Archive for Teams

As it happens, we were at Doug Fister’s major-league debut. By “we” I mean myself, Dave Cameron, and some hundreds of USS Mariner and Lookout Landing readers. We weren’t there specifically for Fister; we were there for a blog event and a game, and Fister just happened to pitch in it. He pitched after Sean White, who pitched after Garrett Olson, who pitched after Chris Jakubauskas, who pitched after Ian Snell. The Mariners did not win that game.

Fister’s debut drew a modest response, because it’s always cool to see a guy play for the first time, and because the Safeco PA system uttered the name “Doug Fister” for the first time. But nobody had attended in the hopes of seeing Doug Fister pitch, because Fister was generally considered a no-stuff non-prospect. He could conceivably fill out the back of a bullpen or serve as rotation depth, sure, maybe, but he wasn’t thought of as someone to get excited over. Fister debuted in August 2009. All these sentences bring us to this:

It’s been a weird ride.

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If you go to the Free Agent Leaderboards, you’ll see Michael Bourn’s name at the top, as the sort for the list is set to descending 2012 WAR, and Bourn has the highest WAR this season (+6.1) of any upcoming free agent. We can pretty much guarantee that Bourn isn’t going to sign the largest contract this winter, though, as free agent value isn’t simply based on a player’s most recent season, nor are all skills as likely to be sustained going forward, and various skills have different valuations in the marketplace. Bourn’s combination of average offense and terrific defense is a valuable package, but how will it translate into market value?

Well, before we figure out how much he’ll get paid, we first have to figure out how much of his 2012 value he’ll retain in future years, or at least, how much teams will expect him to retain. There’s no question that the average offense/great defense package can be highly valuable, but it’s also a young man’s skillset. Here is a list of every player in the UZR era (2002-2012) that has posted a +5 WAR season while running a wRC+ below 110.

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“Bats, they are sick. I cannot hit curveball. Straightball I hit it very much. Curveball, bats are afraid. I ask Jobu to come, take fear from bats. I offer him cigar, rum. He will come.” — Pedro Cerrano

The archetype of power hitters feasting on fastballs and whiffing on offspeed pitches has long floated within baseball circles. The quotation featured above from the movie Major League highlights how pervasive the idea that “power hitters are fastball hitters” has become in baseball.

Alfonso Soriano has long found success by smashing fastballs, and he now receives a heavy diet of sliders and curveballs to counter that strength. Adam Dunn, Mark Reynolds, and Garrett Jones also serve as fruitful examples of sluggers who have experienced the vast majority of their success against fastballs.

The stereotype often proves true, so you’ll have to excuse me for jumping to conclusions when assuming that Oakland Athetics’ outfielder Josh Reddick would fall into that same broad category. After all, his 29 home runs, .216 ISO, and .242 batting average all suggest on the surface that he’s merely another power-hitting, fastball-feasting slugger who needs to adjust to big league breaking pitches to become more consistent at the plate.

That’s not just a misleading statement, though. It’s blatantly wrong. In fact, amongst qualified batters this season, Josh Reddick has the worst batting average against fastballs in all of baseball, and it’s not particularly close.
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Science is neat. In many scientific experiments, you can run trials, generate results, slightly change the conditions, run trials, and generate other results. Then you can compare those results to measure the effect of the change that you made. I used to work in a neuroscience lab with fruit flies, and one of the first projects to which I was assigned attempted to measure the draw of potential mates against the draw of fresh food. Without going into detail, we were constantly futzing with the method and seeing what happened to the numbers in the end. It was not a very good experiment and it never came close to getting published. At least there were usually donuts.

Baseball isn’t like science. In baseball, there is but one trial, and it’s always going on. We can speculate about the effects of certain things, and we can feel pretty confident about our speculations, but we can never know for sure. We can never know for sure how many wins above replacement a player is or was worth. We can never know for sure the significance of a borderline pitch call. And we might never know the meaning of a play that Alex Gordon made in Detroit Wednesday evening.

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The Giants? They’re just a bunch of stat geeks. Look at some of the aspects of their play on the field, and it’s clear that this is not a club that sticks only with tradition. Talk to Bobby Evans, Vice President of Baseball Operations, and you get a sense of a team with a strong process that includes inputs from both the old and the new school of baseball. And this isn’t some sort of new phenomenon in San Francisco.

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The Marlins will be giving former Chicago Cubs farmhand the at bat he lost seven years ago. According to multiple sources, the Marlins are signing Adam Greenberg to make an appearance in their series against the New York Mets:

Pretty cool news: The Marlins are going to give Adam Greenberg an at-bat next week. Nice gesture by Jeffrey Loria and David Samson…

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) September 27, 2012

Greenberg, on July 9, 2005, was hit in the back of the head on the first pitch from Marlins reliever Valerio de los Santos, giving Greenberg a severe concussion and effectively ending his MLB career. I was watching the game with my mother. I remember it well.

