Category Archives: Baseball

Thinking out loud

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I got to thinking about R.A. Dickey last night, which happens sometimes. It struck me that, though Dickey’s awesomeness on the mound in 2010 certainly endeared him to Mets fans more than any of his other qualities, his quirky off-the-field awesomeness turned out to be one of the most entertaining aspects of the last few brutal months of the season. Dude says smart things and reads literature and writes poetry and wants to be a U.S. Open ballboy and goes on solitary retreats for contemplation. For a while it seemed like we were getting new and interesting information about R.A. Dickey everyday.

OK here’s where I start making some leaps. First, don’t get me wrong: I have always been confidant that performance affects morale more than morale affects performance. And I believe that the general manager’s task should be to put the best possible team on the field year after year and that the most effective way of doing that often involves entirely tuning out media bluster.

But undoubtedly morale has some affect on a baseball team. No? You have to figure it at least creates an environment that’s more amenable to free-agents (though obviously not as important as the whole money thing). And rumors have always swirled about the way Mets ownership reacts to the newspapers.

So I wonder if there’s some advantage to Sandy Alderson and his crew in signing players that might provide reporters some good copy in Spring Training to distract the media and, in turn, fans, from getting all bent out of shape about how there have been no major changes.

I mention because Chris Capuano seems like, yes, a good upside gamble for a reasonably low price. But he’s also a well-spoken Phi Beta Kappa Segway enthusiast who, that OnMilwaukee interview tells us, doesn’t eat like most ballplayers. And two of the other starters the Mets have been rumored to be pursuing this offseason — Jeff Francis and Chris Young — have reputations as some of the smartest guys in baseball.

Of course, it’s way more likely that the three seemingly most cost-effective reclamation-project starters this offseason also happen to be smart guys. And when I think about it, it doesn’t seem like it’s really all that hard to catnip fans and the media during Spring Training, with hope springing eternal and all. Plus, as a fan I really don’t want the front-office worrying about anything but building a sustainable winner, and I’d much rather it just shoulder any criticism than work to alleviate it.

So never mind then. I’m just saying it’d be cool if Chris Capuano would grow a beard and start making an awesome yelling face when he pitches. I’d appreciate that.

Hall of Fame stuff

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Of course, not all players in the recent past were steroid users. But the common ground for all players is the fact that their workplace did not test. And the common ground for players before 1947 was the color barrier. It was disgraceful and disgusting, but it was part of the game….

The fear is that a player could be elected and then exposed as a steroid user. But voters have already taken that risk, because we will never know the complete roster of steroid users.

Guessing is dubious. The first player who tested positive, in 2005, was a speedy outfielder named Alex Sanchez. Did anyone ever look at Jason Grimsley, a nondescript middle reliever, and think hardcore steroids user?

Maybe Bagwell took steroids, maybe not. Bagwell played most of his career before testing, but so did everybody else who has ever appeared on a Hall ballot.

– Tyler Kepner, N.Y. Times.

I’ve been avoiding the Hall of Fame debate here because most of it has gotten so loud and stupid that I stopped paying attention. But when I saw the sacred name of Mike Piazza sullied in the Daily News this morning, I figured it was time to chime in.

Kepner’s entire piece is worth a read. He nails it. It’s unfair to punish players simply for playing in an era when the league (and the journalists covering it) failed to do anything to stop cheaters.

I don’t get too worked up over the Oscars or the Grammys or the Gold Gloves or even the MVP and Cy Young Awards. I’m arrogant enough to be confident in my opinions, and no academy of voters is ever going to convince me that The English Patient was a better movie than Happy Gilmore.

But I care about the Baseball Hall of Fame. It is our most comprehensive monument to our greatest thing. I like Cooperstown; every single store and restaurant is baseball-themed. It’s like Mecca.

And if Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and — more ridiculously — Mike Piazza are somehow not enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame, then the place becomes a total joke.

Those fellows are among the best players who ever lived. Many, many of the best players who ever lived — ones already in the Hall of Fame — were cheaters and racists and addicts and wife-beaters and everything else. Many great baseball players were pretty terrible people because many people are pretty terrible people.

I mean, holy hell, if we’re making character judgments based on guilty-until-proven-innocent speculation, Roberto Alomar — who likely will be elected to the Hall of Fame — has been sued by two different women for knowingly exposing them to AIDS. Alomar should be a Hall of Famer, and I don’t know that he actually has AIDS or actually did anything wrong. But he’s basically been accused twice of attempted murder.

