Carlos Pena led off last night. Carlos Pena led off for the first time in his career last night. Carlos Pena led off, despite averaging about two stolen bases per season and going against one old-school adage (speed at the top!) even as he fits another (second basemen bat second!).
Just how rare was the occurrence, though? And given the current state of the Rays, was it a good idea?
“In the end,” Thompson wrote, “very few people will remember anything I have done as a baseball player. But hopefully they will remember what kind of person and teammate I am.”
— the Philadelphia Inquirer
For those who missed the Rays and Red Sox game last night, here’s the update: In the bottom of the eighth, moments before a blood-souring hit-by-pitch to Will Rhymes, pinch runner Rich Thompson took over for Luke Scott at second base. Much of the audience was probably — and perhaps rightly — focused on Rhymes.
But at the same time, Thompson standing at second was a spectacle in itself.
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Yesterday, it took Los Angeles Dodgers manager Clint Hurdle Don Mattingly* approximately 40 seconds — depending on where you start and stop your timer — to argue The Worst Call of the Season. Meanwhile, in St. Louis, it took the umpiring crew about 2 minutes and 50 seconds to gather in the infield, discuss Carlos Beltran’s hit, reconvene in their underground video review chamber, and then return to announce a home run.
* All white guys look the same to me.
Getting the calls wrong in baseball takes time. Managers — depending on their personality, the game situation, and the offense — take different amounts of time arguing both bad and good calls. The arguing, for the most part, exists because of uncertainty. My lip-reading skills inform me most arguments follow this general pattern:
Manager: “Did you really see X event?”
Umpire: “Most certainly did I see X event.”
Manager: “That statement you just made right there is tantamount to the excrement of bovines.”
Umpire: “You are ejected.”
Recent evidence suggests, however, that despite these conflicts resulting from close calls, instant replays still take more time than good ol’ fashioned shout-spittin’ matches.
Evidence furthermore suggests that in the time it takes to get in a healthy workout, a normal person could empty approximately ten Squeeze Cheese cans directly into his or her porcine gullet.
Which is to say: Quicker is not always better.
Evan Longoria has a partially torn hamstring. He’ll miss at least four weeks and as many as eight while he rehabs the injury. His team is left with a slim four-and-a-half game lead on last-place Boston and two months without their star. Their internal options may not seem scintillating, but they could do just enough… provided Longoria can return healthy.
First, let’s set the time frame involved. If we assume the hamstring is not completely torn and it’s not a grade three hamstring situation, we can use eight weeks as a worst-case scenario. If we remove tears and surgeries from the database and average up the 186 mentions of ‘hamstring strain’ and ‘thigh strain’ since 2002 from Jeff Zimmerman’s database, we get an average of 28 days missed. That includes all grades of non-completely-torn hamstring-type injuries, and this one seems somewhat severe. Let’s use four weeks as the best-case scenario.
Initiate sleuthing mode!
On Monday afternoon, the Tampa Bay Rays beat the Boston Red Sox 1-0 in a game ended with a called strike three on to Cody Ross. Mr. Ross disagreed with that particular call and felt emboldened to express his sentiments by flipping his bat to the ground and then carefully, deliberately smash his helmet on home plate — making a pop loud enough to hear on the television broadcast.
Scandal! The stadium, the Twitter, the airwaves, the everything contracted Strike Zone Fever! Was it a strike? Was it a ball? Was it a fair call? Did Molina frame it, or had the ump — Larry Vanover — called it all day?
The answer is a little bit of everything, but mostly: Yes, the umpire called a “fair” zone.
Allow me to explain.
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“Mentally, I was very calm, but my body felt like it wanted to go and go and go,” Darvish said through his translator. “At the beginning of the game, my mind and my body kind of weren’t on the same page.” — Yu Darvish after his first MLB start
On Monday, I watched with imprisoned eyes as Yu Darvish made his major league debut and did that which many had thought impossible — he walked Chone Figgins.
To say the least, I studied Yu Darvish quite a bit this offseason and was surprised at this seemingly immediate loss of control and command. Some of the hits that followed in that four-run first inning were bloops and seers, but even in the pitches preceding the bad luck, Darvish looked wild — nothing like he looked in Japan or even in the 2012 Spring Training season.
