some ugly numbers on the season: he currently sits at 2-7, his worst record since he was starting as rookie in 2003. In 63 games, he has a 5.74 ERA and a 1.47 WHIP; hitters are posting a .262/.359/.426 line off him, and he leads all relievers with 9 hit batters.

Heilman has traditionally thrown two pitches: a sinking fastball and a changeup. In 2007, the fastball was clocking in at a very healthy 94.89mph; his mix of fastballs and changeups was 70/30 to right-handed batters and 60/40 to left-handed batters. Once Rick Peterson was fired this past June, Heilman began throwing his slider again (Peterson apparently coached Heilman not to use it during his tenure with the Mets). Heilman’s been mixing the pitch in to right-handed batters this year, and by all accounts, it’s gone alright: righties are hitting just .207 off the reliever. It’s left-handed hitters that have been the problem for Heilman: in 95 at-bats, lefties are slugging .611, and have 7 of the 9 home runs Heilman’s allowed all year to their credit. They’re murdering him.

His 60/40 mix of fastball/changeup to LHBs is largely unchanged from 2007 to 2008. Both his fastball and changeup appear slightly faster this season, but that could very well be noise in the data, as 2008’s information is much more complete than 2007’s. His horizontal movement chart – courtesy Josh Kalk – is a little strange though. Those changeups look awfully sloppy, and in particular, there appears to be a distinct swath of them on the inside part of the plate, perhaps indicating that Heilman’s been missing down and in to lefties. The numbers back up the picture we’re seeing: Heilman has walked 15 lefties in 95 at-bats versus just 14 righties in 150 at-bats. Going back, though, we see that these numbers don’t historically deviate from what Heilman has always done. In fact, it’s his walks to righties that have been the problem: he walked 6 in 2006 and 9 in 2007, and has already walked 14 in 2008. His walk rate against righties has doubled from last year.

Unless you have a lights-out arsenal, walking guys when you’re a reliever is a really bad idea, especially if you’re on a ballclub that’s prone to removing you in the middle of an inning. This introduces the tricky specter of the Strand Rate. The average Strand Rate for major league relievers with at least 40 IP this year is 75.44%. For every 4 batters you allow to reach base, 3 of them will get left out on the basepaths, either by yourself or one of your fellow relievers. Aaron Heilman’s is 66% on the season, and though he’s got the healthiest K/9 he’s ever had (10.07), this is simply not working for him: one out of every 3 runners that reaches on Heilman is coming around to score, a very significant deviation from the 75% average, especially when you’re a reliever and have little wiggle room.

Heilman has been charged with at least one earned run in 20 of his 63 appearances spanning 18.1 innings, with 14 of those being appearances in which he allowed multiple earned runs. He has walked 12 batters – 6 RHB, 6 LHB – in that time and struck out 17. Of the 42 runs he has surrendered, 33 have been of his own accord. I have no context to indicate how commonplace or rare this is, but I think it’s worth noting that of the 10 baserunners he’s left on base for other pitchers, 9 have scored, 7 at the hands of Scot Schoeneweis, who will probably not be getting a Christmas card from the righty this year. It’s also clear that the team is losing confidence in him: In his first 12 run-allowing appearances, he was yanked three times, but in his last 8, he’s been pulled from the game 6 times. Had Heilman’s successor not allowed any of those runs to score his ERA would come down from 5.74 to 4.48, which isn’t great, but is a lot easier to swallow. This would of course actually underscore how bad Heilman has been.

Four of Heilman’s seven losses have come in the last two and a half weeks, an incredible streak of awfulness. Despite the fact that his successors have largely failed him, they can’t be blamed for putting those runners on in the first place. Heilman’s most damning stat is his 1.46 WHIP: he’s allowed 103 baserunners this year and is walking 4.2 batters per 9 innings. A decrease in ground balls – from 45% to 41.5% – also suggests that he’s been leaving too many pitches up in the zone (contributing to his high home run rate). His lack of control could even explain his higher-than-usual strikeout rate via “effectively wild” syndrome. His BABIP is .335 and his HR/FB is 13.8%, and while one could use those to say that he’s been unlucky, they’d be being kind: you can’t expect to succeed when you’re walking and plunking as many batters as Heilman has been.

