A Closer Look at Closer usage

Over at Baseball Think Factory, there's a link to and some discussion of a short piece at Banished to the Pen about trends in the usage of closers in the last 20 years or so.   The writer asserts that while there is some downward trend in the amount of work each closer is doing, bullpen usage overall has not changed significantly in that span.  

Even if front offices and field staffs want to begin using closers longer in games, the data suggests [sic] that pitchers are now conditioned to work three outs and rarely more. Because of that, the next step in reliever usage doesn’t appear to be calling on the Aroldis Chapmans of the world for more than one inning during the majority of the season.

Instead, the real sea change will happen when managers begin using their closers in the highest-leverage situations late in the game—regardless of conventional baseball thinking or contract incentives that reward saves.

While I agree with the first part of his final thoughts, I'm also wondering if perhaps the latter isn't already happening, but I'll get to that later.  Right now I want to nit-pick about methodology. 

Banished used the top 10 pitchers by Saves each year back to 1995, but this seems needlessly limiting and arbitrary to me.  Besides the fact that the Save is kind of a stupid statistic for measuring pitcher effectiveness, the top 10 pitchers each year are not the only ones with the right to be called "Closers".  Both very good and very bad teams can have closers that do not happen to end up in the top 10 in Saves, which are sometimes a result of happenstance and usage patterns more than talent.  (Joe Borowski led the league with 45 Saves in 2007 despite an ERA of 5.07.  Brad Lidge twice amassed 30+ Saves with an ERA over 5.00, once over 7!) 

For example, in 1998, the "top-10 rule" would eliminate Ugueth Urbina, who was (among relievers) 5th in MLB with 3.2 bWAR that year, despite amassing "only" 34 Saves for the lowly Expos, and Mariano Rivera, who amassed only 36 Saves for the Greatest Baseball Team in History.  Any of the best sportsbooks would have told you to put your money on the 1998 Yankees.  

Or for a more recent example, using the top 10 rule for 2015 (actually 11, as there was a 3-way tie for 10th) you'd leave out Greg Holland, David Robertson, Aroldis Chapman, and Drew Storen, the last of which he uses for an example in his own article.

Therefore, I instead chose to set the benchmark at anyone with at least 25 Saves in a season, which gave me well over 400 data points for the 26 seasons, which I averaged by season to look for trends.  Still an arbitrary benchmark, I'll admit, but one that gives us a more reasonable look at the pitchers would could reasonably be called mostly full time closers in the last two decades. 

Here are the annual averages for pitchers with 25+ saves per year*:

Year    IP     IP/App    %GF-25S    %GF -Top10
1995   66.2    1.05      89%          91%
1996   68.7    1.05      88%          88%
1997   69.8    1.03      85%          88%
1998   70.1    1.05      86%          90%
1999   70.4    1.05      86%          89%
2000   70.6    1.06      87%          89%
2001   68.1    1.02      87%          89%
2002   70.8    1.06      88%          92%
2003   71.1    1.05      84%          87%
2004   73.2    1.06      86%          90%
2005   68.6    1.03      87%          88%
2006   67.8    1.04      85%          85%
2007   67.3    1.02      86%          88%
2008   63.3    0.99      84%          89%
2009   64.6    1.00      83%          86%
2010   63.4    1.00      86%          87%
2011   64.6    0.98      82%          86%
2012   66.5    0.99      79%          87%
2013   63.6    0.98      83%          87%
2014   64.7    1.00      82%          84%
2015   62.3    0.98      81%          86%

*For the strike-shortened 1995 season, I prorated the innings total for 162 games instead of 144.  

These columns are, respectively, the averages for the innings pitched per season, the Innings per appearance, the percentage of games finished for the pitchers with at least 25 Saves, and the percentage of games finished for the top 10 Save leaders each year.  Seems like there are some pretty notable trends here, but in case you're a more visual person...graphs!  

While there was a downward trend in the data for the top-10 Saves closers, and there is one in my own data, the writer at Banished implies that  "...closers throwing only six or seven fewer innings per season now," is somehow "not dramatic," a notion with which I respectfully dissent.    

 

And you can see that this is also born out in the data.   Pitchers used primarily as closers averaged only 62 1/3 IP in 2015, compared with somewhere between 69 and 71 IP in 1996-2003.  (Somehow, 1995 still comes off as an anomaly, even with my data correction.) Then there was a peak of 73 IP in 2004, brought about by the fact that there were seven players with over 80IP that year, including Brad Lidge with almost 94. No other year had more than five such pitchers, and most years -including each year since 2005 - had only one or none at all.  

All seven of those 80+ IP relievers were former starters, and as one of the other trends noted in the banished piece points out, with the tendency to groom closers even from college on to be closers, i.e. not to pitch more than 70 or so innings in a year, we may have seen the end of such groups.

But getting back to that downward trend in innings per appearance, that's about a 10% difference in their total innings.  My data, because it includes some closers who may have lost their jobs or gained them during the season, necessarily shows a slightly less pronounced decline, about 8% lower in 2015 than at the peak in 2002 and 2004, but still, there is a difference.  

If you said that a top position player was playing "only 10-15 games" less per year than was expected of him 20 years ago, and implied that this was somehow no big deal, it would be laughable.  Likewise, if a starting pitcher averaged 20-25 fewer innings per year, and yet expected to be paid more money...OK, that's actually happening.  Bad example.   

