Why haven’t I seen this tool before? It’s way cool.
The user interface is kinda tricky to figure out, but once you do it’s fun to fiddle with. I love being able to toggle through each position. Just remember: pressing “h” brings you to the instruction screen.
Hat tip: Andrew Koch.
The A’s played a baseball game today. At long last! It feels so good, even though the A’s lost to the Cubs, 8-7.
The good:
Mark Ellis hit a grand slam, and Bobby Kielty went three-for-three, including a left-handed home run. Several pitchers threw well: Joe Kennedy, Chad Gaudin, Kirk Saarloos and Huston Street.
The bad:
Dan Haren and Jay Witasick got knocked around a bit, and Ron Flores took the loss. Flores isn’t really to blame, though, as he was hurt by some shaky defense by Cliff Pennington and Daric Barton. The word around camp was that Barton’s defense had improved, but judging by today’s performance, where he failed to catch a couple of throws, and then was indecisive on the game-winning play (he hesitated on whether to try to get the out at the plate, or try for a 3-6-3 double play, and got neither), he still has quite a bit of work to do. But it’s early, and he still has several weeks ahead of Ron Washington in his ear, I’m sure.
Conclusions:
About the A’s–none. Haren was bad, but I saw him get knocked around in spring training last year too, and he turned out fine.
About the Cubs–Carlos Zambrano is (still) one heckuva pitcher. Brian Corey, whom the A’s scored all seven runs off of, is not.
Box Score. (Note: it was Kielty, not Clark, who was 3-for-3. The box score is wrong.)
I’m watching live baseball! I just flipped the remote over to something on ESPN Classic called “ESPN Classic Vintage Live: Negro League Baseball presented by Jordan Brand”. It’s the Bristol Barnstormers vs. the Birmingham Black Barons. I have no idea who these players are, but it’s sure nice to see some live baseball, no matter who is playing. They’re also doing some Negro Leagues reminiscing. As I write, it’s tied 8-8 in the eighth innning.
* * *
Seems appropriate that baseball would show up on the scene the day the Winter Olympics ended. I’m a big fan of Swedish winter sports, a leftover from my three years spent enduring the long, dark winters of Scandinavia. I’ve been on a bit of a high all day long, ever since the Swedish hockey team won the gold medal this morning, beating arch-rival Finland 3-2.
It’s hard to underestimate how big a deal this is in Sweden. Sweden had won Olympic and World Championship hockey gold before, but never in a context where all the top NHL players participated. This victory puts this hockey team into the very top circle of all-time Swedish sports legends, alongside Ingemar Stenmark and Björn Borg. They’ll be talking about Nicklas Lidström’s slapshot, and Henrik Lundqvist’s last-second save forever. An instant classic.
I’ve spent the afternoon browsing Swedish websites for reactions. My favorite was listening to the Swedish Radio highlights (be patient, it’s a little slow to load), featuring all five goals, plus the frantic final minute where Lundqvist made his save. Even if you don’t understand Swedish, I’ll bet it’s kinda fun to listen to, because the radio announcer goes absolutely bonkers. Plus, the guy speaks so fast, he’s hard to understand even if you speak Swedish. But the emotions are clear.
* * *
That’s why I think I’m going to like the World Baseball Classic. Because for smaller countries like Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, the chance to compete in your national sport is something special. I’m American, and I should probably root for my own country, but I don’t think if we win, it will be a big deal for us. I’m kinda hoping one of the smaller countries wins. It would mean so much more to them.
* * *
A Birmingham player steals third, and scores on an error. Seems like an appropriate way to win a Negro League tribute game. Black Barons win, 9-8.
Following up on my last post: Studes points out a simpler online lineup generating tool.
That tool creates a lineup with Jason Kendall leading off, instead of batting ninth. The lineups differ, depending on which projection tool you use:
With Thomas, using ZiPS: Kendall Johnson Chavez Bradley Thomas Crosby Swisher Kotsay Ellis With Thomas, using Marcel: Kendall Bradley Thomas Chavez Johnson Swisher Crosby Ellis Kotsay With Payton, using ZiPS: Kendall Johnson Chavez Bradley Crosby Swisher Kotsay Payton Ellis With Payton, using Marcel: Kendall Johnson Chavez Bradley Swisher Crosby Payton Ellis Kotsay
I don’t know about that. I still kinda like the idea of Ellis batting leadoff instead of Kendall that came out of the last tool. But the rest of the lineup looks a little better.
