Baseball Nation: All Posts by Steven Goldman

Move him up! Dusty Baker, Joey Votto and the Chamber of Secret Batting Orders

2013-05-21T16:26:58Z

It's hard to figure Dusty Baker sometimes. His reputation within the game as a manager who keeps his team focused and prepared is second to none. He has been voted three Manager of the Year awards, putting him behind only Bobby Cox and Tony La Russa, who won four each. He's had great players but few great teams, winning 100 games in a season only once. His career winning percentage of .526 is unremarkable, ranking 50^th among managers who have coached 700 or more games in the modern era, and 23^rd among the 52 managers who managed 2000 or more games. His six playoff appearances have resulted in just one World Series appearance, a loss.

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No manager won a World Series with Barry Bonds as his star, and yet already it is hard to believe that he and Baker were together for 10 years and accomplished so little. We can't put all of that on Baker or Bonds (in the same way we can't put Ted Williams' lack of a ring on the Splinter or Tom Yawkey's often hapless choices of manager), but it's also clear that when Baker has had to confront a situation in which he's had to use a little creativity, he tends to default to stock images to solve his problem and thereby fails to do what a manager is supposed to do, indeed the only thing a manager really can do, which is find an extra run or two between the sofa cushions.

This tendency most often exhibits itself in Baker's choice of batting orders. Now, optimizing a batting order might net a team only an incremental improvement in offense. This makes intuitive sense: There are only nine slots, so moving one player down means moving others up. If you have Frankie Popup as your shortstop and you want to bury him by batting him ninth, that's great, but it will also have the effect of moving Johnny Groundout up to eighth, netting him a few more plate appearances on the season. The only real solution is to bench both of them, but that decision is usually out of the manager's hand -- we assume that if the manager had been given players, he'd play them. Not all of them deserve that assumption, of course.

Baker's Leadoff Men

According to The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, an optimized lineup can net a team perhaps an extra 10 or 15 runs over the course of a season. That doesn't seem like a lot, but it's tantamount to an extra 1-2 wins. Most of the time that won't make much of a difference, but in a season like the Giants had in 1993, when they won 103 games but lost the division title to the Atlanta Braves by a single game, you have to consider every error, physical or mental, as a possible culprit.

A recurrent theme in Baker's career is that he has not been blessed by his general managers with obvious choices for top-of-the-order roles. That 1993 team had Bonds, Matt Williams, and Will Clark, but lacked a Rickey Henderson, Tim Raines, or Kenny Lofton type who screamed out "bat me first!" Lofton is mentioned pointedly -- Baker's teams traded for him twice in two seasons so that he could displace lesser choices such as David Bell and Tom Goodwin (with the 2002 Giants) and Mark Grudzielanek and Goodwin again (with the 2003 Cubs).

Bell and Grudzielanek actually weren't terrible choices in the context of Baker's career. In 1993 and for a couple of years after, he defaulted to Darren Lewis, a speedy defensive specialist who hit .249/.318/.320 during his five seasons with the Giants. The Lewis era ended in 1995, when the Giants included him in a trade for Deion Sanders. At other times, Baker has opted for Corey Patterson (career .252/.290/.400), Juan Pierre (Lewis without the defense), or Willy Taveras (a Lewis clone). Last year, with no player on the Reds who met Baker's preconceived notions of a leadoff hitter, he spent a good deal of the year on OBP-challenged shortstop Zack Cozart. Reds leadoff hitters combined to hit .208/.254/.327, the worst rates in the major leagues.

A Failure of Imagination

This represents a terrible failing for a manager. A batting order is a machine for distributing playing time. The leadoff slot will hit more often than the number two slot, which will hit more often than the third slot and so on. Here's how the batting order broke down last year:

Split	PA	PCT OF ALL PA
Batting 1st	22526	12.2
Batting 2nd	22012	12.0
Batting 3rd	21503	11.7
Batting 4th	21001	11.4
Batting 5th	20532	11.1
Batting 6th	20013	10.9
Batting 7th	19469	10.6
Batting 8th	18860	10.1
Batting 9th	18263	9.9

Baker has demonstrated conclusively that he chooses not to recognize this aspect of the batting order, not only in his choice of leadoff hitters, but his choice of second-place batters -- he batted Neifi Perez(.267/.297/.375 career) leadoff 28 times when he had him in 2005 and 2006, but also batted him second 86 times -- indicates that as well. This year, with Shin-Soo Choo leading off, Reds leadoff hitters have hit .309/.460/.545, the best mark in the majors. Conversely, with Cozart typically batting second, Reds #2 hitters have averaged .232/.265/.363, which ranks 24^th. Essentially, if Baker has an obvious leadoff man, like Lofton or Marvin Benard, he'll use him. Similarly, when he had Bill Mueller, a third baseman who hit like a good second baseman (.291 with 11 home runs and 72 walks per 162 games) with the Giants, he often batted him second.

However, if he didn't have guys who were just screaming, "Bat me first!" he would default to his mental image of "speedy guy" first and "contact-hitting infielder" second. Thus do you get Jose Vizcaino (.270/.318/.346 career) batting second for the 1997 Giants or Alex S. Gonzalez (.243/.302/.391 career) batting second for the 2003 Cubs. This has worked out for Baker on occasion. In 2001 he had one of the more sensible of his batting orders, his occasional listing of veteran hacker Shawon Dunston in the leadoff spot notwithstanding. Shortstop Rich Aurilia, batting second in front of Bonds and Jeff Kent, had the best season of his career, hitting .324/.369/.572 with 37 home runs and a league-leading 206 hits. The season was well out of line with the rest of Aurilia's career, during which his relative impatience led to league-average OBPs.

Another example of Baker's lack of understanding of the batting order of distributive tool was his insistence on batting Bonds fifth in 1993 and part of 1994. That was a difference of perhaps 20 plate appearances, but given how often Bonds walked and homered, those plate appearances were valuable.

