A few baseball ideas
Posted: September 2nd, 2009 | Filed under: Baseball | 82 Comments »
So, I’m reading Why Does E=mc² (and why should we care?) which you will note is different from E=mc²: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation. I read that one too. It’s interesting, at least to me, that I have enjoyed both books immensely even though I still have no idea — NO IDEA — what E=mc² really means. I am so mathematically challenged. It’s ludicrous that I keep messing around with baseball statistics.
The reason I suppose I’m so fascinated by the formula — and this is something that the book I’m reading now does a marvelous job of explaining — is just how utterly counterintuitive Einstein’s thinking (and the various breakthroughs that led to Einstein’s thinking) really was. And still is. These bizarre concepts that time and space are not constant (and that they blend together), that there is no such thing as absolute motion, that mass and energy are interchangeable. It is literally beyond my understanding that if you could somehow travel at 99.999999999% of the speed of light, you could make it to Andromeda galaxy and back in 100 years — but 6 MILLION years would pass on earth while you were gone …
Like I say, I still don’t understand it. But some remarkable experiments back it up. Our world has changed dramatically and our understanding of the Universe entirely because of the way Einstein imagined the world. And even all these years later, it makes NO SENSE to the human mind (or at least to my human mind). It’s so completely contrary to how our minds have been trained to think and work, that it does not seem possible that scientists and mathematicians were smart enough, imaginative enough and (perhaps most of all) rebellious enough to find these brilliant concepts.
So … what the heck does that have to do with baseball? Well, nothing … except, yes, I continue to think about this whole idea of being unconventional in baseball. The other day, I wrote a column about Bill James with the core idea being that baseball teams can bury themselves by being what he calls “too professional.” A few people have wondered what he meant by “professional.” Brilliant Reader Stewart explains it this way: “Most people don’t really want to win at all costs. People will say that, but it doesn’t stand up. If you gave people two options, with A being to lose but look good doing it, and B being to win but have everyone laugh at you or criticize you for how you did it, people would SAY B, but really when given the option in everyday life will come a lot closer to A.”
I would take Stewart’s thought one step further. I DO think people would take Option B if they were GUARANTEED to win. But that’s an impossibility. There are no guarantees. And it seems to be that people are so afraid of Option C — losing AND having people laugh at you — that trumps everything. I think people throughout baseball would rather lose conventionally than risk losing unconventionally.
Like this: You’re a high school loser (or, wait, no, that was me). You could (A) not ask anyone to the prom and more or less go unnoticed, (B) ask out the most beautiful girl in school (the one you’ve had the crush on since the 5th grade) and maybe have her say yes and make you suddenly the coolest guy around or (C) ask the most beautiful girl in school and become the school punch line.
My guess — and my experience — is that C would scare most people enough that they would not even try B. They would stick with A and stay home and watch War Games again. Not that I know anything about this.
So it goes. I feel certain that if a team was absolutely guaranteed a pennant if they went to a four-man rotation, that team would go to to a four-man rotation. But unless Mr. Applegate comes along, you can’t get those guarantees and the heaping amount of abuse that would come down on any team that would fail with a four-man rotation* keeps everyone in line.
*Pitchers going down like bowling pins! Union grievances! Free agents refusing to even talk to you! Columnists and talk radio hosts calling for your head! Mass hysteria!
And that’s a real shame because it’s almost certain that if you got together a few bright baseball minds who were willing and eager to go against convention, to break these unwritten rules, they could probably reinvent the way baseball is played and win themselves some trophies along the way. Several brilliant readers reminded me of this wonderful piece by Malcolm Gladwell about how underdogs can win. It gets to the heart of things better than I am here.
But I guess what strikes me as I read about Einstein conceiving an entirely new universe is that if we could be so far off about something seemingly as fundamental as time and space and motion, how likely is it that teams are totally wrong about the most effective ways to win baseball games?
I mentioned Bill James again … you know that he said he could throw 10 wildly unconventional ideas at me right off the top of his head, but he only actually mentioned one: The off-the-wall idea that maybe some team (say the Pittsburgh Pirates) simply decides that they will stop scouting and acquiring anyone who throws 90-plus mph. Just stop. You throw 95? Good for you, we’re not interested.
I will repeat: Bill wasn’t saying a team should actually do this. He was saying that a team COULD do this, though. I mean, seriously, what would happen? Let’s run a little thought experiment: You’re running the Pirates. And let’s say this was true:
50% of all potential big league pitchers who throw 95 mph will be good big league pitchers.
2% of all potential big league pitchers who throw 83 mph will be good big league pitchers.
I’m sure those percentages are way skewed — no way that half the 95-mph throwers are good big league pitchers, and I have no way of knowing about the 2%. But you can fill in any number you want … the point is we say there are 100 potential pitchers who throw 95, and in this scenario 50 of them will be good pitchers. OK, well, you’re the Pittsburgh Pirates. How many of those 50 do you think you’re going to get? You are competing against 29 other teams that also want guys who can light up the radar gun. The vast majority of those 29 teams have more resources than you do, more scouts poking and prodding those prospects, more money to sign them, more clout to draw them in, more status among players and their families and their agents.