And people aren’t voting for Jeff Bagwell because they think he might have done steroids even though there’s no concrete evidence to suggest it.

None of Bonds, Clemens, Piazza and Bagwell were ever punished by Major League Baseball for doing whatever they did, if they did anything. It’s ridiculous to try to punish them now. The Hall of Fame should just eliminate the character clause from the voting criteria and focus on honoring the best players.

More on David Wright’s streakiness

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During the 2010 season, I wondered if David Wright was actually any streakier than any other hitter. I know he has a reputation for ups and downs, but I speculated that perhaps all players endure ups and downs and we just notice Wright’s because he’s the best hitter on the Mets and because we’ve labeled him “streaky.”

Today at Beyond the Boxscore, Bill Petti investigates Wright’s “volatility” by calculating and plotting 10-day moving averages for his WPA (win probability added) from 2005 on. It’s an interesting read with colorful graphs, and using the moving averages seems as good a way as any to try to track consistency. He concludes:

As one would expect, Wright experiences peaks and valleys over the course of the season.  If we look closely, however, we see that Wright does appear to have become both more volatile over the past few years and has experienced an increase in stretches where, on average, he negatively affects the Mets chances of winning games.  Wright’s positive streaks do not last as long and his negative streaks have deepened and last longer.

Wright’s best year was 2007, where he averaged a WPA of .029 (highest since 2005) and had a standard deviation of .032 (second lowest since 2005).   Wright’s lack of volatility coincided with his best overall performance at the plate (OPS+ of 149, offensive Wins Above Replacement of 7.5).  Since 2007 we see an increase in deep negative stretches, with 2009 and 2010 looking especially volatile.  Essentially, Wright has gone from a consistent high-performer to a boom-or-bust type player.

OK, a couple issues here: First, it’s really difficult to determine if Wright is any more volatile than any other baseball player without points of comparison. Petti shows that Wright has endured longer and deeper slumps in 2009 and 2010 than he did in 2007 and 2008, but he doesn’t show how Wright’s peaks and valleys in any season compare with those of similar offensive performers.

And more importantly, it seems like mere common sense that Wright would have endured more slumps in 2009 and 2010 than he did in 2007 and 2008: He wasn’t as good. Wright enjoyed the best offensive season of his career in 2007. Of course he didn’t have as many slumps then as he did in 2009.

Wright’s wOBA has been on a steady decline since 2007, so it seems to me to make perfect sense that he’d also seem to be getting progressively “streakier” in that time. If I had to bet, I’d guess a similar analysis of Ryan Howard would determine he was way more volatile from 2008-2010 than he was in 2006 and 2007.

It’s a chicken-and-egg thing, of course, because you can say, “oh well maybe if Wright were less volatile the last two seasons his stats for the season would have been as good as they were in 2007 and 2008.” And that’s true, but it doesn’t really matter much one way or the other. Without other players for comparison, we have no way of knowing if Wright’s perceived streakiness is something unique to him or just normal fluctuation, an expected function of performance at his 2009 and 2010 levels.

My expectation is — as it was in June — that the only very consistent performers in baseball are the truly excellent (like Wright in 2007) and (to reuse a phrase from yesterday) the downright Rafael Belliard awful.

Mets sign Segway enthusiast

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The Mets signed lefty Chris Capuano and righty Taylor Buchholz last night and designated Ryota Igarashi for assignment.

According to Adam Rubin, Capuano contract provides a $1.5 million base salary with incentives. Back in the middle part of the aughts, after his first Tommy John surgery but before his second, Capuano was a stalwart member of the Gary (IN) Templetons’ rotation (also the Brewers’, but my fantasy league was pretty high stakes back then).

In 2005 and 2006, Capuano chewed up innings and struck out a decent number of batters, a nice if unspectacular pitcher. Though he missed all of the 2008 and 2009 campaigns after another arm injury shortened his 2007 season, he returned to the Brewers in June of 2010 and enjoyed a decent stint as a long reliever and spot starter until he took a place in Milwaukee’s rotation in late August.

In those final seven starts of the season, Capuano posted a respectable 4.14 ERA with small-sample peripherals vaguely in line with his 2005 marks. He featured a similar mix of pitches as he did in his healthy years and actually threw his fastball a touch harder. He seems like a great pickup at the cost, and should earn a role in the middle of the Mets’ rotation if he can stay healthy. That’s nothing certain, of course — he has, after all, had two Tommy John surgeries. But if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be available for $1.5 million.