But in any case, it does seem to me that this is not an insignificant change.  His argument is that we are more likely to see a change in usage not in total innings, but in situational usage, and I'm not certain if we aren't already seeing that:

This chart shows how frequently these pitchers are used to finish games (i.e. the percentage of their appearances that are used to end games, not the percentage of the team's games they finish.) and is for pitchers with at least 25 Saves each year.  However, the data in the table above also include the percentages for top 10-Saves closers, and you can see a slight downward trend there too, from 88-91% in the mid to late 1990's to only 84-86% now.  

In short, it seems that closers are already not being used as exclusively to close games as they once were.  Some of the differences in the numbers between the two data sets may be attributable to how a pitcher may be used differently, getting promoted or demoted from the Closer role in mid-season.  

The 2012 data for example, mark the lowest percentage, just 79% of appearances to finish games, but these data are skewed significantly by two pitchers going in different directions: 

• Santiago Casilla started the 2012 season as the Giants' closer but had five Losses and five Blown Saves by the end of July and lost his job to Sergio Romo.  

• Tyler Clippard started the 2012 season as the main set-up guy in the Nationals' bullpen, but with Drew Storen injured and Brad Lidge washed-up and Henry Rodriguez wild and ineffective (14 walks and a 4.74 ERA in 19IP through May!) Clippard got promoted and stayed there.  

Take their percentages out of the data and you're up to 83% that year instead of 79%.  All of which is to say, you have to have some idea where these numbers come from.  Picking arbitrary benchmarks without understanding their context can lead to some inappropriate conclusions.

My conclusion, for what it's worth, is that teams are already starting to do matchups in high leverage situations, often keeping two or more "closer-type" pitchers in the back of the bullpen, when possible, as the yankees have with Andrew Miller and Dellin Betances, or the Royals' famous three-headed monster of Holland/Davis/Hererra.  There's probably a way to test that hypothesis, the preponderance of teams with two or more pitchers amassing 10+ Saves, or something like that, but I've crunched enough numbers for today. 

My First Game Ever, I Think

I noticed a feature on Geoff Young's blog about the first game he ever attended, and though I have alluded to my analogous experience in this space before, I had never really taken the time and effort to research it in detail.  The truth is I don't know exactly when my First Game Ever (FGE) actually was, and I remembered so few details from the experience that I assumed I could never know the exact date.

I was right, of course.

I can't know the exact date.  But surprisingly, I managed to cobble together enough details that I think I have at least narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities.  I'm pretty sure the game was fairly forgettable, not least because I have essentially forgotten it.  If someone from my team had thrown a shutout or hit two homers, as Gene Tenace memorably did for Geoff Young's FGE, I would probably remember.

These are the few details I do remember about the game and the day itself:

• It was at Yankee Stadium, some time in the mid 1980's.
• I went with the Lodi Boys Club, in a 15-passenger van, and we sat in the bleachers.
• It was boring (forgettable, as I mentioned above)
• My kid brother, about three years younger than me, was there.  Come to think of it, he still is.*
• I got a sunburn.  
• We lost.
• To the Blue Jays.
• Ron Guidry was on the team, but did not pitch.  
• Jesse Barfield was there.

*Younger than me.  Not in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium.

I think I remember Barfield because he was a pretty decent player at the time and because his name had "Barf" in it.  Ten or 11 year old boys remember stuff like that, you know? 

But that recollection isn't as helpful as you would think because Barfield's career (1981-92) spanned most of the part of my childhood I can remember, and he even spent the last four years of his career with the Yankees, so really, who knows?  But I'm pretty certain it wasn't in the '89-'92 seasons, as I was already a teenager by then, and I would remember the experience better.

Also, I don't think I was going to the Boys Club anymore by the time I was 14, except when they had dances in the big Bingo room upstairs, where I would go to hang out with my friends and throw those snappy-wrapped-in-paper things at the floor near the pretty girls I was too afraid to ask to dance.  I was such a loser. 

Guidry's presence on the team means that it was necessarily 1988 or before, as he retired after that year.  The reason I know Guidry was on the team but didn't pitch was that after the game I told my mom I had met him and shaken his hand when he was in the bullpen, a semi-plausible lie only if:

A) He was on the roster but wasn't pitching that day, and
2) My mom had never seen Yankee Stadium in person, and therefore did not know that I would have needed arms about 10 feet long to shake Guidry's hand from the bleachers.

Fortunately she had never visited the Stadium (this would not change until the late 1990's) and was kind enough not to confront me on my lie when she did.  However, as it happens, my arms are 10 feet long.

It turns out, thanks to the inimitable Baseball-reference.com, that the Blue Jays won exactly 20 games at Yankee Stadium between 1983 and 1988 in which Barfield played, and we can start throwing some of them out right away.

The 1983 game is a Friday night in April.  Even a loser like me could not manage to get a sunburn on a Friday night in April.  We need to look at games during the summer, that started in the afternoon, presumably on a weekend or else a dozen or more school age kids from the Lodi Boys Club would not have been able to go. 

The ten total games in 1985 and 1987 were all during the school year and/or not during sunburn weather (weeknight games in June, and  weekend games in mid September) so it could not have been any of them.  The five games in 1988 were all night games, so they're out.  

That leaves us only four games in 1986.  The October 1st game was a Wednesday night, and Guidry pitched a complete game.  Therefore there could have been no school kids, sunburn, or plausibly fabricated Louisiana Lightnin' handshake story.

That leaves a three-game sweep at the end of June, 1986.  I've always remembered this game as being in July but the end of June is close enough.  Again, the Friday night game is out because Guidry pitched (badly) and it was a night game.  That leaves Saturday and Sunday.

