Baseball Prehistory | Deadball Era | Liveball Era | Post-War
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Last week we covered the position players of the Deadball Era. Our next stop is the Liveball Era. Although the names of the era make it obvious – the Deadball Era was characterized by low run scoring – the Liveball Era saw rise to the home run, Babe Ruth, and an offensive explosion that changed the way the game was played:

The Liveball Era players are ones I am much more familiar with. One fifth of the players in the Hall of Fame are from the Liveball era. There should be a good reason for that. The Hall of Fame was originally established in 1936. The first players inducted were people from the Liveball Era. A special committee of experts was created to select the best players on the 19th century for induction, but the whole process was botched. Initially, the voters averaged about 10 players per ballot, but the Hall of Fame folks only wanted to vote in five players. So they counted each vote as half a vote.

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The Los Angeles Dodgers
2010 MLB Record: 80-82 (4th in the NL West)
Minor League Power Ranking: 17th (out of 30)
Click for: Last Year’s Top 10 Prospect List

The Prospects

1. Dee Gordon, SS
Acquired: Drafted 4th Round, 2008
2010 Level: AA (Southern League)
Opening Day Age: 22.11

Notes: Despite being the son of former big reliever Tom ‘Flash’ Gordon, Dee didn’t pick up baseball until his senior year of high school. What he lacks in polish, he makes up for in athleticism. His speed rates as an 80 on the scouting scale, allowing him to steal 126 bases over the past two season at a 73 percent clip. At the plate, Gordon is a contact-oriented hitter with little power. He posted a meager .077 ISO last year, and after seeing him take batting practice at the Futures Game, I don’t expect him to ever post an ISO much higher than .100 in the big leagues. His swing plane is flat, and his bat speed isn’t good enough to overcome the physical limitations of his 150-pound frame. That being said, he does a good job of barreling the ball, and that skill, coupled with his outstanding speed and ability to make contact, should allow him to hit for average. In the field, Gordon has all the tools to be a plus defender, but he makes too many errors on routine plays. It’s not altogether uncommon for young shortstops to pile up big error totals in the minor leagues and still go on to become solid defenders in the big leagues, and judging by his actions, I think with more experience he’ll make the necessary improvements to stay at short. At his peak, I see Gordon as close to a .300 hitter, with 40 steals, and average defense at short.

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The first memory most fans have of Andruw Jones is witnessing the then-teenager terrorize the New York Yankees in Game One of the 1996 World Series. While Jones’ Braves ultimately came up short in that Fall Classic, the Curacao native announced his presence as a future star by belting two home runs (replacing Mickey Mantle as the youngest ever to go deep in the World Series) and striding swiftly to fly balls that mere mortals would have to dive for, or miss altogether.

Now, Jones’ career has come full circle. He has reportedly signed a one-year, $2 million deal to serve as the Yankees’ fourth outfielder, with an additional $1.2 million in performance incentives possible. Thirty-four in April, Jones has the secondary skills to start for some teams, and he may now be the best reserve fly catcher in the game.
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Maybe for Jon Kabat-Zinn and his cadre of ubercalm friends, living in the present moment represents the greatest of goods. Indeed, speaking as someone who’s legitimately jealous of his own life, I can see the merits which lie therein.

However, I also know that, literally, one of life’s greatest joys — and, listen, people, I’m not effing around for even one second when I say this — is the joy derived from poring over pre-season baseball projections.

The whys and wherefores of this joy are a matter I’ve discussed in these pages with noted projectacators Sean Smith and Beloved Pole Dan Szymborski, so I’ll refrain from offering any poorly formed theories here.

Still, it makes sense to note that recent developments in the field add to the sense that projections are headed somewhere. Here I’m thinking specifically of the aforementioned Smith’s entrance into to the Mysterious Innards of Major League Baseball; of Tango’s continued attempts to assess the accuracy of projections via the annual Forecasters Challenge; of the Fan Projection project here at the site and its relative (if not rousing) success in Tango’s competition.

While I possess nothing like Tango’s facility with measuring the quality of projections, it’s totally within my skill set to provide idle commentary on some surprising individual cases.

In this post, I’d like to do that exact thing — with OLIVER’s batting projections, specifically.

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Sports reporters are frequently criticized. But I don’t think their job is well understood. The media is often blamed for many of the ills in society, from the ever-expanding celebrity culture to the increasing loss of civility in the public sphere, to the preponderance of incorrect or misunderstood stories in the news. They often deserve that criticism. But I think they’re held to an unreasonable standard, because, in my view, sports reporters have a nearly impossible job. So, today, I’d like to try to define what sports journalism is, what it is not, and what it should be.

Why is it nearly impossible? Sports reporters are expected to report on the private business strategy of a monopoly corporation: this requires that they maintain a good enough relationship with the corporation that their access is not revoked, while maintaining both access and credibility. While political reporters have recourse to the legal system and the Freedom of Information Act if government officials decide to stonewall the media, sports reporters have no such luxury. And employees of the corporation, from executives to athletes, are instructed to say nothing of substance on the record. (Except for Ozzie Guillen.) Much of what we know about the inner life of the clubhouse and the front office comes from officially sanctioned leaking, anonymous sources, and tabloid and checkbook journalism from sites like Deadspin.

