Friday, April 8th
WAS (Jordan Zimmermann) at NYN (R.A. Dickey) | 4:10pm ET
• Jordan Zimmermann’s season debut wasn’t the rousing success this author suspected it would be;
• Regard: 6.0 IP, 25 TBF, 2 K, 3 BB, 7 GB on 20 batted balls (35.0 GB%);
• Still, he’s a young pitcher with a 3.64 xFIP in his 128.1 major-league innings.
• And, regardless, R.A. Dickey’s pitching;
• Which, that allows us to revisit this image (again, courtesy of reader Trambone at Amazin’ Avenue):

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That ball is headed for sweet, sweet victory.

Moving the Needle: Matt Downs doubles home the go-ahead run in the ninth, +.363 WPA. The Astros just aren’t going to score a lot of runs this year, which puts the onus on the pitching staff, and Brett Myers stepped up. He held the Reds, who led the league in scoring heading into the game, to just one run through six, and two runs through 6.1. Three runs the Astros can do. They got it done with a pair of singles and a double off Nick Masset in the ninth. Brandon Lyon held on for the save, giving Houston its first victory of the season.

Notables

Sam LeCure: 5 IP, 3 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 2 BB, 6 K, 0 HR, 7 GB. The emergency starter did his part. He was at just 84 pitches, but Dusty Baker — and indeed it was Baker this time — pinch hit for him to lead off the bottom of the fifth. Which might make a lick of sense if Miguel Cairo hadn’t been the pinch hitter. Of course, it worked. Cairo singled.

Edgar Renteria: 3 for 3, 1 2B, 1 BB. Paul Janish might be freed, but Renteria wants his playing time, too. His first double tied the game at one.

Also in this issue: Indians 1, Red Sox 0 | Astros 3, Reds 2 | A’s 2, Blue Jays 1 | Yankees 4, Twins 3 | Rockies 7, Pirates 1 | Brewers 4, Braves 2 | White Sox 5, Rays 1 | Phillies 11, Mets 0 | Orioles 9, Tigers 5 | | Nationals 5, Marlins 3

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In 2003, the New York Mets drafted 18-year old Lastings Milledge with the 12th overall selection. On Thursday, the White Sox designated 26-year old Lastings Milledge for assignment. Having spent time in both the major and minor leagues for four different organizations over the past four seasons, the former highly touted high school product has lost virtually all of his luster.

Though his career is at a crossroads right now, Milledge finds himself in an interesting situation. He isn’t talented enough to legitimately help any team, but he will undoubtedly be given every opportunity to prove that assessment incorrect.

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With today’s 1-0 loss to the Indians, the Boston Red Sox are now 0-6. This is the same Red Sox team that many people, myself included, tabbed as the favorites to win the World Series. So far, they haven’t hit (only Minnesota has been worse offensively after today’s shutout) and they really haven’t pitched (entering the day with a ridiculous 8.25 FIP), and the total team meltdown has led to a miserable start to the season and a 4 1/2 game deficit behind the East-leading Orioles.

Those last three words should be all you need to know about whether the current standings are predictive of where we’ll be at year’s end, but that hasn’t stopped a number of people from pointing out that no team that has ever begun the season 0-6 has gone on to play in the World Series, and only two out of the 85 teams to ever start 0-5 (or worse) had even made the playoffs. Those sound like seriously scary numbers until you realize that there’s a huge sampling bias problem – most teams that start a season with a long losing streak kind of suck. By virtue of filtering only teams that have lost a bunch of games to start the season, we’re left looking at the records of teams who inherently lacked talent in most cases, and holding those teams up as examples of how the 2011 Red Sox (who don’t suck, despite their poor start) will play going forward doesn’t work.

