Baseball Nation - All Posts

Computing Manny Machado's shot at the record

2013-06-19T12:35:03Z

Yesterday, Bill James wrote (subscriber-only) about Manny Machado's chances of breaking the all-time, single-season double record. Here's the meat, or rather the top and bottom buns; I snipped out most of the mathematical meat:

Manny Machado has hit 31 doubles through the Orioles’ first 71 games. At that pace he would hit 73 doubles this season, which would break the major league record for doubles in a season, which is 67 (Earl Webb, 1931). What is the chance that he will break that record?

As best I can estimate it, it’s about 3%.

--snip--

Combining those into one number, then, the chance would be 4% ... (.30 times .085, plus .10 times .064, etc.)

So that method says four percent, but that method is perhaps a little unrealistically optimistic. It assumes that his propensity to hit doubles is the equal of Ted Williams and greater than any other player (and greater than Williams if you measure it per plate appearance, rather than per at bat), and it assumes that he has a 30% chance of getting 697 at bats this season, which would be the 8th highest total of all time. So… .4% seems high; let’s say 3%.

Funny, I was gonna say 3.5 percent. Whatever.

Seriously, there's nothing wrong with getting excited about Machado's shot at the record (not to mention his tremendous talent, generally). But as I wrote a few weeks ago, we've been here many times before. So wake me in August if Machado's still got the shot.

Suing Commissioner Bud

2013-06-18T21:03:03Z

In my favorite coincidence (?) so far, the City of San José is filing a suit against Major League Baseball (.pdf), charging MLB with conspiracy against San José's efforts to attract the Oakland Athletics to a new ballpark. Here's what one Internet expert thinks:

Quick read of the suit: sounds more like a PR document than a viable lawsuit. http://t.co/SmdQceN1da
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) June 18, 2013

Huh. He would know. Used to be a lawyer and stuff.

As you know, one can't really discuss this without mentioning Major League Baseball's strange antitrust exemption, which has been in place since 1922 and essentially allows MLB to restrict fair trade in various ways, and particularly when it comes to the location of franchises. What makes it particularly strange is that Baseball is alone. Here's a relevant passage from Stuart Banner's outstanding book, The Baseball Trust: A History of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption:

In 1980, when the NFL owners voted unanimously to prevent the Oakland Raiders from moving to Los Angeles, the Raiders brought an antitrust suit against the league. They won, and moved to Los Angeles in 1982. (They would move back to Oakland in 1995). Emboldened by the Raiders' victory, five more NFL teams moved in the next 15 years ... Antitrust law rendered the NBA and the NHL equally powerless to prevent franchises from moving to new cities. Basketball and hockey teams moved even more often than football teams did. By 2002, no major league baseball franchise had relocated in 30 years, while in that period the other three sports had seen a total of 22 moves. "It is not a coincidence," explained Robert Dupuy, baseball's chief legal officer, "that baseball is the only sport with an exemption."

Just on the face of it, there is absolutely no reason for professional baseball to be treated any differently than football, hockey, and basketball. But it is. And recent challenges have been fruitless. Mike Piazza's dad sued Major League Baseball when his attempt to purchase the Giants and move them to St. Petersburg was stymied. The next year, Florida attorney general Robert Butterworth sued MLB, too. In both cases, judges ruled against Baseball.

But before the Anti-Trust Exemption was actually overturned, Baseball settled the cases and ultimately placed the Devil Rays in St. Pete. What's more, later judgement have reaffirmed the antitrust clause. In 2001, a Florida judge wrote, "Flood constitutes an unequivocal, binding decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing that the business of baseball is exempt from the antitrust laws, as it has been since 1922, and as it will remain unless and until Congress decides otherwise. Period."

Don't hold your breath, San José. Major League Baseball spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year ~~bribing~~ lobbying Congress. What's more, threatening to revoke the antitrust exemption is far more useful to Congress than actually revoking the antitrust exemption.