There have been rumblings in New York that the boo-birds are starting to get to Heilman, who has complained in the past about his treatment but as I mentioned before, had always succeeded out of the ‘pen. Whether for ineffectiveness or health concerns, the team clearly needs to ease up on Heilman. He’s appeared in 63 games this season, tied for the major league lead. The Mets bullpen as a whole has been used 396 times, the most in the division. The Eddie Kunz callup is a step in the right direction, but despite the fact that he had 27 saves at AA Binghamton, his 38/23 K/BB ratio in 45IP suggests that the 2007 first-round draft pick might not be ready just yet. Billy Wagner returns on Monday, and it’s hard to imagine that the club will do anything drastic before then, opting instead to pray for Wagner’s health and hope that his return shifts everyone in the bullpen pack into their rhythm.

After three years of doing what the team wants instead of what he wants, he’s now doing what no one but his opponents want, which is blowing games for the Mets and angering the team’s most ardent supporters. His -1.48 WPA is in Masa Kobayashi territory. His stuff is still good, but he’s never been happy relieving, and now no one is happy that he’s relieving. If the Mets peter out this season and fail to make the playoffs, the bullpen is going to get blamed, and Heilman is going to represent all that the group failed to accomplish. He remains under the Mets’ control through 2010, but if they can find a team who still likes him enough as a starter to part with a mid-range prospect, they should consider moving him. The team has never put its bullpen at the top of its priority list, and when it comes to keeping Heilman, perhaps they’ll finally relent this winter and ship him off.

 

Start With the Straight Shots, and then Pop Bottles

One of the most marvelous things about baseball is the fact that, while a team sport at heart, it is an individualistic battleground by design, a man-versus-man showdown in which a batter faces a pitcher or, as can often be the case, a pitcher faces himself. It’s theoretically possible to play an entire baseball game without using any of the fielders, except for the catcher. A pitcher could throw a complete-game shutout with 27 strikeouts, for example. Or you could use just one other fielder: maybe the pitcher gets 20 strikeouts, but also induces 7 groundouts to himself. Adding to the quirkiness is the fact that there’s no escaping one’s responsibilities as ball-hurler or bat-wielder: all eyes are on you until one of you wins. There’s no time limit on either actor: an at-bat could last five second, or for all eternity, should the hitter foul off an endless number of pitches. There’s little that a shortstop or right fielder can do in these instances unless something happens to be asked of him on a resultant play, and once a batted ball has been corralled and the play is over, the 60-foot 6-inch contest resumes.

In last night’s matinée Yankees-Rangers matchup in Arlington, Yankees manager Joe Girardi hung an ineffective Damaso Marte out to dry, putting a 5-5 ballgame in his hands and his hands alone in the bottom of the 9th. In what was his fifth appearance with the club since being acquired from the Pirates, Marte was left to throw 42 pitches, the most he’d tossed in an appearance since an August 16th 2006 game against the Brewers in which he threw 44 pitches and was also saddled with the loss. Marte recorded two outs in the inning – one via strikeout – but walked three, and was quite visibly struggling with his control. All told, he threw just 23 of those 42 pitches for strikes, including the first-pitch fastball that Byrd crushed to right field for a walk-off grand slam.

It was his fifth career grand slam and second career walk-off home run, his first coming in his rookie season against Tim Drew, the most obscure of the Drew Brothers. That season was actually quite promising for Byrd: with a .303/.366/.418 line in 135 games with the Phillies, he garnered more Rookie of the Year votes than Miguel Cabrera and Jose Reyes (though both played in fewer games). Since then, he’s been a prototypical fourth outfielder, playing solid defense and not killing his team at the plate while occasionally running into a hot month (see: June 2007, .398). It was a jubilant moment for Byrd, who was the subject of trade rumors around the deadline thanks to the Rangers’ outfield depth and gigantic need for pitching. After being stormed at the plate by his teammates, Byrd high-fived several fans sitting in the front row by the Rangers dugout and then saluted his fans by doing the “Byrd Flap,” an arm-flapping gesture that Rangers fans began taking up last year when Byrd had the best season of his career, driving in 70 runs with a 113 OPS+ in 414 at-bats.