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When I have written about Baker's lineup choices in the past, a common reader response has been, "Well, who do you want him to bat leadoff?" The answer would seem to be obvious: "Not the guy with the second-worst on-base percentage on the team. Other than that, it doesn't really matter." All a manager can really do is put his best players in positions where they will do the most damage. Failing to do that because "The most obvious leadoff hitter is the catcher and who does that?" or similar represents an abdication of responsibility. Finding that his general manager has not gifted him with Rickey Henderson or even half a Rickey does not mean the manager gets to punt.

It says something that on Sunday and Monday, when Cozart sat due to illness, Baker did not alter his lineup, but simply plugged Cesar Izturis, a career .254/.293/.322 hitter, into Cozart's number-two slot.

Non-Traditional Leadoff Men and Number-Two Hitters

Some of the best leadoff hitters have not been traditional speed guys, the center fielders and shortstops. Wade Boggs, one of the great leadoff men of the 1980s, stole about one base a year. The great Yankees teams of the mid-to-late 1950s often used Hank Bauer as their leadoff man. Bauer might have run quickly as a Marine hitting the beach at Okinawa, but he was hardly known as a flier on the bases. During Pete Rose's peak years he stole about 10 bases a year (in 17 tries). Three of the best leadoff men of the late 1940s to the mid-50s, the trio of Eddies Stanky, Joost, and Yost, did little more than walk. Brian Downing was a catcher/left fielder/designated hitter who stole 50 bases in a 20-year career. Catcher Jason Kendall led off for the Pirates in 2004 and in parts of four other seasons, and of course the A's have led off catcher/designated hitter John Jaso in 11 games this year.

To get a sense of how powerful images are, consider that Craig Biggio hit first just 36 times in his first three seasons in the majors. He was a catcher, and catchers don't lead off. As soon as he became a second baseman he was suddenly parked in that spot. His manager, Art Howe, was the same guy who spent the previous couple of years trying to make Gerald Young and Eric Yielding his leadoff men because they were fast and were center fielders. As long as Biggio was a backstop, he was more or less radar-invisible when it came to catching. Once the tools of ignorance came off and he was a middle infielder it was a whole other story.

Number-two hitters have been even more varied than the leadoff men. In 1959, the Braves batted future 500-home run man Eddie Mathews second between outfielders Bill Bruton and Hank Aaron and he responded with a .306/.390/.593 season including a league-leading 46 home runs. La Russa's decision to bat Carlton Fisk second in 1983, a role in which the catcher hit .324/.391/.587, was viewed as a key to that team's surprise division title. More recently, slugging center fielder Jim Edmonds often hit second. Dan Uggla, the low-average, power-hitting second baseman hit second for Joe Girardi and Fredi Gonzalez in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Girardi revived his practice of batting a power-hitting second baseman second this year, listing Robinson Cano second in 24 games.

The idea of placing a power-hitter second seems like the most normal thing in the world to me, but I come from the 1980s, when Wade Boggs was often followed in the Boston batting order by Dwight Evans, a career .272/.370/.470 (127 OPS+) hitter who in his best years was good for 30 home runs and a 100 walks. Third baseman Darrell Evans, his near twin in name and skills, also frequently batted second during the decade. Down the coast in New York, Don Mattingly's 1985 MVP season came with the first baseman batting second in nearly 60 games. He hit far better there (.355/.414/.674) than he did batting third (.304/.344/.505). The value to the Yankees, who could often count on a first-inning sequence with a Rickey Henderson hit or walk being followed by a Mattingly double or home run, was immense.

Joey Votto

If you think this is all a prelude to an argument that Joey Votto, the National League's OBP leader should bat second, you're right. With Choo and Votto up in front of him, Brandon Phillips has batted with more runners on than any other hitter in baseball. He's done an excellent job of delivering them to the plate, hitting .318/.387/.466 with men on and .435/.483/.587 with runners in scoring position. Votto, on the other hand, who has to contend with the pitcher and Cozart being ahead of him in most innings, has seen only the 15^th-most baserunners, a strong showing that is largely attributable to the season Choo has had.

With Ryan Ludwick hurt, and Todd Frazier and the catchers struggling, the 6^th through 8^th spots in the Reds batting order have been weak to say the least. Their sixth-spot hitters rank 23^rd in the majors, their seventh-spot hitters 28^th, and their eighth-spot hitters 25^th. This should change eventually as Ryan Hanigan continues to recover from his oblique strain (he's hit .292 in eight games since coming off of the disabled list), Frazier finds his stroke, and Ludwick returns. In the short term, moving Votto up would eliminate an out machine from the heart of the order (pushing Cozart down to eighth might force him to learn some patience as pitchers work around him to get to the pitcher), get Votto, Phillips, and Jay Bruce more plate appearances, and improve the circularity of the order by bringing Hanigan's patience into the picture as the lineup wraps around in the later innings.

Parenthetically, when I alluded to Cozart's struggles in a post last week, a reader commented that the shortstop is a career .279/.316/.423 hitter when batting second. Over the last three seasons, the average major-league no. two hitter has averaged .264/.325/.394. It's better than Cozart usually does, but it's not anything special or particularly good.

In the longer term, top prospect Sliding Billy Hamilton may change the picture by providing the Reds with a more traditional leadoff man. Off to a slow start at Triple-A, the 100-steal outfielder has recently started to heat up. With his arrival, should it come this season, Choo could drop down one place to become an Evans-style number-two hitter...

...Assuming Baker doesn't drop him down to sixth.

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Jonny Venters: Canary in a coal mine

2013-05-17T20:17:22Z

Like the dodo, the passenger pigeon, and the Carolina parakeet before them, in 2006 a rare breed of bird became extinct. On October 1, Scott Proctor threw his last inning of the campaign, giving him 102-1/3 on the season. After years in decline, the 100-inning reliever was no more.

On Thursday, Atlanta Braves left-hander Jonny Venters underwent the second Tommy John surgery of his career. When it comes to pitching injuries, we can never find an exact moment of causation, specify with any certainty the exact pitch or appearance that shredded an elbow. What we can say is that from 2010-2011, Venters made more appearances (164) than any pitcher in baseball and pitched the second-most innings (171) of any pure reliever in baseball -- only Tyler Clippard had more innings out of the bullpen.

