Beaneball

Best searches of October to hit this site:

• mark mulder broken heart women
• jerry seinfeld observational comedy style
• maureen dowd's rolling stone picture
• barry zito email address
• the japanese term 5's of good housekeeping
• jorge posada and homosexuality
• freshdirect marijuana
• jewish penis
• steve phillips extramarital affair mets
• criminalizing homosexuality

My hands-down favorite is "freshdirect marijuana." All I can say is that I hope the searcher found what he was looking for.

Posted by jason in The Blog at 01:59 | |

Like everyone else, I figured this was finally the Braves's year to lose. Like everyone else, I was wrong again. Of course, the Braves came to the same end as always, getting knocked out of the playoffs in the first round, this time by the Astros. It was entirely reasonable to figure this team for done. Look at the top five starters (by starts made): Russ Ortiz, John Thomson, Jaret Wright, Mike Hampton, and Paul Byrd. There are injury problems, effectiveness problems, mechanical problems, head problems, Coors problems ... every imaginable kind of problem has been experienced by that staff. What did Leo Mazzone mold from this motley crew, though? A rotation where no pitcher had an RA+ under 101. Basically, he got four league average performances, with John Thomson's 107 being best among that group, and one that was significantly better: Jaret Wright's 119. Wright probably had the most performance-related downside of the group (as opposed to injury-related downside), but he may have had the most upside coming in as well, and Mazzone, as usual, delivered on the potential. That those starters were actually not 1-5 at the beginning of the year, but 2-6, makes their performance all the more impressive. Horacio Ramirez started the year very well, making nine starts with a 127 RA+ before going down with a shoulder injury. Paul Byrd timed his comeback well, though, so there was just a small gap between Ramirez going down and Byrd making his season debut. The bullpen was fronted by an excellent-as-usual John Smoltz, but the Braves also got excellent contributions Antonio Alfonseca and Juan Cruz. Cruz was absolutely stolen from the Cubs for Andy Pratt (who the Cubs turned into Ben Grieve) and Richard Lewis, who hit well in AA but couldn't handle his first taste of AAA this year and will likely be headed back there next year, at 25. So he's still got time to make it, but he's not what one usually calls a prospect, I think. It ought to be noted, though, that despite Cruz's 151 RA+ in 72 innings, his performance was calculated by BP as taking away about half a win from the team this year in their reliever evaluation tools. That's not really an odd disparity, especially for relievers, but it certainly is a big one: a swing of two and a half or so wins to the negative. The Braves in general got good performances out of all their pitchers, as we've come to expect from a Leo Mazzone team: just 108.6 innings were pitched by guys with a sub-100 RA+. No other team even comes close to that kind of performance. In fact, the vast majority of teams had one or more pitchers below league average who by themselves threw more than 110 innings. The offense was supposed to be the problem, with the departures of Vinny Castilla (not that he was going to keep up his hitting anyway), Gary Sheffield, and Javy Lopez. Surprises abounded, though. Chipper Jones moved back to third base (thank goodness he came to his senses), where, while he struggled, he still outhit Vinny Castilla, who moved back to Colorado to take a ride in the Juvenation Machine. J.D. Drew adequately replaced Sheffield, almost hitting as well as Shef did in 2003 and, most importantly, staying healthy, reaching 500 and 600 at-bats for the first time in his career. Finally, Johnny Estrada played out of his mind, hitting right around his 90th percentile PECOTA, which, while it still wasn't nearly as well as Lopez hit last year (the Braves lost over .200 points of slugging behind the plate), was enough to soften the blow of the loss. Similar to the pitching staff, the Braves's offense didn't carry them to the playoffs with a couple of stars, but with general adequacy. There were regular starters at six of eight positions for the Braves and each of those players had a positive MLVr, with Rafael Furcal putting up the worst mark, at .031. At first base, the Braves played a platoon of Julio Franco and Adam LaRoche, who were both over .100, and in left field, after Chipper Jones vacated the spot, most of the time was split between Charles Thomas and Eli Marrero, with DeWayne Wise also getting 21 starts out there. Marrero and Thomas were both in the positive, with Marrero's .270 MLVr coming in second only to Drew, while Wise was marginally (-.091) negative, but got just 175 at-bats to do any damage with. I guess my underestimation comes down to expecting the Braves to behave like most other teams: some good players, some bad players. Instead, they were like the residents of Lake Wobegone and that, along with the semi-implosion by the rest of the division, was enough to carry them back into the breach once more.

