Anything You Kendall, I Kendall Better

And you thought the A-Rod for Nomar trade was dragged out?

The Pirates and Padres have been having these on-again/off-again discussions about Jason Kendall since he was playing Tee-Ball, it seems. At least as far back as mid-summer, before the Brian Giles trade was completed (it was completed, wasn't it?), they were talking about making Jason Kendall a part of that trade. It didn't happen then, but it might now.

The theory goes like this:

Team A has overpaid, injury-prone, possibly underproductive* (*relative to his salary) player under contract for three more years making approximately, All the Money in the World, per season. But Team A wants to slash payroll by, let's say, All the Money in the World, per season. This is necessary because their brand spanking new, state-of-the-art, downtown stadium, Beautiful and Intimate though it is, only has about thirty seven seats in it, including those in which the players themselves must sit while not grounding into double plays, and therefore is not bringing in nearly enough revenue to justify paying All the Money in the World to one guy, even if he does have a knack for bouncing back from injuries that would leave lesser men broadcasting. Or playing first base.

So the logical thing to do is to find another team to take said player off their hands, which is easier said (or blogged) than done. First of all, you hafta find another team dumb brave enough to want to take on three years worth of All the Money in the World. This process can be aided if said team has its own shiny, new, beautifully intimate ballpark being constructed right now, in preparation for 2004. The alleged revenue stream from this new ballpark should help to offset the need for All the Money in the World, so long as it occurred to the architects to put more than thirty seven seats in the place. Let's hope it did.

Secondly, you need to convince said team, brave though they may be, that there's some reason they would want this guy. After all, you're trying to get rid of him, so there's gotta be something good enough about him that Team B would want him even though Team A doesn't. The two typical ways of going about this are

A) Player would be happier in new city and therefore play better.
2) Player is from new city and is therefore a bigger fan drawing card.

And of course, you'll probably have to eat some ridiculous contract that the other team wants to jettison just as badly, if not more.

I don't think that anyone is contending that Jason Kendall will play any better in San Diego than he did in Pittsburgh (though he would apparently like to be reunited with Brian Giles), so that's not it. The main thing is that the Padres do in fact have a new stadium opening this year and they, like everyone else, need someone back there to catch the balls their pitchers throw, at least the few that won't get smacked into left field or some nearby body of water.

The Padres have one of these already, in Ramon Hernandez, for whom they traded fewer than two months ago. Hernandez though, they may realize, is just coming off his age-27 season and easily the best offensive performance of his career, so his value is probably as high as it will ever be, especially since he's under contract for two more years at a reasonable rate. This gives him the value they need to package him in a deal with Jeff Cirillo, who used to not suck, but now he does, and sucky players making $7 million/year and playing a position for which you already have a young, reasonably productive and cheap solution are not, as they say in France, "good P.R." So Cirillo and his sub-Neifi .555 OPS have gotta go.

So the Padres get rid of one of the headaches for which they recently traded (Cirillo) and a decent-but-soon-to-be-overvalued catcher (Hernandez) and they get a somewhat better catcher, who's a little older but WAY overpaid, and hopefully some cash to help make up for that.

But how much better is the team? Sure, they got rid of Cirillo, who, like Greg Vaughn and Dr. Kevorkian, makes everyone around him just a little worse. Sure, they upgraded from Hernandez to Kendall, but what's that really worth?

Player, Team	RC	RC27	outs	WS	EQA	RARP

J. Lopez     	107.6	9.11	319	27	.337	64.4

J. Posada 	100	7.35	367	23.1	.318	58.4

J. Kendall  	99.5	6.46	416	21.6	.286	40.8

I. Rodriguez 	85.4	5.93	389	17.7	.293	41.6

M. Lieberthal  	83	6.13	366	17.5	.292	39.4

J. Varitek  	80.3	6.16	352	17	.293	37.5

A. Pierzynski 	78.6	5.96	356	16.3	.285	33.5

R. Hernandez 	71.2	5.15	373	13.4	.272	26.8

G. Myers   	56.3	6.13	248	11.9	.293	23.8

P. Lo Duca   	68.1	4.14	444	10.4	.257	18.1

These are the top ten catchers in MLB, 2003, ranked by offensive Win Shares (the short form).

The numbers also include their Runs Created (RC), Runs Created Per 27 Outs (RC27), Outs made, Win Shares (WS), Baseball Prospectus' EqA and Runs Above Replacement Position (RARP).

A Win Share, as you may recall, is worth roughly one-third of a win, so, for example, Javy Lopez's 27 WS in 2003 are conveniently worth about 9 wins, total. Ten runs in BB Prospectus' calculations are also worth approximately one win. The difference between Kendall and Hernandez is 8.2 Win Shares, fewer than three wins over the course of the season. However, that's not the whole story. Kendall also made almost 45 more outs, which is not insignificant. If you normalize for the same number of plate appearances that Kendall had (661, or 133 more than Ramon) the difference would be only 4.8 Win Shares, about a win and a half. If instead you use RARP, you get an actual difference of 14 runs, approximately a win and a half worth, and a normalized difference of only 7.2 runs, less than one win. So, it's fairly safe to say that with the same playing time, Kendall is worth something like one to two wins more than Hernandez, at these production rates.

However, it must be said that it's not likely that they will see the same playing time, because Kendall's increased number of plate appearances is due partly to his being a pretty decent baserunner for a catcher, not that he steals bases much anymore, but that he's fast enough that it rarely makes much sense to put in a pinch-runner for him late in a game. Hernandez, on the other hand, runs like Wade Boggs towing Cecil Fielder, and has a nasty reverse platoon split (hit .208 vs. lefties, .302 vs. righties in 2003) so he probably gets lifted for pinch runners/hitters all the time.

(Speaking of Wade Boggs, having a home-town boy doesn't really do much to draw fans. Tampa Bay tried this in 1998, and they managed to draw 2,506,293 more fans than they had in 1997, but considering that the team didn't actually play in '97, that's not saying much. They lost almost a million fans in '99, and have continued to watch attendance drop in every year since. It didn't work with Jose Canseco in '99 or Fred McGriff in 2000, or Lou Piniella in 2003, so somehow I don't think that Tino Martinez will help things next year, unless he and the rest of his teammates remember how to hit like Tino did in 1997. And (back to the point...) Kendall won't really help the Padres draw fans unless the team is good. That's the main thing that baseball fans will pay to see. That, and bloopers videos, but since the Tigers have pretty much cornered the market on bloopers, the Padres really hafta put a decent playing team on that shiny new field or nobody's going to give a slice of rat-tart where their catcher grew up, or how beautifully intimate the shiny, new stadium is, after the first year. So there.)

But the point is that Hernandez and Kendall are not so different in terms of production despite their differences in style and playing time, and I think that's clear. I don't see what's really in this for San Diego, other than getting rid of Jeff Cirillo.

Both players will likely suffer something of a drop-off in 2004. Kendall will because he's hitting 30 years old and much of his value is tied up in his .325 batting average, which can fluctuate easily. But he's always had great plate discipline, usually walking as much as or more often than he strikes out, so he shouldn't drop as far as Hernandez might. Even though he's younger, Hernandez's offense is based almost entirely on his decent power (21 homers)and mediocre batting average (.273). With only 33 walks in over 500 plate appearances, and already 27 years old, he's not likely to start taking more pitches at this age, and will be facing almost an entirely new set of pitchers and parks in the NL. He'll probably revert to something like the .250 with 15 homers he usually provides, which is still better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but won't make the Pittsburgh fans forget What's-His-Name.

Oh, yeah: All the Money In The World.

Rocket's Returning

Back in Septober, I suggested that the baseball game to which a friend and I were going on 11 September 2003 might be the last time that a certain pitcher (we’ll call him “Roger Clemens” because he could kick our ass, or just throw a fractured bat at it) was ever going to pitch at home in the regular season. My reasoning was that his next scheduled home start would fall on the second to last day of the season, and that Torre, having wrapped up the AL East title sometime back in July, would likely rest Clemens in preparation for the playoffs. As it turned out, Clemens was availed the opportunity to beat up on the lowly Orioles on September 27th, and did just that, for his 310th career win.

So while I had expected to see an historical game, it was not nearly as historical as I had hoped. There have been only nineteen wins #307 by any major league pitcher in history, and fewer than half of those pitchers are still alive. Only eight of these wins could have been seen by fans who are still alive and able to recount said 307th win in some sort of reasonably lucid manner. So I’m among maybe 100,000 to 150,000 people who attended such a game. So I got dat goin’ for me. Which is nice.

Ah, but the real suckers are all those people who went to the Baltimore game, thinking that they were guaranteed to see the last regular season game of “Roger Clemens” and spent a pile of money on Rocket souvenirs and film and flashbulbs and such. The joke’s on them now, because the Rocket’s not gone at all, he just changed his mind and decided to go to Houston instead. Maybe he figured that a half decent year (( wins) bumps him up into a solid 12th on the all time list, just behind Phil Niekro and his hero (Roger’s not Phil’s), Nolan Ryan. And of course, he only needs 38 strikeouts to surpass Steve Carlton for second place on the all-time list right behind Nolan Ryan, who, as you will recall, is not Phil Niekro’s hero.

Apparently Clemens was talked into un-retiring by his good friend and fellow defector, Andy Pettitte. Both of them live near Houston and can therefore stay at home whenever the team is at home, and thereby spend more time with their kids and wives, which, on a scal of one-to-ten, is an honorable desire. Let's just see how well he likes giving up fly balls that Bernie used to catch and watching them clear the wall at the JuiceBox, and having to stand in and hit against a teammate of a guy he just plunked.

For his part, Yankees GM Brian Cashman isn't apparently taking the news too hard, and has not bashed Clemens for changing his mind, at least not publicly. On the other hand, have you ever seen Brian Cashman? Clemens picks stuff bigger than Cashman outof his spikes between pitches, so I guess I wouldn't be badmouthing him either, if I were that puny.

