Sports on Earth reviews the Baseball America prospect lists from 1994 through 2009. They do a good job, although taking a quick look, the last few years of the study, BA slipped a bit.
Prospect History
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Monthly Archives: January 2014
Cookie Love
If someone you love likes baseball and cookies, check out this Valentine’s day offer from the Cooperstown Cookie Company.
High Order Votto
Actually, instead of batting Joey Votto second, the Reds should bat Billy Hamilton ninth and Votto first until Hamilton can show he can get on base at a great clip:
Hamilton scores from first like clockwork on Votto’s doubles. And, if you’re worried about the opponent simply walking Votto after Hamilton steals second, understand they’d be less likely to do that with #19 batting second and no outs then if he’s batting third with one down. And if Votto does walk you’ve got runners at first and second with no outs instead of one. Either way, it’s better to have Votto’s AB occur right after Hamilton gets on.
One other point is that Hamilton’s strength as an offensive player is stealing bases. Batting a power hitter right behind him limits that strength. The probability of Votto hitting a double or home run is high enough that the Reds should not risk the out to get Hamilton in scoring position with Votto at the plate. Since Votto is a left-handed hitter, forcing the opposition to hold the runner creates more space for Joey to pull the ball for a big hit.
In a way, it’s much more important for Hamilton to get on base at a high clip if Votto bats behind him. While fans think of protection coming from the hitter batting next in the order, a high OBP player who forces defensive movement to prevent the steal and set up a double play does a lot to protect the next batter. A high OBP Hamilton who remains a threat to steal is probably more helpful to Votto than a Hamilton who steal quite often. Whether it’s ninth/first or first/second depends on where Hamilton’s major league OBP settles. We may not know that for another couple of years.
Papi Staying Put
Neyer Moves On
Small Game Morris
Bill James finishes his series on Big Game pitchers (subscription require) by detailing Jack Morris‘s regular season big game starts. Jack did not pitch well in big games overall. Two starts stood out, however:
Next big start is September 5, 1983. Tigers are now 4 and a half games back with 26 to play. Morris starts against Cleveland. He leads 2-0 going into the 7th, gives up a run in the 7th and 2 in the 8th, loses the game 3-2; Detroit misses a chance to gain ground.
September 9, 1983; Tigers now 5 and a half behind with 23 to play. Morris starts in Milwaukee against Moose Haas; loses the game, 2-1.
One of the excuses for Jack’s high career ERA is that he pitched to the score. He would win games 6-5 because he could bear down when needed. These two games argue against that, especially given their importance at the time. In addition, during the 1987 pennant race, Morris went 3-4 with a 3.09 ERA in big games. It was Doyle Alexander that stepped up in that one.
So Morris gets credit for the 1991 post-season, but that really was his only Big Game claim to fame.
Top 35 Big Games
Bill James looks at how pitchers did in their 35 biggest games (even if they didn’t qualify as big games) in part nine of his Big Game Pitchers series (subscription required).
I love creating “mythical seasons” or imaginary seasons, and 35 starts LOOKS like a season. A pitcher pitches well, he can win 20 games. He can strike out 200 batters, or walk 100; he can pitch 250 innings, or 300, just like a pitcher does in a season. You can create “league leaders” in every category.
One problem with this is there is no adjustment for era. So pitchers from the 1960s lead in shutouts, since few pitchers are allowed to pitch shutouts any more. Still, it’s a fun list. Roy Oswalt‘s teams won 29 of his 35 biggest games.
Tomorrow we find out if Jack Morris was a big game pitcher.
Ruling the Roost
Jim Tosches started a new blog about baseball rules, called Baseball Rules! Stop by and say hi.
Save the Date
The 2014 Saberseminar, which raises money for the Jimmy Fund, set the 2014 meeting for August 16th and 17th at Boston University. Any questions can be directed to saberseminar@gmail.com.