* * *
Along those lines, Cyril Morong made some corrections to his DH-only stats. That changes the “ideal” lineup under the corrected AL numbers to the following:
With Thomas: Ellis Thomas Chavez Johnson Swisher Kotsay Crosby Bradley Kendall With Payton: Ellis Chavez Johnson Bradley Swisher Payton Crosby Kotsay Kendall
I don’t think Thomas batting second is likely to happen. Nor Bradley batting eighth.
For what it’s worth, I’d probably write a Thomas lineup like this:
Ellis Johnson Bradley Chavez Thomas Crosby Swisher Kotsay Kendall
which keeps the left-right thing through the top of the order.
* * *
And then late this afternoon, David Pinto emailed me that he had translated my Perl script to Python, and made an online tool for creating lineups. Now you all kinds of choices for your lineup generation. Enjoy.
Ryan has a post about optimizing the A’s lineup over on The Pastime, using PECOTA projections and a formula from Cyril Morong over at Beyond the Boxscore.
Ryan didn’t have the programming nerdiness to work through all 362,800 lineup permutations. But I happened to be cursed with such geekdom, so I wrote a perl script to churn out the calculations. I ran it twice, once with Frank Thomas in the lineup, and once with Jay Payton in place of Thomas.
Here are the best and worst lineups. The number is runs/162 games.
Five best lineups with Thomas:
853.45: Bradley Chavez Ellis Thomas Johnson Crosby Swisher Kotsay Kendall 853.44: Bradley Chavez Ellis Thomas Johnson Swisher Crosby Kotsay Kendall 853.13: Bradley Johnson Ellis Thomas Chavez Crosby Swisher Kotsay Kendall 853.12: Bradley Johnson Ellis Thomas Chavez Swisher Crosby Kotsay Kendall 852.90: Ellis Chavez Bradley Thomas Johnson Swisher Crosby Kotsay Kendall
Five best lineups with Payton:
834.91: Bradley Johnson Ellis Chavez Swisher Payton Crosby Kotsay Kendall 834.80: Bradley Johnson Ellis Chavez Crosby Payton Swisher Kotsay Kendall 834.78: Bradley Swisher Ellis Chavez Johnson Payton Crosby Kotsay Kendall 834.63: Bradley Crosby Ellis Chavez Johnson Payton Swisher Kotsay Kendall 834.50: Bradley Chavez Ellis Swisher Johnson Payton Crosby Kotsay Kendall
A few interesting notes:
With Thomas: 852.58: Ellis Johnson Bradley Thomas Chavez Crosby Swisher Kotsay Kendall With Payton: 834.36: Ellis Johnson Bradley Chavez Swisher Payton Crosby Kotsay Kendall
Providing evidence that Zachary’s preference for Ellis and Johnson at the top of the order is a good one.
Now for some fun: the worst lineups…
With Thomas:
816.79: Crosby Kotsay Johnson Kendall Swisher Ellis Bradley Chavez Thomas 816.84: Swisher Kotsay Johnson Kendall Crosby Ellis Bradley Chavez Thomas 816.92: Crosby Kotsay Johnson Kendall Swisher Bradley Ellis Chavez Thomas 816.97: Swisher Kotsay Johnson Kendall Crosby Bradley Ellis Chavez Thomas 817.05: Kotsay Ellis Swisher Kendall Crosby Bradley Johnson Chavez Thomas
With Payton:
799.02: Payton Kotsay Swisher Kendall Crosby Ellis Bradley Johnson Chavez 799.11: Payton Kotsay Crosby Kendall Swisher Ellis Bradley Johnson Chavez 799.15: Payton Kotsay Swisher Kendall Crosby Bradley Ellis Johnson Chavez 799.24: Payton Kotsay Crosby Kendall Swisher Bradley Ellis Johnson Chavez 799.59: Payton Kotsay Swisher Kendall Crosby Ellis Bradley Chavez Johnson
The perl code is below, for those of you with the Unixness for these things…
Evolution tries some crazy experiments sometimes. Sickle cell anemia: that’s a bad thing, unless there’s lots of malaria around you. Then it’s a good thing.
Or crying: everybody hates it. Hates it! But it’s a wickedly effective means of communication. More babies were saved by this odd form of communication than were killed by irritated parents. Therefore, crying gets to stay in our genes instead of being selected out of them.
When you become a parent, you quickly learn to recognize the different types of cries. There’s the “I’m hurt” cry, the “I’m hungry” cry, the “I’m bored” cry, the “I’m tired and anything that goes wrong is going to make me cry” cry, and of course, the “cry of injustice” a/k/a the “hey, that’s mine!” cry.