The problem is that Clemens was supposed to retire. Give up. Walk away and not look back, you know? Because of this, the Yankees did not bother to offer him salary arbitration, preferring instead to just let him go and not take the chance that he would change his mind, accepting arbitration. Had he done so, the Yankees would have been prevented from cutting his salary more than 15% (I think) from what he made in 2003, which was technically only a little over $7 mil, but actually closer to $10 mil, with all the deferred money. They might have been on the hook for something like $9 million to pay for a 41-year old LAIM pitcher who won’t likely contribute 200 innings in 2004. But if they’d known that he would be willing to come back at all, don’t you think they would have offered him a contract before the deadline, for something like the relatively paltry $5 million the Astros gave him? Of course they would! Five million bucks for something like 180 innings of slightly above average pitching is (sadly) a bargain these days.

And even if they chose not to resign him, the Yankees could have at least gotten a draft pick out of the deal. With their success, it’s not often that they get a very high draft pick, and with all the free agents they tend to sign, it’s sometimes the third or fourth round before they get any at all. Pettitte and Clemens would likely have given them Houston’s top two picks in the 2004 draft, and the Yanks, unlike the Giants, actually like bringing additional, young talent into the organization.

But in the end, as I mentioned, the real joke is on us, the fans. For we all wasted a lot of film trying to take that last picture of that last pitch of that last out of that last inning of that last game at [City and Park names] during [day/night] on a [Sunday/Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday/Saturday] for the distinguished career of “Roger Clemens.”

I hope all the memorabilia dealers managed to sell those pictures already, because they just became pretty worthless.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Incidentally, Dan McLaughlin, the Baseball Crank, has got a post discussing the established Win Shares levels of the best 25 players in baseball. Way to break it down, Dan.

Hall of Confusion

Jayson,

A very good column on your HoF ballot. You did a good job of presenting your arguments, though, as you might have guessed, I have a couple of bones to pick with your choices. I will try to be respectful as I point out what I believe are some of the holes in your arguments, and stick to what the numbers tell me.

#1 - Jim Rice. I understand that he was very good, but being young enough (29) not to have my opinion tainted by seeing him play, I can go to Baseball-Reference.com, look objectively at his numbers and admit that they are very good, but only borderline for a Hall of Famer. But then I can also visit Retrosheet and see his home/road splits and realize that he was helped a LOT by Fenway Park throughout his career. He hit .320/.374/.546 at home but only .277/.330/.459 on the road. I think you can’t vote for him for the same reason you likely won’t vote for Andres Galarraga (a better fielder with similar career numbers) or Larry Walker (a better fielder with better numbers). Their parks helped them too much.

#2 – Jack Morris. Sure he won more games than anyone else in the ‘80s, but that’s a confluence of circumstances more than anything, since he happened to come into his own just as the ‘70s were ending. Seaver, Palmer, Carlton, Sutton, Ryan, Niekro, Fernando, Guidry, Dave Stieb, and a bunch of other pitchers were as good as or better than Morris for most of the first half of his career and Clemens, Hersheiser, Cone, Gooden, Viola, Saberhagen, Dave Stewart, Mike Scott and others were comparable or better than Morris for most of the latter half of his career. No other pitchers of his quality or better happened to come up around the same time and last as long, but being the best of a weak era doesn’t make him one of the best of all time.

Morris really wasn’t the “ace” of any of the World Series teams for which he pitched. He led the ’84 Tigers, ’91 Twins and ’92 Blue Jays in innings, and led those Tigers and Jays in wins, but his ERA was over 4.00 in ’92, and there were two other pitchers on the Tigers with nearly as many wins as his 19. Tapani and Erickson both pitched better than Morris in 1991, Dan Petry was slightly better in ’84 and Jimmy Key and Juan Guzman were both better in 1992, though in fewer innings and with less run-support. It doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t the ace, but you really can’t just throw “clear #1 starter” out there uncontested, at least not in terms of performance.

His set of “peak seasons” is not really the 14 years you present. Though he won 41 more games than anyone else during said span, he had seasons in which he went 16-15, 17-16, 15-13, 15-18, and 6-14! That’s five seasons (out of 14) you could hardly call dominant. In six of those 14 seasons, his ERA was between 2% better and 22% worse than the park-adjusted league average, and another season (when he was the supposed “ace” of the World Series-winning ’84 Tigers, it was only 9% better. Those are seven hardly "peak" seasons.

Morris was helped by his teams’ success tremendously. From 1979-1990, when he was the preeminent starter for the Tigers, the only team that won more games in those 12 seasons was the Yankees. And he followed that up by pitching his swan song years for three World Series winners and a would-be Wild Card team, the 1994 Indians. Put him on the Cubs for most of that career and you can summarize his candidacy for Cooperstown in two words: What candidacy?

Sure, he pitched a 10-inning shutout in the 1991 Series, but his career postseason record was only 7-4 with a 3.80 ERA overall, including an 0-3 with a 7.43 ERA in the 1992 postseason. If you give him credit for coming through in the clutch, you’ve got to give him demerits for blowing it at other times. You can’t have it both ways.

#3 – Bert “Be Home” Blyleven. Besides having one of the best Bermanisms ever, this guy was a heck of a good pitcher. Blyleven’s ERA was better than the league and park-adjusted average in 16 of the 18 seasons in which h pitched enough to qualify for the ERA title. The man started pitching in the majors at 19, and was 37 years old before his adjusted ERA for a full season dropped more than 5% below the league average, and it had done that only once before. His adjusted career ERA (118) is better than Hall of Famers Robin Roberts, Gaylord Perry, Fergie Jenkins, Steve Carlton, Don Sutton, Phil Niekro, Early Wynn, and others, I’m sure.

Only twelve guys faced more batters in their careers, and they’re all in the Hall. Only four have ever struck out more of them, and they will all be in the Hall. In the 20th century, only Tommy John, who had the benefit of good teams and pitchers’ parks, has more wins and is not or will not likely be in the Hall, and he’s only got one more.

I just don’t see, based on what they did, not what their teams did around them, how Morris gets in while Blyleven doesn’t.

But that’s my opinion. If you haven’t already hit “Delete” thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Travis

It’s the End of the World, As We Know It

REM was right.

This weekend’s biggest story in sports wasn’t the College Football (Half-) Championship Game, it wasn’t the Colts bucking the Broncos in one of their worst playoff losses ever, it wasn’t Brett Favre and the Packers continuing to beat their opponents with adrenaline gleaned from the sudden loss of Favre’s father two weeks ago.

It was Pete Rose.

Pete Rose hasn’t played in the majors in almost twenty years, hasn’t managed a major league team in almost 15 years, and yet once again he has succeeded in making himself the center of attention when there are much more deserving stories out there.

In a story roughly as shocking as the revelation that all of those Christmas gifts children around the world recently received were not delivered by a fat, old man who can stop time and drives a sled pulled by flying reindeer, Pete Rose admitted in a recent interview with ABC and a soon-to-be-released book (what a coincidence!) that he actually did bet on baseball, including betting on the Reds while he was Cincinnati’s manager.

There is, of course, a myriad of jokes to be made in light of this admission. I sent an email to the Tony Kornheiser show with a few of my own, but since they probably won’t read it on the air, I’ll show you here:

Tony,

I heard about Pete Rose. ABC broke the amazing story that Pete Rose actually did bet on baseball, but that's not the end of it. In an effort to compete with ABC, some of the other networks will have similarly revealing stories coming out later this week:

CBS will break the story that OJ Simpson in fact is admitting being guilty of murder, but only of one of them, because he "just couldn't help himself" and that he would like to be forgiven. And please buy his new book.

FOX will break the story that Rush Limbaugh is, is fact, a big, fat, idiot, but that he's losing weight to try to dispel that notion. And also, please buy his book.

UPN will break the story that Britney Spears actually has had breast implants, but only in one of them, and that she would like to be forgiven. And please buy her new CD, as she doesn't write books.

NBC will break the story that Michael Jackson actually has admitted to having had plastic surgery, but only once, for medical reasons, and that he would like to be forgiven. And please buy his/her new book.

HBO will break the story that Michael Corleone was, in fact, involved in running the Corleone crime family, but that he was "just a lackey", and that he only did it because he needed the money. No word on who's going to break the story to HBO that Michael Corleone doesn't really exist. But please buy his book anyway.

Travis

Besides the jokes, though, there is some significance to this story. Reportedly, Rose’s admission of guilt in these matters is a steppingstone to his reinstatement into the Game we all know and love. Astonishingly, though, his admission is not only that he bet on baseball, as he has persistently (if not believably) denied for the last 15 years, but also that he actually did bet on the Cincinnati Reds while he managed them.

Some will argue that the fact that he didn’t bet against the Reds is a reason to consider forgiving him. They’d argue that, of course, he was trying to win anyway, as their manager, and so it’s really no different, right?

Wrong.

The clause in the official baseball rules is very clear, and they make no distinction between betting for or against your team. The only distinction lies between betting on baseball in general and betting on games in which you have some direct responsibility.

Rule 21(d):

Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has no duty to perform, shall be declared ineligible for one year.

Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform, shall be declared permanently ineligible.

So Rose is now admitting that he actually did the latter, the one action that a sign in every clubhouse in the majors and minors warns you will get you banned from the game for life, and somehow this admission of guilt is going to help get him reinstated? I don’t understand this at all. It’s like telling accused murderers that if they’ll just admit that they killed the guy, they can go free.

Since when is this a wise or effective policy? Do you think that if Senator Kennedy finally admitted that he was something more than an innocent bystander in the incident at Chappaquidick, the public would all just forgive him? Do you think that if former President Reagan, in an Alzheimer’s-induced stupor, admitted on record that he knew about the Iran-Contra affair all along, people would just let it slide? Don’t bet on it.

