31 March 2011

Let the Games Begin!

Happy Opening Day! (If you don't mind me being redundant.)
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26 March 2011

Caveat Phillies


Nothing, it seems, is certain but death, taxes and the Phillies winning the 2011 NL East. The four-time defending NL East champs sport an historic starting rotation and some of the best hitters in the senior circuit. They'll spend the summer feasting on the Nationals, Marlins and Mets and the fall battling baseball's royalty in seven-game bursts.

Except, as the great philosopher Quick Draw McGraw often noted, "now just hold on thar one cotton-pickin' minute, Baba Looey!" The 2012 Phils are threatening to drastically under-perform on one side of the ball, leaving the ascendant Braves ample opportunity to end the run in the city of sibling affection.

You doubt that Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels will perform anything less than spectacularly? Neither do I, though there's nowhere to go but down with this corps, relative to expectations. It truly is a world class quartet, and if anything goes awry, like someone's ulnar collateral ligament, Joe Blanton is a doozy of a back-up plan.

On the other hand, if Southeastern PA isn't concerned about the lineup, it isn't paying attention. With names like Howard, Utley, Rollins and Victorino, it's easy to become complacent about the Phillies' hitting woes. Take a closer look though, and you'll see how this offense could stink like New Jersey without much going terribly wrong.

First, the team's getting old, with an average age this year over 32. Utley and Rollins missed a chunk of 2010 and Utley is hobbling again even before he's broken a sweat. He is the straw that stirs the drink for the Phillies; hitting for power and average and delivering standout defense at a position where a replacement can be counted on for little more than an occasional  bloop single. By far the team's best player (he was the second most productive hitter last year despite missing 150 plate appearances), Utley's health is a critical concern.

Rollins, not so much. The mis-cast MVP in 2007, Rollins has steadily declined since, losing 200 points of OPS while battling age and injuries. The team leader and spark plug may not have much spark left, and he also plays a position thin in quality replacements.

The third Musketeer is Ryan Howard, who was either slowed by injuries last year or has, at age 31 and 235 pounds, begun his slow descent. Howard slugged 31 home runs, which is ordinarily tremendous, except when that is your signature skill, and you'd been averaging 50-a-year over the past five seasons. If he repeats that, or declines further, the Phillies are going to be a a nuclear plant short in the power department.

Beyond them the news is more worrisome. Dominic Brown has shown no signs that he can replace any part of Jason Werth's game in right field and Carlos Ruiz's chances of repeating his anomalous  .302/.400/.447 season behind the plate are somewhere between slim and none, with the mean listing heavily towards none. Raul Ibanez's utility as a 39-year-old might be in a platoon with John Mayberry, Jr. and/or Ben Francisco. The latter can pop a longball episodically and the former can swipe a base if someone gets on for him, but that's not much production from a corner outfield position.

Placido Polanco at third and the Flyin' Hawaiian in center are both good and reliable players with meaty defensive chops, though if Polanco fails to hit .290 his offensive contribution evaporates. In any case, both are complementary parts, not stars. A Phillie squad left to rely on those two is swimming in shark-infested waters. And with a lineup that still lists portside, the Phils remain vulnerable to southpaws.

Of course, the starters could bail out the offense and Ruben Amaro could flip Joe Blanton for a shiny bauble to offset the woes of Utley or Rollins or whoever. But they may be busy bailing out the bullpen, which could run the gamut from shutdown to incendiary to...Bastardo.

You put it all together and the Phils look less like locks than lox, and there's a team in Atlanta just itching to buy the cream cheese (not Philadelphia brand.)  I've still got the ponies as favorites -- that rotation demands it -- but Charlie Manual will earn the hosannas this season if he can keep the offense on track and the team atop the standings...again.
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20 March 2011

Thirty-three Years Behind and Counting

“It won’t be long before we get the first wave of nonsense from stat-crazed dunces claiming there’s nothing to be learned from a batting average, won-loss record or RBI total. Listen, just go back to bed, OK? Strip down to those fourth-day undies, head downstairs (to “your mother’s basement and your mother’s computer,” as Chipper Jones so aptly describes it) and churn out some more crap. For more than a century, .220 meant something. So did .278, .301, .350, an 18-4 record, or 118 RBIs. Now it all means nothing because a bunch of nonathletes are trying to reinvent the game?”
– San Francisco Chronicle columnist Bruce Jenkins

Whenever someone fires off ad hominem attacks it's a sure sign they're out of rhetorical ammunition. What's especially regrettable is how hackneyed is this particular shibboleth about stat guys. I'd like to assume that in order to achieve columnist status at a major newspaper like the San Francisco Chronicle, Bruce Jenkins must occasionally evince some intellect and creativity. It's striking then that he could find no more clever, insightful or florid metaphors to describe seamheads than the old cliches of homelessness, poor hygiene and geekdom.