Ties Down Under
Dave McNeely, NPB Card Guy, sent along this article about a possible massive tie in the Australian Baseball League. Dave writes:
I thought you might get a kick out of this – the Australian Baseball League entered its final day of the regular season yesterday with three teams (half the league) tied for the third and final playoff spot. Even better, the three tied teams were not playing each other so if all three won or lost, there would still be a three-way tie. As it happened, Canberra and Melbourne won but Adelaide lost so there was only a two-way tie.
On the downside – the ABL is using a tiebreaker scenario based on head-to-head records so there will be no single game playoff between Canberra and Melbourne – Canberra went 5-3 against Melbourne so they move on (Canberra’s actually the defending champs). And there would have been no round-robin playoff if there had been a three way tie – Adelaide had the best combined record against the other two.
Massive ties are much more fun if they lead to a convoluted playoff!
Big Games for Teams
Part eight of the Bill James ten part series on Big Game Pitchers looks at big games by teams and leagues:
I was young then, and I just assumed that this was the way baseball was; there were great pennant races every year. Never thought about it. In the 1960s the average team played just over 14 Big Games per season, but this number dropped sharply in the 1970s. In retrospect, the 1969 split into divisions markedly reduced the number of Big Games, and drained the excitement out of the pennant races. What tended to happen, more years than not, was that there would be two good teams in the league, but one would be in the East and the other would be in the West, so there would be no pennant race. With two six-team divisions, you just absolutely did not get those wonderful three- and four-team pennant races that we had in the 1960s.
The 1980s were about like the 1970s, with an average of about 11 Big Games per team per season. . .lower because of the 1981 strike, but slightly higher if you throw out the 1981 strike.
Q. So did the Wild Card solve that problem?
A. It did. It took me a long time to understand this, and I never understood it fully until I did this study, but the Wild Card system did increase the number of Big Games per team back to about what it had been before the split into divisions in 1969. This came at a cost, because what often happens is that the best teams in the league sew up their divisions early and play few Big Games, but the second- and third-place teams continue to play Big Games until the last couple of days of the season. It might be better to have the BEST teams playing Big Games, but that’s not the way it is.
But anyway, the number of Big Games per team per season is back now to a bigger number, with the Wild Card, and since the number of teams is larger, the number of Big Games is larger. By my count there have been 4,738 regular season Big Games in the last ten years, whereas in the 1970s and the 1980s there were less than 2800 per decade.
Also of note, the Kansas City A’s never played a big game.
The Top Ten (or 11) Big Game Pitchers
Bill James lists his top 11 Big Game Pitchers of the last 62 years (subscription required) in part seven of his ten part series on big game pitchers. Note that this is both a statistical list and a subjective list. James used regular season statistics for his calculations, but in making the ranked list, he also considered post-season performance:
5. John Smoltz
The reason there are 11 pitchers in my Top Ten is that I initially overlooked Smoltz, since his regular-season Big Game record is just good, not truly outstanding. I decided it was better to wedge him in here like this and have you think I was a little slow, rather than leave him out and have you think I was stupid.
That same type of reasoning kept Randy Johnson was being #1 overall, since he was the best regular season big-game pitcher in the study. There are some interesting names on the list, such as Bruce Kison, Ron Guidry, Don Sutton, and the number one pitcher, Roy Oswalt.
In certain ways we are not as good at making myths now as we were a generation ago. The Wild Card system DOES create more Big Games, I believe, but sometimes it creates Big Games for second-place and third-place teams. The story lacks the clarity and symmetry of a pennant race; it is a harder story to tell.
Roy Oswalt won a tremendous number of Big Games for the Astros in the mid-2000s, but when there are six pennant races to follow and two Wild Cards, things get lost in the shuffle. Oswalt’s constant drumbeat of Big Wins late in the season didn’t have the impact of Bob Gibson winning 7 games in September of ’64. But. . .just the facts. Oswalt has won 80% of his Big Games. Wow.
Again, this series is well worth the subscription price.
The Big Kaat
Why the Yankees Can Spend
If you wondered why the Yankees were willing to break their self-imposed salary cap, this may explain it:
21st Century Fox is taking over majority control of the YES Network from the New York Yankees’ parent company.
Fox said Friday it will raise its ownership stake from 49 percent to 80 percent in a deal it said it expects to close by the end of March.