So — my guess? You’re not getting any of those 50. Zero. Oh, you might get some of the 95-mph throwers who WILL NOT be good big league pitchers. And, sure, there’s a chance you could luck into one. But it would take luck. Best bet: A big fat zero.
No, look at the other side. There is much larger pool of pitchers to pick from who top out at 83 mph, or 81 or whatever. Say there are 500 of those. By this formula, 2 percent of them could pitch effectively in the big leagues — that would be 10 pitchers (maybe you don’t believe ANY of them will be good … we’ll get to that in a second). Now, you’re the Pittsburgh Pirates — what are the chances you would get any of those 10?
Well, again, I’m guessing here: But my feeling is that if you have decided to just stop looking at the 95 mph guys and focused ALL YOUR ENERGIES on these slow-throwing guys, well, I think the chances are pretty good that you would get some, most or even all of those 10 pitchers. Why? Because, generally speaking, other teams are not investing much effort in scouting people who top out at 83. They are not scouting those players, they are not making much effort sign those players, they’re not spending draft picks on those players. They simply do not VALUE those players. if you focus all of your effort on it — and you believe in what you’re doing — you will probably figure out which of those slow-throwers has the command, quirkiness, control or movement necessary to get big leaguers out. And if you choose to value command and quirkiness and control and utterly devalue the radar gun, you should be able to corner that market.
Now, there would be people who would say this is a pointless market to corner — that 83 mph pitchers is a dry well. Maybe that’s true. But MAYBE it’s not true. Maybe you can find a cool study that suggests an 83-mph fastball down and away is just as effective a pitch as an 94-mph fastball down and away. Maybe you can point to a collection of ineffective pitchers who can throw really hard (Exhibit A: The Kansas City Royals bullpen) and conclude that speed isn’t all that compelling when it comes to getting out big league hitters. Maybe you would do the math and find that the best slow-throwers would make a better staff than one filled with bottom-third hard-throwers.
Maybe. Look, this is only one idea, and nobody (and especially not Bill) is saying it’s a great idea. But what the heck, it COULD work. And if over the last decade you are the Pirates, the Royals, the Nationals, the Reds, the Orioles … what has worked for you?
One idea. I brought up the other day this idea of building a team of great defenders with absolutely no concern whatsoever for their hitting. Seattle has tried something like this, and it has worked surprisingly well. The Mariners can’t hit a lick, but defensively they are 77-runs better than average according to the Dewan, and they are still above .500 despite scoring the fewest runs in the American League (and only San Diego has scored fewer runs in baseball). What if you took this idea up another notch, and tried to get 100 runs better than average. Or 150 runs better than average. What if you simply found great defensive players at every position? I don’t know. What?*
*Not to bring the Royals back into this … but apparently the Royals have gone on a full-fledged assault to try and win left fielder David DeJesus a Gold Glove. I mean, my friend and Royals TV announcer Ryan Lefebvre talks about this EVERY NIGHT now. They actually had a text poll asking Royals fans who is the best Royals outfielder this decade — DeJesus, Carlos Beltran, Jermaine Dye or Johnny Damon (and in one of the sadder moments in Royals fan history, DeJesus won). Royals PR guy Mike Swanson is sending out fliers to managers and coaches pushing David as a Gold Glove candidate. Dick Kaegel at MLB.com is writing about it.
I don’t know: This whole thing just makes me sad. I would say that David DeJesus is a good left fielder. He makes a lot of nice plays. And he doesn’t have an error, which is nice. Yes, the Dewan plus/minus has him at exactly 0 and ranks him the 15th best left fielder in baseball, making him as average as average can be. But his UZR is quite good — plus-11.8 run — and ranks him third in the league. From my own observation (not that my own observation means much), the UZR tells a fair story; he’s a good left fielder. And anyway, managers and coaches don’t look at all that Dewan and UZR stuff. And when you compare him to every other fielder on the worst-fielding team in baseball, yes, he looks positively Yaz-like out there.
But we all know that:
1. Left fielders almost never win Gold Gloves. Nor should they in the current system — left fielders are there almost exclusively because they aren’t as good defensively as the center fielder and can’t throw as well as the right fielder. The last American League left fielder to win a Gold Glove was Rickey Henderson in the strike year of 1981. That would be 1981. That would be when David DeJesus was 2.
2. He’s in left field because he wasn’t good enough to play center.
3. He’s unquestionably not even the best left fielder in the league — NOBODY would rank him ahead of Carl Crawford. Nobody. I mean NOBODY. Please. NOBODY could watch those two guys play and say “Oh yeah, DeJesus is better.” NOBODY. I mean it. And Carl Crawford has NEVER WON A GOLD GLOVE. OK? The defense rests. Court is adjourned. Thanks for coming.
So, how in the heck is he going to win a Gold Glove? If they gave out TEN American League Gold Gloves to outfielders, he wouldn’t get one. And he wouldn’t deserve one. I do appreciate that we’re in the dwindling days of a lost Kansas City season. And I like David DeJesus. And look, there’s no harm in trying to win a likable player an award. But this just seems about as productive as mowing your driveway. Focus all your energies and Greinke and the Cy Young — that’s the one thing that should happen and could bring some brightness to this dark season.