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With the general overall numbers available from yesterday’s article, here’s each variable:

Age

I divided the data into several buckets, according to individual pitchers’ ages. Here are the results:

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We are happy to present a two-part guest post by Seth Samuels, who takes an in-depth look at a topic that is often a source of disagreement. Part two will run tomorrow.

Last summer, I was catching up with Fangraphs founder (and my elementary school classmate) David Appelman when he mentioned an interest in being able to identify streakiness in baseball players. Baseball announcers and writers are often criticized for psychoanalyzing a player’s current hot or cold streak, even though those streaks may often be a function of small sample sizes. A full season, however, is a much larger sample than five games. So it certainly seems reasonable that some players might tend to be streakier than others over the course of a full year.

As both a Mets fan and an occasional fantasy player, I’ve repeatedly seen my teams — both real and imaginary — bolstered by surges and short-circuited by cold spells. So being able to identify which players are most or least likely to go on streaks would be a useful tool.

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Before Bud Selig recently decreed that there would be no expansion to Major League Baseball’s playoff format, there had been a lot of talk about expanding the playoffs. Many reasons have been cited – adding excitement for fans, the first Wild Card was a boon for the game, etc. But in the end, the only reason that counts is money. But while adding playoff teams would be one way to make the game more money, it wouldn’t be the only way. What if baseball returned to the two division format?

Baseball fans have accepted the four playoff team per league format at this point. But when the Mets go four years without making the playoffs, or when the Cubs and White Sox have each only made twice in the last seven seasons, that is unsettling for those in charge of TV contracts. But adding a Wild Card team isn’t optimal to the current format, since adding another team means adding another round, which means one of three things: pushing the playoffs permanently into November, pushing the start of the season permanently into March or subtracting games from the regular season, none of which is a desirable option. So that leaves the stewards of the game searching for a different solution. And it is this: return to the two-division format, but with two Wild Card teams per league.

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After fruitlessly hunting around for a three year contract all winter, Carl Pavano finally re-signed with the Minnesota Twins yesterday. The two year, $16.5 million contract he signed is perhaps a bit smaller than expected, given that he was generally considered one of the better free agent pitchers on the market and teams have been pretty casual about throwing cash around all winter. Perhaps more interestingly, it’s also the exact same contract Jake Westbrook signed two months ago.

Heading into the winter, I doubt many of us had Westbrook and Pavano linked as guys who would land similar deals, but a closer inspection reveals that they actually are pretty similar: Pavano is 35, Westbrook is 33. Pavano has thrown 1,500 innings in the majors, Westbrook 1,300. Pavano has a career FIP of 4.15, while Westbrook is at 4.17. Pavano doesn’t get quite as many groundballs as Westbrook, but he makes up for the difference by getting a few more strikeouts and walking slightly fewer. Both of them have fairly recently missed seasons due to injuries, but they also both threw over 200 innings last year and have been effective innings eaters when not on the DL.

So now, I’m trying to figure out why we all thought Pavano was going to get more money than Westbrook to begin with. Pavano did post a slightly lower ERA last year while pitching in the American League, but any team who evaluated him by ERA would also have to be somewhat scared of his 2009 mark. Most true talent evaluations would have them as extremely similar, and the market ended up coming to the same conclusion. And yet, that didn’t seem to be the perception going into the off-season.

For instance, here’s Frankie Piliere’s Top 50 free agents from FanHouse – he had Pavano #12 (between Andy Pettitte and Jorge de la Rosa) while Westbrook came in at #20 (between Adam LaRoche and Jon Garland). Sports Illustrated’s list was even more extreme, as Pavano came in at #12 while Westbrook was #32 (between Ty Wigginton and Pat Burrell this time). Perhaps the most credit should go to Tim Dierkes of MLBTradeRumors, who had them next to each other (#13 and #14) on his version of the list.

In retrospect, Pavano and Westbrook are pretty similar pitchers, and this deal for Pavano seems like a triumph of logic over narrative. While a lot of us (myself included in this) expected Pavano to land a better deal than Westbrook this winter, the underlying facts suggested that they should get similar deals, and they did. Score one for capitalism.

When the Yankees announced their signing of Rafael Soriano, General Manager Brian Cashman admitted that he wasn’t fully behind the move. Rarely has an announcement of a big-ticket signing come with such an admission from the team’s General Manager:

I’m charged with getting the payroll down, and this certainly will help us try to win a championship. There’s no doubt about that, so that’s in the plus column, but I didn’t recommend it, just because I didn’t think it was an efficient way to allocate the remaining resources we have, and we had a lot of debate about that … My plan would be patience and waiting. They obviously acted. And we are better, there’s no doubt about it.

That Cashman didn’t find the signing to be an efficient allocation of resources is particularly telling, as many around baseball have questioned spending so much on a bullpen. Our own Dave Cameron has often talked about overspending on relievers, but this is about spending on the team level. Have the Yankees spent too much on the bullpen for the upcoming season? How does their spending this year stack up against years’ past, and other teams?

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