Also, it's not clear that the City of San José actually has any real standing here. Which is probably why Craig suggests this is a p.r. move as much as anything. The Oakland Athletics do have legal standing. But owner Lew Wolff has said many times that he's not interested in pursuing his legal options, and in fact it's not clear that he's got legal options. As SI.com's Michael McCann explained last year, a baseball owner who wants to sue Major League Baseball has to clear a pretty high bar. And unless MLB has broken its own rules regarding franchise relocations and territorial rights, Wolff probably couldn't clear that bar. Which he undoubtedly knows.

Oh, and the City of San José's suit? The erstwhile Shysterball says it should be thrown out of court.

The Mets, Zack Wheeler, and relying on young pitching

2013-06-18T19:52:25Z

If there's anyone weirder about their content online than MLB, it's Gary Larson, so I'll just link to the cartoon and describe it briefly: Two spiders stand in front of a web they've built across the bottom of a playground slide. One spider says to the other, "If we pull this off, we'll eat like kings."

The Mets. This is about the Mets.

Hoping for young pitchers to succeed is like a spider hoping to catch a toddler coming down a slide. At least, that's what it feels like. The Pirates have been using first-rounder after first-rounder on pitching for the last couple of decades. The Orioles were trying to build with young pitchers until they used the escape pod. The Royals set their young pitchers on the roof of the minivan and then forgot about them. The idea of young pitching is great, but it never works.

At least, that's what it seems like. But it can work. From 2002 to 2007, the San Francisco Giants used three of their first-round picks on young pitchers. All three of them panned out. It was a six-year run that was unprecedented in draft history. They caught the toddler at the bottom of the slide and feasted on his carcass. Then they put the leftovers in some spider Tupperware and did it again a couple years later.

Zack Wheeler and Matt Harvey are both top-10 picks. Except one of them was drafted by the Mets, and the other one was drafted by the Giants. Do you know what happens when you plant apple seeds from an apple you eat? You get horrible, inedible apples. You have to take a shoot from the original tree and graft it onto a living rootstock. What the Mets are doing is using the DNA blueprint from a formerly thriving tree to grow their own apple tree.

Wait, apples ... apples ... apples ...

/takes off glasses

… my god …

And if they pull it off, they'll eat like kings. I'm not sure if we're talking about children or apples at this point, but it'll be delicious either way. All the Mets have to do is wait and watch those young pitchers develop. Wait and watch, wait and watch, wait and watch …

It's nerve-wracking, certainly. And all of the young-pitcher qualms will come up again and again. Just ask the Braves and Nationals, who have gone through it all recently. But don't forget to check in with the Marlins, who caught the kid at the bottom of the slide a decade ago.

And here's the part where I double-down on the part where young pitchers are unlikely to pitch well and the odds are against the Mets. Except the odds were against the Giants. If every young pitcher failed, there wouldn't be any good young pitchers.

The odds were against the 2011 Cardinals relying on a 20-something catcher who could never hit in the minors, a 35-year-old DH playing the outfield again for some reason, and a shoulder-surgery vet who never should have made it out of his 20s.

The odds were against the 2009 Yankees keeping a quartet of 35-and-older hitters healthy and fantastic. The odds were against Cole Hamels being good for the Phillies in 2008, because you know what they say about young pitching ...

You can do this for every championship team, just as you can do it for every division winner and wild-card. Every good team is a mix of players who bucked daunting odds and players who bucked even more daunting odds. And while some Mets fans might be scarred by Generation K, there's also a legacy of young pitching working out just ducky. The '69 Mets had Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Tug McGraw, and Nolan Ryan. Four-fifths of the starters in the '86 rotation were 25 or under, including perhaps the greatest pitching phenom of all time.

Every good team is unlikely, in a way. And all we know about the Mets' future is that today they have two of the 10 most exciting young arms in baseball. That'll do for now. That'll do for now. And maybe the Mets will eat like kings after all. They've done it before.

