Dear barroom denizens the world over,

I write to you today to ask simply that you take up a modest question for your consideration. It is not a question of mere fact or mere opinion; rather, like all great questions it requires a careful balance of each. I trust your besotted sagacity and ale-soaked acumen will prove more than sufficient to resolve my dispute, though it may take until the end of baseball to be sure.

My question: “Is Greg Maddux the best pitcher of all time?”

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“Marcus Thames did exactly what you should do as a pinch hitter: on the first good pitch you see, jump all over it.” — Rod Allen, FSN-Detroit color announcer, May 5, 2008

Cliché: “The best pinch-hitters are very aggressive fastball hitters.”
Verdict: False
Why: The idea that a pinch hitter should swing early stems from the false understanding of the pinch hitter as a man who comes up in a key situation with one job: to drive in a baserunner. This is a flawed conception because of the very status of the pinch hitter himself. If he is relegated to first-man-off-the-bench duties, he must necessarily be worse than any other options at his position. Furthermore, although we can safely assume he is situationally better than the batter he replaces (not a foregone conclusion, however), he is likely to be worse than the starting position player who is on deck. Therefore, why strive for an all-or-nothing plate approach when there is likely to be a better batter waiting in the wings in the event of a mere base on balls?

Jeff Pentland, hitting coach for the Seattle Mariners, expresses one flawed justification for this fallacy perfectly:

“When you come off the bench, the pitcher thinks you[’re] cold. That’s why they’ll see a lot of fastballs. Your best pinch-hitters are very aggressive fastball hitters. Generally speaking, the best pinch-hitters don’t let the first one go. They’re able to make good contact early. That’s a big key, so you don’t get into breaking ball counts.”

Locked up in this explanation are a few assumptions. First, the assumption that a pitcher is fresh and is throwing fastballs for strikes. Second, the assumption that batters who are “very aggressive fastball hitters” don’t get as cold or have as much trouble catching up to fastballs immediately off the bench. Third, the assumption is present that pitchers (and managers) don’t realize this, and therefore won’t adjust their strategies according to the approach of the hitter entering the game. Ultimately, the last part of this comment belies the absurdity of holding up one-dimensional fastball hitters as the epitome of pinch hitting. If any batter off the bench were talented enough to hit a big league breaking ball, who would choose Marcus Thames over him? Furthermore, if Edgar Renteria is on deck with two outs, who would send up a Thames to hack away at the first pitch he sees, rather than employing the best option to try to work a walk and give the superior hitter an opportunity?

In reality, the definition of the ideal pinch hitter as an aggressive, dead red hacker is an inversion of causes. Due to their limited ability, aggressive mistake-hitters are often relegated to pinch hitting duties, where they sometimes experience modest success. To say that their limited style is therefore more desirable than the ability to wait for a pitch to hit or draw a walk strikes me as an exercise in placating the sensitive egos of the Thames, Monroes and Dobbs‘ of the world, rather than a legitimate search for baseball truth.

With all due respect to Razor Shines, it has to be Shooter Hunt (let me warn you now I’m going to enjoy this). The Tulane righty has been climbing up draft boards all spring, and is now projected to go somewhere in the middle of the first round. While Tulane is in the Conference-USA (not a powerhouse conference like the SEC), some good players have come through their system, most recently Micah Owings and Andy Cannizaro. Having just ditched the temporary confines of the Shrine on Airline for their brand spankin’ new home, Greer Field at Turchin Stadium, the Green Wave look confident and classy. Hey, they even serve beer! (In a totally unrelated aside, if you’ve never been to New Orleans, you are cheating yourself.)

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I have been thinking about some of the traditional nuggets of baseball wisdom and trying to put them to the test. I am not savvy enough to do this in a statistically rigorous way, but I think we can look critically at some adages and see if they stand the test of time.

Cliché: “Good pitching beats good hitting.”
Verdict: True
Why: If you think about it, a truly good (starting) pitcher has the ability to get through the lineup multiple times without allowing many baserunners or runs. If a pitcher is incapable of retiring the best hitters (say, 1 or 2 through 5 in an order), he will inevitably run into problem innings. It is difficult to regularly produce quality starts while getting hit hard a few innings per game. Thus, a good pitcher is expected to be able to retire all but the most potent of hitters (e.g. Barry Bonds ca. 2004).
As for hitters, even the best are not expected to be able to turn on a nasty pitcher’s nastiest stuff. It is satisfactory (and often even preferable) for a hitter to leave his mark in the later innings, when the starter begins to fatigue or the (presumably less nasty) bullpen pitchers make their appearances. Nobody would point to a top flight batter and complain that his production is low in the third or fourth inning, when an ace is likely to have already settled into his groove.