It’s like the movie Quiz Show, in which Ralph Fiennes’ character owns up to the gameshow-fixing scandal in a Congressional inquiry, and everyone wants to forgive him, because he seems like such a nice guy. Congressman after Congressman chimes in to offer their opinion of what a sincere, heartfelt apology and admission he’s given, as though it somehow wasn’t his fault and they should just let him walk. It seems like maybe Pete Rose just watched the movie, got to this part, and suddenly realized that he could admit his wrongs and the public would receive him with open arms, and instantly ran off to start writing his book. The trouble is that Rose must have turned off the movie before one congressman finally gets up and says:

I'm happy that you've made the statement. But I cannot agree with most of my colleagues. See, I don't think an adult of your intelligence should be commended for simply, at long last, telling the truth.

And there are plenty of people who feel like this about Pete, but Rose isn’t even as contrite as Charles Van Doren was, as evidenced by his own book excerpt:

"I'm sure that I'm supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I've accepted that I've done something wrong. But you see, I'm just not built that way. […] So let's leave it like this: I'm sorry it happened, and I'm sorry for all the people, fans and family that it hurt. Let's move on."

Let’s move on? You’re not sorry for what you’ve done, only that you got caught, and that it screwed things up for you, but let’s move on? You don’t admit to actually making the choices that have placed you in this position, preferring instead to present the situation as an “it” that just somehow “happened” to you, but let’s move on? I don’t think so.

There are a few reasons why it is important not to allow the rules to bend for anyone, even an icon like Pete Rose. First of all, the whole reason that the gambling clause exists in the playing rules is that a gambler whose debt to a bookie has gotten out of hand has a rather easy means of making up some of that debt: If he’s a manager, he can do something to fix a game, or he can provide inside information to his bookie, which helps the bookie to fix the odds in his favor. Perhaps even more importantly, he can do things that increase the physical risks to his players, and to the welfare of the organization, in an effort to win a game (and the money consummate with his bet on that game) he wouldn’t normally need to win, like leaving in a young, fragile-armed starter for too many pitches, or sending a runner barrel-assing into the catcher on the off-chance that he could score the winning run, but perhaps injuring one or the other of those players for life.

It can be argued that in today’s game of multimillionaires, no one would ever have the need to do this, as they should always have plenty of money to pay off bookies, if they become indebted. But gambling, as I understand it, is an addiction that feeds on itself, in which the piling up of losses only serves to whet the gambler’s appetite for more, until he’s beyond the scope of what he can handle on his own salary. If Pete Rose was making $500K to $1 million in salary and was placing hundreds of bets for thousands of dollars each, there’s no reason why a similar figure making ten or twenty million dollars in today’s game couldn’t get in similar trouble making bets for tens of thousands of dollars at a similar pace. So it's still a relevant issue, and until greed and selfishness are things of the past, it always will be.

This is not the first time I’ve written on this subject, and you can see from my columns from last year that my opinion on Rose hasn’t changed since last summer/fall. Lots of others have written about it as well:

Jayson Stark doesn't seem to think he's done enough to get back into baseball. For once, I agree with Stark's analysis.

David Pinto appropriately says that baesball Prospectus is not owed an apology for the denials of the story they ran last summer.

John Perricone, amazingly, still finds a way to blame Fay Vincent and John Dowd.

Mike Carminati finds the news earth-shattering, but figures that it's only a matter of time before baseball forgives and forgets.

Elephants in Oakland, who is finally back to writing consistently, think that Pete Rose vs. MLB seems to them rather like a Monty Python sketch.

And of course there's no shortage of other opinions out there. But now you know mine.

Book Review: The Catcher Was a Spy

The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg
By Nicholas Dawidoff

Nicholas Dawidoff might better have entitled this book “The Sad Life and Death of Moe Berg.” For a man so known and so beloved in the public eye, a man with such talent and potential inside him, a man like Moe Berg, to have met his pathetic and prolonged demise in such manner does not seem appropriate. And yet, whether we like them or not, these are the facts. At least in so much as Dawidoff was able to discover them.

Dawidoff must have taken years to compile all of the information necessary to write this book. Given the seemingly pedantic nature of some of the minutiae he includes in the text, the reader must wonder at some point whether or not Dawidoff omitted anything he discovered in his interviews and research. The book’s epilogue is comprised of a list of everyone he interviewed or relied upon for information for the book, and a list of notes on his sources of quotations, which takes up over about 80 pages! At least nobody can accuse him of not being thorough.

The chosen subject, Morris Berg, would seem at first glance to be an exceedingly interesting catcher. His 15-year career as a major league catcher places him among the elite in almost any conversation, despite that he only managed to hit .243 in said career, but that’s just the beginning. Moe was Ivy League educated, graduating magna cum laude BA in modern languages from Princeton, where he was a star (not a third-string) shortstop. He also graduated from Columbia Law School and passed the bar exam, making him perhaps the first player who was truly qualified to represent himself in free agency, if such a thing had existed at the time.

As if this were not enough, Moe Berg retired from an exclusive and exciting existence as a professional athlete to embark upon perhaps an even more elite and exciting career: He became a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, precursor to the CIA) during the Second World War, and traversed Europe in search of secrets regarding the German Atomic Bomb Program.

And sprinkled throughout this interesting juxtaposition of occupations, Berg somehow found the time to learn to speak or write (by varying accounts) Latin, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian, Sanskrit and/or Swahili. Hence the old joke that, “Moe Berg could speak a dozen languages but he couldn’t hit in any of them.”

Indeed, Berg could not hit, or perhaps would not hit much in the majors. He was not a bad player, but he was fortunate to have laid claim to his position in a time when good-hitting catchers were the exception and not the rule, as today. Interestingly, the author reports that Berg’s status as a third-string catcher was by his own design, that Berg sought the freedom and privileges of life afforded to ballplayers, but did not desire to make himself a standout amongst them, at least not for his play. Berg seemed to prefer sitting in the bullpen, chatting up the pitchers and other players, impressing them with his knowledge of law, history, art, language or other trivia, rather than actually playing consistently. Dawidoff posits the theory that Berg chose to play only when he felt spry, in an effort not to shame himself between the white lines. Ironically, it could be argued that a man of such obvious talent in college might have been a better player overall if ha had allowed himself a bit more practice. Or, as Berg feared, he might well have been washed-up before he was ready to leave, and forced to do something rash, like work for a living.

Berg’s career as a spy is able to be presented in detail by Dawidoff for two reasons: First of all, it turns out that the Germans had no more progress on the Atomic Bomb Project during WWII than they did on their Time Machine Project or on their Perpetual Motion Machine Project. If any project existed at all, it was at worst a ruse, a failed scheme-turned-distraction-to-the-Allies at best. Secondly, Berg was not a very good spy. Virtually everyone who knew him, even in his own times, knew he was a spy, and he was always doing silly things like hushing people for mentioning certain issues or hiding behind beech saplings with no leaves when someone he didn’t want to see walked by. This is not a good spy. If either of these things had not been true (i.e. if Berg had been a good spy or if the Nazis really had developed an A-Bomb) we would not be allowed to know what berg did during the war. That we can know these things is simultaneously enlightening and distressing.

But the greatest distress to be derived from these pages lies in the story of Bergs pitiful life after the War. This man of such varied talents and skills, with such a background as his, could have chosen virtually any occupation he wanted after returning from the war. Let’s face it: There aren’t many people out there who could list two Ivy League degrees, a barrister’s license, a Medal of Freedom and a baseball career spanning almost two decades, on their resumes. But Berg would have none of it. Instead he squandered his waning years, traveling constantly, dropping in on old friends unannounced, staying until he had worn out his welcome (sometimes longer), and moving on. Always moving on. He never found an occupation that suited him as well as either baseball or espionage had, and so he apparently gave up trying, and live out what would be his remaining 25 years or so in a vagabond's life, charming hospitality out of anyone he could.

The book is a comprehensive, well-written piece, but even the greatest of writers could not have made this a thoroughly interesting book without embellishing the facts a little. To Dawidoff’s credit, he provides only the facts, and does little to suppose that he knows what any of the characters was thinking at a given moment in Berg’s history. But this lack of interpretation leaves something of a void for the reader. Where you had hoped to find answers, it turns out that there may only be more, unanswerable, questions.

And even if you have the penchant for minute details that I do (to an irritating degree sometimes, my wife will tell you) this book was hard to get through at times. It took me nearly a year to finish it, and even though it was a year busy with other responsibilities, any avid reader will tell you that they’ll make the time to finish a great book. This one was merely good.

Not Standing on Harden Ground

Your hero and mine, Rob Neyer, makes some interesting points with regards to the relative qualities of two candidates vying for the title of “Best Fifth Starter in the Majors.” However, like most of us, Neyer appears be guilty of seeing what he wants to see in the numbers and ignoring what doesn’t agree with the argument he’s trying to construct. Maybe he's been spending too much time hanging out with Jayson Stark.

In an article he wrote last week, he indicated that with the addition of Mark Redman to their staff, the Oakland A’s probably have the best starting five in the majors, and Neyer’s probably right about that. He also indicated that Rich Harden is therefore the Best Fifth Starter in the Majors, which seems to be a more debatable issue. In particular, a few of Neyer’s readers posited Brett Myers as a better option for said title.

Rob’s response:

His (Harden’s) ERA in the majors last season was essentially the same as Myers' and his peripheral numbers are better. Looking at all of Harden's professional innings in 2003 – roughly half of them in Triple-A -- he struck out nine hitters per nine innings, and his control was decent. Myers, meanwhile, struck out seven batters per nine innings. Granted, Myers spent all season in the majors (Harden didn't), but Myers, a National Leaguer, also faced a lot of pitchers (Harden didn't). [italics added]

Let’s look at the pieces of the argument one-at-a-time, shall we, just like the great philosopher, Nuke Laloosh, tells us we should.

1) Similar ERA with better peripherals = better pitcher? Generally this is true, but the quality of the hitters they faced can influence those peripherals significantly. At the major league level, Harden and Myers faces roughly the same quality of batters overall (.744 OPS vs. .735, respectively), but they didn’t only face major leaguers. But I’ll get back to that… Rob's statement also begs the question of which peripherals, exactly, were better? Look at them (Harden's numbers were projected over the same number of at-bats):

          AB    R   H   2B  RBI  BB  SO   SB  CS   AVG   OBP   SLG   OPS

Myers    754   99  205  43   88  76  143  16  5   .272  .342  .424  .766

Harden   731  100  189  32   87 105  176  24  5   .259  .349  .363  .712

Was Harden better? Sure, but marginally.