Ron Cey and the worst baseball songs ever recorded

2013-06-18T17:46:23Z

So there are two really great things about this record:

1. There's a penguin on the label!

2. It's not even two-and-a-half minutes long...

Then again, that's the B-side of the record. Maybe the A-side is fantastic! I mean, sure, the Beatles' 45's were great on both sides. But who remembers the B-side of "Kung Fu Fighting"? Or "Muhammad Ali (Black Superman)"? What really "makes" a record is the A-side. The artist's very best work. Here's Dan Epstein:

I specifically asked to wear #10 in little league, hoping that the magic of Ron's Dodger uniform number would somehow rub off on me. It didn't. But even though I never developed enough of an arm to play third base anywhere near as well as Ron Cey, I can safely say I'm the better singer. In 1976, Ron cut two "country" songs for a 7-inch single, "One Game at a Time" and "Playing the Third Base Bag," both of which were cringe-makingly awful from conception to execution. Not that Ron would disagree; asked about the single during an MLB.com chat about five years back, he answered with typical good humor, "It was done just for fun. It wasn't a ballad. Anyone who thought I was going to pursue a singing career... well, obviously I was not a candidate for 'American Idol.' "

Oh.

But if you positively absolutely must know for yourself, here's "Playing the Third Base Bag" (nsfw, oae).

(h/t: Eric Stephen)

Subtlety, thy name is @RaysBaseball

2013-06-18T17:41:26Z

Myers will bat 6th, play RF, and wear #9 in his MLB debut. The same 3 things can be said about Ted Williams's MLB debut in 1939.
— Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) June 18, 2013

Oh.

Other players who wore #9, hit sixth, and played right field in their first major-league start include Domonic Brown and Jake Fox. Which is perfect, because if I had to make a prediction about Wil Myers's career, I'd guess he'll either be Ted Williams, Domonic Brown, or Jake Fox, unless he's somewhere in the middle.

Clint Hurdle wore #9, played RF, and batted fifth in his debut, which means he was probably better than Ted Williams. He was at least twice as purple.

Venable's game-saving catch and Bochy's tragic double-switch

2013-06-18T16:38:42Z

Late last night, a number of interesting things happened in San Francisco.

First, Barry Zito struck out eight Padres. He hadn't struck out so many anybodies in nearly three years.

In the bottom of the 12th inning with the game utterly on the line, Will Venable did this:

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The Padres went ahead in the top of the 13th, and then tacked on a bit of insurance. But not before Bruce Bochy blew a double-switch:

San Diego added another run on a bases-loaded walk from Jake Dunning. Giants manager Bruce Bochy had made a double switch to bring in Dunning and had intended to have a fresh Buster Posey lead off the next inning, but mistakenly put him in the seventh hole.

"I messed up the double switch. I got distracted," Bochy said. "I was out there arguing and I totally brain-cramped on that. Once I said it wrong, I was done. I knew that. That's a first. I probably should have stepped back and thought a little bit. ... Once I called it wrong I can't take it back. Got distracted, you're upset a little bit, that shouldn't happen but it did."

This must have been immensely frustrating for Giants fans, as the Giants' third-string catcher led off the bottom of the 13th and Posey never reached the plate before Huston Street closed the Padres' victory.

Did the blown double-switch kill the Giants' chances? Hardly. Basic run expectancy suggests the Giants entered the bottom of the 13th with a seven-percent chance of winning. You can bump that up a few percent if Posey leads off the inning, and you can bump it down a few with Quiroz leading off. As these things go, it was just about the biggest mistake that Bochy could possibly have made. But the Giants were highly unlikely to win either way.

The biggest story Monday night was the Padres winning their seventh straight, passing the Giants in the standings; there are now four teams within one-and-a-half games of first place, which deserves a graphical representation ...

That's pretty cool! Not cool and not pictured, though? Both Sans have been outscored: Diego by 14 runs, Francisco by 10. Which doesn't mean they can't contend. Hell, they are contending. It does mean they probably have to play significantly better if they're going to keep contending. As usual, the Padres' ballpark -- even with the fences coming in this season -- has been terribly rough on hitters. The Padres' hitters have the third-best road OPS in the National League, which is terribly impressive. The Padres' pitchers have the third-worst road ERA in the National League, which is just terrible.