As Clippard's continued health shows, heavy usage doesn't necessarily kill a pitcher. Still, the trend has been away from "everyday" relievers to specialists as managers let platoon matchups dictate their thinking. The result has been a continual downward trend in innings totals.

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When managers first discovered relief pitching, they tended to ride one arm as much as possible. This was because they recognized bench players as necessary to winning games and you couldn't carry more than 10 pitchers without sacrificing flexibility. As such, some relievers were pitching nearly as much as a back-end starter. These are the top 10 single-season innings totals for pure relievers:

		YEAR	IP	G
1	Mike Marshall	1974	208.1	106
2	Mike Marshall	1973	179	92
3	Bob Stanley	1982	168.1	48
4	Bill Campbell	1976	167.2	78
5	Eddie Fisher	1965	165	82
6	Hoyt Wilhelm	1952	159	71
T7	Mark Eichhorn	1986	157	69
T7	Dick Radatz	1964	157	79
9	Jim Konstanty	1950	152	74
10	John Hiller	1974	150	59

Some of these pitchers were able to carry the workload. Others burnt out fairly quickly. There is no real pattern to it, but if you had to generalize it's probably safe to say that the pitchers with the heaviest usage did decline. Thus the workload was spread to more pitchers, but teams still didn't want to carry more than 10 relievers, so the pitchers who worked the middle innings tended to pick up a large part of the load during the 1990s.

		YEAR	IP	G	SV
1	Duane Ward	1990	127.2	73	11
2	Greg Harris	1990	117.1	73	9
3	Scott Sullivan	1999	113.2	79	3
4	Greg Harris	1993	112.1	80	8
T5	Doug Jones	1992	111.2	80	36
T5	Jeremy Hernandez	1993	111.2	70	8
7	Joe Boever	1992	111.1	81	2
T8	Xavier Hernandez	1992	111	77	7
T8	Danny Graves	1999	111	75	27
10	Derek Lowe	1999	109.1	74	15

The nearly simultaneous inventions of the one-inning closer and the one-batter lefty in the early 1990s forced the expansion of bullpens beyond the traditional 10-man limit, a trend that was exacerbated by the decline of the high-pitch outing in the early part of this century. If starters were going to pitch fewer innings, closers were no longer going to be "firemen," coming into the game whenever there was an emergency and pitching one to three innings, you were also going to carry a pitcher who was going to appear in 50 games but only pitch 30 innings*, and you were no longer going to ask your middle men to pitch 120 innings a year, someone had to pick up the excess.

*Tony La Russa often gets credit for inventing the LOOGY (Lefty One-Out Guy, a term that was first coined, I believe, by my SBN colleague John Sickels) with his usage of Rick Honeycutt, but a look at the record suggests that the LOOGY was a case of convergent evolution, with several managers going to the spot-relief model at once. For example, in 1991 Tommy Lasorda used John Candelaria to get one batter 24 times; he made 59 appearances and pitched 33-2/3 innings. That same year, Honeycutt made only three one-batter appearances. Meanwhile, in Seattle, Rob Murphy, who Pete Rose and Joe Morgan had used as a 100-inning reliever, was being repositioned as a spot reliever by Jim Lefebvre.

The question of who discovered the LOOGY reminds me of a line in Disney's "Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier," a favorite film of mine when I was a child. When Crockett arrives at the Alamo, he's introduced to the defenders, including Colonel Jim Bowie. Crockett is impressed; he's heard of the guy. "You're Jim Bowie," he says, "inventor of the knife?" Bowie replies in the affirmative. This always perplexed me. The Battle of the Alamo took place in 1836. Clearly the knife had been invented long before that -- after all, Rome did not conquer the world with spoons and medieval knights did not have pillow fights. It was only later that what Crockett was saying was, "You're Jim Bowie, inventor of [the eponymously-named, large customized] knife [that you are famous for using?]

Similarly, in "1776," the musical play and film about the Declaration of Independence, John Adams introduces Benjamin Franklin to someone by saying, "Have you met Dr. Franklin, inventor of the stove?" Whenever I hear that line, I think, "That's not quite accurate; he invented a stove, not the stove.

By the beginning of this century, the 100-inning guys were starting to disappear. Their innings totals were coming down, and the closers had largely vanished from the list. Also, your name had to be some variation of "Scott" for managers to notice you:

		YEAR	IP	G	SV
1	Steve Sparks	2003	107	51	2
2	Scott Sullivan	2000	106.1	79	3
3	Scot Shields	2004	105.1	60	4
4	Guillermo Mota	2003	105	76	1
5	Scott Sullivan	2001	103.1	79	0
6	Scott Proctor	2006	102.1	83	1
7	Rick White	2000	99.2	66	3
8	Matt Herges	2001	99.1	75	1
9	Byung-Hyun Kim	2001	98	78	19
10	Vladimir Nunez	2002	97.2	77	20

Doug Pensinger

Since the Reign of the Scot(t)s came to an end, the upper limit of relief work has been lowered still further, as the list of pure relievers with the highest innings-pitched totals shows:

		YEAR	IP GS	G	SV
1	Heath Bell	2007	93.2	81	2
2	Saul Rivera	2007	93	85	3
3	Matt Belisle	2010	92	76	1
T4	Tyler Clippard	2010	91	78	1
T4	Jim Johnson	2011	91	69	9
6	Peter Moylan	2007	90	80	1
T7	J.P. Howell	2008	89.1	64	3
T7	Josh Rupe	2008	89.1	46	0
9	Josh Roenicke	2012	88.2	63	1
T10	Craig Stammen	2012	88.1	59	1
T10	Tyler Clippard	2011	88.1	72	0

Venters' 88 innings in 2011 just misses the top 10. Relievers are inherently volatile, rising and falling with the speed of anthills, so it's unsurprising that so many of the pitchers on the 2007-2012 list no longer enjoy the same place of prominence. Still, it seems reasonable to wonder if their usage contributed. Let's go back to Venters' 2010-2011 peak one last time and see how the pitches with the highest innings-pitched totals have changed:

		IP	G	STATUS	NOTES
1	T. Clippard	179.1	150	↓
2	J. Venters	171	164	INJ
3	M. Belisle	164	150	↔
4	C. Marmol	151.2	152	↓
5	S. Marshall	150.1	158	↔	Just off the DL after shoulder tendinitis.
6	D. Bard	147.2	143	↓	Lost at sea.
7	N. Masset	147	157	INJ	Recovering from surgery.
8	E. Mujica	145.2	126	↑	Now closing for the Cardinals.
9	F. Cordero	142.1	143	↓	Gone.
T10	M. Adams	140.1	146	↔
T10	M. Albers	140.1	118	↓	Pitching poorly in Cleveland.
T10	B. League	140.1	135	↓	Closing for the Dodgers.