That ~50-point difference is nothing at which to sneeze, but most of the disparity rests in the difference in their hits allowed, which is hard to predict from year to year, and a few more extra-bases given up by Myers. Those numbers could easily flip-flop next year, especially since both pitchers' home ballparks behaved out-of-character last season. (Veterans Stadium, usually a pretty neutral park, was a better pitcher's park than Dodger Stadium in 2003, and Oakland/Network Associates/Grace L. Ferguson Airline & Stormdoor Co. Coliseum, usually a pretty good pitcher's park, was a slight hitters' park in 2003. Nobody knows what the Phillies' new Stadium will do to offense in 2004, and, similarly, no one knows what the Athletics' stadium will be named next year.)

2) Harden had decent control. I’m not sure what Rob uses as the benchmark for “decent” control, but according to my (admittedly limited) analysis, Harden walked 40 batters in less than 75 innings at the major league level in 2003. That walk rate (4.82 per 9 IP) would rank him in the worst ten in the majors if he had pitched enough to qualify for the ERA title. Of course, you can still succeed as a pitcher walking a batter every other inning if you get enough strikeouts (just ask Kerry Wood) or if your teammates score six and a half runs every time you go out there to pitch (just ask Russ Ortiz). But neither of those means you qualify for “decent” control. And of course, Myers’ control was much better (about 3.5 walks per nine innings.)
3) Harden spent about half of his season in AAA, but Myers spent the whole season in the NL, where you have to face pitchers, so it evens out? Rob may not have said this explicitly, but he does seem to imply that we can somehow just glaze over those differences as we analyze them. Personally, I don’t see how you can equate facing roughly 75 pitchers a season (out of almost 850 batters faced) with facing 400 hitters who aren’t even good enough to make it to the majors (out of about 700 to 750 batters). I’m not totally sure how to compensate for this difference, but I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t just call it a wash.

And besides, if you’re looking for the Best #5 Starter in the Majors, he’s probably in the Yankees’ rotation anyway. The Yanks’ 1-3 starters are Kevin Brown, Mike Mussina and Javier Vasquez, with their #4 and #5 slots taken by some combination of …

…David Wells - owner of 200 career wins, career *ERA+ of 110 (i.e. 10% better than average)

…Jon Lieber (LAIM, perhaps, but still capable of posting 200 innings of 10% better than average work when healthy)

…Jose Contreras (purportedly one of the best Cuban pitchers ever, even though he’s probably 32 going on 40)

Seems to me that not only was Rob making a shaky argument, he was making the wrong shaky argument.

No Longer the Zer0rioles?

When I was in college, not so long ago, the Orioles didn’t suck.

At least not all the time. I was at Lehigh University from the autumn of 1993 to spring of 1997, and as you probably know if you’re a sufficiently intense baseball fan to be reading this website, the O’s made the playoffs a few times in that span. They were decent overall, finishing 2nd or 3rd every year from 1992 to 1996. They won a Wild Card in 1996, losing to the Yankees (and Jeffrey Maier) in the ALCS, and then they became one of the very few teams ever to lead its division wire-to-wire in 1997, though they lost the ALCS then as well, to the Indians this time.

And they haven’t had a winning season since. That 1997 season preceded an immediate and precipitous drop-off, due largely to the fact that so many of the regulars on that team were on the wrong side of 30 (Jimmy Key, Randy Myers, Scott Kameneicki, Cal Ripken, Harold Baines, Chris Hoiles, B.J. Surhoff, Eric Davis, etc.)

I recall, in the seasons and off-seasons prior to the O’s successful years, arguing about the relative merits of those Orioles and my Yankees with fans of the O’s on Lehigh’s Internet discussion boards, which was fun. For a certain fan, (we’ll call him “Mark Passwaters”) it seemed that no matter what the Orioles did in the off-season, they were going to win, and no matter what the Yankees did, they were going to lose, at least to the Orioles.

I recall one time in particular, in which Mark pointed out that Arthur Rhodes was AL Pitcher of the Month for August, 1994, as an indication that Rhodes was really going to make something of himself (as a starter, at the time). Indeed, Rhodes was undefeated in August that year, pitching two shutouts…in only two games, since the season ended on August 12th that year. This analysis, though accurate, ignored the fact that Rhodes had an ERA of 7.17 in his first eight games pitched that season.

I suppose I was guilty of the same thing though, as I recall being pretty excited about getting Jack “The Finger” McDowell in a trade just before my birthday in 1994. I used the fact that he had gone 2-7 in the first two months of the season with Chicago and 8-2 in the next two and a half months to explain why he would be great for the Yanks. (Alas, he was only good in 1995, but he was the best we had until David Cone came along in a late-season trade.

Anyway, the point of this tiresome, rambling introduction, is that Mark Passwaters (and other semi-delusional Orioles fans) have something about which they can be excited again. The Orioles are picking up big-name free agents like they’re barrels of hard pretzels and boxes of Fun-Dip at BJ’s Wholesale Club. Inappropriately-Voted 2002 AL MVP Miguel Tejada has signed with Baltimore for six years and $72 million, which is a lot of money, but a lot less than the $189 mil for ten years that Derek Jeter’s getting for comparable (if not lesser) performance.

Rumors Sunday and Monday had the Orioles signing Vladimir Guerrero and either Ivan Rodriguez or Javy Lopez to catch (and presumably hit a little). I looked at the BP Prospectus' offensive WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player) numbers for these three players and those they'd replace. I-Rod, who seems a much more probable signee than Javy at this point, would most likely replace most of Brooks Fordyce and Geronimo Gil's at-bats, though I suppose Gil would still be the back-up back-stop. Tejada replaces the dreadful Deivi Cruz. Guerrero does NOT replace Jay Gibbons, his 23 homers and 100 RBI, as ESPN has said. Rather he replaces either Jeff Conine or David Segui and BJ Surhoff. Gibbons is young, cheap, and still a good hitter, so they'll place him at first base or DH, keeping that bat in the lineup, and so Vlad effectively supplants some combination of the other three aging monsters.

Anyway, here's how those WARP numbers shake out. I took the averages of the players for 2001-2003 seasons, combining some where a platoon existed for whatever reason. Here's what I got:

            WARP           WARP		WARP	WARP

				Vlad	 7.8	 7.8

Rodriguez    7	Miggy	 6.7	Conine	 4.1	

Brooks/Gil   2	Cruz	 1.5	Segui/BJ		 2.9

difference  +5	diff	+5	diff	+3.7	+4.9

Holy cow.

This makes it look like the Orioles just bought themselves fifteen additional wins (about five more at each position). That's HUGE. Fifteen more wins still only gives them 86, a tie for third in last year's AL East, but that's an enormous improvement in one year.

Of course, they've still got to have somebody pitch those games, and having traded their best pitcher (albeit a LAIM one) in mid-season last year, there's not much of anybody to pick up the slack. Jason Johnson? Another LAIM guy. Rodrigo Lopez? Nah. Eric Dubose? I don't think so. They're gonna hafta go out and spend some more on the free agent market, and there just isn't enough pitching talent out there to buy to get them ten more wins (than the assumed 85 mentioned above), which is what it will take to even be a contender in the AL East in 2004. They'd probably have to sign both Greg Maddux and Kevin Millwood, plus another LAIM with some upside just to have any kind of shot at 2004. I just don't see it.

But hey, Rome wasn't built in a day, and I'm sure they suffered through some 84-78 disappointing seasons before they built up that big empire.

**By the way, Mark Passwaters, if you should happen across this page, drop me a line. If you're nice to me, I may even give you Dave's email address so you can tell him what an idiot he is.

Flashes of Adequacy

Douglas Coupland has “Generation X.” to characterize anyone born between 1968 and 1988, especially if they’re lazy or indifferent.

Pat Riley’s got “Threepeat”, so that now even when the Bulls or Lakers win back3back championships, he makes money.

Somebody came up with LOOGY (Lefty One-Out GuY) to characterize the Dan Plesacs, Buddy Grooms and Jesse Oroscos of the world. Write me if you know whom, so I can give them credit.

And now it’s my chance to coin a term.

A-hem.

The St. Louis Cardinals yesterday announced the signing of LAIM Jeff Suppan for two years and $6 million.

LAIM stands for “League-Average Innings Muncher” and is generally applicable to the likes of Jeff Suppan, Dave Burba, Steve Trachsel, Sidney Ponson, and lots of other pitchers.

Some pitchers, like Suppan, are basically LAIM their entire career, racking up about 200 or more innings without their league adjusted ERA deviating from average by more than 10 or 15% in any given season, and typically ending up within about 5% over the courses of their careers.

Some pitchers, like Aaron Sele, Rick Helling and Charles Nagy, have the benefit of spending the majority of their LAIM career pitching for a good team, and so they win many more games than you might expect for such a LAIM guy. Hence, their LAIMness is disguised somewhat, to the casual observer.

Some pitchers, like Orel Hersheiser, were once great, but due to injuries and/or ineffectiveness, become LAIM and finish out their careers that way. David Wells and Roger Clemens come to mind. (Hey, this isn’t a knock on either of them: If you’re good enough that the “tapering off” stage of your career looks like about 200 innings with an approximately average ERA, you must be pretty talented, right?)

Some pitchers are so bad/inconsistent/often-injured when they start their careers that they aspire to be LAIM and consider it an accomplishment when they plateau for a while, making 32-35 starts and racking up a 4.30-4.70 ERA. (cf. Chris Haney, 1996 and Brian Anderson, 1998)

LAIM pitchers are most certainly not useless ones. You can't jst take them out into the back pasture and shoot them, even with a water pistol. You have to get those ~200 innings pitched anyway, and it’s better to let one Jeff Suppan do it than, say, Brian Meadows, Rob Bell and Joe Beimel, right? I mean, at least you know what you’re getting, it’s better than awful, and you get it just about every time out there: Mediocrity at its finest. You can pencil those guys in to be Decent-if-Unspectacular 30 to 35 times a year, and that’s what you get.