With the headline news earlier today of Derrick Turnbow’s designation for assignment, the Brewers have officially commenced the disassembly of one of the more absurdly constructed bullpens of recent memory. Yes, folks, Doug Melvin spent this past offseason building a veritable junk heap of formerly famous one-inning guys. The Brewers compiled Frankenstein’s bullpen nearly entirely out of the discarded parts of one-time closers’ dead bodies. Melvin bet nearly $25 million of someone else’s money that pitching coach Mike Maddux, one of the great bullpen journeymen of the modern era, could sew the parts together into a lead-protecting and damage-minimizing short relief machine.

Needless to say, even the best laid plans go awry with alarming regularity. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know how many of you had a chance to see, or hear about, Max Scherzer’s 4.3 perfect relief innings two days ago against the Astros, but they were nothing short of sensational. He had seven strikeouts and there wasn’t a single Astros hitter he didn’t get the best of. For those of you who missed it, you can find highlights here.

I was so intrigued that I decided to run Scherzer through the pitch F/X mill to see what we could see. The Mizzou righty had a solid, if inconsistent, debut last season after signing late (one Diamondbacks scout I spoke with told me he went to bed the night before the deadline thinking the deal wouldn’t get done). This season, though, he broke out in a big way, posting this line at Triple-A Tucson: 23 innings, 12 hits, 3 ER, 38/3 K/BB ratio. Note that these stats were from just four starts. The Diamondbacks are confident he will still be a starter, and recently GM Josh Byrnes was quoted as saying, “We’re optimistic that he can be a quality major-league starter and probably prefer that that’s the focus at this point.”

For Scherzer to become a starter basically requires two things. First, he needs to show that he has an adequate repertoire of pitches, and second, he needs to show he can keep his command. As for the second point, I think he has quieted his critics a good bit by posting that 12.7 K/BB ratio (!) at Tucson. As for the first, well, I’m going to let the data speak for themselves. Scherzer’s two primary offerings are a fastball with sink and a hard slider. Here are his pitches from Tuesday night (click to enlarge).

The blue and green cluster in the upper-middle region is a straight fastball. He topped out at 98.3 MPH on the pitch F/X tracker, which is much more reliable than many of the inflated gun numbers you see on TV. Slightly below and to the left of that grouping are the sinkers. These were also all very fast, as none of them clocked in below 93 MPH. The fact that they are below the straight fastballs is how we can identify them as sinkers. (Those of you counting at home, we’re up to two devastating pitches.) Further down and to the left, we find the hard slider. The slider was working at 85-87 MPH, and while he didn’t use it much, he did get Miguel Tejada to whiff hard on one for strike three. Most curious to me, though, is the cluster of five pitches in the bottom right corner. I had heard he was working on a change-up, but this pitch is a solid 15 MPH slower than his straight fastball, and it breaks in the opposite direction of his slider. It looks like, instead of developing a change-up, he’s developed a splitter. He wasn’t able to locate for strikes as consistently as he could his other pitches, but he did get it across for called strikes twice in the game. If he can command that arsenal–straight FB, sinker, slider, and splitter–he will be a very good major league starter. If he cannot, he will be a very good major league closer. As a college product, he is fairly well polished and it looks as though he is ready to make an impact for the Diamondbacks immediately.

Max Scherzer photograph used under a Creative Commons license from flickr user tclifton.

Dear Bruce Bochy and Charlie Manuel,

We each have the distinct honor of playing a significant role in one of the most astonishing anatomical feats known to man. Somehow, through miracles of windups, scap loading, arm speed, and raw torque, Cole Hamels and Tim Lincecum are able to pitch baseballs with extraordinary skill. Both the Phillies and the Giants need their young aces a great deal. In the Phillies’ case, Hamels is the only pitcher in which the team can have consistent confidence. In the Giants’ case, well, Lincecum is the only player that matters. That is why, despite the fact that we are non-sentient ligaments in the pitching elbows of these two star pitchers, we have taken it upon ourselves to question the wisdom of your decisions.