As the old song goes, correlation doesn't necessarily imply causality, if the above even shows correlation. All we can say is that baseball has been involved in a great unplanned experiment since the 1970s, trying to find out the ideal usage pattern for talented pitchers like Venters, trying to extract the greatest value from them while simultaneously not breaking them. As much as workloads have been reduced, it's possible that they should be reduced still further. A liberalization of roster rules in which pitchers are limited to 10 spots on the roster on any given day, but teams can designate a taxi squad from which it can pick pitchers on any given day (as is being considered for September's 40-man roster period) would simultaneously allow for the rebirth of pinch-hitters, pinch-runners, and defensive substitutes and also further spread out the increasing number of bullpen innings.

It is probably also true that pitchers will continue to get hurt regardless of whether they pitch one inning or 100, and until real-time bio-monitoring makes it possible for trainers to look at the interior of a pitcher's arm as he throws pitch after pitch, the causes are going to be something of a mystery. As such, Jonny Venters is a canary in a coal mine, alright, but it's hard to say which coal mine, or what the canary is trying to say.

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MLB's first quarter report card: Best, worst, and in-between

2013-05-16T19:13:38Z

Due to rampant rainouts and the vagaries of the schedule, teams have played an uneven number of games, but as of Wednesday night, 19 teams had played between 40 and 42 games. One-quarter of the season is now in the books. While there are no official awards for player or team of the quarter, there are several obvious possibilities that we will happily deputize ourselves to award.

Biggest Positive Surprise of the Quarter, Player

I hate to go all Brewers on you here, but Carlos Gomez and Jean Segura have to take the price. Gomez is such a good athlete that he made it to the majors at 21 and stayed up despite hitting just .243/.291/.357 in his first five seasons. Power arrived in 2011, his ISO (slugging percentage minus batting average) jumping from his career .102 to .177, then stepping up again to .202 last year. On-base percentage was still a problem, but when you play a rangy center field and run the bases at light speed, the overall package makes up for any one deficiency. This year, though, none of that applies -- Gomez is leading the National League in batting average and has already hit six home runs, leading to .365/.404/.620 rates.

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Segura, a seemingly nondescript piece of the Zack Greinke trade, has come on like a late-‘90s Derek Jeter on vitamins (not steroids, because we all know that Jeter never does anything wrong), hitting .349/.392/.575 with seven home runs and leading the NL in stolen bases with 13 swipes in 15 tries. Segura was a .313 hitter in the minors, so his hitting for average isn't a complete surprise, but he homered once every 60 at-bats -- by that standard he should have about three home runs now.

Josh Donaldson of the A's doesn't come as a total surprise -- he hit .290/.356/.489 and played excellent defense after taking over third base from Brandon Inge last August, but at .316/.390/.520 he's showing that he gave an honest accounting of himself. Other possibilities: Vernon Wells of the Yankees, James Loney (a league-leading .379 average for the Rays).

Biggest Positive Surprise of the Quarter, Pitcher

No doubt some would take Matt Harvey or Clay Buchholz here, but Harvey has all the talent in the world and Buchholz has been pitching well since last May, albeit not this well. The same might apply to Seattle's Hisashi Iwakuma, who had a 2.65 ERA in 16 starts last year. He's definitely taken a step forward, cutting his walk rate by more than half, but his success still shouldn't come as a total surprise. The same can't be said of Travis Wood of the Cubs, who has a 2.03 ERA in eight starts -- his career mark entering the season was 4.22. He seemed like just another fifth starter on a second-division club, but he's had good luck on balls in play this year -- the .196 BABIP against him is the second-lowest on the circuit. He's wedged between Matt Harvey and fellow Cub Scott Feldman, another guy whose results come as something of a shock.

Let's throw an honorable mention Ervin Santana's way -- the Royals righty always seems to swing between good and evil versions of himself, like the Batman villain Two-Face. This year, the coin-flip came up good, and Santana has cut his walk rate to 1.1 per nine and his home run-rate roughly in half.

Biggest Disappointment of the Quarter, Player

There are many veteran possibilities here. Jeff Keppinger has been the worst player in baseball by at least one measure, but last season's .325 average was something of a fluke, and Keppinger's skill set is such that if he's not hitting .300 he's not helping you. Victor Martinez has been terrible, but the guy is 34 and missed a year, so what do you want? Adam Dunn has been a mess, at least until the last two games, but he was here in 2011 as well, so we can't exactly claim to be surprised. As such, I'm going to go with Atlanta's B.J. Upton (.145/.242/.244, not getting better) and Josh Hamilton (.214/.264/.358 and battling illness).

Biggest Disappointment of the Quarter, Pitcher

Giants starter Ryan Vogelsong's major-league comeback after five years away from the majors was a great story in 2011. It still is and always will be, but it might now be a case of, "We'll always have Paris": Vogelsong's eight starts have resulted in an 8.06 ERA and a league-worst 11 home runs. Here's hoping he has another rabbit under his cap.

Best Results, Offseason Acquisition

Shin-Soo Choo has quietly been an excellent player for years. He's outdone himself so far this year with the Reds, hitting .322/.465/.589 with nine home runs. His OBP leads the NL, and oddly enough Dusty Baker bats him leadoff. Call this a tie with Justin Upton, who leads the NL with 13 home runs. He's been pretty quiet in May, perhaps because teams are starting to pitch around him. Granted, that beats at him: Choo has been hit by a pitch a league-leading dozen times.