On a good team, only the fourth/fifth starters will be LAIM, while the first two or three rotation slots will be filled with somewhat more studly fare. One measure of a team’s quality, and perhaps more usefully, its understanding of what is needed to win, is how the front office bills the signings of/trades for LAIM pitchers. If they make a lot of fanfare and/or pay more than about $5 million/year to a LAIM pitcher, they clearly don’t get it. If, on the other hand, they use phrases like “shoring up” or “filling out” the rotation, or they talk about “consistency” more than “greatness”, maybe they understand that this LAIM guy is useful, but replaceable, and not worth overspending for.

And, if you’re lucky and he has a decent year or wins more games than you’d expect but your team is out of the race, you can trade him to some unsuspecting contender for prospects. Their GM will think they’re getting a stud for the home stretch when really the guy was just LAIM all along. And you make out like a bandit.

So there you have it: hopefully the newest term to catch on inthe baseball world. Be sure to give proper credit. You heard (or read) it here first. LAIM. League Average Innings-Muncher.

Now go tell your friends.

****************************************************

By the way, if you like historical comparisons, go check out Dan McLaughlin's Baseball Crank, with a look at Bob Gibson vs. Pete Alexander. Should be pretty interesting.

Also, Alex Belth has an interview with Tom Verducci, whom, I hear, has written a little himself. Some sports magazine, I think. Should also be good.

Fool's Gold

Andy Pettitte is on the brink of changing the course of history, and he doesn’t even know it.

Rumors out of Houston yesterday, and subsequently all over the country this morning, indicated that the erstwhile Yankees left-hander was on the cusp of signing a contract with the Houston Astros. These rumors are not new, only recently solidified, and unless King George pulls another multi-year, multi-million dollar trick out of his hat (as he did when it appeared that Bernie Williams would soon become – horror of horrors – the Boston Red Sox centerfielder) Pettitte has thrown his last pitch as a Yankee.

This is where history comes in. You see, Pettitte’s not really that good. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of other teams would love to have a pitcher who’s “not that good” like Pettitte, but the fact of the matter is that the guy is a little overrated because

A. He’s left-handed, and

2. He’s a Yankee.

Or at least he was. Yankee Stadium is not as biased to left-handed pitchers as it used-to-was, back when the left-centerfield fence was 461 feet from home plate and Joe D. or The Mick got to everything hit in their general direction, but it’s still comparatively kind to lefty pitchers, not to mention pitchers in general. As Pettitte is not predominantly a fly-ball pitcher, he may not benefit from this advantage as much as someone like Roger Clemens or David Wells would, but it still helps.

The other, and in my mind, more significant factor, is that the Yankees have been all but spectacular during Pettitte’s tenure in Pinstripes. Since 1995, when Pettitte began pitching essentially full-time for the Yankees, they’ve won 79, 92, 96, 114, 98, 87, 95, 103 and 101 games in his seasons. Pettitte’s own 149-78 record gives him a stellar .656 winning percentage (21st all-time), which is even better than the Yankees’ .602 winning percentage in that time. There is not a long list of teams that could reasonably be expected to win 60% of their games over the next decade (only Atlanta and the Yankees have done so over the last one), and Houston certainly isn’t on it. This fact brings Pettitte’s legacy into jeopardy.

Now as I mentioned, Pettitte is quite good, with a very high career winning percentage, owed largely to the fact that the team he’s played for has scored runs for him pretty consistently throughout his career, and won a lot of games in its own right. But his career park-adjusted ERA is only 17% better than average, right between the likes of Al Leiter/Chuck Finley (15%) and Jose Rijo/David Cone (20%).

None of these names are particularly high on the list of expected Cooperstown enshrine-ees, and Pettitte probably wouldn’t be either, if ERA were the only number anybody in the BBWAA examined while they’re pondering their Hall of fame ballots. But the baseball writers like wins. They always have, and they’re probably not going to just abandon that tendency within the next decade and a half. Which means that by the time Pettitte comes up for consideration, the best thing he could have going for him is his wins and his winning percentage. Say what you want about the irrelevance of such statistics in measuring the true worth of a pitcher, and I’ll probably agree with most of it, but in the end, you and I don’t get to decide who is Hall-worthy, the baseball writers do. And they like their wins. Three hundred of them is a sure ticket to Cooperstown, and Pettitte’s chance at such an accomplishment essentially dies with the demise of his career as a Yankee.

Lee Sinins pointed out in his Around The Majors report this morning that Pettitte has the fifth highest difference between his expected (.573) and actual winning percentages, behind Vic Raschi, Johnny Allen, Allie Reynolds and Jack Coombs. You might notice something about those names: three of them spent significant portions of their careers as Yankees too, and won a lot more often in Pinstripes than out. The fourth, Jack Coombs, spent a lot of his career pitching for the very good Philadelphia Athletics and Brooklyn Dodgers of the early part of the last century. Winning teams breed winning pitchers, and ain’t nobody wins like the Yankees wins.

Making a lot of BIG assumptions, finishing his career in Pinstripes might have afforded Andy another 130 to 150 wins, if he remains healthy and reasonably talented for the next ten to twelve years (a big if for anyone). He could average something like 16-11 with a 4.30 ERA for nine or ten years and end up with almost 300 wins at the age of 40. That gives him a good shot at serious consideration for the Hall, though he may need to wait quite a few years to get enough of the vote. The BBWAA is sometimes dense, but not blind to the fact that those win totals have a lot to do with the players around him.

In Houston (no laughingstock of a baseball organization, but one that can hardly hope to be as consistently competitive in today's economic climate as the Yanks will) those numbers might be something more like 13-12 or even 12-15 on average per year, which makes a difference of about 40 wins over the course of his career. Perhaps his career won't be as long either, if he's not winning as much, further reducing the possible win totals at the end of it. There aren't many pitchers with career numbers like 240-200 in the Hall, especially if they don't have some other spectacular numbers, lemme tellya.

Just wait, it gets worse: Houston's ballpark (whatever they're calling it this week) is not kind to pitchers in general, as Baseball Prospectus' 2003 edition labels it a "Severe Hitters' Park", increasing offense by over 5%. That number may drop a little, as 2003 marked the second year in a row that the JuiceBowl did not significantly increase offense for Houston's opponents, but it's still generally regarded as a bad place to be on the mound. So now maybe Pettitte's typical ~4.00 ERA becomes 4.30 or 4.50, and maybe over 5.00 in a bad year. Take those higher ERAs, toss in a few losing seasons (for the team and for Pettitte), a healthy dose of late-inning pinch hitters to lower his innings totals, and a dollop of missing the playoffs (in which Andy's career record is 13-8, and where a good record could have been the tie-breaker for Pettitte's Cooperstown candidacy), and you've got yourself a formula that will appease any critics of Pettitte's Cooperstown credentials: He hasn't any. And Andy's OK with that.

Or at least he won't now. The official word came this morning that Pettitte's definitely signed. Three years, $31 mil, about $8 mil less than the Yankees offered him, but we all knew that Andy never cared much about the money. A reasonable man realizes that there's not a whole lot of difference in the lifestyle you can lead making $13 million a year compared to $10 mil, and that if your relationship with Jesus is priority #1, you can have that anywhere. If your family is priority #1a, then they're limited by existing in our current time-space continuum, and can therefore only be in one place at a time. If that place happens to be close to a different employer who's willing to pay you (slightly fewer) gobs of money to do what you love, then you'd be a fool not to take them up on that offer.

If Pettitte knows God like he says he does, then he realizes that it's about God's glory, not his own, and that a piece of bronze with his mashed-down likeness in a small town in upstate New York is not going to last as long or reward him as much as his family, and his Lord, will. He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. In the end, all George Steinbrenner had to bait him with was fool's gold. And Andy wasn't biting.



Good for you, Andy. We'll miss you. God Bless.

Braves New World

Has there ever been an off-season with more big question marks in it?????

Probably. It seems to me that the 1994-95 off-season was pretty up-in-the-air, if for no other reason than the fact that no one was quite sure when/if there would be an on-season.

But given that we all kind of expect most of the more-or-less usual suspects to actually be playing professional baseball at the major league level next year, it seems to me that there is a surprisingly high number of players, especially high-profile players, for or against whom we have no idea where to go to actually root in 2004. Not only are we talking about some of the big-name free agents (Greg Maddux, Rafael Palmiero, Javy Lopez, Vladimir Guererro, Miguel Tejada, Ivan Rodriguez, Andy Pettitte, etc.) but some players who are already signed to pretty significant deals (Nomar Garciaparra, Manny Ramirez, Reigning AL MVP Alex Rodriguez) may not be with their current teams next year either.

And it seems to me that the Atlanta Braves may be the most severely affected by this phenomenon. Rob Neyer rightly points out that they’ve lost two of the five best players in the NL to free agency, and you just can’t make up for that. Not without a whole lotta luck.

Maddux has spent the last eleven seasons with the Atlanta Braves, and they have not failed to make the playoffs in any of those seasons. Maddux pitched at least 200 innings in all but one of them, won at least 15 games in each of them (194 total), won three Cy Young Awards, and more than solidified his stature as a Hall-of-Fame pitcher. But these Braves are not in the habit of overpaying for anything, certainly not a once-great pitcher in the twilight of a HoF career (cf. Glavine, Tom), and so he’s out.

In his stead, the Braves signed journeyman John Thompson, a 30-year old pitcher who’s never had a winning record and whose career ERA approaches 5.00. Heck, last year’s ERA approached 5.00 (4.85). He had had the misfortune of spending only a handful of his career games pitching for a team that plays in a pitchers’ park (nine games in 2002 with the Mets), the bulk of it having been spent in Texas (yuk) and Colorado (yukker). The Braves aren’t paying him much ($7 mil total) or for very long (two years, plus an option), and Leo Mazzone has a knack for taking pitchers who have struggled/underachieved and making them worth their pay (Paul Byrd, Mike Hampton, Mike Remlinger, etc.), so it’s a somewhat fair guess that Thompson could take a step forward in 2004. Or, having just had the best season of his lackluster career, the Braves may have deluded themselves into thinking that the career year was a breakout year, and hafta pay $7 million for two years of continued mediocrity. I suppose that’s about the going rate for mediocre these days, so maybe it’s not a bad deal either way.

