I noticed last night that the Mariners were the only team left in baseball that had yet to play an extra-inning game this season. Division-mate Oakland has already played eight. Sometimes I am content to let a little nugget like that pass off into the twitter-verse and let it die, but in this case I got intrigued enough to head to Retrosheet and see if I could dig up some context. I restricted the search to seasons starting in 1962 when the expansion to 162 games took place and started the season earlier in the year.

The best that I could do was to go by calendar dates. I would prefer to go by game counts, but that was not available to my database at this time. Luckily, calendar dates are a reasonable proxy for how many games a team has played. And the winner for the longest it has taken to play extra innings goes to the 2005 Boston Red Sox who didn’t go beyond nine until their 99th game of the season on July 25. Read the rest of this entry »

Johnny Damon’s case for the Hall of Fame has recently come up (again). Indeed, some people seem to think it is time to start discussing which hat he should be wearing for his induction. My initial response is “he’s been good, but not good enough,” but hey, I’ve been wrong before. Many times. While the voters have made some progress in recent years, they aren’t exactly known for their objectivity or consistency. What the voters will do with Johnny Damon is one question, one that involves stuff like history and folk psychology, things I’m not interested in dealing with here. Instead, I want to address what the voters should do in Damon’s case.

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If the Boston Red Sox are going to contend for the World Series, much of their success is contingent on Josh Beckett’s return to form. After succumbing to a back injury last season, Beckett entered 2011 as one of the question marks on a strong Red Sox team. Throughout the month of April, Beckett has churned out some vintage performances. Now that Beckett appears fully healthy, should we expect his strong performances to continue?
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I am a relatively young baseball fan. As a consequence, there are a lot of players that I missed out watching first hand. Lucky for me that baseball is a sport steeped in numbers. People are biased in their recollections, but past numbers are static and simply awaiting for us to come along and figure out ways to interpret and compare them.

Sure there are the enduring numbers stuck forever on the backs of old baseball cards, but one of the revelations that comes from diving into the rabbit hole of sabermetrics is the realization of how little those oft-quoted numbers actually tell. It’s not just the standard RBI and pitcher Wins are overrated stats mantra, but the importance of era-context that’s left to the individual consumer to internalize and adjust for, if he or she is even aware of it.

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“Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.”

-ye olde Bill Shakespeare (Friar Laurence from Rome and Juliet)

After waiting many hard winter months without any baseball, it seems unfair to ask us sabermagicians to wait even longer to saberize our favorite teams and players. Unfortunately, that is what we must do. One of the core principles of sabermetric thought is the value of sample size.

We cannot do as our detractors think we do: We cannot resort to looking for greater truths from lesser findings.

So, this early part of the year features a lot of articles about players’ plate discipline numbers and pitchers’ pitch f/x changes — small slivers of reality that give us clues to how the big reality will start to look.

One such thing we can look at early in the season: batting average on balls in play (BABIP). Why? BABIP stabilizes slowly, but tends to stay in a particular range for hitters (somewhere between .250 and .350, with most hitters being quite near to .300). So, early in the season, we can usually take a gander at the Luck Loserboard (those hitters with BABIPs at or beneath .200) and get a good idea about which players are poised to rebound.
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A lot of ink and keystrokes have been used over the awful start by Carl Crawford in a Red Sox uniform. After signing a massive seven-year contract worth $142 million, Crawford is being booed by the Fenway faithful less than three weeks into the season. Coming into Tuesday night’s games, the leftfielder was hitting just .133/.175/.167 in his first 63 plate appearances. A year after topping 60 extra base-hits and 40 stolen bases, he had just two of each through 14 contests.

Thus far, Terry Francona has moved Crawford around in the lineup and given him a day off to try and jumpstart his new toy; however, nothing has worked. Truth be told, no change in lineup or day off will cure what ails Crawford. As Jonah Keri would say, only time will.

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It happens every year. A manager gets an itchy trigger finger early in the season and buries a guy before he even gets a chance to earn the faith the manager put in him to start the season. This year is no different, and with an idea sparked from Eric Seidman’s piece yesterday on Brad Emaus — an article that the Mets completely ignored when they waived him today — I present the 2011 Brad Emaus All-Stars.
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Thus far, 2011 has not been kind to the Boston Red Sox and Daisuke Matsuzaka. Through two turns in the rotation, Matsuzaka has given up more earned runs than innings pitched. After allowing three runs on six hits in five innings during his first start, he lasted just two innings last night; surrendering seven runs on eight hits and two walks.

Full small sample size disclosure, but in seven innings of work, opposing lineups have 10 earned runs on 14 hits, and five walks against Matsuzaka. He has just four strikeouts and served up three home runs – including one to Sam Fuld. In addition to some rather alarming results, the process at which he’s going about it also leaves something to be desired.

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After a middling first start, the media was ready to jump on Josh Beckett. The results weren’t bad, exactly, but he didn’t quite look like the pre-2010 Beckett. In their podcast the following day, ESPN’s David Schoenfield, Keith Law, and Eric Karabell talked about Beckett’s lack of conditioning. Red Sox blog Fire Brand of the AL mentioned it, too. Yet there were many pitchers who performed poorly in their first outings who didn’t get called out for conditioning issues. Perhaps this was an ex-post explanation for the bad outing following a poor 2010 season. But, poor conditioning or not, he came back to completely shut down the Yankees last night. I doing so, he looked a lot like the Beckett of old.

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With today’s 1-0 loss to the Indians, the Boston Red Sox are now 0-6. This is the same Red Sox team that many people, myself included, tabbed as the favorites to win the World Series. So far, they haven’t hit (only Minnesota has been worse offensively after today’s shutout) and they really haven’t pitched (entering the day with a ridiculous 8.25 FIP), and the total team meltdown has led to a miserable start to the season and a 4 1/2 game deficit behind the East-leading Orioles.

Those last three words should be all you need to know about whether the current standings are predictive of where we’ll be at year’s end, but that hasn’t stopped a number of people from pointing out that no team that has ever begun the season 0-6 has gone on to play in the World Series, and only two out of the 85 teams to ever start 0-5 (or worse) had even made the playoffs. Those sound like seriously scary numbers until you realize that there’s a huge sampling bias problem – most teams that start a season with a long losing streak kind of suck. By virtue of filtering only teams that have lost a bunch of games to start the season, we’re left looking at the records of teams who inherently lacked talent in most cases, and holding those teams up as examples of how the 2011 Red Sox (who don’t suck, despite their poor start) will play going forward doesn’t work.

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