Posted by jason in Baseball at 16:39 | |

The A's recently hired Rene Lachemann to be the bench coach next year. He had recently been the bench coach for the Mariners, but was presumably not going to be welcome what with the firing of Bob Melvin and all. The A's had not renewed the contract of their bench coach, Chris Speier, so there was an opening. The non-renewal of Speier's contract is a little weird to me. He had only been in that position for one year, and the A's really don't seem to be big on firing people. Who's the last A's coach to be fired? Thad Bosley was let go in the middle of 2003, replaced as hitting coach by Dave Hudgens (who was already with the team in a front-office capacity), but I'm pretty sure the only reason Ken Macha isn't still the bench coach is because Art Howe got mega-bucks from the Mets, and we can say the same about Curt Young as pitching coach. Maybe it's just my perception, but it really seems that the A's understand the concept of the players winning and losing the games. Except in extreme cases (Earl Weaver on one end (who, ironically, was so good precisely because he recognized that the players won and lost the games), Larry Bowa on the other), all managers, base coaches, etc., are basically alike. Why waste your time with a lot of movement, hiring and firing guys, if you can get someone who's not incompetent and let them do their job comfortably until they're ready to move on?

Posted by jason in Baseball, Oakland A's at 16:11 | |

Today in the New York Times, Harvey Araton pulls no punches in blasting Terry Francona (beloved departed bench coach of the A's, and thus always in my heart) for leaving Pedro Martinez in to roast in the late innings of games, making the usual claim that Pedro needs to be babied because he's fragile these days. As you'd expect from a sportswriter, there was no data to back any of this up. I, not knowing what to believe, but figuring, because of the overblown language Araton brought to bear against Francona, that his case might be overstated, I went and looked up Martinez's splits for the year. Turns out that in the 98 batters Pedro faced with pitches 91-105, he allowed a .187/.248/.286 line. From pitches 106-120, he gave up .244/.279/.341 to 43 hitters. Both of those splits are better than his overall line for the year. If anything, Pedro should have been throwing more pitches by warming up in the bullpen longer: on pitches 1-15, he allowed a .333/.360/.657 line. Of course, that's facing the top-of-the-order hitters for the opposite team, but I don't know of anyone's 1-2 hitters with a .657 slugging percentage. It really looks to me like Francona used Martinez quite judiciously this year. Pedro is getting older, he doesn't throw as hard, and he has been hurt, so maybe he is more delicate and shouldn't be stretched as often. However, with his upcoming free agency, the Red Sox could afford to pitch him in a way that might be harmful to his arm, but where the effects wouldn't be felt until next season, so long as he was still effective when he was stretched out. That appears to be exactly what Francona accomplished, Araton's lambasting aside.