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I don’t often unreservedly praise Major League Baseball or the commissioner’s office, other than the John Thorn hire, which was admittedly minor news. But Major League Baseball appears to have taken an intelligent and decent approach to the very real problem of concussions, and I applaud their efforts. In the last couple of years, concussions have become a hot topic in three of the four major sports. Alan Schwarz’s crusading New York Times articles about concussion in the NFL have led to a culture change in the sport, as Ben McGrath has written in The New Yorker. Moreover, while concussions have always been a part of hockey — Eric Lindros had six diagnosed concussions over the course of his career — the issue has taken on a new prominence in the NHL as Sidney Crosby, possibly the best player in the league, has been out for three months since being injured in early January, with no clear return date.

Concussions aren’t as common in baseball as in either football or hockey, but both Jason Bay and Justin Morneau missed most of the second half of the 2010 season due to concussion symptoms, and Ryan Church’s career appears to be on the verge of ending due to concussions. So it’s a very real issue. Last Tuesday, Major League Baseball quietly announced a new concussion policy to deal with concussion in players and umpires: a mandatory seven-day DL with monitoring by doctors required before players could be cleared to play. The next day, I spoke to Julian Bailes, the chair of West Virginia University’s Department of Neurosurgery and former team doctor for the Pittsburgh Steelers. “I would say at least it’s a start,” Bailes told me on Wednesday. “Seven days or a week is kind of standard for what I would call mild, or grade 1 concussion. It’s probably okay, and anything more than that would have been hard to get pushed through.”
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On Wednesday night, Ben Francisco hit his second home run of the year, which, combined with his seeming comfort in a regular role on a contending team, probably caused more than one Indians fan to utter an epithet under his or her breath. Investigating Francisco’s route to the present day seems to call to mind the titular saying – it seems that his beauty is dependent on the person (or organization) that is doing the appraising.

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The Angels and Padres hitters did not have a good time yesterday. While they both did manage to eke out some runs, they spent most of the day walking back to the dugout. The pitchers opposing them, Jeremy Hellickson and Tim Lincecum, had their best strikeout stuff, combining for 23 Ks. Yet their starts couldn’t have been much more different. In fact, it might have been Hellickson who provided the more dominant performance.

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Yesterday, Tommy Rancel wrote about Alexi Ogando’s impressive start to the season, but while Ogando pitched well and his team won, he wasn’t the big story in that game. His counterpart on Tuesday was Michael Pineda, a highly touted prospect who was making his Major League debut for the Mariners. At 6’7 and 250 pounds, Pineda looks the part of a dominating frontline starter, and after he showed off his mid-90s velocity and dispatched the Rangers on 10 pitches (despite racking up two strikeouts) in his first inning of work, it was easy to see why his arrival was so highly anticipated.

The Rangers were able to get to Pineda a couple of times later in the game, notching four extra base hits that led to three runs off the young hurler in his six innings of work, but it was certainly a successful debut overall; there’s no shame in giving up a few hits to the Texas Rangers, after all. However, while Pineda dominating the right-handed bats in the Texas line-up – they combined to go 2 for 16 with a walk and a sac bunt in their 18 attempts against him – his one big flaw was on display on Tuesday, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m not quite sure that he’ll be able to live up to the hype this year.

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With the advent of the August 15th signing deadline, an increasing amount of attention each summer is devoted to which players choose to sign professional contracts and which high school players decide to go to college. With hundreds of thousands of dollars- and sometimes millions- hanging in the balance, the decision of whether to sign or go to college is a monumental one for players and their families. Not only do players have to choose between realizing the dream of playing professional baseball or going to college- two good options to be sure- there is also a pressure to get the best deal possible. The stark reality is that for many players the bonus they receive after signing is the most money they will ever get from playing the game of baseball, so it’s important to get the best deal possible.

In this study, I tried to answer whether players are better off financially by signing out of high school or going to college. In trying to answer this question, I was forced to make several assumptions, and, in some cases, engage in some flat-out guesswork. Therefore, the findings that follow need to be taken with the methodological shortcomings in mind. In this post and the ones to follow, I’ll provide an outline of my methodology along with the results. I’ll let you be the judge of whether or not there is simply too much guesswork to draw a meaningful conclusion. If nothing else, the study should provide a solid groundwork for the types of issues that need to be dealt with in the future.

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