One idea. Hire Bill James. It’s interesting, several people made the point (a couple of people made it rather angrily in fact) that if Bill spends so much time thinking about how to be unconventional and beat the system then why does he work for the Boston Red Sox, a rich team that doesn’t need to beat the system. It’s interesting because Bill made the EXACT SAME point during the game we were watching. “In many ways,” he said, “I work for exactly the sort of team that doesn’t need me.”
Here’s why he works for the the Boston Red Sox: They hired him. They were smart enough to do that. They were smart enough to believe his voice could help make them better. It wasn’t like there were 30 teams banging on his door. Bill James has lived 40 miles from Kauffman Stadium since the park opened, and he probably was the most prominent Royals fan in America until Rush Limbaugh because Rush Limbaugh, and he was reinventing the game. And when things started to go bad for the Royals, they didn’t hire him to be GM or assistant GM or some whole new position. All these teams that NEEDED the ideas of Bill James and NEED them still … well they were afraid to get laughed at. And they stayed home on prom day.
One idea: Dump the five tools as a scouting device. Just dump them. Create a whole new way of scouting players. This was some of the thinking behind the famed 2002 Moneyball draft — which made up some very entertaining pages. You might remember the A’s drafted Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton, Ben Fritz, Jeremy Brown, Stephen Obenchain and Mark Teahen in the first round.
Now, so much was made of the A’s taking Jeremy Brown in the first round — you will remember him as the fat catcher from Alabama — that it has gone fairly unnoticed that A’s actually did quite sensationally with their picks. Nick Swisher has a career 114 OPS+ and, if you prefer more solid numbers you can say that this will be his fourth consecutive season with at least 22 homers, 80 walks, and probably 80 runs. Will he become the star he flashed in 2006 when he hit 35 homers, walked 97 times, drove in 95 runs and scored 100? Maybe not. But he was taken 16th overall and he’s the best every day player taken from that point until the end of the first round.
Blanton is a very solid pitcher … and I’ll just admit it, better than I thought. I expected him to get beat up in Philadelphia. He has a very solid 3.77 ERA, and he has been sensational since the end of May (7-3, 2.49 ERA, 94 Ks, 25 walks). True, Matt Cain was the very next pick … and Cain is a better pitcher. But Cain was a high school pitcher, and the A’s had determined that high school pitchers were too big a risk for them to take. I’ve always thought that was a bit misunderstood too: Billy Beane was not saying that high school pitchers would never become stars. What he was saying was that the risk of taking a high school pitcher was too great for a team that did not have the resources to gamble. What he was saying was that the A’s did not claim to have the supernatural powers to predict which high school pitcher (or player, for that matter) would be good four or five or six years into the future.
The next four high school players selected after Cain were Sergio Santos, John Mayberry (who did not sign), Greg Miller and Matt Whitney. And that’s the point.
Ben Fritz, Jeremy Brown and Stephen Obenchain did not pan out for various reasons. But Mark Teahen is a pretty good big league baseball player — the best selected in the final 15 picks of the first round. To get three every day players in the first round of a draft is remarkable. And it’s especially remarkable when the team doesn’t pick until the 16th overall pick.
Point is: The A’s really did have success by going against conventional wisdom on scouting. But another team could take it even deeper I think. Break some eggs. Destroy some traditions. Throw stuff against the wall. I think a few brilliant readers made the point very well: Even the stuff that people call “unconventional” in baseball is really tame stuff like hitting the pitcher eighth or using your closer for two innings or hitting away with a tie score in the ninth and a man on first. That stuff is really barely coloring outside the lines.
Why not try the four-man rotation again? It worked for a long, long time. Even long relievers pitch on three days rest all time? Why not try it?
Why not try a 10-man pitching staff? Give yourself an actual bench, give the manager a chance to go with real platoons, give yourself more of a chance to match up on the OFFENSIVE side rather than the DEFENSIVE side.
Why not hit your best hitters second and fourth because certain well-formed statistics show those are more important spots in the batting order than third? Why not dedicate your entire organization to being the best in all of baseball at one small thing like going first to third and second to home (like the Angels do) or throwing strikes (like the Twins do)?*
*Another ridiculous aside but: I love the fact that year-in, year-out the St. Louis Cardinals have excellent fielding pitchers.
Dewan Defensive runs saved by Cardinals pitchers
2004: 19
2005: 17
2006: 7
2007: 12
2008: 3
2009: 7
And runs saved by Baltimore pitchers over the same few years.
2004: minus-14
2005: minus-12
2006: 0
2007: minus-11
2008: minus-13
2009: 6
What does this actually mean? I have no idea. Maybe nothing. But I like it … I’m moved by the fact that it is important to the Cardinals that their pitchers field their position well and it hasn’t meant squat to the Orioles. The Cardinals have won a lot of games over those years.
None of these ideas that I’m mentioning are particularly unconventional. A team could play a four-man outfield or a five-man infield. A team could insist that every single one of their players switch-hit. A team could create a team where the shortstop would come into pitch when necessary and the pitcher would go to short, like in little league. A team could do all sorts of crazy and interesting things in an effort to beat the stacked odds.