The Sunday game was a close contest, with the teams tied 2-2 from the second inning until the Yanks went ahead by a run in the bottom of the 4th, only to allow the Jays to tie it again in the top of the 5th.  It stayed 3-3 until the top of the 9th, when rookie manager Lou Piniella (damn, that was a long time ago) brought in Brian Fisher to maintain the tie in the 9th.  He promptly allowed Willie Upshaw to up and hit a single and then Fisher couldn't fish a Damaso Garcia sacrifice bunt out of his glove, so everyone was safe. 

At this point, Piniella presumably should have brought in Dave Righetti, who would have his best season as a reliever in 1986, though at the time his ERA was a shade over 4.00 and he had blown 8 of 24 Save Opportunities.  Still, he had been great as a relief ace the previous two seasons, had five Wins and 16 Saves already that year, and was a lefty, like the next batter, Ernie Whitt, who had already homered that day.

Instead Sweet Lou inexplicably brought in Al Holland, who had pitched three innings the day before.  Somehow Holland got pinch hitter Buck Martinez to fly out to left, but he then allowed a single to pinch hitter Cliff Johnson, a double to Tony Fernandez and a sac fly to Garth Iorg, which you're gonna realize put the Yankees in a 6-3 hole.  Holland finally got Lloyd Moseby to fly out to shortstop and end the inning.

The Yankees couldn't do much against Tom Henke in the 9th and that's the way the game ended, 6-3 Blue Jays, the Yankees' fourth consecutive loss.  Holland had about another month of solid relief work in him before ineffectiveness would get him released in early August, and his MLB career would be over the following April. 

But that is not the game I attended.  For one thing, it was far too interesting, or at least it seems interesting now.

No, I'm now pretty sure that the game I went to was the afternoon before, Saturday, 28 June 1986.  Jimmy Key started for the Jays against Joe Niekro, who had turned 41 in April of that year and really was not any good anymore.  He averaged only about five innings per start and walked more batters than he struck out in 1986.  Who says knuckleballers can pitch forever?

No longer knuckling Niekro allowed four runs in the first two innings and the Yankees never had a lead.  Alfonso Pulido relieved Niekro in the second and they were down 6-1 by the fifth, after Pulido allowed Moseby's second homer of the game and then an RBI single by (*chuckle*) Barfield.  Thereafter Pulido was pulled for Holland. 

The forgettable Gary Roenicke, playing his only season for the Yankees, hit a homer in the 6th off of Jimmy Key, which brought the team's Win Probability up to 23%, as high as it got all day after the second inning.  He also singled in a run in the 8th, but the rest of the team went 5 for 29 (.172) against Key and drove in only one run.

Also by the 6th inning, my hero Don Mattingly, who was in the midst of the best season of his career, even better than the MVP campaign the year before, was no longer in the game.  He had been replaced by Dan Pasqua, who used the opportunity to strike out twice, missing his chance to Wally Pipp the immortal Donnie Baseball.

Notable players included future Hall of Famers Dave Winfield and Rickey Henderson, who each got on base twice, but only Winfield scored or drove in a run, and no bases were stolen, which might have given me something to remember about the game.  Besides their two actual Hall of Famers, the 1986 Yankees had several people related to, but not nearly as talented as, other Hall of Famers (Phil Niekro's brother, Yogi Berra's son and Ken Griffey Jr.'s dad, who would be unceremoniously traded to the Braves two days after my visit.) 

Someone on the Yankees (either Donnie or Rickey) would eventually lead the 1986 American League in Runs Scored, Hits, Plate Appearances, Doubles, Slugging percentage, OPS, OPS+ or Total Bases, and the team would send four players (Righetti, Mattingly, Winfield and Henderson) to the All-Star game two weeks later, but in this game, all were either absent or ineffective.  Worse yet, the bottom of the order (DH Mike Easler, C Butch Wynegar, 3B Mike Pagliarulo and SS Dale Berra, went 0-for-14 with a sac fly RBI and one walk.

Neikro threw a wild pitch with the bases loaded and then walked in another run before being yanked for Pulido.  Holland and Wynegar each made errors, and it was just a sloppy game in almost every respect.  Al Holland, as I mentioned, pitched three (mostly effective) innings to close out the game, which eventually and mercifully ended when Dale Berra grounded out to third and and the colorfully-named-if-not-wonderfully-talented Rance Mulliniks threw him out at first. 

I'm not even sure we stayed that long.  Given how long a drive we had back in the van, how hot it was, and how whiny and annoying a dozen sweaty, sunburned kids become when their team is losing by several runs on a late June afternoon, I can only assume that we probably left early.  Fortunately we had an hour or more waiting in traffic in the hot van on the way home, not to mention my ten foot arms, to amuse us.

The New Oriole Way: No Need for Good Pitchers in Baltimore

The New York Yankees maintained the slimmest of leads  - just half a game - in their pursuit of another AL East Division Title yesterday by sweeping a double-header with the Toronto Blue Jays, 4-2 and 2-1.

They got a shot in the arm from the returning Andy Pettitte, who provided five scoreless innings to start the game despite being limited to 75 pitches.  Since he hadn't thrown more than 5 innings in any of his rehab stints, I imagine they didn't want to take any chances by stretching him out too much in his first game back.

Half a dozen relievers managed to hold onto a slim lead in the day game and then David Phelps hurled 6.1 innings of one-run ball - only his second Quality Start of his career and his first in a month - to pave the way for another W.  Rafael Soriano saved both ends of the doubleheader to increase his total to 42, which besides being the answer to life, the universe and everything is also evidence that perhaps the $35 million the Yankees gave him before last season weren't wasted after all. 