You see, we are not just any elbow ligaments. We’re the critical ligaments in each player’s pitching elbow (for Hamels, the left, for Lincecum, the right) that create the torque and affords them such remarkable arm speed: the ulnar collateral ligament. Sure, you may have heard of us. But you usually only hear our names invoked when a pitcher has torn us. (More commonly, we are not even referred by name but by our initials: UCL. We hate that abbreviation. We think it is ugly.) The result of such a tear, unfortunately, requires the eponymous surgery first received by Tommy John in 1974. Though great gains have been made since Dr. Frank Jobe first pioneered the process of replacing ligaments like us that have torn (or snapped) with ones from the non-pitching elbow or knee, it is still an all too common occurrence, especially among younger players. Research has shown that excessive pitch counts, especially ones above 100 for a single start, can have tremendous impact on a pitcher’s health.

For the twofold reasons that, a) we don’t want to tear or snap, and b) as baseball fans we do not want to see these young pitchers get injured, we have to ask that you be very careful with us.

Allow us to use two in-game situations to demonstrate. Mr. Bochy, on April 24th against the Padres, you had Lincecum in the game. He had cruised through six innings, allowing no runs and just three hits while striking out nine batters. Needless to say, though, all those strikeouts had taken a toll on Lincecum’s arm, of which one of us is a central part. Through those six innings, he had pitched a total of 109 pitches. This excess by itself would not have been a big deal. We are reasonable; we understand pitchers need to finish innings. But then you ran Lincecum out to the mound in the 7th. After an 8 pitch walk to Kahlil Greene, Lincecum was up to 117 pitches. And yet, no hook. In fact, Lincecum was left in for two more batters, finally leaving after surrendering a single to Tony Clark. In 6.3 innings, Lincecum finished with a total of 122 pitches. Let me tell you, as ligaments with inside information, this was not pleasant.

Mr. Manuel (I hope someday you’ll let us call you Cholly, like hard-workin’ ligament-guys), we are equally concerned with your decisions. Just the day before Mr. Bochy made his error with Lincecum, you made a similar mistake with Hamels in a game versus the Brewers. Your star on the mound had pitched well through seven innings, allowing three runs (all in the first inning), striking out 11 and walking just two. He reportedly asked to stay in the game for the eighth inning to face the thunderous heart of the Milwaukee order: Braun, Fielder, Hart. You, being a player-friendly manager, understood and probably even admired Hamels’ determination. But you must not let Cole sway you, for he knows not how he hurts us. He had already pitched 110 pitches through those seven innings. Nevertheless, clinging to a narrow 4-3 lead, you stuck with your ace for the 8th. In the next 11 pitches, Hamels not only lost the lead (after two hard hit drives to right center, one by Braun good for a double and the next by Fielder an oh-brother shot to the bleachers), but he also put unnecessary strain on the same elbow that cost him a month at the end of last season due to injury. As a part of that elbow, we can safely say that we are trying our best not to snap. We just need a little help.

So that’s why we’re asking you, as ligaments first and as fans second, to go easy on the young arms. Because while it is true that there are some pitchers out there with rubber arms who always seem to defy the medical odds, there is no way to know if Lincecum or Hamels is one of those pitchers without first crossing the point of no return. And sirs, there is no one who is less eager to find out than us.

Signed,
Ulnar Collateral Ligament of Cole Hamels
Ulnar Collateral Ligament of Tim Lincecum

Ah, Philadelphia:

Good lookin’ out, Todd Zolecki.

Take a second, and look at your professional track record. Are you ever late to work? Do you ever act arrogantly, or in a way that rankles your co-workers (even if such a reaction isn’t particularly warranted)? Gotta be yes, right? Everyone does.

Unsurprisingly, “everyone” includes major league baseball players. So, yesterday, when Nationals manager Manny Acta held Lastings Milledge out of the starting lineup for showing up late to work, I was unfazed. Acta’s position (that he has three unbreakable rules, and that punctuality is one of them) is completely defensible and reasonable. It makes perfect sense to bench a player who shows up late. Even Milledge understood this, saying, “I was late. … It’s something I couldn’t control. I take full responsibility.” He took his benching like a man, ready to move on. But wait, maybe not.

CBS Sportsline, in their infinite wisdom, described the incident, and added a little commentary at the end: “Let’s hope this latest incident doesn’t send Milledge spiraling back down the wrong path.”

Now, it makes perfect sense to suggest that Milledge might be headed down the wrong path. After all, he is a recovering crack addict who has an agreement with his wife not to drive his car by himself and never carries more than $20 on him at any time, for fear he might try to get a quick score. Oh, nope. My bad. That’s this guy. Hmm.

Let’s recap the sins of Lastings Darnell Milledge, who just turned 23 earlier this month.

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