Perhaps most importantly, Capuano is apparently a Segway enthusiast. In this 2007 interview, he reported that he was frequently called a nerd by passersby while he sped around Milwaukee on his personal transporter. I can’t speak for my fellow New Yorkers, but I can promise Chris Capuano this: If I ever see him riding around Midtown on a Segway, I’ll call him a different name: “Hero.”

(Hero? That could work for me.)

Capuano also appeared on an episode of The Young and the Restless and was Phi Betta Kappa at Duke. Bronx Banter’s Emma Span recently described him as “blogger catnip.”

As for Buchholz, former roommate and Rockies fan Ted Burke called him “the best setup man in the game” in his healthy 2008 campaign, and though my namesake is prone to hyperbole, Buchholz was pretty awesome that season. A converted starter, in his lone healthy year of full-time relief Buchholz posted a 2.17 ERA and a sub-1 WHIP. Those numbers belied his just-pretty-good peripherals, but even just-pretty-good would be a nice addition to the Mets’ bullpen.

Buchholz missed all of 2009 following Tommy John surgery, returned to the Rockies in July of 2010, then promptly returned to the disabled list with lower-back stiffness. He did finish the year with two healthy innings for the Blue Jays in September. At $600,000 — barely above the league minimum — he seems a worthwhile bargain.

Incidentally, both Buchholz and Capuano went to high school in Springfields — Buchholz in Pennsylvania and Capuano in Massachusetts.

Oh yeah, Mets get some guy

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While I was on vacation, the Mets got some guy. His name is Chin-Lung Hu, and he’s interesting mostly because he leads all Taiwanese-born Major Leaguers in most offensive categories. Of course, he’s one of only two Taiwanese-born position players that have played in the Majors, and he actually trails pitcher Hong-Chih Kuo in slugging percentage and OPS.

That’s the bad part: He’s not much of a hitter. He enjoyed one very good season in the Minors across two levels in 2007, but he almost never walks and has been downright Rafael Belliard awful in his first 173 Major League at-bats.

Apparently Hu is an excellent defender, though. If the Mets go with a platoon of Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner or Brad Emaus at second base, perhaps Hu takes the 25th spot on the roster as the all-purpose defensive backup and utility infielder. Like Alex Cora, except cheaper, better at defense, and hopefully never called upon to pinch hit.

Thinking out loud: That would make the bench whichever of Murphy and his platoon partner isn’t playing, Ronny Paulino, a fourth outfielder, Nick Evans or Lucas Duda and Hu. Evans is out of options, which probably gives him a leg up on Duda. Of course, if the fourth outfielder in question does not bat left-handed, the Mets might be forced to reconsider. Another good reason to pursue Fred Lewis.

Hu and tragic-homer-hero Luis Hernandez are both also out of options, but I’m maintaining hope that the Mets’ new front-office administration knows better than the last that its worth risking the loss of a player on waivers to optimize the 25-man roster.

Also, and most importantly, should Hu ever reach base safely for the Mets (or spell Ike Davis, for that matter), we’ll inevitably get a “Hu’s on first” comment from the SNY booth. And that gives me a good excuse to remind y’all that this is amazing:

Hall of Fame predictions

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Chris Jaffe details his method for predicting Hall of Fame votes and concludes that Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven will earn the nod this year. Good; they both deserve it.

I’ll reiterate, though, that if the BBWAA keeps steroids users — and worse, merely suspected steroids users — out of the Hall, then entry to Cooperstown will ultimately be rendered meaningless. Barry Bonds helped his teams win many, many games. He probably used illegal drugs to do so, but no one tried to stop him at the time. Players — Hall of Famers included — found ways to cheat long before the 1990s and will continue to do ad infinitum.

Lastings Milledge is available and the Mets still need a fourth outfielder

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I’m just sayin’s all. Logically I recognize that, given all the recent and historical medical issues for the Mets’ three starting outfielders, they’d be better off pursuing a more proven commodity like Fred Lewis. But Lewis, at least to my knowledge, never high-fived fans after hitting a game-tying home run off Armando Benitez, so Milledge has him in that department. It’s not going to happen and it probably shouldn’t, but I remain a Milledge fan.