I haven't read this particular gentleman before, but I'm guessing, from this small sample size, that  crooked politicians, hoodlum basketball players and accountants with green eye-shades also comprise his diatribe repertoire. Oh, and Mother Teresa was good. What novel ideas, and so revealing!

That's besides the point, of course, because what's really so daft about his blog post in particular and the many daily expressions of similar sentiments from around the horsehide universe in general is the way he (and everyone he's representing) uses statistics to complain about the use of statistics. It's as if opponents of capital punishment objected to lethal injection by preferring firing squad.

Clearly, Jenkins doesn't object to using statistics to describe baseball, he objects only to the upgrade that better statistics provide. This is a pretty thinly-veiled plea to stop making a guy think. He's got a tenuous grasp on batting average, won-loss record and RBIs and doesn't want to have to learn something new, even if it's vastly superior. That his understanding of those statistics often mislead him into believing untruths is of no consequence to him as long as they provided ballast for certainty without possibility of contradiction.

"For more than a century," a horse drawn carriage "meant something," until cars came along and improved transportation. The 19th century Bruce Jenkins and his ilk would be lambasting non-equestrians for their insistence on replacing horse power with horsepower, and like the modern-day version, would be on the wrong side of technology, the free market and history. The free market's funny about better ideas: it prefers them.

If you're reading this blog, you already know the specifics about those stats, but here's a thumbnail sketch. First, all three mean something, just not very much. RBIs are a team event. Win-loss record is a function of many things having nothing to do with pitching ability. One man's .250 batting average can be far more valuable than another man's .300 batting average. Smart people doing real research have discovered shortcomings in these measurements and proposed vast upgrades to quantify the same thing. These new creations are objectively superior: they correlate more highly with individual performance, better predict future events, more fully describe a body of work. There really isn't any room for debate on those points.

Here's another interesting development: Bruce Jenkins stated his case in a blog. On a website. Using a computer. These were all upgrades from the world as it existed when he began his journalism career, and yet he seems to have embraced that change. Perhaps that embrace was reluctant but required by his desire to continue collecting a paycheck.

It would advance the craft of sports journalism if his employers at the Chronicle demanded the same willingness to change and grow from his baseball coverage. They should not accept from him, nor any other writer on their staff, a level of ignorance about the game that he has not just revealed, but flaunted. They certainly would not allow their White House correspondent to continue discussing the latest developments involving President Taft. They wouldn't allow their health reporter to refuse to discuss arthroscopy because cutting people open worked perfectly well for decades. Why is this retrograde attitude tolerated on the sports pages?

Bruce Jenkins has done a marvelous service to the baseball world. He has given full-throat to the many voices of unreason -- the scared, the hidebound, the illogical -- and accidentally shined a light on their shortcomings. There has already been significant blowback in the blogosphere, and I hope it all works out for the reformation of sports journalism. Because ultimately, Bruce Jenkins' tirade against sabermetrics isn't about baseball, or statistics, or even Bruce Jenkins; it's about the narrow, sclerotic minds that control much of sports journalism today.
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19 March 2011

Past Performance May Not Be Indicative of Future Returns


Imagine if you could tease out from a player's performance the skill-wheat from the luck-chaff and make a more nuanced prediction of his future results. The imagination is not so very boggled here; we have many tools in the sabermetric toolkit that help us do this. On the hitting side we have, first and foremost, BABIP, now so widespread in its use that it has its own Wikipedia entry.

Pitching performance is dependent on a larger array of variables, and so requires a more robust distillation. Seamheads around the world have been nose-to-the-grindstone on that, to the point that many of the rough edges (on pitching stats, not on noses) have been smoothed. There exist several calculations that are independent of defense, BABIP and other noise.

Last year, Baseball Prospectus put its SABR light ray to use on the obverse proposition: rather than strip out the obfuscations, why not focus on the core elements of a pitcher's work. Pitchers can control their their walks and strikeouts, their home runs allowed, and the ratio of ground balls to fly balls allowed, so why not simply measure those things to understand their core skill sets? After developing the statistic, called SIERA (skill-interactive ERA), they tested its predictive ability and found that it was indeed superior to other measuring tools.