Posted by jason in Baseball at 15:56 | |

I had the Marlins second in the NL East, but they finished third, three games behind Philadelphia, which is about where I figured they'd be in terms of games back. What I didn't figure is that they'd be just two games above .500. The theme in the NL East is high hopes dashed, especially after the Marlins's run to the championship. What happened? The Marlins had hoped for a full season out of Josh Beckett, but, as any reasonable person might expect, they didn't get it. Beckett made 26 starts and earned 28.3 VORP. This ain't bad, of course, but it's also Woody Williams territory and you can forgive the Marlins for hoping for a little more out of their phenom. Dontrelle Willis pitched at about the same level, though he managed 32 starts and almost 200 innings. He wasn't stellar, but there seemed to be some thought that he was going to crater this season, that his rookie year was a huge fluke, but it appears that while it may have been a fluke, he's not a guy to shove to the bullpen just yet. Brad Penny pitched pretty well, with a 128 RA+ in 21 starts, but he was traded (and just in time, too, given how his arm held up after the trade to the Dodgers) in the package that brought Paul LoDuca and Guillermo Mota to the team. Mota, by the way, was strictly average with the Marlins after putting up another year of nasty numbers in the Ravine out west. That trade was just awful for both teams, in terms of the performance of the players traded after the deal went down: Mota was disappointing, LoDuca put up a .305 OBP, and Juan Encarnacion hit .237. On the other side, Penny got hurt and Choi hit under .200. Talk about lose-lose. Since AJ Burnett is a Marlin, he was hurt for much of the year, but he pitched in 20 games with a good 117 RA+. Having him healthy would have been nice, of course, but there's only so much you can ask. Miracles aren't part of that. I know what you've been waiting for: Carl Pavano. What happened? He blew up is what happened. He almost doubled his 90th percentile VORP prediction by PECOTA, giving his team 62.4 by throwing well over 200 innings with a 136 RA+. He finished behind just Randy Johnson and Ben Sheets in NL pitcher VORP, finally fulfilling the promise he'd flashed for so many years before. Considering how mediocre the team was even with Pavano, it's a bit scary to think of how bad my prediction would have looked had he pitched like the Pavano of old (i.e. gotten hurt). The non-regular part of the rotation was as pitiful as you might expect: it's the rare team that gets a quality contribution from the random guys that have to take the ball every once in a while due to injury or double-headers or whatever. What you can hold against the Marlins is that they had to give 33 starts to guys outside of their top five, guys with names like Nate Bump and Logan Kensing. Compare that to the playoff teams: The Angels had 14 starts outside their top five, but all went to Ramon Ortiz, who was actually the second-best pitcher on the starting staff by RA+; Atlanta gave away fifteen starts, nine of which went to Horacio Ramirez, who put up a 127 RA+; Boston had just five, and three of those were given to BH Kim to see if he could pitch or not; Houston had 28, none of them very good pitchers, and that's not counting the fact that Wade Miller and Andy Pettite essentially split the last spot; the Dodgers had 24, but fifteen of those were by one guy (Wilson Alvarez) and three more were made by Brad Penny; the Twins had 12; the Yankees had 36, though 15 were made by El Duque, who was essentially swapped in for Jose Contreras; finally, St. Louis, for all their pitching troubles, had just eight and they caught lightning in a bottle with three of them going to Al Reyes and Randy Flores, who lit it up with 606 and 235 RA+'s, respectively. Notice that the only comparable teams were the Yankees, who had a crazy offense to make up for it, and the Astros, who had two full-time pitchers who were about as good as Pavano was for the Marlins, plus a bullpen that went better than one-deep (referring to Armando Benitez for the Marlins, who did have an excellent season). The offense is sort of boring: everyone pretty much performed as you expected them to, except Juan Pierre probably had the season of his life, hitting .326, though he certainly hurt his value as much as he could by getting caught stealing 24 times. Other than that, everyone was just sort of solid. Jeff Conine didn't hit well, especially for a left fielder, but he wasn't atrocious, and that's what you have to expect out of Conine, anyway. In other words, since nobody had a major collapse and everything just kind of hummed along for this team, this prediction falls on me. Maybe I was seduced by the World Series of 2003. I think the best thing I can say is that I should be ashamed that I picked a team starting Jeff Conine in left field to finish even second in its division.

Posted by jason in Baseball at 15:46 | |

These games are simply going too late. I keep falling asleep and missing the end. The only ALCS game I've seen end was Saturday's debacle, and that's the one game I would rather not have watched, much less at a bar where I was paying $20 to watch it (well, not really, but drinks, you know). Meanwhile, what the hell's with the scheduling? Didn't the ALCS and NLCS used to be played on alternate days or at very different times so that they wouldn't interfere with each other? Trying to schedule the NLCS game for three hours after the ALCS game's start time is ridiculous. I'd bet that playoff games last longer than regular-season games in general, because managers are far less apt to leave a pitcher in to take a beating, so they make many more pitching changes. I wouldn't be surprised if commercial time was allowed to rise a little in the playoffs, too, but I can't substantiate that. Anyway, it's getting a little annoying having to pick one game to watch. While the Red Sox have made this series interesting, the Cards/Astros series has been a great one all along, especially with the Julian Tavarez excitement and Carlos Beltran hitting homers like there's no tomorrow. But I bet no one's watching.