In any case, the Yankees seem to be doing what they always do: Winning.  None of that is all so terribly exciting, mostly because we who follow the Bronx Bombers have been more or less spoiled since 1994.   
What is exciting is that somehow the Baltimore Orioles, though an astonishing combination of luck, skill, clutch hitting and excellent relief pitching, have managed to be the team that the Yankees find breathing down their collective necks.

There was a time not so long ago when I would have pointed to their terrible run differential as evidence that they wouldn't last.  Or to their lack of any star hitters, or any decent, established starting pitchers.  Or the fact that they hadn't had a winning season since I was a senior in college, or that nobody expected them to win anything coming into the season, or the fact that they had to battle division foes like New York, Boston and Tampa -three franchises clearly much better run than the one in Baltimore.

That time is now past.  The Orioles still have a (slightly) negative run differential, and they still lack an ace pitcher and other than Adam Jones, they don't really have any hitters you'd be comfortable calling a "star".  What they do have is an astonishing record in one-run games (27-8), and an even better record in extra innings (15-2, including 15 straight, the most since 1949).

More important, perhaps, is that they have 85 wins with only 13 games left to play, and so whatever analysis one might do to figure out what will happen from here is nearly moot: the sample size is too small.  Heck, even Houston once won seven out of nine back in April and May, and now they're fighting to avoid 110 losses.

ESPN's David Schoenfeld looked at the Orioles' lack of a true ace yesterday in one of his columns and determined that while it was not so unusual for the best pitcher on a playoff team (in this case Wei-Yin Chen) to be just decent, with only 2.8 WAR, no such team had ever won the World Series either. 

I was somewhat shocked to find that not only is Chen not that good, he's the only pitcher on the team who's actually been decent all year.  Chen is 12-9 with a 3.98 ERA and is the only pitcher on the Baltimores who will qualify for the ERA title this year (162 IP are required).  This got me to wondering how unusual it was for there to literally be nobody else on a playoff team's pitching staff who could say that he had contributed all year.

I used double digit Wins as my benchmark - yes, I know it's an archaic stat, but stick with me here - and looked at every playoff team since they started the 3-division format in 1995.  I used Wins because it's relatively easy to sort and search with them and because while winning 10 games doesn't necessarily make you a great pitcher, it's usually a sign that you at least were sufficiently present on the pitching staff and effective on the mound to be used in such a way as to get credit for 10 or more Wins.  Rarely to lousy, unhealthy pitchers amass 10 Wins.  Got it?

(I did not use Wins amassed for another team, before a late season trade or in the minors, for example, mostly because it would have been a real pain in the butt.) 

That left us 68 playoff teams, and the number of those that had only one 10-game winner?

One.

And none in a full, 162-game season.

The 1995 Colorado Rockies had only one 10 game winner, Kevin Ritz, who went 11-11 with a 4.21 ERA in 173 innings.  Since the league only played 144 games that year, this one is kind of an outlier.  With another 3 weeks in the beginning of the season, Bill Swift would almost certainly have added to his nine Wins, so we can practically dismiss them.

Other than that, no playoff team since 1995 has had fewer than two 10-game winners.  For that matter, only 15 of the 68 have had as few as two, and another of those, the 1995 Cincinnati Reds, also came from a strike-shortened season.  (Unlike the similar-vintage Rockies, the Reds probably would not have added an additional 10-game winner with three more weeks to play, as the next closest pitcher, Xavier Hernandez, was a reliever with just seven Wins, and no starter had more than six.  David Wells had won 10 with the Tigers before coming over in a trade and tacking on half a dozen more for the Reds, so they don't exactly count either.)

In any case, having only two 10-game winners on your playoff team, it seems, does not bode well for your success in the postseason.  None of those teams won the World Series, and only two of them - the 2007 Rockies and the 1997 Indians - even made it that far.

The '97 Indians captured a weak AL Central division with only 86 wins and then squeaked past the Wild Card Yankees and the Orioles before losing to the first Wild Card World Champion, Eric Gregg's 6-foot strike zone Livan Hernandez and the Florida Marlins. 

The '07 Rockies, of course, rode an astonishing winning streak, not just in extra innings or close games like these Orioles, but in nearly all games for about a month.  They won 11 in a row and 14 out of 15 to sneak into the NL Wild Card spot on the very last day of the season, then swept both the Phillies and the Diamondbacks en route to the World Series.  There, despite having gone 22-1 in the previous month, they were swept by the Boston Red Sox.  C'est la vie.

Or, perhaps more precisely, c'est la pitching.  Without at least a few reliable guys to lean on when the team needed to record outs, none of these clubs could withstand the crucible of October baseball.  Almost half of them, seven of the 15 teams, lost in the Division Series, with five of the seven being swept.  Six other teams put up a good fight but ultimately succumbed in the League Championship Series, and the last two we just discussed. 

And these Orioles don't look like they even have a real chance at ending up with multiple 10 game winners.  The next closest pitcher is Jason Hammel with eight Wins, and he's got a knee injury and may not pitch much if at all for the rest of the season.  In any case, he's unlikely to add two wins in the next week and a half.

Chris Tillman is probably their best shot, also with eight Wins, and with potentially three remaining starts, it's conceivable that he could win two more, if he doesn't re-injure his elbow.  (Joe Saunders had six wins with Arizona before getting two with Baltimore, so technically he could win two more games and end up with 10 overall, but he'd have to win both of his remaining starts to do that.)  