Photo credit: Andy Lyons

Worst Results, Offseason Acquisition

Let's call it Keppinger, hitting .185/.182/.207 with no walks through 137 plate appearances.

Living Up to the Hype

Manny Machado, Baltimore Orioles; Bryce Harper, Washington Nationals.

Not Living Up to the Hype

Aaron Hicks, Minnesota Twins; Lonnie Chisenhall, Cleveland Indians; Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas, Kansas City Royals.

Real, Not Faking It

The Orioles seemed to be in line for some major regression after last season's surprise run, but so far they've defied the laws of entropy.

Faking It, Not Real

The Kansas City Royals have a +17 run differential. Given the third-worst aggregate infield production in the league, they might not be able to keep that up, especially if Lorenzo Cain regresses and their outfield production starts to drop off.

Can We Go On Like This?

KC's Jeff Francoeur, following up a .235/.287/.378 season with a .221/.258/.311 start, and Milwaukee's Rickie Weeks, hitting .187/.306/.299 after hitting .230/.328/.400 in 2012.

Photo credit: USA TODAY Sports

Good Player/Bad Team

Jose Altuve (.333/.371/.444).

Bad Player/Good Team

Eduardo Nunez, New York Yankees. When Jayson Nix looks like the better alternative, you know there's a problem.

Free This Player!

Giancarlo Stanton, healthy or injured.

Underappreciated

Padres outfielder Will Venable is an excellent defender who is hitting .250/.330/.450 due to unusually robust hitting at home. He's a career .270/.338/.444 hitter away from Petco, so this is what he's capable of doing in a fair park. His road stats are uncharacteristically flat, so if he can maintain his hot hand at home (perhaps the new dimensions have given him a boost) and get back to his normal production elsewhere, he's going to have a breakout year at 30.

Consistently Frustrating Batting Order

In the NL, Dusty Baker has batted Zack Cozart second in 28 of his 36 games despite his hitting .214/.242/.352 this year and .246/.288/.399 last year. In the AL, Terry Francona has kept Carlos Santana in the fifth or sixth spots (for eight and 20 games, respectively) despite his .430 OBP (following up on his very respectful .365 last season), while Jason Kipnis and Asdrubal Cabrera have been locked in the second and third slots.

Comeback Kid

Mark Melancon, Pittsburgh Pirates.

Anyone Can Close

Jason Grilli, Pittsburgh Pirates; Kevin Gregg, Chicago Cubs.

Well, Maybe Not Everyone

Carlos Marmol, Chicago Cubs.

Over or Just Cold?

Ichiro Suzuki, New York Yankees; Paul Konerko, Chicago White Sox.

Historic

St. Louis Cardinals if they keep up their great starting pitching, Miami Marlins if they continue to excel at not hitting.

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Bryce Harper's injury a case of Dodgers' negligence

2013-05-14T15:01:13Z

The Dodgers should be ashamed of themselves. Different ownership, bigger wallet, same, stupid values. Bryce Harper, the Washington Nationals right fielder and the greatest young star in the game, was forced to leave the game with a jammed shoulder and lacerated neck when he ran face first into the plexiglass scoreboard in right field in pursuit of a fly ball off the bat of A.J. Ellis. Harper was able to leave the game under his own power; agent Scott Boras later reported (via Adam Kilgore) that the outfielder had received 11 stitches but did not suffer a concussion. Nevertheless, the risk to Harper, to any outfielder who plays in Dodger Stadium, is appalling. And it's not the first time that this has been an issue.

On April 9, 2007, Matt Kemp, then 22 and starting what would have been his first full season in the majors, suffered a separated shoulder in a collision with the same scoreboard. Writing about it at the time, I said, "Who was the genius who installed the nice, soft scoreboard over the outfield padding in Dodger Stadium's right field? Whoever it was, they killed Matt Kemp. Welcome to Team Darwin, geniuses." A day later, I added, "Matt Kemp hit the DL after ‘mildly' separating his right shoulder by colliding with a Plexiglas scoreboard in Dodger Stadium's right field. If U.S. policymakers could forget Vietnam in 30 years, it's not surprising that the Dodgers could forget Pete Reiser in 60. Both developments are offensive."

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Six years later, it's still offensive. Kemp, who had started the season on one of those torrid streaks that would later make him an MVP candidate, missed 17 games. Given his career since you can't say that there was any lasting damage. With luck we'll be able to say the same about Harper. Still, there easily could have been; just because both players got off with minor damage doesn't make it any less apparent that an unpadded section of outfield wall is a bad idea. As the allusion to Reiser suggests (see Mike Bates' upcoming post on Reiser for more), there was a time before warning tracks and padding when running into concrete walls at full tilt was an occupational hazard for ballplayers. Reiser's career was destroyed by those walls, and quite nearly his life as well -- at one point he was given last rites in the clubhouse -- and Hall of Famer Earle Combs' career was significantly shortened due to fractures, including of the collarbone and skull.

Those days are supposed to be in the past, but the Dodgers, in their brilliance, have resurrected them on a small portion of their outfield fence. No doubt some genius in the ad sales department said, "Hey, more signage means more revenue, and what are the odds a player ever runs into it? It will happen every six years at best, more than an acceptable risk and one that is far outweighed by the rewards." This may sound like an unlikely case of mustache-twirling villainy, and maybe that's so, but the alternative to calculated cupidity in this case is uncalculated stupidity. For me, the former is somehow easier to take than the latter.

Given the gap between Kemp and Harper, one injury every six years seems about right, but the risk is hardly worthwhile if it costs the game even a single day of a Matt Kemp or Bryce Harper -- or, for that matter, a Roger Bernadina, Endy Chavez, Collin Cowgill, or the fringiest fourth/fifth outfielder you can name.Other ballparks have unpadded features in their outfields as well, and I question the existence of all of them. I like an old-fashioned, hand-operated scoreboard as much as the next guy, and if your art installation involves a set of rotating machetes, I'll applaud that too, but neither should be in a place where an athlete running at full tilt should be able to run into them. I could care less what their aesthetic appeal is, or how many sponsors one can get for a video scoreboard.