And now, after a public campaign to get Greenberg another shot at the majors, the long-time minor league and independent league 31-year-old player will get his chance.
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Lost in all the hoopla created by Mike Trout, Miguel Cabrera’s run at the Triple Crown, and the various pennant races is the fact that Joe Mauer is having another amazing season. He currently leads all of baseball with a .414 OBP and has what feels like the quietest 141 wRC+ in baseball history. He is seeing more and more time at first base and DH these days (only 70 starts behind the plate this year), but that’s an amazing offensive effort regardless of position. It’s part of the reason why his performance on Wednesday afternoon is so noteworthy.

The 29-year-old Mauer has now played 1,059 games in his big league career, and on only six occasions has he struck out three (or more) times in a single game. Two of those six games came back in 2005, which was essentially his rookie season after the knee injury in 2004. Another came in 2007, another in 2009 (his only career four-strikeout game), and two this year. Ryan Dempster got him three times during interleague play back in July, and yesterday CC Sabathia struck him out in each of his first three at-bats. That’s not all: those three strikeouts came on nine total pitches.

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Holding and participating in weekly live chats is a really effective way to find out what people want to know more about, and therefore what might be worth writing about. It’s at least an effective way to find out what a few people want to know more about, and that’s usually good enough for me. I’ve been receiving an awful lot of questions about Rockies catcher Wilin Rosario, so he seems like a guy to discuss. Before we discuss Wilin Rosario, we must first discuss Josh Bard.

In 2005, the Red Sox had both Tim Wakefield and Doug Mirabelli. Mirabelli worked well with Wakefield, by which I mean Mirabelli demonstrated that he was capable of catching Wakefield, but in December Mirabelli got traded to the Padres. The next April, Wakefield made five starts for the Red Sox, throwing each time to Josh Bard. In the first start, Bard registered three passed balls. In the next start, Bard registered zero passed balls, but in the start after that, Bard registered two passed balls. He had another passed ball in Wakefield’s fourth start, and in Wakefield’s fifth start, Bard racked up four passed balls. That was on April 26. On May 1, the Red Sox traded with the Padres to get Mirabelli back, and Mirabelli caught Wakefield that day. He didn’t record any passed balls.

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Likely waiting tastefully until the Talk Like a Pirate Day celebrations were in the rear view mirror, longtime Pittsburgh (and short-time Seattle and Atlanta) shortstop Jack Wilson, who was released by Atlanta back in August, is reportedly going to retire after the season. The first thing I think of when I think of Jack Wilson is how I used to always get him mixed up with former teammate catcher/outfielder/first baseman Craig Wilson. Remember when the “Wilson Brothers” and Jason Bay were part of a future Pirates contender? Good thing those miserable days are over. HOKA HEY.

Anyway, Jack Wilson’s reputation was based almost completely on the very good glove he displayed in his prime. Yeah, there was that 2004 season in which he hit .308/.335/.459 (103 wRC+), made the All-Star Game, and people talked about it being a “breakout” year for him. Actually — and I can’t believe this happened to a guy who walked in under four percent of his plate appearances — it looks like that was probably mostly random variation. That was Wilson’s only major-league season with above-average offense, and his career line is .265/.306/.366 (74 WRC+). Despite this, his glove made him a valuable player in his prime, and that was what one should really focus on when thinking of his career.

However, even a glove-first shortstop will manage some big hits over 5,339 plate appearances. So, in honor of his impending retirement, let’s use the story stat, Win Probability Added (WPA), to look at three of Jack Wilson’s biggest hits in terms of their in-game impact.

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I’m not exactly sure how Major League Baseball players feel about fame, but you can probably guess what they think about infamy. You want to leave your mark because of your greatness, not because of some asterisk or fluke or memorable gaffe.

Cliff Lee is a fine pitcher. Fine like diamonds, not like, say, a Subaru Justy. He’s been among the elite starting pitchers going on five straight seasons. And he’s is making history this season. But probably not the way he wants to.

I doubt that the recording of the win and reliance on ERA were the genesis of sabermetrics. But a lot of what exists here — both in the statistic and narrative format — is because of a disdain for traditional measures of what supposedly makes a pitcher good.

But allow me to depart from that for a moment, because Lee is accomplishing something that’s rarely seen: He’s been a dominant pitcher without earning many wins this year. It’s not that I like the win any more than anyone else, I just like the significance of the anomaly that we’re seeing.

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