Archive for Teams

The author, because he’s an idiot, mistakenly wrote this preview for the Yankees-Orioles series despite having definitely been assigned the Nationals-Cardinals NLDS, instead, by his fearless editor Dave Cameron. Interested readers can expect full coverage of the Nationals and Cardinals beginning tomorrow (Monday).

If you’ve made your way to FanGraphs — and if, furthermore, our demographic data is even half accurate — you’re the sort of person who either (a) has done well in school or (b) is currently doing well in school. Which, that means you’re probably also the sort of person who (a) has taken a number of quizzes before and also (b) has done well on those same quizzes — and maybe even (c) actively enjoys taking quizzes.

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The Baltimore Orioles have had an amazing season. They weren’t supposed to be any good, but they kept winning. They were supposed to regress to the mean, but they never did. They spent the entire summer giving Pythagoras the bird, and then, forced to play for their lives on the road against a Rangers team that simply looked to have every advantage, they won handily. Behind Joe Saunders. Against a line-up full of right-handers. The 2012 Orioles are why there’s a Twitter account called “You Can’t Predict Baseball”.

But, now, in a five game series against the Yankees, everyone’s going to bet against the Orioles again. Everything points to New York being the better team. They won more games. They scored 92 more runs and allowed 37 less. They have the best offense in baseball. They’re the Yankees. They have players who we expect to be good.

The Orioles, meanwhile, have a roster full of guys with track records of mediocre performance. This isn’t a team full of fresh-faced kids straight up from the minors — well, besides Manny Machado, anyway — who are introducing themselves to the Major Leagues. It’s a roster heavy on guys who were discarded by other organizations, with histories that suggest that they just aren’t that good.

Perhaps no player typifies the 2012 Orioles more than Tommy Hunter. And it’s guys like Tommy Hunter who are why we need to reevaluate what we know about the 2012 Orioles.

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Eventually, you’re all going to get sick of me talking about how everything that’s going on now is for all intents and purposes unpredictable. Hopefully you aren’t sick of it yet, because Game 1 of the NLDS between the Reds and the Giants went to show why playoff predictions are a complete waste of time. Allow me to review the action:

(1)Ace Cincinnati starter Johnny Cueto had to be removed after eight pitches due to injury, but

(2) the Reds still beat the Giants 5-2 on Saturday, because

(3) they hit two home runs off Matt Cain in AT&T Park.

It would’ve made perfect sense for this to turn into a pitcher’s duel. Cueto is one of the better starting pitchers in the National League, Cain is one of the better starting pitchers in the National League, neither the Reds nor the Giants have amazing team offenses, and AT&T Park suppresses run scoring like it’s poisonous and AT&T Park doesn’t want people to get poisoned. Instead, Cain was passable for five innings, and Cueto barely pitched. There still weren’t a whole lot of runs, but this didn’t go the way it was supposed to go.

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If you hadn’t been paying close attention to the Athletics and the Tigers, you might have a couple preconceptions about the matchup. Maybe “old, slow sluggers” vs “speedy upstart youngsters.” Or maybe “tradition” vs “moneyball two.” Or maybe even “offense and an ace” vs “pitching and defense.” Delve further into the numbers, though, and this matchup between the elephants and the tigers isn’t so easily monikered.

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Major League Baseball’s six divisions were won by one, two, three, four, eight, and nine games. The Giants finished eight games ahead of the Dodgers, and their lead reached double digits on September 20. The Reds finished nine games ahead of the Cardinals, and their lead reached double digits on September 11. Suffice to say, for both teams, it’s been a while since they played what felt like a legitimately important game. Saturday, the important games resume all of a sudden, as the Giants and Reds are squaring off in a National League Division Series.

Incidentally, one wonders about the effects. Some people argue that it’s better to have to play at full intensity all the way through to the end, while other people argue there are benefits to being able to relax. Both the Giants and the Reds have more or less been able to relax, their playoff spots long secure, and we’ll never know how much this mattered, if it ends up having mattered at all. If it does matter, maybe it’ll matter about the same for both, since they’ve both been in similar situations. Nothing’s getting settled in this paragraph so here comes the next one.