And … I wish a team would. I fully appreciate that there has only been one Albert Einstein … and nobody running a baseball team would be confused for him. But just reading more about him and his universe-shaking formula reminds me once again: We really don’t know much about anything. The things that baseball people accept as certain truth almost certainly is NOT certain truth. You wish these small-market GMs who have been stuck in this spiral of losing for so long would take a chance, break away, try stuff that will shock the system.
Or as another genius Jerry Seinfeld once told George Castanza: “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.”
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The only success the Pirates have had in the last quarter century started with hiring Syd Thrift, who was kind of a different GM.
I suppose for the Royals hiring Hillman was SUPPOSED to be that kind of move. Of course, now that it hasn’t worked, they’ll go back to the list that they found Buddy Bell on.
As a long time fan of the Reds (I was 8 in 1990 when they last won the World Series…and therefore don’t remember it all that well)…I would LOVE to see them try something completely different and off the wall. The worst that can happen (in baseball terms) is that they lose a lot of games…so not much would be different!
I actually think the fact that it is Cincinnati (or Kansas City) would make this a difficult sell to the fans. Medium sized Midwestern cities aren’t exactly known for their willingness to do things in a non-conservative fashion. I wonder how well the fans would take an approach like this. That said, wins heal all wounds.
Anyway…another awesome post!
One more point about an all-defensive type team and I’ll shut up. Almost by definition a good defensive player has some speed, so by stocking up on this type of player you should expect to improve your overall team speed. This should equate to: beating out more grounders, stealing more bases, getting from first to third more often, running the bases, in general, more efficiently, and scoring more consistently, maybe not a lot more runs, but more consistently, game in – game out.
There are a lot of other great examples of this. Warren Buffett became the world’s 2nd richest person by going against pretty much everything taught in modern finance classes (efficient markets, diversification, etc).
A lot of “unconventional” thinking is just common sense to people outside the industry. I once worked in investment management and my boss gave me a study that basically said that in order to beat the S&P 500, you had to hold different stocks (or the same stocks but with different weights) than the S&P 500. That study would be common sense to most people, but it just floored my boss. (Yet another reason why most actively managed mutual funds are rip-offs)
I think being outside baseball’s inner circle for so long was actually a huge benefit for Bill James. If he’d have gone to work for a team early in his career, I think he’d be a lot more conventional now.
It’s also amazing to me how most of Einstein’s ideas came from elementary thought experiments. If you haven’t read Isaacson’s biography of Einstein, I highly recommend it.
Joe, if you enjoyed the biography of e=mc^2, you may also enjoy the biography of 0.
http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Biography-Dangerous-Charles-Seife/dp/0140296476/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251947274&sr=1-1
If you are a small market team that has trouble drawing in fans why not remove the bleachers and make the field obnoxiously huge (like 500 ft). If you pair that with going after a super fast great defensive team, you could actually change a player’s value in your stadium. You could possibly make someone like Prince Fielder relatively worthless, because he wouldn’t be able to stroll leisurely around the bases after hitting a pop fly ball that only goes 320 feet to right field.
It may make it less fun for fans outside your market, but if you started winning, you’d have an identity and be able to build a fan base around it.
I wouldn’t want all of baseball to do it, but it would sure be interesting if the Royals did it.
Re: #6. While I think this is a great idea, I’m not so sure that MLB as a whole would be fond of it. While Joe is right that there might well be tons of different ways to win baseball games, MLB as an entity has a vested interest in teams trying to win a certain way, the way that has proven to draw in fans. I don’t think they’d approve the plans of a stadium that was anywhere near that spacious.
Related, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to see an MLB game played on a field with no fences. It seems like it would be something they could do in a spring training/exhibition setting…
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Mark: Another thing that speed would add to is the amount of times that batters reach on errors.
Jason Giambi ROE (6601 AB): 50
Jose Reyes ROE (3353 AB): 48
I guess the thing you have to look for is inefficiencies in the market. What are the skills that help you win baseball games that aren’t as valued as some other things.
I agree that pitch speed could be one of those things. We seem awfully wedded to the radar gone in the modern game.
I have also thought about going for a whole bunch of middle relievers. Build a 12 man pitching staff, and set them up in teams of three, and have each team pitch three innings per night on a four man rotation. You throw in a two righties and a lefty, maybe one flame-thrower and one junk-baller, and mix it up every night. I don’t know if it would work or not. But you could have 12 guys throw 120 or so innings each, and have them throw 40-50 pitches per game.
Also, I don’t know that Bill James wasn’t necessary to the Red Sox success. When they were just out trying to be Yankees-lite fighting for every free agent, they were always second best. They had to be more focused and strategic to get to the top.
Hey! How did you know I chose A in high school and had a crush on that girl from the fifth grade through our senior year. How did you know?
I’ve often thought about things like this in football, as well. Let’s say you’re the Detroit Lions – coming off the first 0-16 season, historically bad franchise. Maybe you want to use the stack (3-3-5) as a base defense, bringing secondary personnel on blitzes more often. Why not?
Better yet, perhaps you just build your team to have the ultimate defense. You spend most of your money on the defensive side of the ball. On the other side, you run a trick-play offense. You run the option, the wildcat, the wishbone. You dare to lateral after a play crosses the line of scrimmage. You draft fast college QBs who all the other pro teams see as possible WRs, if anything at all. If they get hurt, it doesn’t matter, because you can just plug another unwanted college-style QB in your system. It’ll be easy to learn, and you’d be drawing from a largely unwanted pool of athletes. And your dominant defense could keep things close, no matter what.