Somewhere around first or second grade, those cries start turning into other forms of behavior. If you’re lucky, the cries turn socially accepted behaviors: the “I’m hungry” cry becomes the sentence “What’s for dinner?”. Sometimes, it turns into something else: the “I’m bored” cry becomes the “kick your sister in the shin for no reason” behavior.
My kids, ages five and eight, are almost over the crying thing now, although the younger one still does cry on occasion. But we have visitors at my house now who have a two-year-old girl, and I’m getting to relive those cries all over again.
The interesting thing is that this little girl, who can only speak a handful of words, and who still has her full complement of cries, has learned to imitate the post-crying behavior to manipulate her environment. If she wants attention, she simply screams “Ow!” as loud she can, and everyone around her stops what they’re doing to make sure she’s all right. OK, now that I have your attention…can I have a cookie?
So what does this have to do with Frank Tanana the A’s? Just an observation. Camps have opened, and the fluffy puff pieces have started to flow from the tap. The most interesting one so far has been this story by Joe Roderick about Milton Bradley. Bradley seems by all accounts a very intelligent person, who has one very big flaw: he overreacts to injustice.
Overreacting to injustice: anyone who has ever had a two-year-old has seen that before. The “cry of injustice” is probably the loudest, most piercing cry of all. And the hardest one to deal with as a parent: you often can’t fix the problem. Sorry kid, you can’t have cookies for dinner. I don’t know why you expected that you could, but you can’t. Life is unfair sometimes. Sorry.
Most of us eventually resign ourselves to the fact that life sucks, give up the temper tantrums, and learn to deal with the pure injustice of being alive. There’s a reason the Terrible Twos only lasts about one year, instead of five or ten. In prehistoric times, the kids that had their Terrible Twos last longer than that probably didn’t make it through puberty very often to pass down their genes.
So I wonder, perhaps Milton Bradley is one of evolution’s strange counterintuitive experiments. One of those things where a bad trait has a benefit in a particular context. Perhaps Bradley’s inability to shed his cries of injustice, his refusal to accept not getting what he wants, is exactly the trait that drives him to be a better baseball player than 99% of the human population. In an environment where pro athletes can have all the sex they’d ever want, and being the child of a pro athlete is a great predictor of becoming one yourself, perhaps the question to ask isn’t “Why is Milton Bradley so unusual?”, but “Why aren’t anti-social athletes much more common than they already are?”
A strong wind blew through the Bay Area yesterday and cleared out the air. I’m sitting here staring across the bay, and it’s quite distracting. The visibility is absolutely perfect. The colors are vivid, the edges are sharp. It’s Mother Nature’s own HDTV.
I can see individual cars driving on the freeway past Candlestick Park. I can see the individual aisles of Pac Bell SBC AT&T Park. I can see individual windows on individual buildings on the San Francisco skyline. There’s a sailboat about 300 yards out, slowly drifting southward in the breeze. The sailor is wearing a light blue shirt, and a white visor. It feels like I should be able to just leap out and hop onboard from here. Warning: objects may be farther away than they appear.
It’s spectacular. I can feel the winter doldrums being lifted right off my shoulders, and the winter fog being cleared from my mind. It feels like spring again. I’m ready for some baseball. Let’s go.
We’re looking at baseball like boxing: if you beat the champ, you’re the champ. Today: a look at the 2002 season. Previously: 2003 2004.
The 2002 Heavyweight baseball season was dominated by the St. Louis Cardinals. They won over twice as many games as any other team. They also ended up holding the title at the end of the regular season. Ordinarily, for a team that doesn’t win the World Series, that might be something of significance to remember your season by. But the 2002 Cardinals had anything but an ordinary season, as Cardnilly so poignantly points out.
Heavyweight of the Year: St. Louis Cardinals
Final 2002 Regular Season Champ: St. Louis Cardinals
2002 Heavyweight Standings
| team | w | l |
|---|---|---|
| SLN | 39 | 16 |
| HOU | 19 | 21 |
| SDN | 15 | 19 |
| SFN | 14 | 11 |
| ARI | 12 | 10 |
| LAN | 13 | 15 |
| CHN | 13 | 20 |
| SEA | 8 | 5 |
| MIL | 7 | 7 |
| COL | 7 | 9 |
| FLO | 5 | 7 |
| PIT | 4 | 5 |
| CIN | 3 | 10 |
| TEX | 1 | 2 |
| PHI | 1 | 2 |
| OAK | 1 | 3 |
Game by game:
Marine Layer has a fabulous essay over on his A’s ballpark blog about the relationship between the amount of personal income in a metropolitan area, and the number of sports teams in that market. Money quote:
Many outsiders and the Bay Area’s own media blame the market’s fickle, fair-weather fans for attendance woes. In the end, does this have more to do with simple market dynamics?