By the third inning, a different man was pitching, a steadier, stronger Darvish. He mowed through the Mariners lineup — while the Mariners pitchers got mowed over by the Rangers — and ended up “winning” the game with 5 ER, 6.2 IP, and raucous applause. Watching the game, I could not help but suspect something more than a rusty start was at hand. Maybe my studies of Darvish and likewise high expectations for him tainted my perception? Maybe the psychological framing of it being his first start in the MLB pushed me to think this, but for my money, Darvish looked nervous.
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Fernando Rodney has three saves and a win so far this season. Fernando Rodney has gotten eight outs so far this season. As strange as it may first seem for a late-inning reliever to have four decisions with so few batters faced, it’s business as usual in Tampa Bay. Here’s a box score that is fairly typical for the Rays:
It certainly appears that the Rays are micro-managing their bullpen. Perhaps the aim is to gain the platoon advantage in as many situations as possible — teams do that all the time. But which ones are doing it most often?
Read the methodology behind the ratings here. Remember that the grading scale is 20-80, with 50 representing league average.
2012 Organizational Rankings
#30 – Baltimore
#29 – Houston
#28 – Oakland
#27 – Pittsburgh
#26 – San Diego
#25 – Minnesota
#24 – Chicago AL
#23 – Seattle
#22 – Kansas City
#21 – Cleveland
#20 – New York Mets
#19 – Los Angeles Dodgers
#18 – Colorado
#17 — Miami
#16 — Diamondbacks
#15 — Cincinnati
#14 — Cubs
#13 — Milwaukee
#12 — San Francisco
#11 — Washington
Tampa Bay’s 2011 Ranking: 4th
Read the methodology behind the ratings here. Remember that the grading scale is 20-80 (50 representing league average) with extra weight given to 2012 and Revenue rankings.
2012 Organizational Rankings
#30 – Baltimore
#29 – Houston
#28 – Oakland
#27 – Pittsburgh
#26 – San Diego
#25 – Minnesota
#24 – Chicago AL
#23 – Seattle
#22 – Kansas City
#21 – Cleveland
#20 – New York NL
#19 – Los Angeles
#18 – Colorado
#17 – Miami
#16 — Arizona
#15 — Cincinnati
Chicago’s 2011 Ranking: #19
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There aren’t many mainstream writers out there who are willing to tackle sabermetric concepts with players, so I have to give Marc Topkin from the the Tampa Bay Times a tip of the hat for mentioning BABIP to Jeremy Hellickson. Not only did he mention a sabermetric statistic to a player, but he brought one up that makes Hellickson look bad:
“Yea, I just got lucky on the mound,” Jeremy Hellickson says dryly. “A lot of lucky outs.” […]
“I hear it; it’s funny,” Hellickson said, not quite sure of the acronym. “I thought that’s what we’re supposed to do, let them put it in play and get outs. So I don’t really understand that. When you have a great defense, why not let them do their job? I’m not really a strikeout pitcher; I just get weak contact and let our defense play.”
First of all, I have to agree with Craig Calcaterra on this one: I couldn’t give a rats patootie if Hellickson knows about or understands BABIP. Sabermetrics is a field most helpful to front office personnel and managers, and while some players find it useful, players don’t need be saberists in order to be good players. And anyway, it’s never going to be the successful players that stumble upon sabermetrics; it’s always going to be the borderline players, the ones looking for any sort of possible advantage to help them get ahead. So should I be annoyed that Hellickson is poo-pooing BABIP? No, not in the least. Good on him.
Instead, this article caught my eye for a different reason: it refers to BABIP primarily as a measure of luck. Hellickson had a low BABIP, which therefore meant he was lucky on balls in play last year. Any pitcher with a low BABIP is therefore “lucky”, and any pitcher with a high BABIP is “unlucky”.
This is a common perception about BABIP, and one that used to be in favor among sabermetric circles. Heck, I subscribed to this philosophy three or four years ago, and I used “luck” as a quick way of describing BABIP to the uninitiated. But these days, that’s an outdated mindset and, quite frankly, misleading.
BABIP is one of the most important sabermetric concepts, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood. What does BABIP tell us? What doesn’t it tell us? Let’s explore.