As a few other interesting statistical anomalies of the Baltimore pitchers - 

Baltimore has:

• One complete game.  This sounds worse than it is, since today's game doesn't require guys to finish what they start very often.  Oakland has only one as well, and the playoff-hopeful Dodgers and Pirates only have two each, and the Brewers have none at all.  Even Washington has only three, and they've got the best record in baseball.   
• Seven Tough Losses, i.e. losses in games in which they got a Quality Start from their pitcher.  This would be the lowest number in MLB except that the Rockies haven't been even attempting to get Quality Starts since some time in mid June, so they have only four such losses.  Generally the good teams are near the bottom of this list, rarely squandering a good performance by their starter.   
• Thirty relief Wins.  This would be the best in the majors if not for the bizarre experiment in Colorado, where they've amassed 33 such wins.  
• Ten relief Losses.  Fewest in MLB, though Texas and Oakland each only have 11.  
• Allowed 33% of inherited runners to score.  This is the third worst number in the majors (the Angels are at 34% and the Cubs at 38%.) 
• Allowed 74 total inherited runners to score, 4th most in the majors, and seven more than the next closest playoff contender (San Francisco, who has a much better percentage).  
• 58 Holds, third fewest in MLB.  This kind of makes sense, since a Hold requires that a pitcher come into a game in a Save situation and hold onto the lead without actually finishing the game and therefore getting the Save.  Since the Orioles rarely have a lead early enough in a game for this to happen, it's only logical that they wouldn't be able to do this much. Oddly, Texas has even fewer Holds, just 55, but in their case I think it's because they score so many runs that when a relief pitcher comes into a game, it's usually already out of reach, and hence not an opportunity to get a Hold.  
• Allowed only 62 steals, third fewest in MLB, and caught 33% of would be thieves, 5th best in the majors.  This strikes me as one of the "little things" that an old-school manager like Buck Showalter would stress, i.e. not giving away runs with carelessness about he guys already on base.  
• Had relievers enter 73 games with a tie score, most in MLB.
• Had relievers enter the most high-leverage situations (168) in MLB, since their games are always close.    
• Had relievers enter 321 games with the bases empty, most in the AL, but only 9th in MLB.  I imagine this is because NL pitchers often have to be swapped out for pinch hitters, rather than just for situational matchups, so they'll more often come in to start an inning after a pinch hitter has replaced their predecessor on the mound.  The fact that the Orioles have more of these situations than any other AL team I believe is a result of either Showalter's rigid determination to use his relievers to start innings whenever possible, or the fact that Baltimore relievers rarely leave the game with a baserunner on base.  Either way, it's kind of odd.  
• Needed its relievers to get three or more outs 121 times, most in MLB among teams that don't play some weird brand of baseball in Denver.  Only one other potential playoff team has more than 99 such games.  

Naturally, I'll be the first to admit that stuff like run differential and the number of Holds or inherited runners scored in the regular season all go out the window once the playoffs start.  The teams that score more runs than their opponents more often than not in each series will win, just as they always do.  The 2001 Mariners, on paper, were a demonstrably better team than the Yankees that year, but in the end, it was the Seattle tam that ended up watching the Yankees lose the World Series to Arizona, not the team with the 116 regular season victories.

So the Orioles may get into the playoffs, and may even win the AL East, but luck and magic and clutch hitting can go away for no apparent reason at all, just as they showed up for no apparent reason.

Just ask the 2007 Rockies.

Phillies are Disappointing-est of All

ESPN's David Schoenfield had a bit Monday morning about how the LAnahfornia Angels are baseball's biggest disappointment, not, he says, the Boston Red Sox*.  Well, the headline says that, though I don't think that's what he actually means.  Editors often go with pith and punch over, say, correctness.

What I think Shoenfield means to say is that the disappointment created by the Angels' collective failure to live up to this year's expectations should have gotten a lot more media attention than it has, and the Red Sox' clubhouse soap operas and losing record ought to be less surprising and hence less thoroughly covered by the mainstream media than it is.  But then the Red Sox are the Ratings Sox, and that's just how it is. 

*For me, the biggest disappointment was the Red Sox, but not for the reason you'd think.  I finally got to a game at Fenway Park a few weeks ago.  Being a lifelong and avid baseball fan (albeit of the Yankees) I was quite excited to finally get to see this old cathedral of baseball, and even more so when I noticed that reigning MVP/Cy Young Justin Verlander would be toeing the rubber against Sawx ace Josh Beckett.  Sports betting sites were probably giving fairly even odds for what should have been a tight, well-played game.  What more could you ask, right?  


Well, it turns out that you could ask for seats that would allow you to, say, actually have knees.  You could ask for Verlander not to give up 4 runs in 5 innings (it was his shortest regular season start since August of 2010).  Or for Beckett not to pitch lackadaisically for two innings and then leave the game with back spasms.  Or for it not to rain all night, forcing the game to be called in the 6th and forcing my friends and me to get drenched on the way back to our hotels. But I digress... 

Also, you could ask them to expunge this logo - which I think is a worried, strawberry flavored  condom with a billy club - from their nostalgia wall. 

Anyway, while Schoenfield's piece is decidedly lacking in hard evidence to support his editor's contention that we should all be more disappointed in the Angels than the Red Sox, Schoenfield does a capable job of describing why we all aren't more aware of what a bummer of a season this is turning out to be for Anaheim.

