The Chicago Cubs general manager, Jim Hendry, has been described by many as a lame duck, but team owner Tom Ricketts may want to get out the hunting rifle now before the situation deteriorates any further.

Hendry took over the Cubs GM position midway through the 2002 season and has never quite assembled the impressive major league team comparable to the impressive farm system he built in the late 1990s. Once touted for assembling a farm system that included future stars like Corey Patterson, Mark Prior, Eric Patterson, Felix Pie, Rich Hill, and (hey, mildly positive ones!) Kerry Wood and Carlos Zambrano, Hendry is now widely considered a neither great nor terrible GM.

His on-the-field product reflects that dichotomy:

His great times (2008, 2004) have been great; his good times (2003, 2007, 2009) have been okay; and his bad times (2005, 2006, 2010, 2011) have been numerous.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whence we last examined yonder batting orders, we came away with several expected observations (Jose Bautista plays baseball like a video game, the Oakland Athletics do not care much for scoring runs, Rick Ankiel and Ian Desmond are not feared hitters, and so forth) as well as a number of curious findings (the Cubs lead-off combo was tops in the majors, the 7th hitters on AL teams were worse than the 9th hitters, NL managers effectively managed the bottoms of their lineups, and such).

Read the rest of this entry »

If there were questions earlier this year whether Adrian Gonzalez was among the best hitters in baseball, consider your doubts answered. After hitting 71 home runs and posting a .288/.400/.530 line (.390 wOBA) in the past two seasons in San Diego, Gonzalez has started off his tenure in Boston on a blistering pace. He now has a .434 wOBA — second-best in the American League behind only Jose Bautista — and his .357 batting average is the highest in the majors. Can he adjust to the AL? Will he thrive in the toughest division in baseball? Gonzo laughs at your concerns.

So while Gonzalez is tearing the hide off the ball, there’s also an interesting subplot going on. Namely, how is Fenway Park affecting his hitting value? He’s hit 16 home runs so far this season and he’s on pace for 34, a small bump from last season. But it was a common assumption during the off-season that Fenway’s cozy confines would lead to an even more dramatic homer increased for Gonzalez. In fact, although Gonzalez currently has the highest Isolated Power of his career (.248 ISO), it looks as though he’s hitting with less power this season.

Read the rest of this entry »

With a right-handed pitcher on the mound for the second game of the Philadelphia Phillies-Boston Red Sox series, Terry Francona has decided to rearrange his lineup and get all his biggest bats into the game. That means he has to find two places on the field for Adrian Gonzalez and David Ortiz, neither of which is particularly fleet of foot, and although Gonzalez has a slick glove, it’s fair to question how he could handle the outfield. These questions will be answered today, as Francona has elected to put Gonzalez in right field to open up first for the statue that is David Ortiz.

Ortiz effectively replaces Mike Cameron in the lineup. Cameron has been a shell of his former self this year, posting a miniscule 25 wRC+, whereas Ortiz has been playing his best baseball in years, posting a 165 wRC+, a difference on the order of 90 runs over the course of a full season. The true talent difference probably isn’t quite that large, but throwing in the platoon advantage it’s not difficult to imagine an offensive gain of around half a run per game with this move.

This will be Gonzalez’s first game as a right fielder since he played eight innings there for the Rangers in 2005. The worst right fielders (think Adam Dunn and Brad Hawpe) tend to be around -30 runs over a full season, and I can’t imagine Gonzalez, very out of practice and lacking outfield range, would be much better. David Ortiz has been the butt of jokes as an American League representative at first base in All-Star Games at NL parks before, which should speak to how poor he is in the field. Think Prince Fielder, but without the practice of playing the position every day, and probably with less range. The defensive difference between Gonzalez and Cameron, two above-average defenders, as opposed to Ortiz and Gonzalez, likely two of the worst fielders in the game at their position, could approach something like 50 runs over the course of a whole season, or about a third of a run per game.