Then again, the once pitching-rich Giants have the second-worst ERA in the league.

The Padres and Giants are bizarrely similar this season. Both play in extreme pitcher's ballparks, both have scored more runs than we expected, and both need to pitch significantly better.

Pajamas, salamanders, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt

2013-06-18T16:20:18Z

You might be familiar with the video of what cricket looks like to Americans. Now there's a spiritual companion for baseball. Behold!

Once Ichiro hits it in the Pernicious Poem Place, everything stops until Jacoby Ellsbury recites a poem that incites the crowd to dump beer on him. Makes perfect sense if you let the game come to you.

(Hat tip to CBC who got it from CBS who got it from Kottke by way of the Internet)

On the Decline of Western Civilization ...

2013-06-18T13:00:03Z

Bob Costas was covering the U.S. Open this weekend, but he took a break to give the world a piece of his baseball mind. The video (thanks to Amazin' Avenue):

To be fair, this was almost certainly a little tongue-in-cheek. You can tell that Costas isn't a fan of walk-off celebrations, but the use of hyperbole was designed to make you chuckle, not think. Costas's Swiss Army knife almost certainly has a fold-out soapbox, and he'll use it when he sees fit. This wasn't the soapbox.

But it rankled Mets fans, which is always funny. And it does bring up an interesting question: How much celebrating over a regular-season game is too much celebrating?

Key components of the most recent Mets' celebration included ...

Punching the person who did a good thing
The home-run hitter discarding his helmet before he gets to the plate because people are going to punch him, which seems counterintuitive
Hopping up and down
Actin' the fool

It was quite innocuous, and it was certainly a funny thing to take umbrage with, even if in jest. It would be one thing if this sort of thing had just started. But here's the oldest regular-season walk-off celebration MLB.com has in their archives:

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There was less punching back then, but Carlos Beltran still whipped his helmet into the peanut gallery because he could. I'm not sure when the swarm-and-jump tradition started at home plate, but it's been going on for a while. And look at these old-timey guys acting like they won the seventh game of the World Series:

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SMDH. Act like you've been there before, guys.

Before we ask how appropriate it is to walk off like the Mets, let's explore how rare it is to be in their situation. First, let's look at the number of walk-offs for each team since 1998. The only reason to make that the cutoff year is so we can include all 30 teams equally:

Team	Walk-off hits, 1998-2012
1. Reds	113
2. Athletics	111
3. Dodgers	106
4. Indians	103
5. Giants	99
5. Rays	99
5. Twins	99
8. Cardinals	98
9. Marlins	97
9. Phillies	97
11. Padres	95
12. Cubs	92
13. Brewers	91
14. Braves	90
15. Mets	89
16. Nationals	88
17. Angels	86
18. Blue Jays	85
18. Red Sox	85
20. Diamondbacks	84
21. Orioles	83
21. Pirates	83
21. Rockies	83
21. White Sox	83
25. Rangers	81
25. Yankees	81
27. Tigers	79
28. Mariners	76
29. Astros	75
30. Royals	72

Each team has 81 chances every year, and some of them take advantage less than others. In the 15 seasons between 1998 and 2012, every team played 1,215 home games, give or take a couple of tiebreakers or rainouts that weren't made up. And the walk-offingest team in the land, the Reds, walked off in nine percent of their home games. The least likely team to walk off, the Royals, still walked off in just under six percent of their home games. That's not a ton, but probably more than you might have guessed. Between six and nine percent is more than I guessed, at least.

Still, there are walk-off droughts. The 1998 Angels enjoyed one walk-off all season, as did the 2001 Cardinals and 2002 Red Sox. The Royals had one each in 2006 and 2007. They aren't so frequent that players should take them for granted.

Walk-off home runs are even rarer, of course. Teams go entire seasons without hitting a walk-off home run. The 2012 Giants were one of those teams, which is one of the reasons Giants fans are so whiny and unfulfilled this year.

