Gardy Redux
Posted: June 27th, 2009 | Filed under: Baseball | 39 Comments »
Heading home after our week-long vacation in the stratosphere … and you know it’s really hard to hold your break. We still have a lot of driving to do — a LOT of driving. Have some Kansas City Royals thoughts (collapse, yikes) and a few other thoughts as well, will try to get to them when I get back home. In the meantime, a quick thought on Ron Gardenhire.
I have received enough emails from Twins fans to know that the overwhelming man-crush I have on Minnesota manager Ron Gardenhire is misplaced. I get it. He gives Nick Punto too many at-bats. He doesn’t give enough innings to Joe Nathan. He doesn’t respect on-base percentage enough. Whatever. I love the guy. I think he’s the best in the game.
And my feelings were only magnified when I got this link from Brilliant Reader Padre. That’s a column by Jim Souhan. It’s about the Twins-Cardinals game Friday night … ninth inning, Twins up two runs on St. Louis, Colby Rasmus hit a double. And Albert Pujols stepped up to the plate … the tying run.
This led to a wonderful confrontation between Nathan and Pujols — that’s what the excellent column is about and I would recommend you read it. But for our purposes, the point is that we even GOT a Joe Nathan vs. Albert Pujols confronation. You can bet some managers — cough-Hillman-cough — would have called for the walk there. And that leads to the money quote comes from Gardy, explaining why he did not even consider having Nathan walk Pujols:
“It’s dangerous, but that’s the way our game is supposed to be played,” Twins manager Ron Gardenhire said. “People didn’t come here to see us intentionally walk Albert Pujols. They came to see him hit, and our best pitcher pitch to him.“
OK, seriously, how can you not love that man?
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Speaking of love … I do have to make mention of my brother Tony and his wife Rebecca, proud new parents of Brody Layne. With just a little bit of creative spelling, the kid could have been named after 58,316 NFL passing yards — a little John Brodie, a little Bobby Layne. Oh well. I don’t think that had anything to do with the naming. Everyone is doing well, resting, crying, changing — everyone filling their roles. It’s hard to believe my little kid brother is a Dad, but he will be a great one. Feel free to head over to the blog (Tony’s down 218 pounds!) and offer your congratulations.
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I love him, but there are plenty that don’t.
Go Twins.
One of the rare good moves by Gardy but Souhan is a hack!
I like Gardy…but, maybe he shouldn’t have pitched to Albert today. First base open twice with Chris Duncan behind him…2 HR’s, 4 RBI.
As a Twins fan first and baseball fan second, I realize that there are worse managers than Gardy, so I have come to have a deep respect for the round genius. He makes mostly good decisions and consistently has good records.
That said, he makes mistakes. Maybe not as often as other managers do, but Gardy isn’t perfect either. But without mistakes from managers, where would bloggers be?
Very glad we have Gardy for as long as we do.
Big congratulations to your family and especially Tony for his astonishing health turnaround. Awesome.
Would Hillman have walked Pujols, or brought Farnsworth in to face him?
I like that he let Nathan pitch to him but him doing the same with Slowey cost them the game today. They also have a Nick Punto #2 with Delmon Young, who he keeps playing as well. At least Nick Punto can play decent defense. Delmon Young does nothing well. I don’t really like Gardy, but since most managers seem to make the same sort of decisions that he makes and he seems to be really good with the players, I don’t think he should be fired or anything.
I wish Gardy would give up on some of the small ball stuff. But mostly I wish the Pohalds would take some of the money they saved when they didn’t re-sign Hunter and traded Santana and shore up the bull-pen. An upgrade somewhere in the middle infield wouldn’t hurt, either.
I would love to see intentional walks banned somehow. We want to see good match-ups, not taking the dull way out. I know it is legal and sometimes even the wiser move, but I don’t think anyone is a real fan of seeing intentional walks.
I swear when I read Gardy’s quote this morning, I thought “Posnanski would be so proud.”
As far as Gardy’s flaws, seeing Matt Tolbert go 0 for 4 every single game really makes you long for the Punto days.
Off topic, but I came across this today (also, it helps to know that, in the English-speaking world, “Z” is pronounced “zed”).
“. . . the favourite chant of fans of Premier League side Fulham about their oft-inaccurate striker Bobby Zamora: ‘When the ball hits your head and you sit in row Z, that’s Zamora!’ “
First time commenter as they say and I absolutely love this blog. But, if you were a fan of the team, would you really want your manager managing for what the people want to see? How many times do you see fans boo regular baseball plays? I’ve seen pick off moves get booed loudly, so let’s get a manager that outlaws pickoffs because steals are more exciting! I prefer a manger, or general manager, who flies in the face of convention and DOESN’T do what the fans want. If I want to win.