In addition, Javy Lopez, who had easily his best offensive year (.328, 43 homers, 109 RBI) at age 33, is also gone, because the Braves know better. They know that it’s not often that a player sets personal bests in hits, runs, doubles, homers, RBI, BA, OBP, SLG, OPS and a bunch of other stats as he enters his mid thirties and then repeats the performance. And it’s not often that such a player would be content to settle for a paycut from the $7 mil he made last year, even though he had been grossly overpaid in 2001 and 2002, making almost $14 million in two years in which he hit at a level roughly 80% of mediocre. So Javy’s gotta hit the pavement too.

Gary Sheffield, no slouch himself with 39 homers, 132 RBI and a .330 batting average, is also looking for a new employer, which he may have found in George Steinbrenner’s Yankees. Steinbrenner, unlike John Schuerholtz in Atlanta, never met an aging, overpaid free agent he didn’t like. However, unlike Atlanta, and pretty much every other team in professional sports, Steinbrenner can afford to make such mistakes. I’m not sure that signing Sheffield to a three-year, $36 to $39 million contract is exactly a mistake, but Sheffield isn’t young, probably just had the best year he’s ever going to have, and is headed to a park that’s not traditionally kind to righty power hitters. Besides this, he’s got a reputation as a troublemaker, and seems to have already begun this process before even having signed with the Yankees, by asking for $3 million more than their alleged handshake agreement originally called for. No wonder the Braves let him go.

Atlanta’s front office has its work cut out for it. It seems like every year we say this, “No, really, this year they’re gonna drop off from contention…No, wait, I mean this year…no wait…” but honestly, this could be it for the Braves’ run of division titles, which is sad. Thirteen seems like plenty though, and it won’t be broken any time soon (the Yankees currently have a 6-year streak for division titles, 9 playoff appearances, plus a quasi-division title in the unfinished 1994 season.)

The Braves won’t just disappear. They’ll be decent, but it’s hard to see them losing all the offense they (surprisingly) got from Lopez and Sheffield, not to mention the relative rotation stability afforded them by Maddux (albeit in an “off” year) and still winning 100 games next season. There just isn’t a catcher out there who can make up for what Lopez did this year, and they can’t afford to get someone like Vladimir Guerrero if they’re attempting to pare $20 mil from the payroll. Add to this the facts that Marcus Giles and/or Rafael Furcal aren’t likely to be quite this good again and that the journeymen stalwarts of the bullpen may be due for a drop-off, and you’ve got a recipe for backsliding, if not disaster.

Should be interesting watching to see what the Braves do to figure out how to beat the pants off the rest of the NL East. I don’t see it happening in 2004, but then I didn’t see it last year either, and it did. Rob’s smarter than I am when it comes to thinking about baseball, and the Braves continue to confound him, too.

I should know better than to guess by now.

Vazquez Right-Wing Conspiracy

I am not happy.

My favorite team has just officially announced a trade for one of the ten best pitchers in all of major league baseball, and I'm not happy about it.

It would appear that there is some vast conspiracy, some grandiose plan to rid my favorite team of anyone who might be both successful and cheap at the major league level, thereby neccessitating these continuous, infernal ticket price increases. Sadly, the conspirators in this process happen also to be the ones who actually run the team, so there's nothing I can do about it.

Evidently it was almost too good to be true to think that an up-and-coming young LHP (Brandon Claussen) might have actually earned himself a rotation spot next year, so they dumped him off on Cincinnati. And now, the possibility of having not one, but two or three relatively inexpensive, home-grown players who might not just be good parts of a championship club, but actually stars on it, was just too much to bear. So, out go Nick Johnson and Juan Rivera, and in comes Great Pitcher about to Get Expensive.

Oh, sure, I'm looking forward to watching Javier Vazquez win some games in Yankee pinstripes. The 5-6 runs per game the Yankees could score when he pitches mean that he could win 20 games even without matching the kind of stellar performance he has compiled with the Expos over the last few years. You couldn't do any better to fill a hole in your starting rotation via trade. Well, unless you can get Curt Schilling, but who could pull that off? Besides, with the age difference, I'll take Vazquez long-term any day.

As a Yankee fan, I won't especially miss Juan Rivera, even though he's young, cheap, and could have been the heir to Bernie Williams in CF if the organization ever admits to itself that Bernie doesn't belong out there anymore. Rivera's kind of projected as Juan Gonzalez-lite, which is a pretty good guy to have on your team, as long as he doesn't come with Juan-Gone's trips to the doctor.

I won't miss LOOGY (Lefty-One-Out-GuY) Randy Choate. Heck, I don't think I even knew that Choate pitched for the Yankees in 2003. I think I sneezed once in April or something and I missed it.

But I'll miss Nick. Oh, will I ever miss Nick. Nick Johnson is the kind of player you dream about your team developing. The kind of player a stat-head like me lays awake at night trying to figure out how to make one of these for the computer baseball game I play to pass time between loads of laundry on quiet Saturday afternoons. The kind of player you tell your kids you got to see play before anyone knew how good he was gonna be.

BP said last year that he might end up a cross between Barry Bonds and John Olerud, in terms of his hitting. This is a guy with already tremendous plate discipline, now walking more than he strikes out, developing power (slugging percentages from .313 to .402 to .472 the last three years in NY) and a pretty decent glove to boot (or not to boot, as is the hope with infielders...) Johnson's 1999 season at AA-Norwich, at age 21, saw him rake for a Bonds-ian .526 on-base percentage, not to mention 52 extra-base hits in only 420 at-bats for a .538 slugging%), which made him one of the best prospects in all of baseball, if not for his health.

This guy's talent might be once-in-a-lifetime. The problem is that his injuries are more like once-in-a-season, and tend to cost him a month or two at a time. Consider:

1998: Separated shoulder. Misses six weeks.
1999: 37 hit-by-pitches, due to plate-crowding. Plays 132 of 140 games at AA.
2000: Does not play. Undiagnosed wrist injury keeps him out entire season.
2001: Plays 110 games for Columbus and 23 for Yankees
2002: Wrist sprain. Misses four weeks.
2003: Stress fracture in his right hand. Misses over two months

If not for the injuries (which, I realize, is right up there with "If Woody had gone right to the police...") Johnson would not be traded for anyone. You couldn't offer a GM enough to let this guy go. His career numbers, to this point, compare favorably to John Olerud's after three years in the majors, and Johnson hasn't even had three full years. Take a look:

Johnson	Age   AB   R    H  2B  HR RBI  BB   SO   AVG   OBP   SLG   OPS

2001*	 22  358  32   69  11  11  43  37   80  .194  .308  .313  .621

2002*	 23  454  67  110  18  18  70  58  118  .243  .347  .402  .749

2003*	 24  458  85  130  27  20  66  99   81  .284  .422  .472  .894



Olerud											

1990	 21  358  43   95  15  14  48  57   75  .265  .364  .430  .794

1991	 22  454  64  116  30  17  68  68   84  .256  .353  .438  .791

1992	 23  458  68  130  28  16  66  70   61  .284  .375  .450  .825

I've normalized(*) for Johnson's relative lack of playing time, since he saw only 23 games in the majors in 2001, and only 96 in 2003.

Now I'll grant you that John Olerud is not Lou Gehrig, but who is? And the fact that Johnson displays the command and ability he's shown at this young stage in his career, though he is a year older, but without the benefit of as much playing time as Olerud had through three years in the bigs, is impressive. Think about it: If you could get John Olerud's skills, with more power, even more patience and possibly better defense, wouldn't you take it in a heartbeat? Omar Minaya would. And did.

And if he gets enough playing time, Johnson could break out next year, just like Olerud did, win a batting title, lead the league in OBP and OPS, and lead the Yankees to a World Series.

Sorry, I meant the Expos. So much for the World Series. So now, instead of fulfilling his destiny of becoming the neext, great cog in the Yankee Championship Machine, Johnson gets to be the shiny chrome bumper on the rusty '78 Pinto the Montreal Expos organization has become. Very sad.

But the Yankees needed to make a splash, and they needed some solid starting pitching, and they felt that with the injury risk that Johnson seems to be, it would be a worthwhile opportunity cost. The ironic part is that in three or four years, Nick Johnson will be elligible for salary arbitration, and if he's as good as I think he'll be, the Expos won't be able to afford him. So the Yankees could get him back anyway. And he may still do great things in Yankee pinstripes. Just not for a long while.

So long, Nicholas Robert Johnson. We hardly knew ye.

Shout-Outs...

I recently added a few new links:

Redbird Nation, a Cardinals (duh) blog, was kind enough to post a reference to my ALMVP analysis posts, and I got a nice spike in hits for a day or so because of it. Thanks. Redbird Nation is now a permanent link on the left, the old-fashioned St. Louis logo toward the bottom of the image links.

Another kind soul, General Zod, made reference to my body of work as "[his] top 5-7 of best overall baseball blogs" for which I am flattered, on a discussion forum called Birds on the Bat. Though I don't have the time to become an actual member and spend that much time discussing these things, I have added a link on the left for them also, in case you do have such time, in which case, you should probably go out and get a job.

Also, I noticed that a website called 2-Headed Monster was linking to me, which is a blog about Chicago baseball (both teams, as you might have guessed), so the picture of the Cubbies pez dispenser on the lower left is a link to them.

In addition, one of my least new links, Jay Jaffe from the Futility Infielder, has a long break-down of the starting pitching on the market and how some of them might help the Yankees, or your own team, for that matter. Jay does good work. Go read his stuff.

Milton For All He's Worth...

Here's a headline:

Phillies Get Former Yankees LHP...

...Eric Milton?