Posted by jason in Baseball at 07:00 | |

I'm going to leave the AL West for last (prolonging the pain), but I suppose it's time to start looking back to see what went wrong with my predictions for this year. Beginning in the NL East, I had, as everybody, the Phillies phirst, phollowed by the Marlins, Braves, Mets, and Expos.

Philadelphia

The Phillies phinished second, ten whole games back of the Braves, and won just 86 games, so they weren't particularly close to the Wild Card, either, finishing six games back in that race. Philadelphia repeated phailures phinally cost Larry Bowa his job, but, as with any manager (except Grady Little), it's hard to tell who's to blame when your players don't get it done. But let's start with who can't be blamed. The list has to be topped with Jimmy Rollins, who had a breakout season, posting the best VORP by a shortstop in the National League, more than doubling the offensive contribution of the former cream of the crop, Edgar Renteria. It seems like we should be saying "finally" about Rollins, but let's remember that he doesn't even turn 26 until Thanksgiving-time this year. Also at the top of his league at his position was Bobby Abreu, who out-VORPed Lance Berkman by about six runs, though he was less valuable on a rate basis than both Berkman and JD Drew. Still, a .428 OBP and 40 steals from a guy who's slugging almost .550 is unimpeachably excellent. David Bell was also a rousing success, outperforming both Chipper Jones and PECOTA expectations (not to mention human ones), both in terms of playing time and hitting performance. Jim Thome was his usual self, finishing third in VORP among NL first basemen, behind just the incredible duo of Albert Pujols and Todd Helton. Nothing to be ashamed of in not out-hitting those guys. Placido Polanco continued to provide some nice pop at second base, out-hitting his PECOTA weighted mean pretty handily. Mike Lieberthal hit better than anyone had a right to expect, though he wasn't Johnny Estrada or anything. Pat Burrell, perhaps surprisingly to some people, also goes in the "did his job" category. Perhaps he's just not going to be Pat Burrell, and the Phillies have to live with that. He pretty much hit like PECOTA figured, rebounding from his atrocious 2003, though not nearly to the levels of 2002, which now looks more and more like a fluke season. It's too bad, but his inability to slug .550 can't be called the reason for a ten-game deficit. Clearly, the offense was not the issue, as expected. Unfortunately for the Phils, they thought they'd get at least adequate performances from their pitchers, and they didn't. Their top VORPer was Ryan Madson in the bullpen, whose 25.8 VORP rank between Steve Trachsel and Solomon Torres. If that doesn't tell you something ... It's just piling on if I start naming names (*ahem*, MillwoodMiltonMyers, *ahem*), so I'll just say that the pitching really let down a team that finished fourth in the NL (three behind the Rockies) in scoring. For a team that had playoff aspirations to only allow fewer runs in the NL than the atrocious Diamondbacks, Rockies, and Reds is truly embarassing. I'll grant you that the Phils were much closer to fifth (seven runs) than they were to third (121 runs), but still, none of the other playoff teams allowed even 700 runs, and the Phils were motoring on toward 800.

Next

Clearly, this is going to take longer than I expected, so I'll just probably go team-by-team for awhile. New post Thursday.

Posted by jason in Baseball at 19:52 | |

We'll start the analysis later. For now, I just need to mourn for awhile. The playoffs are going to be more painful with the A's not in them than they were in seeing them eliminated in the first round (sometimes after huge leads) every year. The collapse of this team wasn't quite epic, but it was certainly surprising and painful. I went through denial when they lost the first game of the series 10-0, because it was pretty much over after that. The anger was a flash at seeing the ESPN headline this morning, but it went away pretty quickly. I'm not really one to bargain, or perhaps the A's in the playoffs aren't worth bargaining for. Either way, I'm definitely in the depression stage at the moment. I can only hope that acceptance comes soon.

Posted by jason in Baseball, Oakland A's at 16:07 | |