I had been getting pretty bored with Baseball Prospectus lately, but BP has suddenly awakened with a vengeance. Will Carroll’s 2006 Team Health Reports are starting soon. But I really dig the new PECOTA cards. Before, my eyes would mostly glaze over when I looked at all the numbers. Now there are some nice graphs along with the numbers. The five-year “Stars and Scrubs” chart for each player is really cool: you can visualize at a glance how a player is likely to perform over the next five years. Will he be a star, a regular, or a scrub? Just look at the chart!
Along with the new cards is Nate Silver’s new method for ranking prospects. Each player gets a score, based on objective measurements only (no scouting involved). What the score means is a little unclear to me, but from what I gather, a score over 300 is pretty much a can’t-miss prospect, someone who is very likely to be a star. From 200-300 is a good prospect, probably will be a regular, with a modest chance to be a star. 100-200 is someone who will likely make the majors, possibly as a regular, but probably not a star.
According to PECOTA, the A’s have no top-level prospects. It likes Daric Barton as a good, solid contributor, but doesn’t think he’s likely a superstar. An A’s Top 10 prospect list from PECOTA would like this (if my math is right):
1. Daric Barton: 239.4
2. Kevin Melillo: 203.5
3. Chad Gaudin: 192.6
4. Dallas Braden: 159.1
5. Javier Herrera: 153.4
6. Matt Watson: 129.9
7. Kurt Suzuki: 122.1
8. Cliff Pennington: 120.4
9. Mike Rouse: 112.5
10. Travis Buck: 107.4
There are some names missing from PECOTA’s list, like Jason Windsor, Shane Komine, and the three high-school arms drafted last year: Italiano, Mazzaro, and Lansford. And is Watson still a prospect? Compare this list to Baseball America’s list (for the Los Angeles Athletics according to the title bar…), there are some holes:
1. Daric Barton, 1b
2. Javier Herrera, of
3. Cliff Pennington, ss
4. Travis Buck, of
5. Kevin Melillo, 2b
6. Santiago Casilla, rhp
7. Craig Italiano, rhp
8. Shane Komine, rhp
9. Vince Mazzaro, rhp
10. Kurt Suzuki, c
There are some interesting notes here. PECOTA loves Kevin Melillo more than any other prospect site I’ve read. Chad Gaudin looks like the guy to step in for Barry Zito when he leaves for free agency: his score is almost identical to Joe Blanton’s. (I’m not sure if Gaudin was with the A’s when BA made its list, or where he’d fit on it.)
On the negative side, PECOTA thinks Richie Robnett is a flop, and will be out of baseball within two years. It isn’t much kinder to Danny Putnam. It’s lukewarm on Santijairo Garcasilla and Juan Cruz, who each scored just below 100.
As for the existing core of young A’s players, there are two tiers. Eric Chavez, Bobby Crosby, and Rich Harden are the big stars, all scoring over 400. Mark Ellis, Dan Haren, Nick Swisher, Huston Street, and Dan Johnson all score in the 200’s, with Joe Blanton just behind at 194.4.
What all this means, I’m not quite sure yet. You have to get used to these new measurements, compare them to other teams and players, learn its strengths and weaknesses, and absorb them. But it’s fun to have a new tool to play with. I’m looking forward to the rest of Silver’s series on using PECOTA for measuring prospects. Welcome back, BP!
I recently browsed through the A’s rosters of the last ten years, and found 14 players in the last decade that I have absolutely no recollection of them ever appearing in an A’s uniform.
Most of them were from 1996-98, which makes sense, because (a) there have been plenty of time for those brain cells to evaporate, (b) the A’s weren’t very good in those years, and (c) I was working about 100 hours a week in them crazy dot-com days, so who had time to pay close attention to anything important like baseball?
Some of the names are familiar to me, but I don’t remember them playing in Oakland. Here’s the list:
For a sec, I thought I remembered watching Tim Kubinski, but then I realized I was thinking about the guy who married a monkey.
Anybody remember these guys?
What players have you forgotten from your favorite team? Or is that like asking what you look like in a mirror with your eyes closed?
OK, it’s just a topical corticosteroid cream for an allergic rash, but I dig catchy titles. Take that, Will Carroll!