But the truly surprising thing to me about the article isn't its lack of statistical evaluations or insightful analysis, but rather the absence of one word:

"Phillies."

I mean, seriously, when we're talking disappointment, Philadelphia has got the market more or less cornered.  Phillies Phans think they're the center of the universe, and their news media just plays into it*.  When rumblings happen in the sports world, Philadelphia fans think their world is ending.  And when a true athletic earthquake happens, Philadelphia imagines it is at the epicenter.  The Phillies' beat writers, sports anchors and bloggers step right in to cover the carnage and the aftermath as though their team is the only one that matters, and the only one that could possibly ever suffer in this way.

*Fifteen years ago, when the Florida Marlins were making their first surprising run at a World Series title, I saw a Philly newscast in which the anchor said people were referring to the Marlins as "Phillies South" because of the presence of Darren Daulton and Jim Eisenreich on the roster.  

Jim Eisenreich, for crying out loud.  

Around that same time, the next March perhaps, I saw a column, I think by Bill Conlin, lamenting the fact that the Blue Jays had been forced to cancel a split squad game with the Phillies on short notice due to some unforeseen circumstances.  The fist line of the column was "First Joe Carter, and now this." 

Because this is exactly like cancelling a Spring Training game.

But melodrama aside, the Phillies and their fans have every right be be disappointed this year.  The team kept together the core that had won five straight division titles, re-signing Jimmy Rollins and with discussions of keeping Cole Hamels in a Phillies uniPhorm Phor the Phoreseeable Phuture.  (Sorry, I'll stop that.)

They had recently added Hunter Pence to an already potent offense (they scored the second most runs in the NL in the second half of 2011, after getting Chase Utley back) and were expecting continued development from young outfielders Dominic Brown and John Mayberry.  They hoped that they could compensate for the loss of Ryan Howard, who tore his Achilles tendon in the last game of the 2011 season, with a decent platoon at first base and a remarkable pitching corps of Hamels, Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay and Vance Worley, who had gone 11-3 in 2011. 

And just to be sure, after they jettisoned Brad Lidge and Ryan Madson, they spent $50 million on Jonathan Papelbon, to help make sure all those quality starts wouldn't go for naught when the back of the bullpen faltered.

But it turned out that while Howard was perhaps not that hard to replace, he couldn't just be replaced with literally the worst player in the National League, not if you wanted the Phillies to contend.  You also couldn't stomach the losses of both Howard and Utley, whose presence essentially turned the 2011 Phillies season around, for half a year.  Not when Placido Polanco, John Mayberry and Yul Brynner Shane Victorino  were all losing between 50 and 150 OPS points from their 2011 performances.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

In fact, with a few noted exceptions, the Phillies' entire offense more or less went in the tank this year.  Research has been done to show that "protection" in a lineup is either overrated or perhaps very difficult to measure, and while that may be true of any one batter, the loss of the two best hitters in the lineup seemed to have a trickle down effect on the Phillies hitters.

In years past, during and even before their stretch of division titles, the Phils always managed to score a good number of runs, largely because they always took their walks.  Since 2003, during a nine-year stretch of winning seasons, they ranked lower than 5th in the NL in walks only once, and this in 2009, when they led the league in homers and runs and won the NL pennant, so they could afford to only be 7th in walks that year.   

But without Utley and Howard to light the way, the rest of the team sunk from 5th to 14th in walks, and without Victorino or Pence on the roster, they're likely to sink even further.  Well, probably not past the Astros. The absence of Howard and the death of whatever remained of Polanco's "bat" meant that the Phillies got next to nothing out of their corner infield spots this year.  They ranked 11th and 15th out of 16 NL teams in OPS at those respective positions.

Second base has been a hole too, despite ranking 6th in OPS in the NL, because this is an awful year for second basemen.  Phillie shortstops (mostly Rollins) and all three outfield spots rank in the bottom half of the NL in OPS.  The only bright spot in the lineup is the catcher, and clearly that's not going to do it.

The starting rotation, though sometimes injured or not as spectacular as in the past, has been good enough to complete, but the bullpen (other than Papelbon) has been sub-par, ranking 12th out of 16 NL teams in ERA and allowing 34% of inherited runners to score, very nearly the worst mark in baseball.  Papelbon may have 29 Saves and a 2.70 ERA, but he's saving games that don't mean anything, and being paid a fortune to do it.

The worst part about all of this is that it was all eminently preventable.  Ryan Howard's ankle didn't hurt itself on Opening Day or in the middle of spring training, forcing the Phillies to scramble to find someone.  It happened on October 7th, exactly as the Phillies' 2011 season ended.  General manager Ruben Amaro had six months to find a suitable replacement.

Instead he signed Jim Thome in November, even though Thome had not played a game at first base since 2007 and had not spent significant time there since 2005.  Then, three weeks later, he traded the proverbial Mr. ToBeNamedLater to the Rockies for Ty Wigginton, who in 2011 had somehow managed to hit just .242 despite playing half his games at Coors Field (including .216 with two homers in the second half).  Wigginton hadn't had a decent season with the bat since 2008 and, it could be argued, had never had a decent season with the glove, so Amaro's presentation of him as a potential answer to the missing Howard was a cloudy proposition, at best.

Meanwhile folks like Lew Ford and Dan Johnson and Steve Pearce and Brad Eldred could have been had for a song, and could reasonably have been expected to produce at least as much as Wigginton.  Granted, he hit over .300 in April, but has barely cracked the Mendoza Line since, and clearly does not belong in the lineup of a major league team anymore.

