I think I’m like most baseball fans in that when I think of a designated hitter, I think of home runs. The DH spot has usually been filled by power hitters since its inception in 1973, and that makes sense. If a player is playing a position with no defensive value, he needs to produce on offense. Home runs are the most valuable offensive event. The most valuable hitters in any given year usually have plenty of home runs and extra base hits. One often hears that a player who doesn’t hit for power doesn’t have the bat to play on the “easy end” of the defensive spectrum, and and even moreso in the case of a player who is primarily a DH. Billy Butler is a current example of a player who mostly fills the DH spot, but since he hasn’t hit for much power (yet), you will sometimes hear people say that he doesn’t fit the profile of a DH. Without focusing specifically on Butler, I’d like to write briefly about what it means to “hit well enough to be DH,” and then to see how often that actually happens with a relatively low amount of power.

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Yesterday, the great Mitchel Lichtmen gave us a look into how FanGraphs’ latest toy, Ultimate Base Running (UBR). This nifty base-running stat is now on the player pages and a part of WAR. As Dave Appleman noted, UBR (or Bsr, short for base running, on the player pages) has a rather small effect (though not insignificant) on a player’s WAR.

Although small on a player level, UBR (henceforth called Bsr) does help us spot organizational trends, identifying which teams prioritize bag-dashing and the like. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between base running and runs scored is not very meaningful. This should make sense because base running is great, but teams cannot run the bases if they are not getting on base — and they cannot run the bases if they clap a homer.

Looking at the MLB through the 2002 and 2011 seasons, we encounter more than one surprise:
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“Hey, guys. Remember how I’m really good at baseball? Yeah, me too.”

This edition of One Night Only (from a super-extra-special guest host!) contains:

1. Expanded previews for two games: a matchup of aces in Boston, and a West Coast rivalry game featuring two solid young pitchers.

2. Additionally, find enclosed brief previews for three other, only slightly less titillating tilts: Atlanta at Arizona, Chicago (AL) at Cleveland, and Milwaukee at San Diego.

3. Pitcher and Team NERD scores for every one of tonight’s games.

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A Lame Beggar
I am unable, yonder beggar cries,
To stand, or move; If he say true, he lies.
   -John Donne

One of the MLB’s most backward leagues, the National League Central, appears primed for a face lift. The weakest NL league is within reach of establishing itself as dominator and shaking its beggar reputation.

The Houston Astros, presently undergoing an ownership change, have become bedfellows with rumors about the Rays de facto general manager Andrew Friedman and the Rockets’ shrewd GM Daryl Morey.

Meanwhile, the Cubs have already undergone one faux-firing this season (last week, an internet rumor spread like whipped butter on the toast that is Twitter, proclaiming the Cubs had fired GM Jim Hendry) and the team is now fighting the odds to have a winning season. The rampant speculation with the Cubs has formed the central narrative that Hendry faces a win-or-be-gone season, and this year’s sub-.500 start has alerted the gravediggers.

What could a regime change in Houston and Chicago mean for the NL Central, a division burdened with excess teams and limited success? Possibly a lot.
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The news has it that John Lackey is headed to the disabled list to find what he has lost or let his elbow strain heal, whichever version you believe. Headed back into the rotation is the 45-year-old Kid ’66, Tim Wakefield. It seems like the simple, every-day transaction that a contending team has to go through in the course of a season. For the player, though, there are interesting possible ramifications for the move.

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It can be easy to forget that major-league baseball players are also human beings.  We watch them every night on television, read numerous articles about them on a daily basis, and treat them like commodities when discussing roster moves with fellow fans. We pay large sums of money for something as silly as their autograph, and we adorn our backs with their names and numbers. Many of these players we’ve idolized since childhood and put on a pedestal; they don’t seem to exist on the same plane as us everyday fans, but are something higher and greater.

But when you stop to think about it, this is a load of bollocks: ball players are regular people just like the rest of us. In fact, their lives aren’t necessarily all that great. Sure, they get loads of money if they reach the majors, but there are lots of costs to pursuing professional baseball as a career. Many of them aren’t as well educated, as they have to put so much time into baseball and are normally drafted before finishing college (and sometimes, before even starting college). Baseball is their career and life, but that means they have to kick around in the minors, spend half of their year traveling from place to place and living in hotels, and become mini-celebrities whether they want to or not. Ball players are watched by thousands of people while performing their job, and their success or failure is talked about and dissected by even more people. And if you want to have a family, talk about a stressful life; from mid-February to early October every year you become a vagabond and get to see your wife and kids infrequently. Being a baseball player ain’t all sunshine and lollipops, that’s for sure.

So when I heard John Lackey’s now infamous quote Thursday — “Everything in my life sucks right now” — my heart went out to him. Here’s a person whose world is crumbling all around him. Not only is he failing at his job at an epic level, but he’s had personal issues crop up over the last year: his wife is battling breast cancer at the moment, and the couple suffered a miscarriage only a little more than a year ago. And for all we know, Lackey could have even more on his plate; these are just the details of Lackey’s personal life that have been made public.

This is probably the most obvious statement in the world, but Red Sox — if you’re out there, you need to give Lackey a break. As someone that’s worked closely with cancer families, you simply can’t underestimate the stress that cancer can have on a family.

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I noticed last night that the Mariners were the only team left in baseball that had yet to play an extra-inning game this season. Division-mate Oakland has already played eight. Sometimes I am content to let a little nugget like that pass off into the twitter-verse and let it die, but in this case I got intrigued enough to head to Retrosheet and see if I could dig up some context. I restricted the search to seasons starting in 1962 when the expansion to 162 games took place and started the season earlier in the year.

The best that I could do was to go by calendar dates. I would prefer to go by game counts, but that was not available to my database at this time. Luckily, calendar dates are a reasonable proxy for how many games a team has played. And the winner for the longest it has taken to play extra innings goes to the 2005 Boston Red Sox who didn’t go beyond nine until their 99th game of the season on July 25. Read the rest of this entry »

Johnny Damon’s case for the Hall of Fame has recently come up (again). Indeed, some people seem to think it is time to start discussing which hat he should be wearing for his induction. My initial response is “he’s been good, but not good enough,” but hey, I’ve been wrong before. Many times. While the voters have made some progress in recent years, they aren’t exactly known for their objectivity or consistency. What the voters will do with Johnny Damon is one question, one that involves stuff like history and folk psychology, things I’m not interested in dealing with here. Instead, I want to address what the voters should do in Damon’s case.

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If the Boston Red Sox are going to contend for the World Series, much of their success is contingent on Josh Beckett’s return to form. After succumbing to a back injury last season, Beckett entered 2011 as one of the question marks on a strong Red Sox team. Throughout the month of April, Beckett has churned out some vintage performances. Now that Beckett appears fully healthy, should we expect his strong performances to continue?
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I am a relatively young baseball fan. As a consequence, there are a lot of players that I missed out watching first hand. Lucky for me that baseball is a sport steeped in numbers. People are biased in their recollections, but past numbers are static and simply awaiting for us to come along and figure out ways to interpret and compare them.

Sure there are the enduring numbers stuck forever on the backs of old baseball cards, but one of the revelations that comes from diving into the rabbit hole of sabermetrics is the realization of how little those oft-quoted numbers actually tell. It’s not just the standard RBI and pitcher Wins are overrated stats mantra, but the importance of era-context that’s left to the individual consumer to internalize and adjust for, if he or she is even aware of it.

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