In other words, if you see a pitcher who went 20-8, 2.97 last year, you probably assume he pitched spectacularly. In fact, what you're seeing is a pitcher with spectacular results. The correlation is imperfect. If that hurler benefited from great defense and run-scoring support, fabulous relief pitching, an unusually low BABIP, unsustainable success with runners in scoring position and a good home pitching park, you could conclude that fortune has smiled upon him and may be looking elsewhere next season -- what we commonly call regressing to the mean. Conversely, if he served up a lot of strikeouts, limited his walks and HBPs, and kept the ball in the park and on the ground, he's got the requisite core skills to repeat, rinse and shine.

As soon as SIERA was introduced last year, I thought how interesting it would be to examine the 2010 pitchers whose SIERAs varied dramatically from their actual ERAs and then observe their 2011 performances. BP has provided just that list, so I present to you the hurlers whose performance will be worth noting this year. (Of course, these predictive tools have enormous Fantasy Baseball value, and in fact, BP has become more of a Fantasy Baseball site.)

Just one note of caution: Judging a player on a single season can be like judging a city's climate by one day. The weather in Fargo might be nicer than in Miami on a given day, but not over the long haul. So seamheads ordinarily use a rolling three-year average when measuring player performance and BP is doing that with the gentlemen listed below.

The four unlucky moundsmen capable of dramatic rebounds in 2011 are Josh Beckett, Brandon Morrow, Aaron Harang and Dan Haren. Beckett, slowed to 128 innings by a balky back, went a miserable 6-6, 5.78 for the Red Sox. But SIERA saw his performance more generously and believes he's more like a 3.84 ERA starter, which is among the league's elite. If he's healthy, expect his ERA to be as well.

Morrow, a rookie for Toronto last year, shoves strikes down batters' throats for a sterling 3.15 SIERA. An out-of-kilter .344 BABIP pushed his ERA to 4.45, but the SIERA suggests he could be a star in 2011. Aaron Harang's SIERA of 4.44 was 88 points better than his actual ERA in Cincinnati in 2010. Now toiling in a pitching-compliant Petco Park in San Diego, his actual ERA could plummet. The same for Haren, who spent half of last year in Arizona's hitter-haven park.

The four sons of serendipity in 2010 who might be best avoided in your fantasy draft are Brian Duensing, RA Dickey, Livan Hernandez and John Garland. Hernandez is a walking cautionary tale. Knuckleballers like Dickey are often immune to the Laws of Sabermetrics, so he might not belong on this list. Garland is a flyball pitcher, but at Petco that wasn't a demerit. He's employed by the Dodgers this season and he'll lose baseballs if he keeps his pitches up. Duensing, who pitched half in relief and half in the rotation for the Twins, had a 2.62 ERA with 4.22 skills. His inability to miss bats may come back to haunt him.

Over the years, SIERA, like all baseball metrics, will be whittled and honed as more information is revealed and more smart people contribute to its improvement. It'll be interesting to see how well it identifies the outliers in its first year.
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crAP!


Yes, it's time for another installment of crAP! where we bust on those Fantasy Sports Gurus, the Associated Press. It's not that the good folks at AP play Fantasy, it's that their coverage of sports is based on a fantasy.

Two items from Saturday's paper for the guffaw-impaired:

Item One: "The Rangers and Canadiens, fighting for playoff positioning, staged a post-season-like show at Madison Square Garden." 

If these two clubs, or any hockey teams in any hockey league, are concerned with playoff positioning, they are, to be perfectly blunt, morons. They might be, but I suspect this is simply a matter of transference by the good journalists of the AP, who have managed not to notice the signature 30-year trend in the NHL.

The correlation in the NHL between playoff seeding and results in the playoffs, particularly in the first round or two, is roughly equal to the correlation with a coach's horoscope. The lowest ranked playoff team -- often a sorry squad that wins less than it doesn't -- has defeated the top-ranked team a third of the time since the '79 expansion. The gap in playoff performance between sixth and seventh seeds, which Montreal and New York currently occupy, is the difference between Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen.

More likely, the Garden rocked for a late-season tilt against a traditional rival, after a string of contests versus the likes of Ottawa, Florida and Nashville.

Item two: "It was a key win in Milwaukee's playoff push, pulling the Bucks within a game of Charlotte and the final playoff spot in the East."