I’m also taking a strong antihistamine for the rash, so if I act oddl
y or fall as
leep in
the middle of th
zzz
zzz
…mmm…huh? where was i? oh february. i hate it. might as well sleep through it anyway. billy beane said at the fanfest that after signing mark ellis he’s going to take a month off. zito trade: not happening. so what better time to be zonkkndkeided. i’ll be coked to the gills when I bump that old buzzard off.
did you know the super bowl and i are twins? I was born first. I turn XL tomorrow, Supe turns on Sunday. we’re having a combined party. I’d invite you over, but I’ll probably just be a
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
ombie, and you could probably have more fun elsewhere. Maybe I’m a barrel of laffs when I be souped up on antihistamines and corticosteroids, but I doubabtttttttt it.
hehhhh i said tttttt it.
speaking of drugs you gotta wonder if the amphetamine ban is an ever bigger advantage for the a’s this year. billy beane has constructed a very deep team, with quality replacements at practically every position. without their uppers, players may need more time off this year, and the a’s will be in better position to exploit that than probably every other team. as joe sheehan said
When you consider the depth of the bench and bullpen, the A’s may have the strongest 16-25 roster in the game. That matters over 162 games.
and especially ove r 162 greeniefree games?
of course if the green team relied on a lot of greenies in the past, they may suffer more than most, too. won’t know til august september what am i saying we probably wont even know then. pay no attention to me im’m on the oppositittie of greenies.
hehhhh i said oppositittie
i listened to vince cotroneo on mlbradio yesterday, decent voice, a bit of a chatterbox, can probably give ray fosse a run for his runonsentence money if you know what i mean but i think he’ll be at least inoffensive which is all i am relaly hoping 4
punctuatio nis too mcuh work who needs it anywys nd spacebar isawaste
saygoodnightkengoodnightken
I feel about FanFests the way I feel about trade conferences: you spend all day at the thing, and if you’re lucky, you find one or two useful pieces of information. Are those one or two things worth a day of your life? I’m never quite sure.
I spent five and a half hours today at the Coliseum today, and came out with about five minutes worth of interesting stuff. I keep thinking there could be a more efficient use of my time, but for some reason, I keep going. At least the entrance fee is free, with my season ticket package. Plus, it provides a nice little emotional baseball fix in the middle of winter, if nothing else. Or so I tell myself.
I think the emotional fix would have been stronger if I had walked into the Coliseum today and seen a plush green field under a bright blue sky. Unfortunately, the grass had been completely removed. There was only drab gray dirt under a drab gray sky. Baseball still seemed to be deep in hibernation.
On the bright (or at least less drab) side, I had actually never seen the field completely bare like this, so I was provided with a new experience, even if it wasn’t exactly a beautiful one.
* * *
Another new experience was seeing some tarp installed over the third deck sections behind home plate. I wonder, are they going to install tarp over the whole third deck, or just those four sections? I hope it won’t just be like this. The tarp layout looked off-center: they covered one middle section, one section on the first base side, and two sections on the third base side. Those of us who have even some minor Adrian Monk tendencies will be left haunted by the unevenness.
Seeing the third deck even partially covered makes me wonder something: if you’re not going to use the third deck, could you move home plate a few feet closer to the seating bowl? Isn’t it the angle of the third deck the main reason home plate needs to be so far away from the seats? Are there any other seats that would be obstructed by moving home plate back a foot or three? If one of the reasons for closing the third deck is to create a more intimate atmosphere, wouldn’t effectively making everyone’s seat one row closer to the action be more intimate?
You’d have to fiddle with the fences, and there’s only about three feet of wiggle room in the corners, but the position of the outfield fences is already arbitrary.
* * *
I used to always enjoy the Billy Beane Q&A sessions, but my interest is starting to wane. I’ve seen his act enough now to know pretty much what he (isn’t) going to say. This year was particularly uninteresting, because he didn’t have to defend any controversial moves.
And yet…there was one new tidbit he dropped, almost in passing. He claimed that young players usually play quite inconsistently until sometime midway through their second season (Huston Street being a rare exception). He fully expects Nick Swisher and Dan Johnson to struggle at times in the first half of the year, and then sometime around midseason, things should start to click for them.
I’d never heard of that one-and-a-half-year rule of thumb before. I wonder if that idea is merely observational on Beane’s part, or if he has some statistics backing that idea.
* * *
The player Q&A sessions never really teach you anything about the game itself, but sometimes it can be fun to learn a little bit about the clubhouse chemistry. For example, who knew that Dan Haren was such a tease? Or that Kirk Saarloos is quite the wit? I had always imagined Frank Thomas as rather surly, but he seemed downright jovial in his Q&A session. Esteban Loaiza, who played with Thomas in Chicago, called Thomas “a big man, but a big teddy bear”. Those were the most interesting words out of Loaiza’s mouth, as otherwise he was a fountain of baseball cliches.