Byrd will never really be famous, nor is he likely to be remembered for very long once his playing days are over. Now 30 years old, the right-handed outfielder from Boynton Beach, Florida should bounce around in the game for as long as he can play a decent center field and hit above .250. When he reflects on his life, he’ll see a track record that includes playing in parts of double-digit major league seasons, with over 50 home runs, and maybe around 800 hits, which ain’t too shabby when parts of those seasons include the local fanbase gesturing in celebration of you. It’s certainly more than most can say for themselves, and when your better days witness you mashing walk-off grand slams against the New York Yankees, well, count yourself amongst the lucky. It was clear from last night’s celebration that Marlon did just that.

As for Damaso, the tragic foil to Marlon Jerrard’s heroics, he’ll survive. There may have been little else that Girardi could have done: with the best closer in history unavailable with back spasms and his second-best option wearing a Detroit Tigers jersey, it was reportedly either Marte or rookie David Robertson, as Veras has been “overworked” and Bruney appears not to be ready to resume a meaningful role in the bullpen following his Lisfranc injury. Marte was signed by the Mariners all the way back in 1992 out of the Dominican Republic as a 17-year old, and he holds a tidy 21-22 career record. He’ll notch his 500th career strikeout this year, and when you’ve got a 3.29 ERA in 499 career appearances, well, you’ve had a decent life. He makes $2 million dollars in 2008, and it stands to reason that his ability to hold lefties to a career .193 batting average against has transformed the lives of everyone in his family and given him everything he could’ve ever wanted. Who among us wouldn’t sacrifice a foot – and the occasional +1 in the loss column – to do the same?

 

The Anti-Manny

The Chicago White Sox, making a play to stay atop the AL Central and get back to the playoffs for the first time since 2005, made a pretty weird deal yesterday, picking up an aging Ken Griffey Junior from the Reds in exchange for two mid-level prospects. The deal is less strange in its details than it is in its effects and implications: Paul Konerko, captain of the ballclub and mayor of South Side Chicago has basically been bumped from the lineup.

Konerko was drafted all the way back in strike-shortened, summer-of-O.J. 1994, going 13th overall to the Los Angeles Dodgers (right between Nomar Garciaparra and Jason Varitek). Hailing from Providence, Rhode Island, the 6′3″ Konerko was selected as a catcher, but was shifted to 1B when they bumped him up to the AA San Antonio Missions. He responded by increasing his OPS 120 points over the previous year, and aside from brief stints at third base and in the outfield, the change was a permanent one. The Dodgers called him up in September of 1997 and he singled in his first at-bat as a pinch hitter for the legendary Mike Harkey.

He broke camp with the Dodgers in 1998 as a 22 year old, but stunk, slugging just .306 in 144 at-bats (he somehow managed to hit only one double in that span). The Dodgers weren’t thrilled with what they saw, and so they traded Konerko on July 4th (along with Denny Reyes – yes, THAT Dennys Reyes) to the Reds for closer Jeff Shaw. Konerko failed to impress the Reds, and was traded after a half-season to the Chicago White Sox who, after shifting Frank Thomas to DH, were looking for a young and talented first baseman (Cameron was expendable after going .210/.285/.336 with 101 strikeouts in 396 at-bats in ‘98).

Jerry Manuel and the White Sox handed Konerko the starting first baseman job out of spring training, and he responded by posting an OPS of .558 in April. The team stuck with him though, and he began to hit: he batted .420 with 7 homers in July, and then drove in 26 runs in August. He finished the year at .294 with 81 RBI. He earned his first All-Star nod in 2002, and from 2004-2006 was especially prolific, batting .291 over that span with 330 RBI and 116 HR. The White Sox, of course, won the World Series in 2005, thanks in no small part to Konerko’s 15 post-season RBI (he was named MVP of the ALCS and knocked a grand slam in the World Series). Konerko’s contract expired following that season, but he decided to accept Chicago’s 5-year, $60-million dollar offer to stay part of the ballclub along with new DH Jim Thome, whose signing signaled the end of Frank Thomas’ 16-year career with the club. The 30 year old Konerko was named team captain by Ozzie Guillen in April 2006.