Where did this come from? The Andy Pettitte rumors of previous off-seasons might have suggested to us that we could expect the Phils to make a splash picking up someone like this, but nobody guessed it, as far as I know. I suppose we get so used to hearing the rumors long before any trade actually occurs that when a GM actually does a good job of hiding his intentions, we're all surprised. I was.

In truth, Milton never got a chance to throw a pitch at the Major League level for the Yankees, despite having been so excited about being drafted by the Bombers out of college that he immediately went out and got a Yankees tattoo. (reason #257 not to get permanent markings on your body...). He was traded to the Twinkies with three other players for Duck! Chuck Knoblauch before the 1998 season, and immediately became…mediocre?

Baseball Reference.com indicates that Milton’s adjusted ERA has never been more than 13% better than average in his career, and that his career ERA overall of 4.76 is not appreciably better than the 4.80 average for the AL in that time span, though his career numbers are hurt significantly by that 5.64 he posted over 170 innings as a rookie in 1998. He's Livan Hernandez without the durability.

The Yankees caught a lot of flack at the time of that trade for letting this “future of the franchise” get away, and the heat intensified when Milton was winning 15 games and making an All-Star team in 2001 as Chuck Knoblauch’s aim, batspeed and career abandoned him, but Milton’s never really been as great as his hype suggested. Slightly more than 200 innings/year with slightly better than average ERAs is NOT a star, and not worth the $9 million for which the Phillies are now on the hook for 2004.

Baseball Prospectus’ synopsis of Milton’s career suggests that, like Ron Guidry, who didn’t have his first great season until he was 27 years old, Milton might still have his best years ahead of him, but I tend to disagree. Milton’s a big lefty (6’3”, 220) who throws hard and has decent control, but a lot of scouts have questions about his mechanics, and besides, the reason Gator suddenly became so successful was his discovery and perfection of the slider (more of a cut fastball by today’s standards) in 1977-78. BP's reviews of each of Milton's seasons through 2001 are always gleaming, in spite of the fact that the numbers just don't seem to support their hope in him. His 2002 season saw all of Milton's numbers drop off, across the board: fewer innings, higer ERA, lower strikeout rate, and perhaps not all of that is attributable to the knee injury. Perhaps he was hitting the plateau before he got hurt.

Milton’s knee surgery essentially wiped out his 2003 season, in which BB Prospectus expected him to take a step forward and become one of the 10-15 best pitchers in baseball. Didn’t happen, though it could in 2004. Or the arm injury everyone’s been waiting for could happen instead, and the Phils could end up paying $9 million for another pitcher not to live up to expectations. The more likely result is what we usually see from Milton, if he’s healthy: about 200 innings of league average or slightly better pitching, which any team can use.

Kudos to the Phillies, who didn't give up too much for Milton. Knowing that they would have to pick up an All-Star salary, they leveraged the deal by taking something the Twins couldn't afford to keep (an expensive but oft-injured and ultimately replaceable starter) and gave up a replaceable relief pitcher in Carlos Silva and a middle infield prospect with some speed and patience but no power at all, in Nick Punto. And a PTBNL. No big losses. Serviceable pieces of a decent major league team, but all replaceable.

And if Milton does what BP thinks he can do, Ed Wade looks like a genius. Worth the risk, I think.

Yankee Roster Moves...

Well, I have to admit that I'm somewhat less than impressed by the Yankees recent signings.

The first official signing they've made was to re-up with a thirdbaseman who hit .254/.302/.418 as a Yankee, who hit .297/.366/.530 at the Great American Phonebooth and .251/.308/.413 everywhere else. If he can keep up the .295/.337/.534 pace he hit for in September, Aaron Boone will be worth the $5.75 million they'll pay him in 2004. But I have my doubts that he'll do much more than .260 with 20 homers and 70 RBI. Some would argue that his ALCS heroics make him already worth that money, but I don't play that way, and neither do the New York fans. If he's hitting .160 in May, they're gonna forget all about him ever having blasted a hanging knuckler into Bronx Bomber history.

Tom "Flash" Gordon was also signed to a two-year, $7.25 million contract, to bolster the bullpen, though it's was not clear from the deal which half of which season he would actually be pitching. Since he became a full-time reliever in 1998, he's had exactly two seasons in which he's pitched more than 45 innings: 1998 and 2003. The rest of the time he was either stinking, recovering from arm injuries, or both. Now don't get me wrong, he was great last year:91 strikeouts, 31 walks and 57 hits in 74 innings with an ERA just over 3.10 is stellar for a relief pitcher in this age, but giving seven million dollars to a 37 year old pitcher with a history of arm trouble and only one season of "proof" that he's past them is rarely a wise move. Maybe they figure that between Gordon and Steve Karsay they might actually get a whole season's worth or right-handed relief pitcher, and for the bargain basement price of just over eight million dollars! It's all starting to make sense now...

Gary Sheffield, on the other hand, would be a great addition. Sure he's got his health problems too, but he's managed at least 130 games in each of the last eight seasons, and has averaged 145 games the last five years, which isn't completely awful. Heck, it's more than Bernie Williams. I argued over a year ago that Sheffield could have been a lock-Hall-of -Famer if not for his injury history, and that was before he hit .330 with 39 homers and 132 RBI in 2003. A few more years like that and he will be a lock for the Hall. A few more years even close to that and he should have little trouble getting into Cooperstown, but there are no guarantees, and for $36 million, you sure wish there were.

Incidentally, is it just me, or is "Yankees Looking to Trade Jeff Weaver to Dodgers for Kevin Brown" the silliest headline since "O.J. Looking for the 'Real' Killer"?

AL MVP Debate, Part II

This is Part II of Boy of Summer's MVP Thoughts. You can read Part I here.

As I mentioned, some sportswriters are really not happy about this, perhaps most notably, Jayson Stark. As Rob Neyer confirms, Stark is a prince of a guy, so I'll be as kind as possible. However, it should be noted again that I think he's dead wrong on this issue, and that I think he's not much of a statistician, when you get right down to it. Most baseball writers would take that as a complement.

Examining Jayson Stark's MVP criteria is not as easy as it sounds, becasue he seems to keep grasping at different things, anything, to get people to believe him instead of the Rules.

If you've read Stark's columns for any length of time, you've learned that he's a pretty good journalist. He gets good stories, and he writes them well. He's interesting and creative and seems like a decent fellow. But he seems to have something less than a firm grasp on how statistical analysis ought to be utilized. One of the worst things you can do with stats, and one of the things that Stark does fairly often, is to pick an arbitrary number that seems to support your point, and don't bother to give any other information that might make your point look anything less than salient.

In an article he wrote in September about why A-Rod shouldn't be the MVP, he said, "Since 1994, when baseball broke into six divisions and created twice as many pennant races, no player from a losing team has finished within 100 points of the winner. That includes A-Rod last year. And it undermines his candidacy this year."

OK, he picked 1994 because of the break between the two and three division formats, meaning that there are more contenders and therefore (theoretically) more potential MVPs. But the 100 points could have been anything. It sounds like a nice, round number, but it's arbitrary.

When players have MVP voting clauses written into their contracts, they're written by placement, not point totals. And while what Stark says is true, it's misleading. Players from losing teams have been as high as second or third in the voting on several occasions in that timespan. A-Rod was second in 2002, Griffey was second in 1994, and Frank Thomas finished third to Griffey in 1997, all playing on losing teams. Players from non-playoff teams have been up pretty high in the tally as well, including Carlos Delgado (4th in 2000), Griffey (4th in 1998), and Mo Vaughn (5th in 1996).

That same article made three "key" points in the argument against Rodriguez's candidacy for the AL MVP:

1) WHAT PART OF "VALUABLE" DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? - Stark argues that the BBWAA has almost always chosen a player from a winning team for the MVP, so why should we change that tradition now?

2) WHERE WAS HE WHEN THEY NEEDED HIM? Stark argues that A-Rod faded when his team sank from contention in June, and that he didn't consistently produce the way an MVP should.

3) THIS ISN'T 1991 - Stark argues that an MVP should only come from a losing team if there are no true/close pennant races, and therefore no clear player who makes the differene between his team making the playoffs or not.

Let's take these on one at a time...

1) WHAT PART OF "VALUABLE" DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? The meaning of the word "valuable" has nothing to do with the context of the object in question. The Hope Diamond would be no less valuable in the bottom of a landfill in Staten Island than it is in the Smithsonian, it just wouldn't be as useful. Once the diamond's recovered, the landfill would admittedly be somewhat less valuable without it.

The fact that baseball writers have traditionally used winners, especially playoff contenders, to determine the MVP does NOT mean that it should be this way. History held many 'traditions' to be perfectly acceptable right up until someone showed that there was a better way. Ever read a short story called 'The Lottery'?

2) WHERE WAS HE WHEN THEY NEEDED HIM? This has to be Stark's weakest argument. He cites the following as evidence that Rodriguez was not the MVP:

So as the ship sank, he sank with it. It really wasn't until his team's season was essentially over that he began compiling many of these alleged MVP numbers.

He hit the second-most home runs in the league in April (8). But he was 10th in May (6), 20th in June (5) and 21st in July (5), before leading the league in August (15) and September (7).[Ed. NOTE: A-Rod was 5th in the AL in Sept.]

He was fifth in the AL in RBI in April (22). Then he fell to 44th in May (13), 34th in June (15) and 17th in July, before leading the league in August (31) and ranking third in September (15).

OK, how about slugging percentage -- a stat that doesn't depend on the contributions of anyone around him? He was fourth in the league in April (.667). But then he was 54th in May (.462), 31st in June (.540) and 37th in July (.505), before an .849 August (first) and .594 September (fifth).

Does that sound like an MVP season to you? It doesn't to us.

Well, Jayson, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't but since you don't give us anyone else's numbers to compare with A-Rod's, how are we to know whether it does or not? He could have picked a lot of other stats (runs scored, on-base%, etc.) but I suspect that he chose these because they supported his point. I'm going to use OPS (on-base% + Slugging%) to try to rebut his point, because it's a pretty good rough measure of a player's offensive contributions, apart from his teammates contributions, and also because I didn't feel like charting all of the possible stats.