The Dodgers' scoreboard is just one of the more obvious examples of putting other values ahead of player safety. Simply put, it has zero business being in the field of play at all. To paraphrase an old Peter Gammons line, "If Bud Selig were still alive, this would never have happened." Nevertheless, the commissioner or his proxies should direct the Dodgers to remove the scoreboard immediately. They already contributed to Harper's injury; to allow it to continue would be to implicate the whole of MLB as well.

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Wainwright, Miller, and the rise of a great rotation in St. Louis

2013-05-11T21:29:39Z

On Friday night, St. Louis Cardinals rookie right-hander Shelby Miller pitched a one-hit shutout against the visiting Colorado Rockies, allowing a single to leadoff hitter Eric Young, Jr., then retiring the next 27 batters. On Saturday afternoon, teammate Adam Wainwright did his best to top the kid, allowing no baserunners before issuing a walk to Todd Helton with one out in the fifth, and not allowing a hit until there was one out in the top of the eighth. He allowed one more hit in the ninth, but completed the shutout as the Cardinals won, 3-0.

It was the first Rockies hit in 51 batters, spread over the two games.

The Cardinals' starting pitching has been extraordinary this season. Entering Saturday's game, their rotation had a 2.20 ERA, a figure which leads the second-place Washington Nationals' rotation by 1.20 runs and beats the National League starting-pitcher average by 1.71. Chris Carpenter's career over? Kyle Lohse allowed to depart? No problem -- not when you have Wainwright, Miller, Lance Lynn, Jaime Garcia, and Jake Westbrook. The record is all the more extraordinary when you note that the Cardinals have yet to play a single game against the Miami Marlins, whose offense is so poor that it can be fairly described in terms of its place in history. (As measured by Baseball Prospectus's True Average, the Fish have the worst offense in at least 60 years.)

The work by the Cardinals' rotation is almost as historic, or would be if the Tigers' 3.22 ERA in the DH league wasn't at least as impressive when judged in context. Still, both staffs are doing the kind of work that hasn't been seen in the majors in quite a while -- perhaps since the "Year of the Pitcher" staffs of 1968, or the dominant Mets rotation of 1988, which posted a 2.97 ERA on the arms of Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling, David Cone, Bobby Ojeda, and Sid Fernandez.

For more, join our Cardinals community, Viva El Birdos

This is wonderful to see -- the hyper-inflationary offensive period of the post-strike years deprived us the possibility of seeing this kind of pitching -- but it seems unlikely to last. Those aforementioned Mets were only about half a run below the league average, so it's asking a lot of any staff to be this good for a full season. We know that as good as the Cardinals' starters can be, they're unlikely to have two starters keep their ERAs below 2.00 for a full season, or have all five starters maintain ERAs below 3.00. Lynn goes through funks in which he's a different pitcher than when he's at his best, and the 35-year-old Westbrook has a career 4.24 ERA.

Just two pitchers have had ERAs below 2.00 in a season of 180 or more innings since 1999: Pedro Martinez in 2000 (1.74 in 217 innings) and Roger Clemens in 2005 (1.87 in 211.1).

Still, it's great to see a well-run organization reap the rewards of its carefully cultivated depth; even without Carpenter (who may yet come back), the Cardinals have such a strong supply of starting pitchers that two hard-throwing arms capable of starting, Trevor Rosenthal and Carlos Martinez, have been remanded to the bullpen.

None of these pitchers, some of whom are veterans of the 2006 or 2011 World Series winners (in a couple of cases, both), are likely Hall of Famers. But that's also part of the Cardinal way -- even dedicated baseball fans would be hard-pressed to name many Cardinals starting pitchers between Dizzy Dean and Bob Gibson, but nevertheless, arms like Mort Cooper, Max Lanier, Harry Brecheen, and Johnny Beazley brought the organization four pennants and three World Series titles. That was a long time ago, but -- and please pardon the invocation of a cliché -- the spirit of St. Louis is alive and well with Wainwright, Miller, and their fellow pitchers.

A note of update: On Sunday, the Cardinals placed Westbrook on the disabled list with inflammation in his right elbow. Lefty soft-tosser John Gast, 24, was called up and will start Tuesday.

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Umpire Fieldin Culbreth suspended for not knowing the rules

2013-05-10T22:05:09Z

Bill James once observed that Joe Torre bears a passing resemblance to Richard Nixon. Maybe that's why now that he's in an executive position at MLB and does something typically passive, like admitting an umpire's call was wrong but refusing to reverse it, I am reminded of the old Trickster himself talking with John Dean on the Watergate tapes:

Granting executive clemency to Howard Hunt -- "You don't do it politically until after the '74 elections, that's for sure," Mr. Nixon told Dean. When Dean suggested that "it may further involve you in a way you should not be involved in this," the President replied: "No -- it is wrong, that's for sure."

That's Joe Torre, a broken record saying, "No -- it is wrong, that's for sure," again and again, but still letting whatever the "wrong" thing is stand. It's all hilarious until you realize that it hides a deeper dysfunction. That is why it is deeply shocking that MLB will act to discipline an umpiring crew chief, Fieldin Culbreth, who allowed a manager to break a rule that has been on the books in various forms for 104 years.

Culbreth gets 2 gane suspension from mlb for error in last nights game
— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) May 10, 2013

Culbreth was also fined an undisclosed amount.

On Thursday night in Houston, the crew chief and his umpires forgot one of baseball's most basic rules and allowed Astros manager Bo Porter to remove a pitcher from the game without his facing one batter. Porter had concocted an elaborate fantasy in which MLB had changed the rule so that, "If you have to pinch-hit for that batter, you now have the right to bring in another pitcher. Technically, Wesley came in to pitch the batter that was scheduled to hit [Shuck] but he pinch-hit for the batter that was scheduled to hit. Which, from my understanding of the rule, you can bring in another pitcher to face the pinch-hitter."

Actually, no; what Porter described is exactly what the rule is intended to prevent. There used to be a time when managers studied the rule book so that they would know (a) when they could gain an advantage, and (b) when they were being taken advantage of. Those days are gone, but then, so are the days of players wearing high socks so the umpire could have a bright line drawn where the strike zone ended (think about it -- it makes perfect sense). For that matter, a protest hasn't been upheld in nearly 30 years. Fairness takes a back seat to just getting it over with and not complicating the schedule.