So although the difference in runs per game appears negligible, just looking at these dry statistics, I think Francona is making a great decision with this lineup. With John Lackey on the mound, the Red Sox may need to score more runs than usual regardless of the quality of their defense. Also, in one individual game, there’s a chance Gonzalez may only be forced into action at RF two or three times, and Ortiz may not even have to face any challenging plays at first. Regardless of what happens in the game, though, both the first baseman and right fielder will have to hit at least three times, and likely four or five.

The Red Sox have a flexible enough bench that they can easily go to a defensive replacement at any time in the game by inserting Cameron into right field and returning Gonzalez to first base. With the heavy-hitting run-scoring lineup on the field to begin the game, the Sox may be able to sprint out to an early lead and then revert to a defensive lineup in the later innings. Francona is employing a creative and potentially risky plan, but the flexibility of his lineup and talent of his hitters suggest that it is the right one.

Why do so many Major League Baseball players come from the Dominican Republic (DR)? Why does economically strong, population-rich Japan produce so few MLB players? Why does baseball-loving Colombia have so few MLB alums (nine total)? Well, as it turns out, the answers are not so easy to find.

My previous two articles — one on East Asian talent, th’other on the relationship between height and OBP — have generated a lot of good discussion about what determines where a baseball player comes from.

In the first piece, I proposed that teams should invest in Chinese (and Indian) baseball academies to take advantage of the exceedingly large pool of athletes in those areas. However, several commentors suggested that baseball culture, not population size, determines the talent pool.

I found this a most intriguing analysis, so I went back to the ol’ opening day roster/injury list of foreign born players.

This is how it breaks out:

It does not require an electron micrometer to see the DR and Venezuela give the MLB lots o’ players. These two nations composed 17.5% of opening day rosters, but have a combined population smaller than Korea or Columbia individually.

So what does determine MLB talent sources? Well, it certainly does not appear to be population:

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2007, Daisuke Matsuzaka became the talk of baseball with his Gyroball and the over $51M paid by the Red Sox to negotiate for him. The next season, Hiroki Kuroda quietly signed with the Dodgers. Since coming over from Japan, Matsuzaka has gotten more media coverage while the less publicized Kuroda has been the better pitcher on the field.

Matsuzaka came to the U.S. under a media storm which can be seen in the number of news articles written about him. Doing a Google search for news stories shows that he has had about 25K news articles written about him. On the other hand, Kuroda has had only about 1/4 the number of online articles. The 36-year-old Kuroda has definitely flown under the radar compared to his fellow countryman.

Since joining the league, their only similarity seems to be that they were from Japan. After signing with the Red Sox, Dice-K had 15 wins and over 200 Ks, helping the Red Sox to a 2007 World Series title. He had similar production in 2008 with an 18-3 record. In 2009 is when injuries began to creep up on him. In 2009 and 2010 he went on the DL five times and missed 164 games. In 2011, the story hasn’t been much different. He managed only seven starts and has been on the DL since May 17th.

His WAR totals definitely mirror his ability to stay healthy. In 2007 and 2008, he generated 7.2 WAR. From 2009 on he has totaled only 3.2 WAR. The 30-year-old still has a chance to rebound to his previous levels, but after each injury he deals with, the chances get slimmer and slimmer.

On the other hand, Kuroda has been fairly steady with his production while with the Dodgers. He has averaged 3.3 WAR and 28 starts from 2008 to 2010. So far in 2011 he has generated 1.2 WAR for career total of 11.1 WAR in 3.5 seasons, or 0.7 WAR more than Matsuzaka has created in his 4.5 seasons with the Red Sox.

Besides the fanfare of the signing and helping lead the Red Sox to a World Series Championship, it can be easy to tell why Matsuzaka gets more media attention. His 49-30 record looks prettier than Kuroda’s 33-39 record. Also he has been able to strike out more batters (8.2 K/9) than Kuroda (6.6 K/9).