I suspect this deal puts a lot of cash in the Yankees pockets.
This Should Make for an Interesting Debate
The Twins added Jack Morris as a broadcaster:
Morris will also fill in as an in-game color announcer when Bert Blyleven is not scheduled to work, and he’ll co-host a Sunday morning radio show on the franchise’s flagship FM network K-TWIN.
I’d like to see Bert and Jack cover a game together, just to see if a fist-fight breaks out over the Hall of Fame!
To Increase Mather’s Responsibility
The Mariners named Kevin Mather as their new team president.
On Friday, the organization announced that Kevin Mather will replace Armstrong as president and chief operating officer – a position Armstrong held for 28 years. Mather had previously served as the Mariners’ executive vice president of finance and ballpark operations.
…
“Our fans, first and foremost, are our focus, and we understand what they want most – a championship team,” Mather said in the release. “I am looking forward to supporting Jack Zduriencik, as he continues to lead the baseball operation and builds the Mariners both for 2014 and for future seasons. At the same time, our commitment to this community and this region will remain a top priority. This is a tremendous opportunity, and I’m excited about the Mariners future.”
No word if the team is planning on renaming Safeco Field Mather House.
More Big Gameness
In part five in his series on Big Game Pitchers (subscription required), Bill James presents a number of lists, but leaves the top ten best for another day. The two takeaways from this article are that Bill issues a mea culpa on what he wrote about Don Drysdale in The Politics of Glory:
One way I could defend myself would be to say that there were these 13 “bad big” games that I identified in 1994, but there are another 66 “sort of big” games in which he was better. But that’s not true, either. Another way to study a pitcher’s Big Game performance is to focus on the 35 BIGGEST games of his career. In the 35 Biggest Games of Drysdale’s career (regular season), he was 17-7 with a 2.16 ERA. That’s pretty good. No defense, no alibis. I was wrong, and I apologize.
One other thing is something that Bill states very well, and I think is important to how teams make decisions about players.
Underlying skills are not always the issue; sometimes the issue is simply what he did. Underlying skills are important in the winter, when you are putting together next year’s team—but when you are looking back at last year’s team, what matters is performance, not ability.
It reminds me of when the Royals signed Storm Davis because of the number of games he won for the Oakland Athletics. Davis’s underlying skills were not there, but in the context of the great Oakland teams of the late 1980s he could win.
Bill also winds up giving some credence to the “can’t handle New York” argument sometimes made against players. Ed Whitson, Javier Vazquez, and A.J. Burnett make the list of worst big game pitchers.
Bronson Lester?
I remember when Bronson Arroyo took a discount to stay in Boston.
Reports are that Arroyo is not getting a no-trade clause in his contract. Does he have a verbal agreement that he won’t be traded? He’s making himself cost effective; is that enough to keep him in town?
Two months later, he was gone:
Until someone reminded me in the comments, I had forgotten about Arroyo’s recent contract. The home town discount didn’t prevent the trade. Sometimes it’s a good idea to listen to your agent.
Now Jon Lester says he’ll take a home town discount to stay in Boston. I hope he learns from Arroyo’s mistake and gets a no-trade clause.
Big Game List
Bill James continues his series on Big Game pitchers (subscription required) with the list of pitchers who started the most big games in their careers, and a mention of those who started the highest percentage of big games. Andy Pettitte tops the list of most starts with 82, with Jim Palmer and Roger Clemens right behind at 81. Sandy Koufax and Johnny Podres were 1-2 in percentage of starts in big games. Of course, Koufax had a short career.
Getting to the Jack Morris/Bert Blyleven debate, Morris started 46 big games, 8.7% of his starts, and Blyleven started 47 big games, 6.9% of his starts. Those percentages are about average. I like my estimate of Morris’s big game starts at around 40. I was also right about CC Sabathia, who made starts in 61 big games so far.
Walt’s Fault?
Redleg Nation defends Walt Jocketty.
I put Walt in the class of great intuitive general managers like Pat Gillick and Terry Ryan. They may not be the biggest fans of Money Ball, but they build their teams in the same way. Reds fans should be happy he is running the team.