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The presentation of Joe Saunders as a joke has escalated ever since the Orioles had the gall to name him starter for Friday’s American League Wild Card game. Nobody is accusing Joe Saunders of greatness, but he has made a living on competency. He has a 98 career ERA- — just slightly better than average. Aggressively competent, even.

Still, it’s understandable why Saunders is treated as the kind of pitcher who should be hit hard. In both browsing his statistics and watching his pitches, he has no discernible strengths. He lives in the high 80s with his fastball. He doesn’t throw a curveball with exceptional break. He has a changeup, but he isn’t a changeup artist of the Shaun Marcum or Johan Santana variety.

But in one way, Joe Saunders has been one of the major league’s best pitchers since 2008:

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‘Tis the season to fire coaches and managers. Among the coaches fired yesterday was Kansas City hitting coach Kevin Seitzer. The Royals cited underperformance by the hitters. It is hard to argue that the offense did well, relative to expectations. After the team sported a 102 wRC+ last year, it was expected that with young talent like Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas entering their second season, the team’s hitting would be on the way up. It did not work out that way, as the Royals finished the season with a 95 wRC+. Hosmer and (oh boy) Jeff Francoeur, in particular, had horrific seasons in 2012, and after a promising start to the year, Mike Moustakas’ bat fell apart in the second half.

Trying to determine how much of this is and is not attributable to Kevin Seitzer’s work and whether the firing is justified is extremely difficult, and I will not really be doing that in this post. Rather, I simply want to offer some general reflections on the Seitzer’s tenure and dismissal that might be illuminate the difficulty in evaluating these sorts of decisions.

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Every weekday morning, I have the exact same routine. The alarm on my cell phone goes off, I yell at it for a few minutes, it doesn’t stop making noise, then I succumb and get up and turn on the coffee maker. My first walk is always to the kitchen, to start making coffee, and then the rest of the day begins. Yet as certain as I am every morning that I’m going to make myself coffee, I’m still less certain of that each day than I was that the Red Sox would dismiss manager Bobby Valentine. If anything the surprise was that he lasted through the end of the year. Valentine was a dead man sitting, and now a year after finding a new manager, the Red Sox are in the early stages of finding a new manager.

And the guy reportedly at the top of their wish list is one-time Red Sox coach and current Blue Jays manager John Farrell. Last year, the Red Sox tried to get Farrell until the Blue Jays were like, “wait, no.” Now the Red Sox want Farrell again, and the Blue Jays are listening. Farrell’s still got another year on his contract, so while the Jays are open to the idea of him bolting for Boston, a trade would have to be worked out. That’s a trade involving a manager, which, as you can imagine, is historically pretty rare.

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The Orioles and Rangers square off tonight in a winner-take-all/loser-goes-home showdown. The Rangers are throwing Yu Darvish, who has been their best starter for the last month or so, and has the stuff to dominate on any given night. The Orioles are throwing Joe Saunders, who they acquired in an August trade after he cleared waivers. This seems to be the definition of the word mismatch.

There are some match-ups where you’d be okay with Saunders pitching in a critical game because of the composition of the opposing team’s line-up. For instance, Saunders would be a pretty good match-up against a team that has a lot of thump from the left side that he can neutralize. Because, realistically, Saunders is a situational lefty masquerading as a starting pitcher.

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We’re to the point now of there being less baseball, which means we’re to the point now of there being more important baseball. The stakes are the highest they’ve been, and all those little managerial decisions people love to complain about during the regular season might at last be worth actually complaining about, because the leverage of everything is suddenly through the roof. Every little decision now could conceivably contribute to a team winning or not winning the World Series. Thursday, we all got news of one decision in particular — for Friday’s Wild Card playoff against the Cardinals, the Braves will start David Ross at catcher instead of Brian McCann.

It feels weird to imagine the Braves deliberately benching McCann at a time like this, where one game will decide whether there are subsequent games. McCann’s long been the regular in Atlanta, up to and including this season, and by and large he’s been a terrific one. You’d think that a team would go with its trusted regulars in a one-game playoff, no matter how much it also trusts its backups. But it’ll be David Ross catching Kris Medlen and the relievers, and more, the decision seems sound.

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