Which brings us to the second interesting point of the day: that Thomas and Loaiza each said that they chose to sign with Oakland because they wanted to play for a winner. Normally, those are words reserved for teams like the Yankees and Red Sox–I can’t ever recall anyone saying it about the A’s before. Usually, the A’s get free agents who are just happy to have a job. The A’s have reached a new level of respect within baseball. If done right, it could be the start of a virtuous cycle: good players want to play for you, which makes you a good team, which makes more good players want to play for you.
* * *
In the afternoon, I eschewed the crowded player Q&As, and attended some more intimate seminars with A’s coaches. There were a couple of “Baseball 101” sessions that dealt with how hitters and pitchers use video to maintain their mechanics and prepare for their opponents. Hitting coach Gerald Perry and catcher Adam Melhuse spoke about hitters, while pitching coach Curt Young and bullpen catcher Brandon Buckley talked about pitchers.
It was the combination of these two separate sessions that led to the third interesting thing I learned today: there is a sort of unspoken Hippocratic Oath that (A’s) coaches follow: first, do no harm.
The mechanics of both hitting and pitching are subconscious–you want the hitter concentrating on the pitcher, and you want the pitcher concentrating on his target. You don’t want a player thinking about his mechanics, because then he isn’t concentrating on the thing he needs to concentrate on to succeed.
So there is a very real risk that by talking to a player about his mechanics, you can actually make things worse, because you can turn a subconscious act into a conscious one, and interrupt the automatic mechanism that brought them the success to reach this level.
Gerald Perry and Curt Young each spoke independently about not telling their pupils everything they notice. They choose what they talk to players about with great care. If they make a suggestion, they make sure to keep it a small and simple one, so that their conscious mind doesn’t have too much information to hold. If you give a batter three different things to think about, by the time he thinks about those things, a fastball has gone right past him.
Earlier in the day, Dennis Eckersley was asked in a Q&A session why he was not a coach. Eck replied that it takes a special kind of person to coach, someone with a passion for it, and someone with patience. Eckersley admitted he did not have the patience to be an effective coach.
Coaching involves understanding technique, tactics, and psychology. You may see something that needs fixing, but you need the patience and understanding to know when and how to try to fix it, and when not to. Coaching is a delicate craft, and I don’t think I fully appreciated that until today.
Clunk! Bam! Crash! What’s that sound?
It’s the sound of an A’s prospect plummeting down the rankings of top A’s prospects, that’s what it is. For it turns out the name Jairo Garcia is not spelled “Jairo Garcia”, it’s only pronounced that way. It’s actually spelled “Santiago Casilla”. Oh, and this Santiago Casilla fellow is nearly three years older than “Jairo Garcia”.
What are we going to find out next, that Dan Haren isn’t actually Dutch? Oh, yeah, that too.
Can’t help but think about the Pixar-Disney deal. It’s not a huge surprise, and it seems to make sense for everyone involved.
Everybody is saying how this deal can help Disney get back to its glory days of great animation. Perhaps. I’m more curious about how it affects baseball. A few facts of note:
So with Steve Jobs as the largest individual shareholder in ESPN’s parent company…will we soon see an ESPN iPod cellphone? If Disney owned the exclusive rights to all MLB national broadcasts, would that help Apple sell more iPods?
I don’t know…I’m just askin’.
* * *
Back in Disney’s glory days, one of Walt Disney’s main animators was a man named Frank Thomas. So is it a coincidence that the day after the Disney deal is announced, ESPN.com issues a scoop that a Frank Thomas deal is imminent?
I don’t know…I’m just askin’. Even if this isn’t confirmed yet, it’s not a huge surprise, and it seems to make sense for everyone involved.
If Frank Thomas stays healthy…well, we all have imaginations. I’m hoping having Frank Thomas on in their lineup will restore the A’s to their glory days, just as the Pixar deal can help bring Disney back to its glory days when Frank Thomas was in their lineup.
More goodies from David Pinto’s Probabilistic Model of Range series on Baseball Musings: the 2005 shortstop rankings.
The point of interest for A’s fans is the defensive falloff from Bobby Crosby to Marco Scutaro when Crosby was injured. Crosby’s numbers for 2005 were among the top 10 defensive shortstops in the majors, while Scutaro’s were the second-worst, ahead of only Derek Jeter.
Now keeping in mind that we have to take these defensive numbers with a healthy grain of salt, as Dave Cameron so eloquently explains at USS Mariner, it’s a fun exercise to try to roughly quantify how much Crosby’s injuries impacted the A’s last year.