Pitchers Start to Fall
The free agent dominoes start to fall, as the Yankees signing of Masahiro Tanaka leads to the Brewers grabbing Matt Garza.
Matt Garza, Milwaukee Brewer: free agent pitcher Matt Garza has agreed to a 4 year, $52 million deal with the Milwaukee Brewers, per Ken Rosenthal.
Source: Garza in agreement with #Brewers, four years, $52M, pending physical.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) January 23, 2014
Garza is one of those pitchers FanGraphs WAR likes a lot better than Baseball Reference WAR. Garza seems to be very sensitive to his defense. When he was with the Rays, his xFIP was high, but his ERA was good. Since leaving, his ERAs have been higher than his xFIP. He only pitched one truly outstanding season in his six full seasons in the majors, so it looks to me like the Brewers are over paying a bit for his services.
Wooing Tanaka
Via Bronx Banter, how the Yankees closed the deal on Masahiro Tanaka:
During the Beverly Hills meeting, Tanaka told the Yankees that some of the other clubs he had met with said they planned to ease him into their rotations without putting too much pressure on him. That did not sit well with him.
“He didn’t want to be eased into anything,” said one of the Yankee executives in the room at the time. “He said he wanted to be the man.”
The Yankees came away impressed by his confidence. They felt he resembled Matsui, whose quiet but strong personality became an enduring part of Yankee teams in the previous decade.
The great players have the need to be in the limelight.
Big Game Level
Bill James posts part three of his ten-part series on Big Game Pitchers (subscription required). In this one, he defines the Big Game Score level at 310.
The biggest game in my data, by this system, is the third game of the 1962 National League playoff series between the Dodgers and the Giants—the 165th game of a 162-game season. Johnny Podres started against Juan Marichal; the Giants won. That game scores at 411 for each team. The second-biggest score in our system in the same series the previous day, Drysdale against Jack Sanford, and the third-biggest is the first game of that series.
Next on the list is the Bucky Dent game at Fenway Park, October 2, 1978. After that we have a Cardinals/Mets game at the end of the 1985 season, then a Blue Jays/Yankees game, also at the end of the 1985 season. The top 100 or so include all of the play-in games for races that have ended in a tie. In the top 100 games there is no game that occurred earlier on the calendar than September 25, and the biggest of Big Games are always games between two teams with excellent won-lost records.
Off the subject a bit, but how many sports have games named after okay players? Dent had a good peak, posting a B-WAR of 13.4 during his seasonal ages of 25 to 29, a lot of that coming from his defense. If he had not hit that home run, how many people today would know who he was? The structure of a game allows nearly anyone on the team to be the hero, something you don’t see in many sports.
Back to the subject at hand:
It’s a “hard” 310, by the way; 309.5 is NOT a Big Game. In the data there are 241,536 Game Lines—almost a quarter of a million—of which 18,530 starts are designated by this process as Big Games. Tomorrow we’ll start naming names as to who was and who wasn’t a Big Game pitcher.
I believe there are 62 years of data in the set, so there are about 300 big games a year. I suspect today there are more, since we now have six divisions and multiple wild cards. That means there are about 10 big games per team per year, although most of those should be concentrated in the best teams. So, assuming these games happen randomly with a five man rotation, someone like Jack Morris may get just two or three chances a season to pitch a big game, maybe 40 times over a long career. Back in the 1950s, when managers tended to use less of a set rotation, you might see the ace of the staff get into these game more often. From the 1970s on, however, I suspect that moving the ace to pitch a specific regular season game happened less, although CC Sabathia might have pitched a lot of these games with the Brewers. Stay tuned.
Trying on a New Sizemore
The Red Sox reached a deal with Grady Sizemore. There is a low guaranteed salary with a decent incentive clause. Surprisingly, the Red Sox offered a major league contract. I guess they had a roster spot to spare:
It’s a good deal for both sides. Sizemore gets a chance to breathe life into his career, and the Red Sox add outfield depth on the cheap. Sizemore still has the potential to be a very productive player, which isn’t the case for the few remaining outfielders on the free agent market.
