I just got out of the Nationals - Brewers Memorial Day special at Nationals Ballpark, where I watched yet another extra inning game (although this one didn’t end happily for the home team). Unfortunately, this game left me thinking about the symptoms of struggling teams that are approaching the one-third mark of the season with a sense of inevitable cellar-hood. No, happily this is not perennial bottom feeders like the Marlins (currently 9 games over .500), the Rays (10 games over), or the Astros (6 games over). Instead, below the surprise disappointments (Mets, Tigers), we see the usual faces of the Nationals at the bottom of their division. Yes, they have been attacked by the injury bug like some of their peers, and they are recovering from an era of slash and burn drafting that has left their fields fallow of inside talent. However, neither of those circumstances warrants a manager doing anything less than the utmost to win ballgames.

Today’s game featured Manny Acta keeping a reliever in to throw 11 straight balls and load the bases in the 11th inning of a 1-run game. That pitcher was Saul Rivera, and he had already pitched a scoreless 10th and given up the go-ahead run in the 11th to the eighth batter he faced. Naturally, Manny Acta kept him in to face 3 more batters, walking two and going to 3-0 on Rickie Weeks before getting a couple called strikes and escaping the frame.

In the bottom of the inning, Manny spoke with his bats. In a game that saw a Nats starting nine including Willie Harris, Aaron (Effin’) Boone and Rob Mackowiak batting 1st, 3rd and 6th (respectively), it would seem reasonable to expect some pop off the bench in extra innings. Instead, Acta marched out Boone and pinch hitter WIL NIEVES to end the Nationals’ hopes for holiday cheer. Yes, folks, instead of aiming high with the resting and restive Ryan Zimmerman or the potentially willful and walloping Wily Mo Peña, Manny called upon the catcher who began the season fourth on the depth chart. (For those of you new to the game, back-up back-up back-up catchers are not known for the punch they pack at the plate.)

Perhaps Manny was excited by the 30-year old’s success bashing his first career home run in April of this year, or maybe he had an eye toward Wil’s 51 career home runs launched in 1005 minor league games. Most likely, Manny was enamored of Nieves’ .327/.389/.429 line on 56 plate appearances this season. Just another example of a sense of futility permeating a team through managerial ennui.

Ever pine for the days of yore, when contract deals were made with a handshake? Lifelong baseball man Buzzie Bavasi (father of current Mariners GM Bill) passed away a few weeks ago, and he left behind a long and storied legacy. Perhaps his most famous moment was dealing with one of the first instances of concerted collective bargaining in baseball: the Koufax/Drysdale holdout of 1966.

Back then, you see, the reserve clause was still in effect, meaning players were under team control more or less in perpetuity. (It wouldn’t be until 1975, with the watershed Seitz decision, that free agency would become a possibility.) Hall of Fame pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale had other ideas, however. They decided, just after the 1965 season, that they could have some actual leverage if they made a pact: either both of them were satisfied by the terms of the contract, or neither of them would sign. This leverage wasn’t just imaginary.

(more…)

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?”

(more…)

“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.)

(more…)

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. (more…)

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.