I’m pretty sure Gardenhire’s comment about putting on a show for the fans came as an afterthought when the decision to pitch to Pujols proved successful.
Basking in the glory of a win, he likely decided to take a little side trip to the moral high ground. And why not? He’d earned it.
youre right nothing is more entertaining that a good duel. but i saw a phillies game recently where ryan howard comes from the hospital to pinch hit with runners on first and third and everybody in the stadium knows hes going to hit a home run or strike out. pitchers on deck (they would pitch hit, basically eric bruntlett who makes punto look good, or a catcher). they pitch to him instead of walk him and he hits a home run into the bullpen.
There are some out there that don’t like Gardy but I think they are just a vocal minority. A lot of people in and around baseball have called him the best, or one of the best, manager in the game – you, Leyland, Heyman, Ozzie, Andy McPhail(sp), etc. He does some stuff that on paper makes no sense (like keeping Gomez at #1 for a month despite him hitting like 4-60) but it makes baseball sense (the team went 23-4 during that slump and Gomez wasn’t emotionally ready for a demotion to the 9 spot). Or letting Redmond hit third when subbing for Mauer (something Leyland did too and Redmond hit like .350 in the three spot). He’s not perfect but he’s more willing then most managers to admit it and move on, I think.
Seriously, though, Bruce Chen?
Woo hoo, Brilliant Reader status! I can now die a happy man.
I’m a big fan of Gardy too, I can’t tell you how tired I am of the intentional walk (of course, Buddy Bell’s use of the intentional walk led me to this feeling). That being said, I noticed that you used a lyric from “Growing Up” by Bruce, but I’m pretty sure that the line goes “it’s really hard to hold your breath”, unless you were making a joke that it’s hard to hold the brake in your car since you’re on vacation, but even then, you spelled it break. Sorry to be nitpicky, I just wasn’t sure if I was missing a joke or not. Hope the drive back goes well. Go Royals!
Not to change the subject…But Billy Mays died today…..waiting for the Joe column on that. ShamWoW
Yes, just read that THE Billy Mays died earlier today at his home after being on a commercial US Airways flight yesterday that hit the runway quite hard on landing in Tampa. The plane’s tires blew and things started falling on passengers. Mays was quoted yesterday that something hit his head but that he wasn’t hurt and that he has a hard head….Interesting…Coincidence? RIP Billy Mays of McKees Rocks, PA.
Look, Gardy is Gritty. We get it.
You know who else is gritty? Brandon Phillips–who, if I remember correctly, gets mocked by you on occasion. He of the “People don’t come to the ballgame to see me take a walk.” Just because you’re doing something that fans want to see, doesn’t mean it’s a sound baseball strategy.
And you, Joe, of all people, should know that.
It’s easy to love Gardy’s balls to the wall approach when it’s for some team you don’t have a rooting interest in.
When it’s costing your favorite team wins, it wears thin quickly.
“I would love to see intentional walks banned somehow. We want to see good match-ups, not taking the dull way out. I know it is legal and sometimes even the wiser move, but I don’t think anyone is a real fan of seeing intentional walks.” (Post #7)
The problem with this is that then teams would just resort to the unintentional-intentional walk. Unless you want to ban those too, which then leaves the umpires to decide when a team is trying to pitch around someone and when the pitcher is just being wild.
Byrz, I suppose what I would really like (as post #7) is for managers to embrace the confrontatons instead of avoiding them. I would like them to view the IBB in all but the most extreme late-inning situations as a coward’s approach.
But I have suggested, rather unpopularly, that a four ball walk would be give two bases–the pitcher would have to groove one into the strike zone or put a man on second. This is a little like a co-ed league I played in: if a male was walked, the woman could choose to automatically walk, too. The result was that there were very few walks.
But mostly it is a question of attitude, not of the rules.
You could not love him if Chris Duncan were on deck hitting behind Pujols.
If we banned the intentional walk, Pujols would set the record for HBPs by the all-star break.
Can someone explanin how Grienke got charged with that second earned run? I know Lefebre got into it but are these official scorers just dumb or do they just like playing God?
Larouche hits a double that Guillen treats like a wet bar of soap and he advances to third on his ERROR. Ground out. Rain Delay. Ground out. Inning over.
If the runner was held to second base, he makes it to third on the groundout but then is stranded there on the second groundout for the third out of the inning.
I’d like to punch that official scorer in the ear. Grienke’s stats are just about the only thing I have left this summer.
Gotta agree with the commenters who disagree with Gardy’s tactics, or at least with his reasoning. I don’t want my team to hire a manager who caters to what the fans want to see. I want them to hire a manager who will win.