Chicago finished in 3rd in 2006 and 4th in 2007, but the team currently sits atop the AL Central division, and yesterday added 38 year old first-ballot Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Junior to the club. The move was necessitated largely by the ineffectiveness of certain key members of the Sox offense, including Konerko. The organization plans to play Griffey in center field – which at face value is a terrible idea – and shift Nick Swisher to first base. The move will seriously affect Konerko who, in his 10th year with the White Sox is posting a miserable .214/.312/.349 line with just 35 RBI on the year. Swisher (L) and Konerko (R) are likely platoon partners now, and the club is obviously hoping that the arrangement lights a fire under one of them, as Swisher himself has disappointed with a .228 average. Konerko had this to say two days ago:

“No doubt, Kenny is working,” White Sox first baseman and team captain Paul Konerko added. “He’s not working to get a deal done, but you can rest assured he’s on top of everything. He’s working on everything from every angle. This year, above any other year here, probably excluding last year because we were out of it, it just doesn’t feel like there’s anything going on, like there’s any moves that are going to happen.”

As it turns out, the one move that did happen will affect Konerko the most. For his part, he’s taken the Griffey rental (the White Sox and Reds will split the $4 million buyout of his 2009 option) like the true professional that he is, but it has to sting a little bit. Kenny Williams is a very smart GM, and one has to wonder if he made the trade as much to take pressure off Konerko’s bat as he did to put pressure on him to produce. Konerko’s sudden and precipitous decline has seemed to be prompted by either a pitch recognition problem, an injury, or because he’s pressing desperately. Here’s a few numbers to chew on: coming into August, Konerko’s swinging at 2.60% more balls outside the strike zone than he was in 2007, and at 2.73% more pitches overall. On balls outside the strike zone, he’s making contact with an incredible 11% fewer pitches, the most dramatic dropoff in the majors from 2007-2008. His contact rate overall is down 5.33%, third worst in the majors, and when you – albeit crudely – combine his change in the rate of balls outside the strike zone that he swings at with his change in his outside-the-zone contact rate, Paul Konerko has experienced the most dramatic dropoff in the majors over the past year where the ability to handle pitches off the plate is concerned. If you’re interested, the most-improved player is B.J. Upton.

The White Sox control Swisher through 2011 (club option for 2012) and, should he play like the White Sox hope he’s capable of playing, he’s a steal (he’ll make $5.3m in 2009). Konerko’s under contract at $12m per through the 2010 season, after which he’ll be entering his age 35 season. There is no organizational shake-up occurring here: Kenny Williams appears to be making a bold and interesting move in acquiring a half-year bat to take playing time away from his team captain during a deep and prolonged slump. It’s difficult to say how this will effect the team’s defense as a whole: Swisher is probably an upgrade from Konerko at 1B (Konerko’s defense is getting quite bad these days), but Griffey is very old and a very, very bad defender. Bordered by Quentin and Dye, the White Sox might have the worst defensive starting outfield in the majors.

They obviously don’t expect Griffey to stay healthy, no one is that stupid. Since the turn of the millennium, Griffey has averaged 374 at-bats per season, and roaming center field at U.S. Cellular, the man is a mortal lock to miss time, which would shift Swisher back to center and put Konerko at first. Theoretically, that could happen as soon as tonight: Griffey’s never safe, never far from a strained hamstring or pulled quad. Perhaps that’s how the trade should be viewed. This isn’t that big of a deal, because Griffey is basically volatile bench depth who will happen to be starting when healthy, which will add up to anywhere from 0-200 at-bats (and that upper limit is mighty generous). If Konerko’s humble attitude continues and they get decent production from the Swisher-Konerko-Griffey-Thome mélange, Williams will have pulled off an enviable feat: adding depth and usurping playing time from a star veteran without having to worry about hurting anyone’s pride or feelings. Griffey hasn’t had a playoff at-bat since grounding out to Cal Ripken Jr. off Armando Benitez in the 1997 ALDS against the Orioles. Thome’s last playoff AB was a groundout to Bret Boone off Jeff Nelson in the 2001 ALDS. With 34+ years of playing time between them, neither has a World Series ring, and both badly want one. The White Sox have told Konerko that where they need him most right now is in a reduced role, but make no mistake about it: they need their veteran captain more than ever.

