Andruw Jones was having a brilliant career, that is, until he turned 31 years old. Since that point, he’s barely been a league-average player. He went from an all-time great player, to an iffy hall-of-fame candidate.
In advance of the trade deadline, the Angels seemed poised to make a run, and that was before they traded for Zack Greinke. The Angels traded for Zack Greinke and at least on paper, that made their starting rotation laughably awesome. Even though the trade might’ve had more to do with the playoffs and signing Greinke long-term, the Angels still had to finish well in the regular season, and there was little reason to believe Greinke wouldn’t help them do that.
Greinke hasn’t helped them do that, at least not yet. He very easily still could — there’s a lot of season left — but so far the Angels are 1-4 in Greinke starts, and he’s averaged about a walk or a hit batter every other inning. He’s allowed 22 runs in 32 innings, and all in all he just hasn’t looked like the same Zack Greinke capable of posting comical strikeouts and walks. Greinke’s another player for whom the Angels are crossing their fingers, where the idea was that Greinke would be a player they could take for granted.
What follows isn’t intended to explain everything that has gone wrong. I think the best explanation for what’s happened with Greinke might be Baseball!, just as that’s the best explanation for how Chris Davis earned a win over Darnell McDonald. What follows might not actually explain anything, but Greinke’s struggles provided a convenient opportunity to bring this up and I’m nothing if not opportunistic. Actually that isn’t true, one could never be nothing. By definition, one is always something. I am something, and possibly opportunistic. All right, moving on.
Pretty much every player in the Majors goes on waivers at some point in August, so the fact that Josh Beckett was placed on waivers isn’t really news. However, unlike most players in baseball, Beckett will almost certainly clear waivers, since he’s due approximately $4 million over the remainder of the 2012 season and $15.75 million in each of the next two seasons. Any team claiming Beckett would be on the hook for $36 million, and he’s clearly not worth that kind of investment at this point, so he’ll sail through waivers without any blinking.
Once he clears, the Red Sox will be able to trade him to any team that’s interested, and they can create additional interest by picking up a significant chunk of his salary in order to move him. At that point, the question becomes how much cash Boston should be willing to eat to move on from their struggling former ace.
Let’s just go ahead and get this out of the way now: there’s no such thing as a good time to lose a starting pitcher like Bartolo Colon. Over 24 starts with the A’s, Colon posted a 3.43 ERA and peripherals that make him look only a little less good, and Colon has been a big part of Oakland’s attempted playoff push. Now he’s done, having been found out for cheating, and at this writing Oakland is five games out of the division and just a half-game out of the wild card. If the A’s were terrible, this would be too bad, but it wouldn’t be potentially devastating. The A’s aren’t terrible. The starting rotation has lost value right when the season leverage is getting its greatest.
But while there’s never a good time to lose a Bartolo Colon, there are worse times and there are better times. In one regard, this was a profoundly bad time for the A’s given their position in the playoff race, but on the other hand, Colon was suspended a day after Brett Anderson made his 2012 season debut. Anderson was excellent against the Twins Tuesday night, and Anderson figures to be a major stretch-run contributor right when it turns out the A’s could really use one of those.
The St. Louis Cardinals and Jake Westbrook have agreed to an extension. The new contract is reportedly a one-year, $8.75 million contract for 2013 with a superfluous mutual option worth $9.5 million for 2014 with a $1 million buyout. While the mutual option seems increasingly prevalent, given that it is usually irrelevant in practice, it might be more straightforward to think of this deal as a guaranteed deal for one year and just under $10 million dollars.
There exists the idea of a kind of proof-of-concept game, that I’m rather fond of. In any individual baseball game, a player’s performance is essentially unpredictable. The range of possible outcomes spans every possible outcome, as looking at one game is no way to evaluate a player’s true talent. But it stands to reason that a guy can fluctuate around his true talent by a magnitude of only so much. Kerry Wood established in one game that he was capable of 20 strikeouts, and, say, Kirk Rueter could never have done that. Juan Pierre has had games where he’s finished with zero hits and five hits, but he’s never had a game where he finished with multiple homers or four or five strikeouts. Extreme performances are notable, because they demonstrate that a given player is capable of such an extreme performance. It’s within the error bars around his true talent.
Tuesday night, against the Tigers, Ricky Romero put together such a proof-of-concept game. Those who followed along know I don’t mean that in a good way. Tuesday night, against the Tigers, Ricky Romero faced 29 batters, and he walked eight of them while striking out zero of them. Romero and the Blue Jays, unsurprisingly, lost.
Updated: Thanks to the commentors, especially Evan, for double checking my work. I had an issue in Excel that messed up the results for May and June. Charts have been updated.
For most of 2012, the Baltimore Orioles have been playing over their heads. Well, at least when it comes to their expected win-loss record.
Based on the run differential the team has generated, the O’s have amassed 10 more wins than we would expect based on their Pythagorean winning percentage. The team has outplayed its cumulative expected winning percentage throughout the year and — since April — picked up two additional wins at the end of each month. If they sustain this performance and finish August with at least 10 more wins then their Pythagorean winning percentage would predict, they would be just the third team to do so since 2001 (the 2004 Yankees and the 2007 Diamondbacks are the other two).
Some might point to this glaring discrepancy between Baltimore’s actual winning percentage and Pythagorean winning percentage as evidence that the Orioles cannot sustain their winning ways. Of course, this raises the question of whether we really gain anything from a predictive standpoint heading into September if we focus on a team’s expected winning percentage rather than their actual performance.
The answer based on a review of the past decade seems to be no.
There’s a sense that the knuckleball is more prone to the home run. The guys on the MLB Network, while watching R.A. Dickey give up three home runs to the Reds, thought out loud that the lack of spin meant that it would go further upon contact and lead to more bombs. The home run seems to be the source of some of the ‘risky’ label attached to pitchers that use the knuckler. Even physics professor Porter Johnson said in a recent interview that if a knuckleball “doesn’t move, it’s basically a home run.”
As with all conventional wisdom, this link is worth unpacking.
Consider for a moment that the top three teams in the American League wild card standings right now are the Rays, Orioles, and Athletics. Now consider in the following moment that the three teams right behind them are the Tigers, Angels, and Red Sox. This is not new information, for any of us, but it seems like the kind of thing we might not be appreciating for everything it’s worth. Regardless of how things turn out, this is the way things are toward the end of August. Baseball is amazing.
Now then, because it’s August, trades can still be made that affect regular-season and postseason rosters, and because the wild card race is so tight, teams are looking to make even slight improvements. On Monday night, as announced during their own game, the A’s made what they feel like is an improvement, acquiring Stephen Drew from the Diamondbacks in exchange for minor leaguer Sean Jamieson. Nothing against Sean Jamieson, but this is the last time he’ll be mentioned in this article. For the Diamondbacks, this was not about the talent return; it was about saving money. For the A’s, it was about getting a little better where getting a little better might make all the difference.
Paul Goldschmidt had some pretty robust projections entering the year — Steamer projected him to have the seventh-highest wOBA among first basemen, for instance — considering that he had just 177 major league plate appearances under his belt. And despite a slow start, the 24-year-old slugger is living up to those projections and then some. If he keeps producing for the final six weeks in the same fashion, he will need to be considered one of the best first basemen in the game.