But if you're looking for something exceptionally rare, check out how infrequent it is for teams to hit a walk-off homer when they're behind. Again, this is since 1998:

Team	Walk-off HR when trailing, 1998-2012
Reds	15
Indians	13
Rays	13
Nationals	11
Red Sox	11
Angels	9
Athletics	9
Yankees	9
Diamondbacks	8
Phillies	8
Braves	7
Cardinals	7
Marlins	7
Rockies	7
Astros	6
Blue Jays	6
Brewers	6
Dodgers	6
Tigers	6
Padres	5
Pirates	5
Rangers	5
White Sox	5
Giants	4
Mariners	4
Orioles	4
Twins	4
Mets	3
Royals	3
Cubs	2

They're one of the best events in baseball, of course. Some of them don't leave the infield before you know the game's over, and some of them drift back, slowly, slowly, until tens of thousands of fans explode. So rare.

And the home runs when teams are down two or more?

Team	Walk-off HR when trailing by two or more, 1998-2012
Reds	4
Nationals	3
Red Sox	3
Angels	3
Athletics	3
Indians	2
Rays	2
Yankees	2
Diamondbacks	2
Braves	2
Cardinals	2
Rockies	2
Padres	2
Pirates	2
Phillies	1
Marlins	1
Astros	1
Blue Jays	1
Dodgers	1
White Sox	1
Giants	1
Twins	1
Royals	1
Cubs	1
Brewers	0
Tigers	0
Rangers	0
Mariners	0
Orioles	0
Mets	0

Paul Molitor hit the Brewers' last walk-off when down by two or more runs. Tony Phillips hit the last one for the Tigers in 1994, Fred Lynn hit the last one for the Orioles in 1985, and Oddibe McDowell hit the last one for the Rangers in 1987. The Mariners have had exactly one of these home runs in their history.

The last time the Mets had one before Kirk Nieuwenhuis, it was Bobby Bonilla vs. Rob Dibble. Here's the Mets' history of walk-offs down by two or three:

Date	Batter	Opp	Pitcher	Score	Inn	RoB	Out
1962-08-21 (2)	Marv Throneberry	PIT	Roy Face	down 4-2	b9	12-	2
1963-06-07	Duke Snider	STL	Diomedes Olivo	down 2-0	b9	-23	1
1963-06-26	Tim Harkness	CHC	Jim Brewer	down 6-4	b14	123	2
1980-06-14	Steve Henderson	SFG	Allen Ripley	down 6-4	b9	12-	2
1983-09-05	George Foster	PHI	Al Holland	down 5-3	b9	1-3	1
1992-08-30	Bobby Bonilla	CIN	Rob Dibble	down 3-1	b9	12-	2

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com

That's it. Six in 51-plus seasons. Think about the excitement of a walk-off homer, regardless of context. That split-second from contact to realization. Some of them are obviously home runs before they even leave the infield. Some of them drift back slowly, slowly, slowly, messing with the crowd before the eventual release.

There isn't anything like it in sports. There aren't five seconds of anticipation to see if a puck drifts in the net during sudden-death overtime. Then add in the team going from defeat to victory in the time it takes the ball to go over the fence. It's a rare, beautiful cocktail of events that causes a frenzy in the stands and on the field. They don't come around too often.

There hadn't been a home run like this in over 20 years for the Mets.

Long post short: If soccer players get to pretend they're airplanes after a goal because there aren't that many goals scored in a soccer game, baseball players can subject each other to mirth and general grabassery after a walk-off win. And if it's a walk-off homer when the team is down by a couple runs? They can act like it's the seventh game of the World Series. It's rare enough. We'll allow it.

Baseball Nation - All Posts

Computing Manny Machado's shot at the record

Suing Commissioner Bud

The Mets, Zack Wheeler, and relying on young pitching

Amazin' Avenue on Zack Wheeler

Ron Cey and the worst baseball songs ever recorded

Subtlety, thy name is @RaysBaseball

Venable's game-saving catch and Bochy's tragic double-switch

Pajamas, salamanders, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt

On the Decline of Western Civilization ...