Scutaro made 229 outs at shortstop. If you replace his opportunities with Crosby’s rate numbers, you’d get 257.4 outs. So replacing Crosby with Scutaro cost the A’s about 28.4 outs on defense.
How many runs is that? Using Chris Dial’s run value per play at shortstop of .753, that means those extra outs costs the A’s about 21.4 runs.
Using the rule of thumb that 10 runs is worth about one win, we can then estimate that Crosby’s injuries cost the A’s about two games in the standings, just on defense alone.
* * *
On offense, Crosby had 50.8 Runs Created in 84 games (.605 RC/game), while Scutaro had 47.1 Runs Created in 118 games (.399 RC/game). That’s a difference of .206 RC/game. If you give Crosby 162 games instead of 84, and subtract out Scutaro, you’d get an extra 16 runs.
Again, going by the 10 runs/win rule of thumb, the A’s lost about a game and a half on offense from Crosby’s injuries.
So in total, replacing Crosby with Scutaro for half the season cost the A’s about three or four games in the standings. That’s not enough to make up the seven games they missed the playoffs by, but judging by these (admittedly rough) numbers, it is roughly half the story.
There are some interesting things to note about the A’s from David Pinto’s latest defensive report, where he shows (a) which pitchers had the best defensive support behind them in 2005, and (b) which pitchers produced the easiest balls for fielders to turn into outs.
First to note is that the A’s had a great defense last year. All of the A’s starting pitchers from 2005 show up in the upper half for best defensive support:
The result was more mixed with regards to which pitchers gave their fielders the easiest balls to turn into outs:
For Haren and Harden, this probably doesn’t hurt them much, because they’re strikeout pitchers. They don’t rely on their fielders as much as other pitchers. But for Saarloos, who strikes out very few batters, the fact that the balls he allowed into play weren’t particularly easy to field is not, I would think, a good sign of things to come.
This brings us to Saarloos’ replacement in the rotation, Esteban Loaiza. How were his numbers?
Easy to field: 13th best.
Defensive support: Next to last.
Of all the major league pitchers who had over 300 balls in play last year, only Carl Pavano had worse defensive support. Let’s compare Zito to Loaiza:
| Pitcher | Balls in play | Expected outs | Actual outs | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zito | 654 | 460.30 | 486 | +25.70 |
| Loaiza | 661 | 462.19 | 444 | -18.19 |
The numbers look awfully similar: they both pitched about the same number of innings, and produced similar levels of easy-to-field balls, but there’s one big difference: Zito’s defense turned about 44 more balls into outs than Loaiza’s.
It should be quite interesting to see what happens when Loaiza gets put in front of the A’s defense come April.
The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting interview with A’s owner Lew Wolff today.
Juicy tidbit, about how to finance the new park:
Cities don’t have a lot of money these days, and when they go into the bonding capacity, at the end of the day, the city is on the hook no matter if you have a joint powers agreement or you have a parking bond or revenue bond or tax increment bond.
What cities do have, especially in the area of growth, and the Bay Area, good or bad, is growing, whether it’s growing right or not is not my decision totally, they have zoning rights. We call them entitlements; you’re entitled to build 1,000 apartment units.
Those entitlements are the new currency, in my opinion, for cities, governments and regionals and counties and so forth.
More interesting notes:
Reading between the lines, it seems that Wolff thinks a deal with the Giants over San Jose should be possible. I’d guess that the best way to get those rights is to threaten to build in Fremont. Fremont is in the A’s territory, where the Giants would get no compensation, but close enough to San Jose that the A’s would siphon off a lot of Silicon Valley revenue. Would the Giants rather have the A’s in Fremont and get no compensation, or have them in San Jose and receive $100 million (or whatever it would cost)?
The long-awaited first domino of any potential Zito-to-the-Mets deal has finally fallen. Today, the Mets traded Kris Benson to Baltimore for Jorge Julio and John Maine.
Buster Olney speculates that this could be a precursor to the Mets signing Jeff Weaver, but MetsBlog speculates that it could also be a precursor to a Zito trade.
John Maine being part of this deal is interesting, because Maine was one of the rumored pieces last year, when Billy Beane was shopping Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder to the Orioles.
If a Zito trade happens, I’d guess the scenario now looks something like this:
From Oakland to Boston: Jay Payton
From Boston to Oakland: David Wells (to replace Zito)
From Oakland to Mets: Barry Zito
From Mets to Oakland: Lastings Milledge, Victor Diaz (to replace Payton), John Maine
Whether something like that happens or not, we’ll just have to wait and see. Beane certainly didn’t slam the door shut on that possibility in his recent interview with Blez. Until Jeff Weaver and David Wells get new homes, we won’t know for sure.