I disagree with the statement about Sizemore’s potential. It’s tough to come back from missing a full season of play, let alone two. He’ll play 2014 as a 31 year old, someone who would already be in decline. Maybe he worked his way out of the injuries and back into shape, but I would not expect that much out of him.
Watching Tanaka
I just received this press release from One World Sports:
What:
ONE World Sports will present, in its entirety, an encore of a Nippon Professional Baseball game from June 9 that featured Masashiro Tanaka pitching against the Yomiuri Giants. In the game, Tanaka threw seven scoreless innings and won his eighth game of the season on his way to posting a 24-0 record for NPB’s Rakuten Golden Eagles.
Tanaka has agreed to join the New York Yankees for the coming Major League Baseball season in a reported seven-year deal worth $155 million dollars. Several MLB clubs had pursued the Japanese pitching ace.
In addition to the full game, ONE World Sports will post highlights on its YouTube channel. As the exclusive U.S. broadcast home of the Yomiuri Giants, ONE World Sports aired all 72 home games of the team during the 2013 season, including this notable Tanaka game.
When:
ONE World Sports will carry this high-profile game on Thursday, Jan. 23 at 7 p.m., with additional presentations starting Friday, Jan. 24 at 7 p.m.
Exclusive clips of Tanaka in action, culled from the June 9 game, will be made available at www.oneworldsports.com and the network’s YouTube Channel www.youtube.com/oneworldsportstv.
Free previews of ONE World Sports are also available to registered users at www.oneworldsports.com/watch, and the network’s app Watch ONE World Sports is available for download in the Apple and Google Play stores.
Fashion Icons
Tanaka Gets A-Rod’s Money
Lady Loves Pinstripes links to this Ken Rosenthal tweet:
BREAKING: Tanaka to #Yankees, seven years, $155M, opt-out after fourth year.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) January 22, 2014
Admittedly, I had my doubts whether Tanaka would come the Yankees over the Los Angeles Dodgers, and if Hal Steinbrenner would really blow past his $189 million goal but both did. And Tanaka is going to be a New York Yankee for the next seven seasons for the price of $155 million, but he does have a fourth-year opt out clause for when he is more Igawa then Darvish, maybe?
I must admit, I am surprised. I thought the Yankees really wanted to get under the salary cap. They still may make a move to do that, but wanting to win seems to have won out over saving money. Of course, with television at the moment being a cash cow, the Yankees may have decided they have more than enough money to pay both players and a high luxury tax.
Trade in the Works
There is a rumor that the Padres will trade infielder Logan Forsythe to the Rays for reliever Alex Torres in a multi-player deal. Torres had a breakout year as a reliever in 2013 while Logan Forsythe hit poorly. Logan posted incredible OBPs in the minors, but will play this season as a 27-year-old. Having not proved himself in the majors yet, his career might end up a short one. He’s exactly the kind of player the Rays like to take a chance on, cheap with a ton of upside. If Joe Maddon can figure out how to use him properly, and Logan can stay healthy, he might be a nice surprise on the Rays infield.
Big Game Series
Bill James gets into the meat of his Big Game Pitcher series, as he defines Big Game scores (subscription required, and well worth the money). The score is straight forward, but James spends a ton of time and math eliminating games from the list. Basically, no team out of the playoff race can play a big game. He looked at all regular season games from 1952 on:
All of that sounds complicated and obscure, and it is—but even with all of those outs and exclusions, the Early Elimination Discount is applied to 42,751 games in our study, so. . .it’s not like it’s a trivial adjustment. It is a necessary adjustment to prevent the Big Game List from being polluted by teams that couldn’t find a pennant race with a bloodhound, even though they have not been either mathematically eliminated or virtually eliminated.
This, of course, is the problem with any kind of clutch statistic. For almost any definition of a clutch situation, you can find exceptions. Eliminate those, and one winds up with a small sample size for a player. I’m guessing Jack Morris ends up with a sample size of about 20 big games.
Big Game Hunter
Bill James begins a ten-part series on big game pitchers (subscription required). Jack Morris will be the focus of the series.