Of course, in the NFL, the financial playing field is much more even, but that breeds even less innovation, because every team thinks they can win by following an already existing model.
That being said, as a long-suffering Pirate fan, the Bucs did sign a couple of Indian pitchers to contracts after they won a reality show. That’s certainly a different way of thinking. People laughed at the Bucs for that. But what’s the worst that could happen? They don’t pan out, like just about every other Pirate pitcher during the last 15 years? What if one somehow strikes it big? What if a nation of more than one billion turns its eyes to baseball…and all of India’s children want to play for the Pirates?
Poz, it’s funny that you use the Orioles as your example of a lousy defensive-pitcher team. Having watched clowns like Daniel Cabrera who were at best indifferent to (and at worst frightened of) a batted ball, I’m not at all surprised at those stats. I’m also unsurprised that they’ve improved this year. Several of the younger pitchers that they’ve brought in (particularly Brad Bergesen and Brian Bass, to my naked eyes) are fairly adept at fielding their position, and it’s practically been a marvel to watch. We take what we can get in Baltimore…
Tbe way I see it, the new wave of physics has a theory that the quickest way to travel to the stars many light years away is to bend and fold space. Rather than build a rocket ship and travel in a linear fashion. Currently, I believe that these are the “Bill James” of astro physicists making these claims. For example, if you were to take a piece of paper and place 2 dots on either side of the page, the quickest way to connect the dots is to fold the page in half, rather than drawing a line to each dot. Anyways, thats how I, an Economics major, understand astro physics. Any physicists out there that can explain this theory any better?
I’ve had the idea for a few years (I’m probably not the first*) of creating “hybrid” starters. Starting pitchers that throw 3 innings or 50 pitches–basically half of a normal start–every three or four days.
The Yankees, for instance, could have Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes combine for 6-8 IP twice a week. Both Joba and Hughes have proven more effective and efficient over shorter stretches. Just recently, the Yankees pulled Joba after 3 IP, but only because of concerns for his long term health.
Rich Harden, Max Scherzer, Chan Ho Park, and lots of other guys routinely run out of gas in the 5th or 6th inning. Why not pair a couple of these guys up, pull them after a set number of pitches, and let them alternate starts every 4th day so as not to get anyone throwing fits because they never qualify for the win.
This would be different than the traditional “bullpen” start in that your hybrid starters would be on a schedule. The 2nd guy into the game would have plenty of time to prepare in the pen because he’d almost always enter the game to start the 4th or 5th inning.
I saw the Dodgers do this several times last year with Hong Chi Kuo and Chan Ho Park. It worked rather well.
*I refreshed before I submitted my comment, and I’m not even the first on this thread, lol. Curtis (#10) beat me to the punch with a similar idea.
Ok, I’ve been reading this stuff you’re posting the past couple days on this subject and thinkin’ about it. I really think you’re onto something here, but I have a question…. What exactly is “professional looking” in baseball operations? Define this term. I’m failing to see how say… hiring Dayton Moore looks professional. Or say… Dayton Moore consistently signing low OBP players looks professional? That looks stupid in 2009 even if you don’t know much about sabremetrics, and stupid, isn’t what professionals do. I’m not meaning to bash Dayton Moore here, but he’s the perfect context for understanding the term “looking professional” rather than unconventional. Signing high OBP players isn’t unconventional.
Great post as always, Joe. It certainly is interesting to think about what might happen if some team decided to REALLY go outside-the-box and try some new things. As you said, the fear of failure is a huge obstacle to overcome.
One minor quibble regarding the A’s and the 2002 draft. While I love the *idea* of Moneyball, the argument that Oakland had a successful draft using an unconventional approach is questionable at best. First, the A’s had seven picks in the first 39, of which four played in the big leagues and three (Swisher, Blanton, and Teahen) became regulars. And it’s not like Teahen has turned into “the next Jason Giambi,” either.
Second, and more importantly, the two picks the A’s *shouldn’t* get much credit for are Swisher and Blanton, both of whom were highly regarded prior to the draft and were going to be taken right around where they ended up going even if Oakland hadn’t selected them. Baseball America’s rankings generally represent an industry consensus; they had Blanton and Swisher ranked #18 and #34, respectively. They also had McCurdy #45, Fritz #53, and Obenchain #170, so it’s not like no one had ever heard of these guys. Jeremy Brown, of course, retired at Age 27 with 11 big league plate appearances.
Again, I have all the respect for Billy Beane and what he was willing to try, but I don’t think you can call that draft a success.
Keep up the great work!
The real problem is with ownership. The life of a general manager is so short that general managers are like politicians – their goal is to remain being a general manager. This causes them to abandon reasonable thinking in many ways. Rome wasn’t built in a day though, and as baseball evolves, hopefully general managers on these failing teams will begin to see things in terms of efficiencies – that they have to come up with things no one’s thinking about.
I’m glad someone brought up the Indian pitchers that Pittsburgh signed – Dinesh Patel gave up 1 earned run in 6 and 2/3rds innings in rookie ball this season, walking none and striking out 4. I don’t know if that screams major league pitcher, but it suggests the kid’s got potential.