Here are the monthly ranks for for each of the top ten MVP points-getters:

	April	May	June	July	Aug	Sept	Avg (T)	Avg (5)	Season

Delgado	 1	 5	14	12	16	10	 9.7	 8.4	 1

Ramirez	16	40	 6	 4	20	 2	14.7	 9.6	 2

A-Rod	 3	49	22	26	 1	13	19.0	13.0	 3

D. Ortiz	 *	45	18	11	 3	 5	16.4	16.4	 5

Posada	18	36	40	25	11	 6	22.7	19.2	10

Beltran	**	16	43	17	 9	14	19.8	19.8	12

V. Wells	58	19	 9	23	31	12	25.3	18.8	13

B. Boone	23	10	17	18	68	25	26.8	18.6	15

No-mah	49	11	10	44	28	92	39.0	28.4	20

Stewart	54	38	***	24	44	51	42.2	42.2	32

First, a few explanations:

Only the top 100 players, in terms of at-bats, were rated each month. I had to cut it off somewhere.

*David Ortiz wasn't the everyday DH in Boston until June, but he amassed essentially one month worth of at-bats between April and May, which got him an OPS around .800, which would rank him around 45th in the league in any given month, hence the 45 in May and nothing in April.

**Carlos Beltran was injured the first month of the season and only got 38 at-bats in April.

***Shannon Stewart got only 33 at-bats in June.

The Avg(Tot) column is the average rank of the totals for all six months of the season. The Avg(5) column is the average of the player's five best months, which helps to normalize for players who didn't get enough at-bats in a particular month to qualify due to injury (Beltran and Stewart) or platooning (Ortiz). It also gives some grace to players who may have had one really off month that skewed their average. The Season column is the overall rank of that player for (you guessed it) the season.

OK, with that said, what can we learn from this?

A) Carlos Delgado is the only player who meets Stark's criteria of "consistently" producing. He's the only player in the top 20 in every month, never straying higher than 16th (Aug), and therefore ranked 1st overall at the end of the year. However, based on Stark's insistence upon players from winners and playoff contenders, Delgado's no good either. The standard deviation in his rank (which I didn't post here) was two and a half times smaller than anyone else's on the list.

B) Manny Ramirez, A-Rod, Vernon Wells and Bret Boone are the only other players who rank in or near the top 30 in the AL five out of six months. Other players either didn't qualify for a month or had more than one month in which they ranked over 30th.

C) Nomar Garciaparra was particularly flaky, ranking as high as 11th in May and as low as 92nd(!) in September. Ouch. Still, he managed to finish a solid 20th at the end of the year.

D) Jayson Stark's pet candidate, Shannon Stewart, was so valuable that he never ranked higher than 24th, and easily averaged the lowest among the lot. Even when he was supposedly somehow turning the Twins around and leading them into the postseason, he ranked as the 44th and 51st best hitter in the AL down the stretch. And Stark wants you to vote for him?!?

Regarding the fate of the Rangers with relation to Rodriguez's play, the fact that the team was as close to the .500 mark as they were (25-27 on May 29) was essentially a fluke, a mirage created by the ability of the early season to skew our views of reality (remember when we thought the Royals were contenders?).

The team's Pythagorean record at the end of May (the wins and losses you'd expect them to have based on the total runs scored and allowed) was a couple of games worse than what they actually had, which means that they'd been lucky to do as well as they did to that point. Certainly, there's no denying that June was Rodriguez's (and the Rangers') worst month, but there aren't many players who avoid a 3-week swoon all season, and the man couldn't do anything about the Rangers' pitching staff's 6.63 June ERA. And besides, A-Rod's worst month (49th in OPS) is about as good as Shannon Stewart's average month (42).

3) THIS ISN'T 1991 Stark contended that MVPs only come from losing teams whn there are no pennant races. This simply isn't true. He uses the AL's only example (Cal Ripken in 1991) because it supports his point. But if you dig just a little deeper, and choose another league to analyze, I don't know, let's say...the National League, you find that this isn't the case at all. Andre Dawson won the NL MVP in 1987 on a Cubs team that finished last, even though both the Mets and the Expos finished within four games of fisrt place in the NL East.

Also, in 1959, when Ernie Banks won the NL MVP on a losing Cubs team, both the Braves and Giants finished within four games of the Dodgers, who won their first pennant in LA. So we see that the Senior Circuit doesn't necessarily discriminate against a truly great and valuable player just because there are pennant races and good players on the teams vying for them.

Stark's post-mortem article on the MVP debate revisits the issue of tradition, which we've already addressed, so I won't get into that again. However, he also asks "Where would the team have finished without him?" and answers it accurately: Last. Again, though, his answer is uninforming and misleading.

In any other division in all of MLB, the Rangers (71-91) would not have been last. They were, admittedly, the worst team in a relatively strong division, but taking A-Rod away and replacing him with Joe Average Shortstop costs the Rangers something like six to ten wins in the standings, which is a lot. I'm sure that as bad as the Rangers were last year (and the year before that, and...) a lot of Texans are really glad that they didn't lose 100 games in 2003, and A-Rod is a major reason for that.

If that's not Value, then value doesn't exist.

AL MVP Debate, Part I

The following is the first of a two-part series on the 2003 AL MVP results. Just like the Wachowski Brothers, I found that I had way too much preachy, self-important, overblown and ultimately disappointing crap to fit into only one offerring. Sorry. Stay tuned for Part II.

I was having trouble coming up with something to write about the AL MVP Award being given to Alex Rodriguez (finally). I was going to find the instructions for the award somewhere and then re-vamp them with a bunch of tongue-in-cheek crap about clutch hitting down the stretch and fighting for a pennant and such, but then it occurred to me: They actually got it right for once. So I don't hafta do that. Wait til next year.

Several people, including David Pinto and my hero, Rob Neyer, argued that not only does A-Rod deserve the award, but that he might actually win it this year, as no offensive American Leaguer was really having a standout season besides him. Turns out they were right.

Others, however, most notably Everyone's Favorite Empirical Scientist Jayson Stark, are actually upset about this occurrence. Can you believe that crap?? I mean, A-Rod has easily been the best player in the AL for the last half decade, and the BBWAA finally finds a way to actually give him one award, and Stark's pissed about it??

It turns out that I found the actual ballot instructions at Aaron Haspel's God of the Machine, who had found them on (are you ready?) Jayson Stark's home page. When he argued that A-Rod didn't deserve the MVP last year either.

Dear Voter:

There is no clear-cut definition of what Most Valuable means. It is up to the individual voter to decide who was the Most Valuable Player in each league to his team.

The MVP need not come from a division winner or other playoff qualifier.

The rules of the voting remain the same as they were written on the first ballot in 1931:

1. Actual value of a player to his team, that is, strength of offense and defense.
2. Number of games played.
3. General character, disposition, loyalty and effort.
4. Former winners are eligible.
5. Members of the committee may vote for more than one member of a team.

You are also urged to give serious consideration to all your selections, from 1 to 10. A 10th-place vote can influence the outcome of an election. You must fill in all 10 places on your ballot.

Keep in mind that all players are eligible for MVP, and that includes pitchers and designated hitters.

Only regular-season performances are to be taken into consideration.

Let's look at each of these criteria individually, shall we?

1. Actual value of a player to his team, that is, strength of offense and defense.

The main argument against A-Rod, or any other great player on a losing team for that matter, is that the team still wouldn't have won even if he sucked. Which is a true statement, but limited in its usefulness. The writer of the ballot instructions seems to understand that a player can have value even if his team is stinking up the joint, and frankly, the Rangers weren't really that bad in 2003. Oh, their pitching was terrible, but they were among the best offensive teams in the majors, and had a record (71-91) identical to or better than four other teams in the AL. So A-Rod's value clearly was not completely wasted on a truly awful team, as Aubrey Huff's or Dmitri Young's was.

The irony here, as a fellow blogger pointed out last year, is that the argument against thinking that an MVP must come from a winner is right there in the instructions: The MVP need not come from a division winner or other playoff qualifier. And the definition of "value" is given right there in the instructions as well: Actual value of a player to his team, that is, strength of offense and defense. So the strength of a player's offense and defense actually defines his value, regardless of his team's position in the standings.

And if this is the case, then A-Rod has to be the MVP. By almost any objective measure you'd ever pick, he was the best player in the AL last year. First in the league in homers, runs scored and slugging percentage, second in RBI, 3rd in OPS, and eighth in walks and On-base %. Bill James' Win Shares has him tied with Carlos Delgado atop the AL, according to David Pinto. A great hitter, who plays great defense at a tough position, with no obvious competition as the best player in the league? Sounds like an MVP to me.

2. Number of games played.

No problem there. Alex Rodriguez suited up and played 161 games. The game he missed? Sept 24th, at Oakland, after playing in 546 straight games. Say what you want about him being overpaid, but the dude shows up to work. Oh, and in case you're wondering, the Rangers lost that game, so there you go: Every time A-Rod doesn't play, they lose. How's that for value?

3. General character, disposition, loyalty and effort.

Boy, I don't see how anybody could coplain about this. Again, he may make too much money, but you don't ever hear him complaining about being underappreciated, about the "daily grind," about the fans, about anything. He just straps on his gloves, laces up his cleats, goes out there and kicks butt. And then the Rangers' pitching staff squanders his efforts by giving up all those runs. Personally, I'd be complaining, but he doesn't.

4. Former winners are eligible.

Not a problem. A-Rod's been shafted in the MVP voting at least two or three times previously, so there's no conflict here.

5. Members of the committee may vote for more than one member of a team.

Well, that won't be necessary, although this is what killed A-Rod's chances in '96, when he and Ken Griffey Jr. ('member when he was good?) split the MVP voting, even in their own city, and the trophy went to Juan Gone.

So we see that based on the criteria set forth by the Baseball Writers' Association of America, Alex Rodriguez clearly should be (and is) the AL MVP for 2003.

But some are still not satisfied...