Here's a little unsolicited advice for Bucks brass, which I suspect they don't need: Throw your remaining games. The reward for capturing that last playoff slot with a .412 winning percentage is playoff carnage at the hands of Chicago or Boston, winning percentage .700+. The reward for finishing ninth is a ball in the lottery for the number one, two or three draft pick and an opportunity to improve next season. Any "playoff push" by Milwaukee is more likely a lottery dive by Charlotte.

Just two more data points in the argument that sports journalism has nothing to do with the actual reality of sports.
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12 March 2011

And He Could Run A Fast Break


When you reminisce on the career of Kenny Lofton, you probably remember a fleet-footed mainstay of the powerhouse mid-90s Indians who bounced among nine teams in his last six years. But an accidental stumbling onto Lofton's stat sheet reminded me what a very valuable player he was.

Lofton was drafted by the Astros out of Arizona, where he was a star baseball and basketball player, backing up Steve Kerr on a Wildcat hoops team that reached the Final Four. In fact, Lofton is one of only two people (Tim Stoddard, the other) to play in a Final Four in college and a World Series professionally.

The YouTube video that would chronicle Kenny Lofton's defensive gems would speaks for itself, and feature the gravity-defying leap that robbed BJ Surhoff of a third-row dinger at the Jake in '96. The defensive metrics validate the view that Lofton, particularly in the Cleveland two-thirds of his career, was a superior defender in the one critical outfield position.

That's the icing on the cake though. The layered chocolate goodness that was his offensive contribution may have been severely under-rated. Lofton was probably one of the 10 or 15 best leadoff hitters of all-time, sporting a .372 OBP with 622 steals at an 80% rate. (A sabermetric review rates his 1994 performance the sixth best leadoff season since 1960. Remember, the 1994 season ended in August, with 50 games yet to play.) He led the league in steals five times and swiped 32 of 37 bases at age 39. It's no surprise that Lofton came around to score at least 90 times for 11 consecutive seasons.

Kenny Lofton never hit for power; reaching 15 homers in a season just once. But research shows that table setters who get on base, swipe bags and burn around the bases have an intangible value that has yet to be fully captured by the seamheads and their whiz-bang tools. Being a strong up-the-middle defender further enhances his value, though it might be difficult to capture as it whizzes around the basebpaths.

Lofton spent six years of his baseball dotage as a vagabond, seemingly dragging the baggage of post-season heart break with him. His '99 Tribe squad blew a 2-0 best-of-five lead to Baltimore; his '02 Giants succumbed to the Angels in the World Series despite a 5-0 eighth inning advantage in a potential clinching Game 6, his '04 Yankees famously coughed up a 3-0 ALCS series lead on Boston, and his '07 swan song in Cleveland was three straight ALCS losses to the Red Sox to fritter away a 3-1 series lead. 

On the other hand, playing from 2002-2007 for the White Sox, Giants, Pirates, Cubs, Yankees, Phillies, Dodgers, Rangers and Indians, but never for more than 136 games, Lofton at least helped his clubs earn post-season berths. The itinerant second act to his career masked his continuing value, even as his prowess with the leather waned. In his final half season with Texas, he hit .303/.380/.438 and appropriated 21 of 25 bases before finally being shipped back to Ohio.

Lofton's not a Hall of Famer; he wasn't the best player on any of his teams or at his position; and he wasn't the best lead-off hitter any time during his career (thanks a lot, Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines.) But as a stellar center-fielder who wreaked havoc from the top of the order, he was an awfully useful player.
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09 March 2011

Catching Hell


Among the reasons that the decade's two best baseball teams have combined for 15 playoff spots and three World Series titles has been their strength behind the dish. As we leave the aughts and start the teens, suddenly the reverse is true. The Red Sox have two bad options at catcher while the Yankees' only bad option is now no option at all.

For years, Jorge Posada struggled to reach the mean defensively while lighting up opposing pitchers like a left fielder. His .275/.377/.479 bonafides with the bat are 23% better than the average player who is spared the need to squat all game. After injury struggles and obvious decline the last three years, Yankee brass has advisedly banished Posada to DH in the hope that fresh legs will keep his bat vital. 

Great strategy...if you have a replacement. Whether Francisco Cervelli and his .343/.340 in 423 MLB at-bats was a legitimate contender is now moot for two months thanks to a busted left foot. Even when he returns, his resume includes a league leading number of errors last year in half a season and and 14% caught stealing rate. That leaves Joe Girardi one step closer to donning the gear himself, or sending out Yogi, given the alternatives.