Brilliant, as always.
I think Bill James was hired by the Red Sox because they were smart enough to ask, and then they were smart enough to LISTEN to what he said once he started talking.
You have hit the nail right on the head here. What’s the point of continuing with the same old same old?
I remember early in the 2003 season when the bullpen was going up in flames and the Boston sports fan was crying about how the “bullpen by committee” didn’t work. I tried, and failed, to point out to some of them that a)that wasn’t exactly what James suggested and b)it didn’t matter what kind of strategy you tried, if the pitchers in question couldn’t get anyone out.
build your pitching staff backward.
you’ve got 6-7 relievers you’re going to use 4-5 times a week.
pay THEM the big money and pay the starters peanuts.
there are a ton of Paul Byrd-type guys (and worse) who can go 5 innings every 5th day.
in fact that’s ALL they’ll ever do.
if you’ve got a Halladay or Sabathia-type ace, by all means pay him.
but most teams don’t have that.
Great post, but you’d think someone who’s dedicated so many words to Tony Pena Jr and Joey Gathright might see why forming a team only considering defense might not be the best idea. If you could get the Fielding Bible awards team (last year, Pujols, Phillips, Beltre, Rollins, Crawford, Beltran, Gutierrez), obviously that would be a great team, but if you wanted to solely concentrate on defense you’d find the best defensive team consisting of guys who are relatively easy to acquire.
I believe it was Bill James who said “the best defense in the world won’t turn Shawn Boskie into Pedro Martinez.”
Joe,
Have you read Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony? For me, it did a really nice job of helping conceptualize E=mc^2.
@ Nick (#6): Don’t underestimate Prince Fielder’s speed. He did hit a inside-the-park homer at the Metrodome after lovable Lew Ford lost the ball in the roof on a 225 ft. pop up.
Your idea of the distant fences and creating a speedy team is very intriguing. Gap hitters would also profit from this type of field, and theoretically flyball pitchers as well. Opposing managers would probably have harder choices with their starting outfield, and I bet everyone else (including Poz) could think of what other types of players would benefit from this field.
@ Zach (#7): You never know. MLB did OK Minute Maid Park, with Tal’s Hill and a freakin’ flag pole in play. Also, while there are minimum dimensions for outfield fences (325 ft. down the lines and 400 ft. to CF*) for any park built or remodeled after 1958, there are no rules stating that there is a maximum limit of distance for a fence. Thus, Nick’s idea of 500 ft. fences would be legal (and would suppress homers more than Citi Field).
* I first learned of this rule from the Twins blog “Alright Hamilton!” (http://www.alright-hamilton.com/2009/05/yankee-stadium-dimensions-conspiracy-or.html). One of the writers, Michael Haas, actually emailed MLB asking why new Yankee Stadium was allowed to be built when it’s LF and RF lines (318 ft. and 314 ft. respectively) are in clear violation of this rule. Here was the response:
Dear Customer,
Thank you for your email, as we have received your inquiry and will respond as soon as possible.
We appreciate your patience as we work to ensure that each inquiry receives the detailed response that it deserves.
Thank you again for taking the time to write!
Regards,
Fan Feed Back Customer Support
Lastly, I apologize for the self-promotion, but if you are curious to see one of the wackiest baseball fields ever, I’d recommend checking out my rough MS Paint drawing of my high school’s “B” field: http://tinypic.com/r/2yxnfqb/3
One advantage to the Red Sox of hiring a guy like Bill James, despite the fact that they are the kind of team that doesn’t really need outside-the-box thinking, is that they thus deprive their competition (ie. teams that *may* need to think outside the box) from hiring him. It sorta like when big insurance companies keep hotshot plaintiff lawyers on retainer just so they won’t have to face the guy in court.
This reminds me of a book by, I think it was Tom House, where he suggested that it would be worthwhile for a team to invest in the development of knuckleballers.
I mean, really, every team has this surfeit of mediocre conventional pitchers who will never make it, so why not turn a few of them into knuckleballers. Tim Wakefield has a value above and beyond the innings he eats up and his rubber arm (although these are also valuable things). Imagine being able to put 2 or 3 guys like that on your MLB roster?
Joe, excellent article as always.
As far as understanding Einstein’s theories, I think it took something like 30,000 years for homo sapiens to figure out the wheel. This is 30,000 years of people watching round rocks and boulders rolling before they figured out there was some value to this.
As far as baseball it’s still amazes my the heard mentality the sport has by Fans/Media/Management.
I’m still amazed that teams sign pitchers to long term multi million dollars contracts based on win-loss record. Oliver Perez winning 15 games in 2007 had to have played a large part in his 36 million dollar deal, but in reality he was about the 90th best pitcher in baseball that year.
That would be like Stock brokers still using ticker-tape machines from the 1920’s.
I’m still amazed that Zach Grienke will probably not win the Cy Young even though he’s something like 1st or 2nd in 10 different pitching categories*(Joe P. previous article) all because he doesn’t have an overwhelming W-L record.