Let’s face it, a lot of fans don’t really understand certain aspects of the game. For instance, guys like Dunn, Burrell and Abreu have been dumped on throughout their careers by these fans for taking walks in key hitting situations. Taking Gardenhire’s mentality a step further, would you want a manager who tells those guys they’d damn well better swing away, because fans aren’t paying to watch them walk? Good luck selling that viewpoint when those guys stop producing because they’re forced to play outside their comfort zone.
As for Ian [#13], I think you’re showing a poor grasp of cause and effect. The Twins went 23-4 despite the fact that their leadoff hitter was giving the team nothing while sucking up a ton of plate appearances, not because they were getting practically zero from the guy. As for Carlos Gomez not being “emotionally ready” for a demotion to the 9-hole, I don’t know what you’re basing that on, but I wonder how much the added emotional maturity he’s gained has helped him en route to a sub-.300 OBP and sub-.350 SLG. That’s the kind of bat you do your best to hide, not the kind of offense you start a game with. Keeping him at leadoff is the antithesis of “making good baseball sense.” If not for his defense, the guy would have no business at all in the majors.
Redmond hits for a good average for a catcher, and hitting him third won’t hurt your team in short stretches, but I don’t know that you can argue that his success was due to Gardy hitting him in the third spot.
Basically, nothing against Gardenhire, but I think I’d be pretty peeved at a lot of what he does if he were managing my team.
This would not help to eliminate the IBB but I remember how some buddies and I treated the pitch count while playing some great whiffle ball games 30 years ago. Any strike of any kind would immediately erase the balls count, putting it back to zero. So, if the count was 2-0 and the batter hit a foul for instance, the count then became 0-1. This made for some excellent whiffle ball at bats while allowing the pitcher more opportunity to experiment with whatever he could make that whiffle ball do – and, it obviously drastically cut down on the boring whiffle ball walk to first base.
Paul: If your Grienke scenario above is correct, sounds like the Pittsburgh official scorer lost interest and blew it. Oh, and yes, some of them LOVE playing God.
A bit overrated, but his strike-happy style pf pitching had led the Twins to the best K/BB ratio in MLB.
And the 2nd most innings out of their starters.
Suffering through Dice-K has made me a huge fan of efficiency in starters.
Man, quoting Jim Souhan, the leader of the move Mauer to third brigade. And how good did that let’s pitch to Pujols strategy look on Saturday? Never fear, though, Gardy took the heat for that. Um, no. He threw Slowey under the bus (repeatedly!) on his Sunday morning radio show for giving Pujols something to hit. What?
And as for Punto, he’s not batting at all right now. Why? Because the fool has been sliding into first FOR YEARS and somehow the Twins manager has been unable to get this marginal player to quit making such a stupid play. Now, he’s hurt (got hurt, yep, sliding into first base) and not on the disabled list and the club has to play short. A warning and a couple of fines could have nipped that in the bud years ago. But, maybe he was too busy dreaming about whether we should pitch to Albert Pujols.
I actually disagree with Gardy. The fans come to the game to see their team win. And you do that by whatever strategy makes the most sense. It’s not about being macho. Walking Albert makes a lot of sense a lot of times. So walk him and find other ways to show how tough you are.
Otherwise, if we really are going to embrace the “fans came to see a show” mentality, let’s have the team steal bases every time, have the pitchers buzz opposing batters more often, and encourage your batters to only swing for the fences.
That rant aside- Joe, do you guys keep track of how many different state license plates you see? On any long road trip, we keep a running tally in the “captain’s log.” Our personal best is 45. We are of the opinion that Rhode Island is the Great White Whale of license tags. I think that Rhode Island may not even have a state plate- they just use Connecticuts.
I predict Joe is working on a 1,000-word post about the death of Fred Travalena.
Didn’t Bill James, in his Historical Baseball Abstract, explain how he ran a computer simulation a billion or so times in which about half of the time he walked Babe Ruth and the other half of the time he pitched to him?
If I remember correctly, he says “…the more successful strategy is pitching to him–and it’s not even close.”
“That rant aside- Joe, do you guys keep track of how many different state license plates you see? On any long road trip, we keep a running tally in the “captain’s log.” Our personal best is 45. We are of the opinion that Rhode Island is the Great White Whale of license tags. I think that Rhode Island may not even have a state plate- they just use Connecticuts.”
I see them every day in Massachusetts.
It’s rather cute, it has this little sailboat on it. Cause it’s the ocean state (even though Maine has more ocean).
Living in Massachusetts, I can tell you that Rhode Island INDEED has it’s own license plate, and you do well to steer well clear of them. Until a few years ago it was the only state NOT to require drivers to carry insurance and they still lead the nation in car related insurance fraud.