Baseball ducked a bullet last night in that the Angels came back to win the game, thereby obviating the need to replay the game from the point of the protest, a protest that almost certainly would have had to be upheld (though it's worth noting that if, in view of the official reviewing the protest the rules violation did not affect the outcome of the game, the replay can be denied). MLB's normal tolerance for this kind of thing is troubling; if, in the old days, umpires derived their legitimacy from being sacrosanct authority figures who could control a rough game, now they derive it from being professionals. Events such as this one undermine that legitimacy at a very basic level.

As such, it's heartening to see MLB take some action to discipline an umpire for being unable to perform his job at its most rudimentary level -- here is a book, learn it -- but they still have a long way to go to restore faith in their arbiters.

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The Quotable David Ortiz: The DH fires back at PED accusations

2013-05-10T19:43:18Z

Sometimes it seems as if all the best baseball quotes belong to yesteryear, maybe because the process of professionalization has steamed out most of the odd situations that give players a chance to reveal character. It seems like an odd thing to mourn, but we'll never have another Joe Jackson saying, when asked when why he went along with the 1919 World Series fix, "The Swede is a hard guy." This reference to the team's shortstop, Charles August "Swede" Risberg was so evocative, so full of pathos, that it had White Sox fan and A Walk on the Wild Side author Nelson Algren marveling for the rest of his life, and writing bitter verses like

Do not be remembering the most natural man ever to wear
spiked shoes.
The canniest fielder and the longest hitter,
Who squatted on his heels
In a uniform muddied at the knees,
Till the bleacher shadows grew long behind him.
Who went along with Chick and Buck and Happy
Because they treated him so friendly-like,
Hardly like Yankees at all.
With Williams because Lefty was from the South too.
And with Risberg because the Swede was such a hard
guy.

You don't get this kind of anguish out of a Pete Rose reality show. Still, David Ortiz had a line that, while it isn't going to make anyone's list of top-100 epigrams, is still a wonderfully blunt response by a player trapped in a situation that is simultaneously impossibly stupid and highly annoying. Hold on to that thought, because for the line to have full impact, we have to set the scene: Ortiz began his professional career in the Mariners organization, but he had the misfortune to be dealt to the Twins after his first season in A-ball. The Twins have long had an odd way of doing things; I don't think it's unfair to say that they have spent a good chunk of the present millennium avoiding power hitters and, since they heyday of Johan Santana and Francisco Liriano ended, strikeout pitchers. The policy seems foolish to the point of perversity, but you can't say that the Twins weren't successful with it until recently: from 2002 through 2010 they won the AL Central six times.

Still, they presently rank 14^th in the American League in isolated power (slugging percentage - on-base percentage), a position they have held five other times since 2000 -- their highest ranking this century has been sixth; they have never been more than .005 above the league average. As such, they didn't quite know what to make of Ortiz, a dead-pull power hitter. His first year in the Twins system, he hit .317/.372/.568 with 38 doubles and 31 home runs as he rose all the way from High-A Fort Myers to the major leagues. He began the 1998 season as the Twins' starting first baseman and raked early in the season, hitting .306/.375/.531 through his first 34 games. At that moment, he broke his wrist and vanished for two months. His power was gone, temporarily as we now know, and he hit only .261/.369/.400 the rest of the way.

Somehow that was enough for the Twins to give up on Ortiz, though it took a while for him to get free of them. In 1999, they gave the first base job to rookie Doug Mientkiewicz. The designated hitter position initially was given to Marty Cordova, but in the second half he spent more time in the field and several players were rotated through the position. But for four games, Ortiz wasn't one of them -- he spent nearly the entire season with the Salt Lake Buzz of the Pacific Coast League, hitting .315/.412/.590 with 30 home runs in 130 games. Despite losing 97 games that year, the Twins apparently couldn't use a hitter with that kind of ability. Returning to the team in September, he went 0-for-20 in 10 games.

For more, join our Red Sox community, Over the Monster

Ortiz, now 24, finally got a chance to play somewhat regularly in the majors in 2000, though he had to hit his way out from behind Ron Coomer and Butch Huskey to do so. Please, read that sentence again, dwelling, in the full light of retrospective knowledge, on an eight-time all-star being trapped behind those two players. Now forget about bending over backwards to be fair and consider what the Twins knew at the time:

1. Doug Mientkiewicz hadn't hit and had pointedly not enjoyed his time with manager Tom Kelly, so he was getting the Salt Lake treatment -- a full year of exile.

2. Coomer was 33, a career .281/.314/.436 hitter (90 OPS+) who had posted an on-base percentage of .301 over the previous two seasons. He could hit left-handers well, but was mediocre at best against same-side pitching; he would finish his career hitting .259/.296/.381 against them.

3. Huskey was 28 and was a career .268/.313/.447 hitter to that point (OPS+ 98). In fairness to the Twins, it should be noted that those rates included some early-career struggles. In the four years preceding 2000, he'd hit .276/.319/.462. Of course, those years were 1996-1999, so that works out to an OPS+ of 103. Like Coomer, Huskey's main ability was hitting left-handed pitching; he hit .301/.362/.487 lifetime against southpaws, but only .252/.298/.422 against right-handers. Unlike Coomer, who as a transplanted third baseman was a little bit more limber than your average first sacker, Huskey had had his glove confiscated by the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Defense.

4. They had Ortiz, who was not particularly well-conditioned and not very good on defense, but had absolutely creamed the ball in both the high minors and the one healthy period of full-time play the Twins had given him.

That the Twins made the decision they did given the available evidence helps explain why the period from 1993-2000 was such a wasteland for them -- not that Ortiz made them eat their words. He hit only .282/.364/.446 with 10 home runs in 478 plate appearances. Here's where the quote comes in. As Ortiz recalled one he got to Boston, "Something in my swing was not right in Minnesota. I could never hit for power. Whenever I took a big swing, they'd say to me, ‘Hey, hey, what are you doing?' So I said, ‘You want me to hit like a little bitch, then I will.'"