“I’m pretty sure it will cut playing time, so I’ll just do what’s asked of me,” Konerko said Thursday. “I don’t care what, where or whenever, but I’ll just do what’s asked of me. That’s it. Make the best of it. We have a good team here, just help when I can help, that’s all I can do.”

To those ends, winning a World Series probably wouldn’t hurt very much either. If that happens, with a few more productive years from Konerko, he’s arguably approaching Retired Number status. Konerko was offered more money by the Orioles after the 2005 season, but came back to Chicago because it was, ultimately, where he wanted to be. With his effective demotion, he’s got a bittersweet chance to prove that love, and cement his place in the Windy City’s long and illustrious baseball lore.

 

Retrospectives on Obscurity: Ken Harvey

You could not play major league baseball. Not a chance. Not on your best day, in your nicest pair of shoes, after eating a completely balanced breakfast.

In fact, no one you know, or have ever known, is good enough to play baseball in the majors. Jeff Weaver could pitch left-handed and make you look like Billy Crystal. Juan Pierre would deposit your most intently-hurled fastball on the moon. Barriers to entry are high in this market for the majestically gifted. What’s all the more fascinating is the fact that pretty much every AAA player who’s never so much as sniffed a major league bench could dominate you as well. Such is the nature of professional baseball- the entire spectrum of talent, from the lowliest pinch runner to the most accomplished of superstars, is contained within but a few small percentage points on some unseen scale. Those percentage points just happen to be a great many standard deviations away from wherever you sit reading this. A quarter of an inch closer here, a tenth of a second faster there: it’s what separates Alfonso Soriano from Izzy Alcantara, and Izzy from you and everyone you’ve ever played wiffle ball with.

There are, of course, a great many men who have charged brazenly across the talent divide with total disregard for the fact that they do not actually belong on the big show’s greener pastures. They are gunned down by turrets the guard towers eventually, but as for how far they make it, there is considerable variation in the experiences of these not-quite-good-enoughs. The clock runs out on most in about the time it takes for a scouting report to be published. Can’t hit the slider. Susceptible to fastballs on the hands. Change-ups are an absolute adventure.

Some men, though, are able to eke out a bit more from their brief journey through the majors than others. Kenneth Eugene Harvey – all 6′2″, 250lbs of him – was one of those men. Harvey began his trek towards the majors like most others do: by hitting the ball prodigiously throughout high school and college. He was by all accounts an extremely gifted college player, and in his senior year at Nebraska led the nation in hitting at .478, which included 23 homers and a 23/38 K/BB ratio. That got him a fifth-round selection by the Royals in that summer’s draft. He’d go on to hit .328 in the minors from 1999-2002 before breaking camp with the Royals in 2003; they had lost 100 games in 2002, and really had no business keeping a young .300 hitter off the squad, regardless of who or what they thought he might eventually become. Harvey hit .266 in 485 at-bats as a 1B/DH for a Royals club that bunted, blooped, and stole their way to a miraculous 83-79 record.

The following year, the team got back to being miserable (58-104), and in late June traded their best player, Carlos Beltran, to the Houston Astros. Beltran was set to be an All-Star but, having been traded in the middle of balloting, was told that he could not play for the AL, nor could he be placed on the NL ballot (he was named as an injury replacement on the NL team anyways). This left the Royals without an All-Star; Harvey, batting .330 at the break, was tabbed as the team’s obligatory representative. He even got into the game: in the 3rd inning, with the bases loaded and one out, Harvey struck out on an 87mph Randy Johnson slider, an outcome which Channel 6 News in Lawrence, Kansas called “fitting.”

Harvey’s decline had already begun, though. From the first of July forward, he hit just .235 with 13 extra-base hits while missing time with a strained ribcage and sprained knee. Opposing pitchers had caught up to him, and finding himself unable to catch back up, he scuffled badly. He’d also accomplish what those who witnessed it reckoned to be a major-league first: while playing first base against the Padres at Petco, in a 4-4 game in the bottom of the 8th, Khalil Greene hit a sacrifice fly to Royals right-fielder Matt Stairs. Stairs caught the ball and fired a throw home down the first base line – Harvey, caught up in the moment, had turned his back to Stairs and was, on bent knee, watching Kerry Robinson attempt to tag. Stairs’ throw wound up drilling Harvey directly in the back; stunned, the portly Harvey slowly keeled over and dropped to the infield grass in pain, leaving Graffanino to jog over and retrieve the baseball. The Royals lost the game 5-4.