Just a thought on math and lineups. From a lot of Strat games using unusual lineups, and then from my knowledge of probability, the key to a good offense was to have at least five really good hitters in a row*. If they bat 1-5, it’s obviously best, but really, 5-9 works almost as well; you win up losing the first inning (probably) instead of the last inning. Obviously most of the time there will be outs made by several of the good hitters, and some of the time the stiffs will get on base, but statistically the key is to get them all together.
Get eight guys who pound lefties, and then you’ll never lose a game to a left handed starter. Not in the regular season. Not in the playoffs. Not once. My last team also went 12-0 in the playoffs, which isn’t easy in a play by mail league, where half the games are on the road. There were only six guys who pounded righties, but unlike MLB I traded for every one sides low value card I could get, knowing the players were good. That’s why Strat does not prepare one to GM; you have the advantage of hindsight in player evaluation. But I digress.
Now we come to Gardenhire. It *seems* like the Twins have those five good hitters. It *seems* like they were batting sequentially, although adding Harris into the mix at second probably isn’t helping. They won 23/27 games, and Gomez was not disrupting the value of the five block (for all you backgammon players out there) at leadoff. So in Gardenhire’s mind, I’m sure there were three issues. #1, keep the good hitters in a row, which he did. #2, show confidence in the slumping hitter, which tells everyone else on the team that he has confidence in them. #3, if Gomez breaks the slump and becomes a good #1, then the block becomes six long, and that’s the way to have a REALLY good offense.
Like most of us sabermetrician types, I don’t value intangibles as much as do most baseball teams. I mean, I’d happily play a team with a lots of walks and a higher OBP than SP even if they had a low batting average. But I’ve heard Tommy Lasorda speak, and I was completely ready to discount him for too much small ball, too many innings for his hot starters, and so forth. I am *not* a Lasorda fan. But in person he was mesmerizing. I believe that there are managers out there who get players to play better even though I don’t know how to measure it. And I believe that Gardenhire’s tactics during the hot streak were motivationally successful, because after all the Twins went 23-4 without anything from their leadoff hitter. Similarly, I think a lot of the Dodgers’ excellent play without Manny was based on letting Pierre not just play himself back into the lineup (when aside from guaranteed contracts Xavier Paul clearly had won the #4 outfield slot in spring training) but become the leadoff hitter. Do I think Matt Kemp (.312, 10 homers) should be batting 8th? Hell no. But would Kemp do so well batting anywhere else? I’m not sure. There’s perhaps something about knowing they’re likely to walk you to face the pitcher which gives Kemp that needed extra bit of plate discipline to make him extremely valuable instead of a .270 hitter higher in the lineup.
The keys to judging a manager are: is the team winning, does the team play hard, is the team cohesive, is the team meeting expectations. Looking at the Twins’ payroll, I’d have to say that Gardenhire is a successful manager.
Richard: You must have caught Tommy Lasorda on one of his unusually good days. In my mind, those were few and far between. To think of Tommy as “mesmerizing” is an entirely new concept that I am unable to get my arms around…Like Tommy before he decided to drink those diet shakes for part of a year and dropped about 40-50 pounds. Yes, I come to the subject of Lasorda with some major biases. In my dictionary, next to the word “blowhard” there is a picture of Lasorda. When Tommy dies and an autopsy is done the coroner will not find blue blood but he’ll find an awful lot of brown….
“Living in Massachusetts, I can tell you that Rhode Island INDEED has it’s own license plate, and you do well to steer well clear of them. Until a few years ago it was the only state NOT to require drivers to carry insurance and they still lead the nation in car related insurance fraud.”
Not to mention they actually succeeded to drive even more terrible than even my fellow MA drivers.
Shelby #32 –
The Bill James simulation you speak of was done with Barry Bonds at his peak OBP (.609 in 2004) to minimize the differential between his “normal” OBP and the 1.000 OBP he would have if he were walked every PA.
He also filled the rest of the lineup with fictional Mario Mendozas to maximize the variance between Bonds and the rest of the lineup (i.e., if we know that everyone else in the lineup will make out 80%+ of the time, Bonds’ always being on base should have less effect than if he were followed by Albert Pujols equivalents).
In spite of these parameters, the conculsion he reached after repeated simulations (in the millions, IIRC) was exactly as you state it: pitching to him would always be better than walking him 100% of the time, and, no, it was not even close.
I don’t know enough about Gardenhire and the Twins to comment on his other moves, but he is absolutely correct in his estimation that pitching to Pujols is actually the BETTER strategy, regardless of individual outcomes.
I don’t know Gardy’s role in this, but I am consistently amazed by the ability of the constantly-underrated Twins’ system to produce incredible players to fill any hole at any point. They seem to always have somebody to do what needs to be done, whether it be on or off the field. Hell,they even groom all their coaches, managers, and GMs on the inside.