"So you want me to hit like a little bitch?" No wonder Tom Kelly sent Ortiz into exile; Ortiz was both rebellious and mocking all at once, calling the Twins on their counterproductive strategies in a way they couldn't answer. To paraphrase Jim Croce, you don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit in the wind, you don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger, and you don't ask Big Papi to hit singles to the opposite field. When the Twins simply released Ortiz after the 2002 season, perhaps it was their all-too-typical parsimony towards an arbitration-eligible player, perhaps a reflection of how many candidates they had to DH at the time, but (and this is an inference, but it seems to me a reasonably fair one) that if Ortiz had not been resistant, if he had not spoken truth to power, the Twins would not have cut him loose so easily.

USA TODAY Sports

That stood as Ortiz's best line until recently. First, his response to the Boston Marathon bombers should not go unremarked: "This is our f***ing city. Nobody is going to dictate our freedom. Stay strong." That remark will go down as part of the aftermath of that terrible event in the same way that the return of baseball to New York City after 9/11 became part of the recovery from that event. Having said that, and despite having spent about a thousand words grounding the "little bitch" comment in its context, I have a new nominee for the best-thing-David-Ortiz-ever-said award: Virtually everything he said in response to Dan Shaughnessy's Boston Globe column, which suggested that Ortiz's hot start could be due to PED usage because, "You [Ortiz] fit all the models. You are from the Dominican Republic. You are an older player. Older players don't get better. You've had injuries consistent with steroid use. You showed up on the list from 2003. You fit all the formulas."

There is a logical fallacy, a failure of deductive reasoning where you construct an argument something like

Fish can swim.
Michael Phelps can swim.
Therefore, Michael Phelps must be a fish.

Here we have a kind of racial profiling where Shaugnessy says

Some Dominicans have been caught using PEDs.
David Ortiz is Dominican.
Therefore, David Ortiz is using PEDs.

There are a lot of other problems with the argument as well, starting with the fact that almost any player can have a strong (now) 73 plate appearances. Baseball is filled with small-sample heroes who have all the breaks go their way for a while. You also have the opposite, players who have inexplicable slumps. If we go into the game logs for, say, Ted Williams' best seasons, we would almost certainly find stretches where he hit .600 (The Splinter was juicing!) and a few where he hit .200 (the Splinter was tanking it!). That's why we call them batting averages. Indeed, as Ortiz pointed out, he's been caught in this same trap:

"I've had a couple of bad Aprils and they have tried to bring me to the point of suicide, but the seasons have continued, and I got better and finished with good numbers, but they have continued talking about the bad Aprils. Now I'm having a good April and they attack me anyhow," Ortiz told the radio show.

Ortiz could also have called out "you are an older player" -- his career progression has been unconventional from the outset because of the way the Twins handled him, as well as injuries that interrupted his progress in 2001 and 2002. More appropriately, though, he focused on the easy generalizations made about his nationality:

"Yesterday, the guy came to see me and asked some questions about steroids, and when you see the writing, it basically focuses on the fact that I'm Dominican and that many Dominicans have been caught using steroids. And what about the Americans?" Ortiz said.

"If you're from the Middle East, because there are some people there who put bombs and terrorize civilians, I have to see you like that, as well? If you are a white American, I have to call you a racist because white Americans were in the Ku Klux Klan?

Given the parameters of the discussion as established by Shaughnessy, the players can't win. Every successful catch by the testing program shows that players are getting away with cheating because, "the cheaters are always ahead of the testers." Except when they're not. If you get caught, you're a cheater. If you don't get caught, you have a secret formula that's allowing you to pass, or you fooled the testers in some other way. Maybe that's what the game deserves given the lax attitude it took towards PEDs. It took Babe Ruth and willful amnesia for baseball to get past the Black Sox -- there were rumors of subsequent World Series games being fixed, but no one cared, not because those rumors weren't credible, but because they had simply decided not to pay them any attention. Home runs were fun -- that's all that mattered.

The same "home runs are fun" mania accounts for our ability to believe that even mediocre ballplayers could hit balls over buildings. With no equivalent distraction, some of us seem to be going through a never-ending period of remorse, where every swing in performance will be viewed as evidence of secret chemists in basement labs, concocting super-slugger serums alongside the crystal meth. Maybe it's naïve to think that isn't happening -- it almost certainly is, because as long as there is the possibility of an advantage in anything, someone will try to take it. Still, you can't live like this without eventually succumbing to total paranoia.

Paranoia is the enemy of logic. It causes you to make inferences that aren't necessarily supported by the evidence while shutting out exculpatory information, in this case chiefly that (1) swings in player performance are not unusual, (2) David Ortiz is and has been unusual in other regards, (3) while Dominican players have been caught using PEDs, that is not a reason to (a) tar the entire population of Dominican ballplayers, the vast, vast majority of whom are guilty of nothing more than wanting to earn their way out of poverty by playing the game, and (b) most of whom do not resemble David Ortiz but rather are fringe players looking to gain an advantage.

In short, David Ortiz doesn't deserve this, but as he pointed out, he's screwed either way: the great irony is that Shaugnessy would feel more comfortable if the 37-year-old DH was hitting like a little bitch.

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Brett Anderson takes a win where he can find one

2013-05-09T21:41:48Z

Ever notice how payback doesn't always happen when you want it to? It's so rare that you see the guy who cut you off on the highway pulled over, or the annoying guy at the party who insisted that it's not Don Zimmer, it's Dom Zimmer get handed a Baseball Encyclopedia and corrected right in front of you. Well, on Thursday Brett Anderson of the A's had one of those moments when life balanced the sheets just a little bit, and he was there to see it.

We might've lost the series but I just witnessed an Indians player/coach back into a light pole in the parking lot...see ya taillight.
— Brett Anderson (@BrettAnderson49) May 9, 2013

That there is what the Germans call schadenfreude. It feels good, but it only goes so far -- the Clevelander will get his car fixed, but the A's will still have been swept out of a four-game series by the Indians.

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