Yankee fans may believe Jesus is their savior. The #4 prospect in baseball, Jesus Montero, stood tall in Triple-A last year (.289/.553/.517) before he could legally drink a beer. Scouts say the bat plays at the next level but he moves behind the plate like George Wendt. The franchise may be better served seasoning him in Scranton before Carl Crawford steals four bases and his pride the first time the Sox come to town.

Brian Cashman alertly signed the worn nub of Russell Martin during the off-season for just such a circumstance. Martin was a firecracker out of the gate as a 23-year-old Dodger rookie in '06, earning two All-Star berths and a centerfold in Hot Backstop magazine. But his knees absorbed 449 games of wear over the next three years, causing his power and defensive prowess to disintegrate. Spottier duty in the Bronx might lead to a revival, or he might just have used up all his mojo.

The Red Sox begin the year already in this predicament. The departure of Victor Martinez, combined with the retention of Jason Varitek, but not his baseball skills, leaves Boston with two choices, both lousy. Either they suit up 38-year-old Tek, who's been roughly replacement level for three years, or they give former prospect Jarrod Saltalamacchia an opportunity to show Varitek what replacement level's really all about. In 800+ games, Salty has won membership in the Third String Catcher union, but not much else. His 82 OPS+ (i.e., he hits 18% worse than average; striking out 30% of the time will do that to a fella) belies a below-average defensive skill set.

The pickle in which NY and Boston find themselves is not particularly novel. Absent Atlanta and Minnesota, most teams punt the backstop position to a defender who is even odds to hit his weight. It's just the contrast that's so vivid. Between 2001-2005, Boston's receiver posted an OPS over .850 four times, made two All-Star teams and starred in his own version of True Grit. From 2000-2007, his New York counterpart made a Hall of Fame case, smacking 183 homers and tripping .920 on the OPS meter three times. 

To see their teams struggle to fill the void, even in their presence, is disorienting. Maybe it's a sign the torch is being passed. Fans in Baltimore and Toronto, two teams set at catcher, can only hope.
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05 March 2011

Intriguing Teams of 2011, Part 2


It's not every year that people write off a team projected to win 91 games and sport a 71% chance of reaching the playoffs. With the Yankees, whose usual playoff odds are in the Ghaddafi election win realm, a mere seven out of ten seems like a brewing disaster.

No doubt, the coupling of Boston's winter signings and trades with the retirement of Andy Pettitte, leaves New York playing second fiddle to the Red Sox in the 2011 AL Beast. Unless they reprise their 2010 injury explosion, the Red Sox have few weaknesses, while the Yankees have a severely depleted starting pitching staff after Misters Sabathia and Hughes. Banking on AJ Burnett, Sergio Mitre, Ivan Nova and their ilk sounds an awful lot like giving mortgages to people without money and expecting them to make the payments. The results could be similar.

On the other hand, let's not forget that the entire Yankee infield has a VIP pass to Cooperstown. It's all the rage these days to dismiss Derek Jeter as a career that's passed, but great players have a knack for rebounding from bad performances with renewed dedication. That's not to say that Jeter can escape the ravages of age -- he's unlikely to ever again be an adequate shortstop afield -- but don't be surprised if he bounces back with the bat  and hits near .300, which would alone qualify him among the two or three best-hitting shortstops in the league. In addition, a deep outfield and well-stocked bench mean Big Apple fans will continue to enjoy the league's most potent lineup.

New Yorkers are exfoliating themselves over the rotation, and again, there is some cause for concern. But how many teams can trot out five reliable arms? If two of the menagerie of pitchers on the spring roster can coax league average performance out of their arms to complement Sabathia and Hughes, the bats and bullpen can make it work. It's easy to disregard the off-season bullpen moves and the yawning margin of error afforded to starters by Mariano Rivera and Rafael Soriano; nonetheless, they're real and relevant.

Of course, all this ignores the elephant in the room, or rather, approaching the room at a pachyderm's pace. Come trade deadline the Yankees will, with near certainty, provide cost relief to some non-contender or three by removing the burden of paying their ace, and/or star backstop, and/or slugging outfielder. The franchise's revenue and tradition advantages will be exploited to keep the Yankees in the race, regardless of the flailings of the #s3-5 starters.
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