Bryz,
I couldn’t help myself…had to see this field for myself:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=spring%20lake%20park%20high%20school&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wl
Your memory of LF is a bit off, but you nailed RF. According to google earth, it’s actually about 380 down the LF line (where you hit the fence), 306 at the shortest point in left-center, 458 to where the wall intersects the tennis courts just to the right of dead-center, 480 to the deepest corner of RF and 270 down the RF line (that’s like the Pesky Pole corner on steroids).
What’s interesting about this to me is how you’d play it defensively. I’m thinking you’d put your best defensive OFer in left, then have someone (with a great arm) in deep right and have a floating OF that moves between short-RF and short-CF depending on the hitter.
Mckingford, excellent point about knuckleballers, I was thinking about that the other day.
throwing the knuckle ball does less damage on your arm/shoulder than a fastball. Pitchers can throw forever.
I think the big problem with knuckleballers is the macho aspect of sports.
Who is more highly regarded, Phil Niekro or Nolan Ryan? When in reality Niekro was the better pitcher.
That also goes back to the conformity in baseball and sports in general.
Joe,
Your light-speed point above is basically what the premise of the Planet of the Apes movie. 4 astronauts (1 died in flight) travel at the speed of light and return to Earth a few months later only to find that several thousand years have passed by.
I can’t help thinking of the run-and-shoot offense in football as the exception that proves the rule (about Joe’s professionalism argument, with which I concur entirely).
I was always partial to the R&S, *because* it was unconventional, and because I was (and, sigh, remain) a Lion fan – and their only modicum of success in my lifetime (or the lifetime of anyone born after Bobby Layne’s championship) was when they ran the R&S.
But the rap on the R&S is that you can’t win a Superbowl with it…Yes, you see, 3 teams* in the history of the NFL have used the R&S and not one of them made the Superbowl, so there you have it. Of course by this standard the Pro Set offense is a dismal failure because thousands of team-seasons have employed it without ever winning a Superbowl.
[*The Oilers, Lions and Falcons - all of whom were above average when they played R&S style football.]
And it met an inglorious end, for some bizarre reason, because the Houston Oilers blew a 35-3 halftime lead in the playoffs. Only in the NFL – the Holy Grail of conventionalism – could you look at a team giving up 35 second-half points and blame the offense for it.
But there you have it, and this explains why teams will always continue to lose conventionally and dare not risk winning unconventionally: when you try something different people will go to the greatest lengths imaginable (like, for instance finding fault with the offense when the defence surrenders 35 points in a half) to tear it down.
It seems like the San Diego Padres are in a perfect position to try out the idea of: absurdly massive field dimensions/stocking the team with defensive specialists.
For starters, they’re terrible, have a weak farm system, and are NOT going to win conventionally any time soon. And they have by FAR the biggest ballpark there is. What have they got to lose?
Imagine this:
A couple of guys playing hoops in the park, one on one.
Eric has the ball and takes a shot, but Freddy blocks it out of bounds. Eric, obviously, gets the ball back. But Freddy blocks his next shot out of bounds, too.
Actually, it doesn’t stop there. Seven more times in a row, Freddy blocks Eric’s shots out of bounds. Vicious blocks.
Finally, on his 10th shot, Eric makes an ugly layup.
Here’s my question: Who would you rather be? Who would most athletes rather be? Would most GMs rather be?
We all know how the guys watching this humiliating spectacle would rather be.
Me? I’d rather be Eric. Make it/take it, right? I’d take the point over looking good.
To expand on the all defense team idea, I have wanted to do this since seeing Gary Pettis cover half the planet for the Angels:
1. two outfielders, Pettis clones;
2. five infielders, Ozzie Smith clones, and;
3. a sinkerballer, submariner staff; highest GO/AO ratios to be found.
Fifth infielder would generally play behind second base, but could play in short right for the Williams shift and move right to close the 5-6 hole for right-handed hitters.
@ Geoff (#27): I’m impressed that someone went to Google Maps confirm my claim, and shamed that I didn’t think of that in the first place. I assumed that anyone/everyone that looked at my drawing would have just shook their head and wondered “no way…”
As you can tell from my drawing, I thought that the field faced more west than it actually does. With that short CF fence*, I crashed and was stuck, bent over at the waist, on the top of it because it was only about 3 1/2 ft. high one day during batting practice (lost track of where I was in the outfield and foolishly chased a ball that eventually cleared the fence by 15 ft.)
* By the way, the fence is removable so the football teams can use the field for practice. Makes the ground rock hard and perfect for bad hops.
The field was only used for 9th/10th grade teams and younger, so the coaches were never really serious about playing advantages of who had better arms or better range. Basically, we were taught to always go backwards first on a fly ball, and if you could field and/or hit, you got to pray that nothing was hit past you.
@ MT Head (#33): Under Bob Brenly, the Arizona Diamondbacks employed about 4 sidearm/submarine pitchers, so although I cannot prove it, it’s possible that the D-Backs were going for relievers with high GO/AO ratios, or just because they threw from a funky angle. After all, one guy was quoted as saying that since Brenly had so much difficulty hitting those types of pitchers, he decided to stock up on as many as he could.
Here’s the field compared to a rough sketch of the Metrodome’s fence: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=ibyxee&s=3
For those that need a reminder, Metrodome dimensions are LF: 343 ft, LCF: 385 ft, CF: 408 ft, RCF: 367 ft, RF: 327 ft.