Kuroda, on the other hand walks, less than half the batters (2.1 BB/9) than Matsuzaka (4.4 BB/9). Even though Kuroda has started seven fewer games, has has generated a bit more WAR due to his better walk rate. Kuroda’s career ERA/FIP/xFIP values (3.52/3.52/3.63) are about 0.75 points lower than Matsuzaka’s (4.25/4.25/4.52) values.

Matsuzaka came over from Japan with a media blitz and once he is done pitching, there will probably be another one. Kuroda has had less hype surrounding him, but has been the better of the two pitchers.

While trade season primarily involves contenders raiding also-rans for useful players, we always hope for that trade that makes us go: what? When the Red Sox traded Manny to the Dodgers in 2008: What? (Which was preceded, of course, but a much louder what when it was reported they traded him to Florida.) We don’t see those very often, because they often involve high-profile players with big contracts, which complicates matters. Chances are we won’t see any jaw-dropping moves this off-season, but that doesn’t preclude us from writing about possibilities.

Today we’ll hold a bad contract swap meet. There aren’t too many huge, horrible contracts out there — that is, contracts that a team would dump if possible and not really miss the player’s production. The entrants, with the year their contracts expire and the money they’re owed beyond 2011 (assuming options declined):

Boston Red Sox: John Lackey (2014, $47.85m)
New York Mets: Jason Bay (2013, $39.26m)
San Francisco Giants: Barry Zito (2013, $46m)
Chicago Cubs: Alfonso Soriano (2014, $57m)

Read the rest of this entry »

Facing one of the worst offenses in baseball last night, Andrew Miller yielded 10 baserunners, became the first pitcher to give up a home run to Orlando Hudson all season, and walked away with a no-decision, despite facing an unimpressive mound opponent and pitching for a clearly superior team.

He also pitched out of trouble multiple times, pitched backwards when he needed to, and induced nine whiffs out of 89 pitches. For a pitcher making his first big league start of the year following an 8.54 ERA last season, three runs allowed in 5 2/3 innings ain’t half bad. Clay Buchholz’s stint on the disabled list might not hurt much at all.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about how the dramatic turnaround Josh Beckett has experienced this year has been mostly driven by a huge change in his BABIP, and in doing so, noted that this year’s version of Beckett doesn’t seem to be that different from last year’s version. The always insightful David Pinto responded, using Pitch F/x data and heat maps to show that Beckett’s pitches are showing a real difference this year. His conclusion:

To sum up, Beckett exhibited less control of a straighter fastball in 2010. Batters hit that pitch harder. Beckett’s bad luck seemed more due to an injury hurting his mechanics than balls finding holes on good pitches.

DIPS is often right, as it was on Dan Haren. In the case of Beckett, however, there is reason to believe that his improvement is more than just regression to and past the mean. Sometimes pitchers make their own luck.

In reality, I don’t think David and I actually disagree here — he just corrected some sloppy writing on my part, and that got me thinking that I probably needed to talk more about BABIP and regression, because too often, we just sum up variation as luck but don’t explain what we really mean by that. So, here’s a general take on what I see as the main causes of variations in BABIP.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Josh Beckett posted a 5.78 ERA in 21 starts, and his struggles were one of the main reasons the Red Sox missed the playoffs. This year, Josh Beckett has a 1.86 ERA in 14 starts, and his dominance is one of the reasons that the Red Sox have the best record in the American League. A look beyond ERA, however, shows that Beckett is the poster boy for why metrics like xFIP were created in the first place.

Last year, Beckett had an xFIP of 3.86, 8% below league average. This year, Beckett is posting a 3.69 xFIP, 8% below the league average. In fact, his K/BB ratio is almost exactly identical (2.58 last year, 2.63 this year) to what it was a year ago. His ERA has been slashed by over four runs thanks to huge reductions in two factors that are counted in xFIP – BABIP and HR/FB.

Read the rest of this entry »