After watching Wigginton hit .213 between early May and the All-Star Break, manager Charlie Manuel probably thanked his lucky stars to have Howard back.  He's relegated Wigginton mostly to pinch hitting duty since then, and he's no better suited to that job: He's hit .156 in 45 at-bats.  Unfortunately, Howard is almost exactly as bad as Wiggy was - with an OPS just 20 points higher in roughly the same number of at-bats - as he tries to regain his form after missing the first half of the season.

The Phillies of 2012 have also suffered from a somewhat difficult schedule and particularly tough losses, at least in terms of which teams fate decided to allow to beat them.  The scheduling gods deemed that the 2012 Phillies should play against most of the AL East, generally regarded as the toughest division in baseball, though they also faced Minnesota and took two out of three from the woeful Twins.  But they lost two of three each to Baltimore, Boston, and Tampa and then got swept by the Blue Jays ("First Joe Carter...")

And the Phillies played particularly badly against their own division, losing key games against crucial opponents.  They have won only five of 12 games against the lowly Marlins, four of 12 against the sputtering Mets, and - most damning of all - only three of 12 against Atlanta.  If they had just managed to split the games they've played to date against the NL East they might at least be hovering around .500 and not have had to jettison Jim Thome, Joe Blanton, Pence and Victorino, and might have even picked up some third base help for the stretch.  Kevin Youkilis might be mashing for the Phightin's instead of the Pale Hose.

But it was not to be, and of course no amount of hoping by the Philly-centric Phans will help them surmount the 10-game deficit and hurdle four or five teams to make the playoffs.  And that, for a team that started the year with three Cy Young Awards (Halladay has two) and two former MVPs on its roster, with a $175 million payroll that is second only to the Yankees, is an extraordinary disappointment.

For once, Philadelphia actually has a legitimate gripe.

OK, two.

The Oakland A's Swept the Yankees, Still Won't Make Playoffs

I'm not sure whether I was more surprised to see that the Yankees suffered a 4-game sweep by the Oakland A's this weekend or that they still have the best record in baseball after four straight losses.

In case you weren't paying attention, the Yankees had been firing on all cylinders for most of the last two months.  Since the season's nadir on May 21st, when they lost badly (6-0) to the lowly Kansas City Royals and stood 5.5 games behind the Orioles (!) at 21-21, the Yankees had won nearly three out of every four games (36-13) coming into this four game series in the Oakland Mausoleum.  They had scored 5.3 runs per game in that span, owing largely to having hit 85 of their MLB-leading 150 home runs in those 49 games.  And the injured Brett Gardner never even took a swing in pinstripes. 

The team ERA was a sparkling 3.31 during that stretch, with Hiroki Kuroda and Ivan Nova picking up half a dozen Wins each and Phil Hughes and CC Sabathia (despite a 2-week stint on the DL) adding five more apiece.  All of that too, without Mariano Rivera, without Joba Chamberlain, and much of it without Andy Pettitte, who's been on the DL with a cracked fibula for most of the last month.

In that time, the Yankees had swept three game sets against the Indians, Blue Jays, Mets, Braves, Nationals and yes, even the Athletics, had taken three out of four from the Red Sox in Boston, and had lost more than two consecutive contests only once.  They could do nearly no wrong. 

Of course, none of that mattered once they got to Oakland.  

They started the long series on Thursday night with Freddy Garcia, who had been stellar since giving up two runs in mop-up duty in that May 21st loss to the Royals.  Since then, he was 4-0 with a 2.52 ERA, including wins against Boston and the LAnahfornia Angels in his previous two starts.

No matter.  Garcia surrendered nine hits, two walks and four runs, including a homer to Yoenis Cespedes (who maybe isn't such a waste of money after all) and left without finishing the sixth inning.  The Yankees could do little except slap a few singles off someone named A.J. Griffin, who allowed only two runs in six innings for his second major league win.  I'm beginning to think the Yankees should just steer clear of pitchers named "A.J." all together.  

Fortunately, rookie David Phelps showed some mettle by pitching 2.1 perfect innings of relief to keep them in the game.  Unfortunately the Yankees managed to get only one man on base the rest of the game - and that only briefly - as Nick Swisher hit a round tripper in the ninth to bring the Bombers within one, where the score would remain.

Friday's game was more tense and dramatic, but the net result was the same.  The Yankees had been 38-9 when they hit two or more homers in a game in 2012.  In this case, however, the two bombs were both solo shots, one by Robinson Cano and the other by Russell Martin, who's hitting just .180 despite the double digit jacks (Rob Deer, eat your heart out).

More important, perhaps, was that for the second game in a row, the Yankees did not draw a walk.  That marked only the 6th time all year in which the Yanks didn't get a single free pass, and the only time it's happened on consecutive days. 

The Yankees' other six hits were all singles, and never more than two happened in the same inning.  Still, after Martin hit that homer in the top of the 8th inning they were down only one run, thanks to another solid showing from Ivan Nova (6.2 IP, 2 ER). David Robertson did a little Houdini act, escaping the bottom of the inning without allowing any runs, despite a triple and a walk. 

Then Robby led off the ninth with a solo homer to tie the game at 2-2, and things were looking up, but the Yankee Retread Corps (Raul Ibanez, Andruw Jones and Eric Chavez) could not muster another hit, so Joe Girardi was forced to bring in his closer, Rafael Soriano, to try to maintain the tie and hope the Yankees could score in the tenth.