Update: Or maybe not. Looks like the Red Sox are about to acquire Coco Crisp, so they won’t need Payton. Which might mean the Red Sox would want Justin Duchscherer for Wells, as previously rumored. That would mean that the A’s wouldn’t need Diaz, but that the A’s would want Aaron Heilman instead, to replace Duchscherer. Mets GM Omar Minaya is probably reluctant to part with both Heilman and Milledge, so this deal is looking less likely now.
You ever have one of those weeks where there are just too many coincidences for comfort? The very evening I found my kids discussing macaroni and cheese rain, and I wrote about it, my sister-in-law turned the TV to the Food Network to watch Unwrapped. And what were they covering that evening? A man who collects macaroni and cheese boxes, of course.
* * *
I went to the Baseball As America exhibit at the Oakland Museum yesterday, and I left somewhat disappointed and bewildered.
It wasn’t that they didn’t have an impressive list of memorabilia: Babe Ruth’s bat, Shoeless Joe’s shoes, Jackie Robinson’s uniform, Honus Wagner’s baseball card…but somehow it just didn’t make quite the emotional impact I expected.
Perhaps it was the way everything was displayed. Nearly everything was behind glass, each item crammed into a three-foot-wide display case with about 30 other items. It’s hard to contemplate one thing, when there were about thirty other things to contemplate right beside it. Your eyes bounce around from item to item, and you can’t pull it all into your mind.
In the rare cases where a small set of items were displayed by themselves, there was a greater emotional effect. The Honus Wagner card was in a case all by its lonesome, and it did make an impact. I was struck by how small it was, but even more struck by the color. I had seen pictures of it in books and online…but in person the colors were far more vivid than I had imagined.
Jackie Robinson’s uniform was off by itself, too. The thing that grabbed me about that was not the history behind the man who wore the uniform, but the low-tech nature of the “Dodgers” script on the uniform. It looked like scissor-cut felt that had been hand-sewn on by Grandma. The result was an emotional effect quite the opposite of what you’d expect and want: instead of being pulled in and empathizing with Robinson’s plight, I was struck with a distance…those events suddenly seemed so far away from our globalized, mechanized, high-tech age. It was a different era.
I was grateful to see some of the A’s memorabilia on display: Rickey Henderson’s 938th stolen base (with white shoes), Catfish Hunter’s perfect game cap, the 1989 World Series trophy. Good times, but all too brief. We need an Oakland A’s historical museum–as long as it’s not filled with the kitchen sink. Sometimes, less is more.
Which I suppose why, overall, the show left me numb. Some choices were strange: Curt Flood’s letter to Bowie Kuhn, Shoeless Joe’s shoes, Bobby Thomson’s bat…they all get crammed in with a bunch of other stuff, while the San Diego Chicken costume gets its own display case. Huh?
* * *
Oddly, the biggest emotional event of the day, for me, involved football. Yesterday morning, for some reason, Jason Kottke put up a link to a three-year-old article about The Play. A good article bringing back some happy memories. “The Bears…have won!”
One thing I learned from the article that I did not know: White Sox GM Kenny Williams was on that Stanford football team. So that afternoon, when I came across Freddie Garcia’s cap from the 2005 World Series at the museum exhibit, I naturally started thinking about well Williams’ trade for Garcia turned out, which led me back to thinking about The Play.
Now here’s the weird part: moments later, I found myself at the museum standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Joe “Oh, the band is out on the field!” Starkey himself, staring at a display of baseballs autographed by U.S. Presidents. One minute I’m staring at an LP record of the most famous call in baseball history (“The Giants Win the Pennant”), locked behind a pane of glass. The next minute, I’m standing next to the man who made the most famous call in college football history, a call I was thinking about just a few minutes before.
The irony was palpable. Here was history contemplating history. Here was history that I was contemplating suddenly showing up in the flesh to contemplate history that I was contemplating.
A little while later, my two daughters were each seated at these touch-screen computers with stories about Hall-of-Fame members. My youngest daughter got up from her seat to go annoy her older sister at the other seat. As she got up, Starkey stepped in to take her place. He immediately started browsing through a list of White Sox Hall of Famers…the very team that I was contemplating that made me contemplate Starkey’s call in the first place.
At that point, I think if Starkey had suddenly pulled out a bowl of macaroni and cheese and started eating it as he sat in front of that computer, I would have instantly run out into the courtyard of the Oakland Museum and shouted “Tech Support! Tech Support!” at the top of my lungs.