There was little left to mystery following that 2004 season. Harvey managed a .287/.338/.421 line on the year, but everyone understood just how inflated with early-season singles those totals actually were. For a big man, he had no power. He was an average defensive first baseman at best and had little to no plate discipline. Being the miserable organization that they were, the Royals had entire minor league rosters filled with mediocre first-basemen with bad backs, and in 2005, he lost his job to Calvin Pickering, a behemoth of a man (6′5″, 275lbs) who could do neither the things that Harvey did right (hit singles) or the things that he did wrong (everything else). The Royals went through three managers that year, lost 106 games, and only had 2 players reach 500 at-bats, one of which was Angel Berroa, who walked 18 times in 159 games. Harvey would see a little action – 45 at-bats – but could turn just 10 of those into hits. He started on May 18th against Bruce Chen and the Baltimore Orioles. In the bottom of the 8th, facing Steve Kline, he grounded back to the pitcher; he was placed on the DL on May 22nd, and would never again appear in a major league game.

He latched on with the Twins organization in 2007, but did absolutely nothing in just 10 games and that fall opted for free agency. With no major league organizations interested in his services, he signed on at age 30 with the Kansas City T-Bones of the Independent Northern League where, at last check, he was hitting .275 with a nifty .310 on-base percentage. As an added note of great personal humor to me, I discovered that Harvey’s newest teammate with the T-Bones is none other than Westfield, MA native and Northeastern University alumnus Bobby Carrington, a big right-hander who went 1-8 with a 6.85 ERA over three years with the Huskies. Carrington just recently graduated, and not only did I frequently observe him stalking around campus by himself early in the evenings, he also took a writing course with a girl I know who wanted desperately to sleep with him. She managed to be as successful toward those ends as Carrington was on the mound – which is to say, not at all. She remains in a slump, and he’s currently throwing pickoff throws to Ken Harvey at CommunityAmerica ballpark.

Last Sunday, Harvey hit a game-winning solo blast for the T-Bones in the top of the 9th against the Schaumberg Flyers at the tail end of a 6-game road trip. They start a homestand today against the Fargo-Moorehead RedHawks, and according to those around him, Harvey still aspires to get back to the Majors. For what it’s worth, he is almost certainly a helpful presence in the T-Bones clubhouse, and serves as an unmistakable reminder to his teammates of everything that’s possible, for better or for worse, in this silly world. Harvey lives with his family in Kansas City and, now clearly heavier than he was during his younger days, has little chance at making it back to the bigs.

Such is life, Ken. Many things are given and many are taken away. He’s had two knee scopes, and were he able to avoid an injury here or there, he might still be getting 300 at-bats a year for some major league squad. Fate, though, is unconditional; he was destined to play the role he did, in front of the eyes of those who cared to watch, now and forever. A poor major leaguer and a wholly undeserving All-Star, Harvey did more in the game than thousands before him, and accomplished more than what many after him will aspire to. We all have good days and bad days, and were the lot of us reducible to averages and percentages, we’d be able to look back on our times and pick out the unequivocally best of them. For baseball players, the task is a bit easier. It’s possible that Ken Harvey’s best days had nothing to do with baseball, but as a 30-year old playing in front of a few thousand people every night, that seems somewhat unlikely.

For good measure, here’s an incomplete list of the things that the big guy accomplished in his 271-game major league career:

• Faced Randy Johnson with the bases loaded in an All-Star Game
• Singled off Tim Wakefield
• Doubled off Johan Santana, Rich Harden, Roy Halladay, and C.C. Sabathia
• Homered off Jake Peavy, Kenny Rogers, and B. J. Ryan
• Hit a home run in Yankee Stadium
• Hit a walk-off home run on an 0-2 count against a major league closer (Brian Anderson)
• Hit a grand slam
• Hit a triple
• Had 10 game-winning RBI in your first season, tied for sixth all-time among rookie first-basemen
• From 2003-2004, led the majors with home runs on an 0-2 count (8)
• On June 15, 2004, was leading the majors in batting average (.361)
• Had a 15-game hitting streak
• Stole three bases

What have YOU done lately?