No, wait, Girardi brought in lefty Clay Rapada.  Well, with the A's only major lefty power threat coming up in Josh Reddick, I guess that made sense.  Rapada had been pretty terrible with four different teams before the Yankees signed him in the offseason and essentially decided not to let him face right handed pitching anymore (he had allowed a .359 batting average to righties in the majors before coming to New York), and he's generally been just what they wanted this year.  True to LOOGy form, he struck out Reddick on five pitches and then went to take a shower, another 10-minutes day's work in the books. 

That allowed Girardi to bring in Soriano to hold off the A's and maintain the- no, wait, Girardi instead brought in Cody Eppley, who admittedly has been pretty good this year as well, but who promptly allowed three straight singles to lose the game, 3-2.  Joe was apparently saving his closer for a Save situation that never happened, which is a crappy way to lose a game. 

Saturday's game was much better, as Phil Hughes gave up only two runs in nearly eight innings - his 7th Quality Start in his last nine outings - and, wait, he took the loss anyway?  Hughes allowed only two walks and four hits, but two of those hits were home runs - another by the definitely-not-a-waste-of-$36 million Yoenis Cespedes and one by Brandon Inge, whose 1-for-3 showing brought him right up to the Mendoza Line for the year (eat your heart out, Russell Martin).

The Yankee bats remained uncharacteristically silent once again, as they could do little more than slap singles, and not even many of those.  A leadoff singly by Derek Jeter in the first went for naught, as did base knocks by Teixeira and Chavez in the third.  Singles by Alex Rodriguez and Raul Ibanez - sandwiched around two groundouts - brought the Yankees' only run home in the 4th.

Curtis Granderson did show a little patience and draw a walk to lead off the 6th - the Yankees' first base on balls since the 4th inning against the Blue Jays on Wednesday - but A-Rod, Cano and Tex all failed to bring him home.

The Yankees would not get another hit until the top of the ninth, when Rodriguez singled off someone named Sean Doolittle, who did a lot by striking out Cano, Teixeira and Andruw Jones to end the game and pick up his first career Save.  He threw only two pitches that were not fastballs among his 21 offerings, but since the rest were 93-95 mph heaters from the port side, he evidently didn't feel much need for another pitch.

On Sunday, the Yankee bats finally showed a little life, this against their former teammate Bartolo Colon, as they smacked eight hits (including their only non-homer extra base hit of the four game set, when A-Rod hit a 2-run double off Colon in the third) and scored four runs in six innings and change.  But the A's bullpen stymied the Yanks, allowing five baserunners in the next five-plus innings, but none of them past second base.  
Soriano finally saw his first action of the series, this time to protect a one-run lead in the ninth.  Having not pitched since Tuesday, he may have been a little rusty but even if not, he still blew the Save.  Seth Smith smacked a hanging slider over the center field fence to tie the game at 4-4, and the two bullpens exchanged zeros for a few innings until the A's again had the pleasure of facing Cody Eppley with the game on the line in the 12th.  A single, a bunt to advance the runner and then Coco hit one crisply to right field to bring home the winning run and give the A's the sweep.

As heartbreaking as it is to get swept like this, especially to lose three of the four games in the 8th inning or later, it's not as though the Yankees were thoroughly schooled or severely beaten.  With a smidgeon of luck, they could have won any or all of those four games.  They just didn't.

And none of that is to say that the A's don't deserve credit for their wins or that the Yankees shouldn't be blamed for failing to come through in the clutch, or be patient at the plate, or whatever.  But it does mean that the Yankees and their fans shouldn't be deluded into thinking that the team is somehow horribly flawed, that this series uncovered some glaring weaknesses or that the sky is falling down on the Yankees.

Nor does this happy moment for the small market A's and their fans mean that they are in any way something other than also-rans in the American League playoff hunt.  Sure, the A's are 51-44, but they're also behind the Angels and the Rangers in their own division, both of which can much more readily afford to fill a gap at the trade deadline if needed than Oakland can.

Additionally, the fact that the A's have 48 of their remaining 67 games against teams with winning records means that the hardest part is yet to come.  While they have played well against such teams (33-25 to date) it's unlikely that they'll be able to continue that pace.

Their 16-12 record in one run games is very good, the result of some good luck and good relief pitching, and their 10-5 record in such contests since mid-June has been a big part of why they went from nine games under .500 to seven games over in just five weeks.  Additionally, their 7-2 record in extra innings and their major league best 11 walk-off wins are much of the reason for their apparent ability to contend this late into the season.  This kind of "skill" rarely propels a team through an entire season.

More likely they'll regress to the mean and start losing a few of these close contests.  An "offense" that carries three regulars hitting below the Mendoza line isn't likely to blow out many of its opponents, so they'll come back to the pack.  More important, perhaps, is that the A's would have to fight off not just the Angels but also best the Rays, the White Sox, the Orioles and even the Red Sox, who have a much better run differential than the A's despite their relative positions in the standings.

The Orioles, though they have the same record as Oakland at the moment, are only there because of extraordinary luck (they're 19-6 in one-run games, 32-38 otherwise) and are therefore not likely to stay there, all other things being equal.  Still, they already have 51 wins in the books, and money is not a problem for the O's.  A few astute trades could turn them into the team their record suggests they already are.

The Blue Jays might have had a shot but now without Jose Bautista for a while and missing essentially an entire pitching staff due to injuries, they're bound to fade.  That leaves six teams for two playoff spots, and I have a hard time imagining that Boston, LA or Chicago won't go and get what they need to make a push for that other spot, or that Oakland's hot streak will prove to be just that: A Streak.

And streaks always have an end.