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.

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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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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 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.

Over at Slate, Baseball Prospectus alum Greg Spira takes a look at the breakdown of baseball players by birth month. He notes that, since most baseball leagues (from the little league level on up) use July 31st as a cutoff date, players born in August have a natural advantage. At each step of the game, they can be months older than their peers. The result is that there are approximately 50% more major leaguers born in August than in July.

I wonder if this effect would persist if you looked at just the most elite players. I suspect that among the very best hitters and pitchers, this factor reduces to random noise.

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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Yes. (Okay, not really.)

Dear Pythagoras,

I know this is a little weird for me to be writing a letter to you, considering you’ve been dead now for about 2500 years. But there are some told-you-so moments that transcend time and the River Styx. You see, you came up with the Pythagorean Theorem, which related the three sides of a right triangle. It is elegant and logical, and it has proved extremely useful to mathematicians and scientists for centuries. Kudos, good sir. My time at Haverford College taught me to respect the classics.

More recently, though, Bill James hoped to come up with a formula that would relate a baseball team’s expected winning percentage to its runs scored and runs allowed over the course of a season. The idea was to create a predictor of success that was not based as much on luck as simple win/loss totals. His creation, the Pythagorean expectation, was named because it shared more than a passing resemblance to your timeless formula.

Last season, the Arizona Diamondbacks won the NL West and advanced all the way to the National League Championship Series. As the General Manager of the Diamondbacks, I’m very proud of what the players accomplished on the field. However, despite our strong starting pitching and lock-down bullpen, we were eliminated by the upstart Colorado Rockies. Many observers noted that we had a pedestrian 79-83 Pythagorean expectation, despite the fact that in the real world we won 90 games.

Well, this past offseason was no time to sit around counting my money (though I did receive an unparalleled 8 year contract. Suck on that, DePodesta). No, instead, I went out and I acquired the best pitcher available not named Johan Santana: Danny Haren. Not only that, but our core of young players, including Chris Young, Justin Upton, Mark Reynolds and Micah Owings is showing immense growth very quickly. Now, our team is built to last, but also built to roll through the playoffs. I don’t think anybody wants to face Webb and Haren twice in a series, even if they do have Matt Holliday’s aw-shucks smile and Troy Tulowitzki’s magic wand (I’m coming for you, Mr. O’Dowd, sir).

So, Pythagoras, I hate to bring this up with you, because it’s not really your fault. But Bill James is with the Red Sox now and I’m mad at Theo Epstein ’cause he won’t return my DVD copies of The Shield (the jerk), so you’re all I’ve got. Well, my team is 9-3 now, first in the NL West. And guess what? We’ve scored 77 runs and allowed just 45–good for a (you guessed it!) 9-3 Pythagorean expectation! Now, I’m not saying we’re going to win 122 games like we’re on pace to do, but I just got so fed up with people besmirching your good name.

Proportionately,
Josh Byrnes
Arizona Diamondbacks GM