I included the spot where I crashed into the fence that I mentioned in post #34.
(I’m a 20 year old college student that doesn’t leave for 4 more days. Forgive me for my boredom).
I think 09/09/09 just got overshadowed:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/26700.html
A number of people have advanced the idea of “paired” rotations (having the starting pitcher throw 3-4 innings, and having a paired reliever throw 3-4 innings). There was a nice discussion on this by Ken Funck on Baseball Prospectus:
http://baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=9228
It just seems silly that no one is trying this (when minor league pitchers are regularly doing this at the lowest levels).
For shame Joe! How can you not see that our beloved Royals are at this very moment doing exactly what you propose?
They’ve put together a team of below average defensive players, with below average speed, below average power, below average ability to get on base (far below average) and below average base running ability. They’ve combined them with pitchers who are below average strike throwers.
That HAS to be an attempt to win unconventionally.
This is a great post, Joe, and I agree with just about everything in it. There was one glaring exception though:
“Left fielders almost never win Gold Gloves. Nor should they in the current system — left fielders are there almost exclusively because they aren’t as good defensively as the center fielder and can’t throw as well as the right fielder.”
Sorry, but I don’t that logic doesn’t hold up. First basemen are there almost exclusively because they can’t play ANY defensive position as well as the other guys on the field, yet they get Gold Gloves each year. Hell, some of them failed miserably as left fielders, lost their job to Pete Incaviglia, moved to first base and were suddenly multi-Gold Glove winners (yes, I that’s Rafael Palmeiro). With the apparent exception of the Cardinals, pitchers are on the mound with almost no regard for whether or not they field their position well, yet they get Gold Gloves each year, too.
I just don’t see the logic behind completely ignoring corner outfielders in general and left fielders in particular when the current system provides annual fielding awards for the only positions on the field that are lower on the defensive spectrum than left field. Seems pretty silly.
“Sorry, but I don’t that logic doesn’t hold up.”
Damn, I sure do wish comments could be edited.
Yes. Yes. 1000 times Yes!
The A/B/C thing is completely true. I would rephrase as: A is a 15% chance of losing, but a 0% chance of looking stupid. B is a 50% chance of winning with a 20% chance of looking stupid.
This probably goes back to: humans avoid pain before they pursue pleasure. Losing $100 hurts more than winning $100 feels good.
So, really, doesn’t it all go back to: it’s more important to avoid getting eaten by a bear than it is to get that extra bushel of nuts?
If you went to Andromeda and back in 100 years, and 6 million years had passed on earth, would the Royals still be terrible?
I’ll say it again, you and Gregg Easterbrooke should get together on this, and write a book on innovations in sports. He has the same theory, 100% same, about NFL teams/coaches.
Studies are super clear that punting is stupid, but what NFL coach is going to go for it all the time? None. Why, it’s too risky. They’ll be ridiculed over and over.
Innovations: jump shots, the forward pass, trying to walk in baseball…..I’m sure there are plenty that could be written about (and you are my two favorite writers right now……). Do it!
I don’t know why the Royals have to hire Bill James specifically. Aren’t there dozens of talented sabermetricians out there who could make the Royals more “unconventional”? There are probably thousands who would love to be hired by an ML team.
As far as why the Red Sox need Bill James, they still have to compete with the Yankees. In their own little AL East world, they are like a Moneyball team. Less resources, lower payroll, (they are $85 million short of the Yankees in payroll), etc. Granted, they just have to worry about one team. But at least the Royals don’t have to beat out the Yankees every year to win a division title. For crying out loud, 87 or 88 wins might deliver a division in the central this year.
Thanks for recommending Why Does E=mc² (and why should we care?). I’ll look for it. I enjoyed E=mc²: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation (which I heard on audiobook). Have you read any Douglas Hofstadter? He often writes about what goes into creativity. He’s likened mental invention to twiddling knobs that represent variables. geniuses twiddle knobs that the rst of us don’t even realize are there–eg, once you stop assuming that time is a constant, the rest of relativity comes easy.
I’m convinced that all of the secrets of the Universe are contained within the mind of Gary Busey.
Follow the money. As any business grows larger the people involved are going to have less of an incentive to be unconventional.
An average MLB team is a $200m/year business. Not exactly Microsoft but a good-sized business. The people in decision-making positions are very well compensated, jobs in their field are exceptionally scarce, and they are subject to constant public scrutiny. That’s practically a formula for killing innovative thinking.
Have you noticed that many real innovations in sports have come from lower level amateur competition? The Wildcat, the run-and-shoot, the spread offense, basketball’s “Grinnell” offense….these were all developed at high schools or lower-level colleges where the financial stakes are comparatively low.
It’s easy for us to say “What the hell? Take some chances,” but the kind of person who has the stones to be unconventional when the stakes are truly high is very rare. Warren Buffett is certainly one good example. Rupert Murdoch, whatever you may think of him, is one. In sports Bill Belichick strikes me as one. There aren’t many.
Risk-taking breeds success and that success then kills risk-taking. That’s what I see in my business, anyway.
I scanned through the comments quickly, so sorry if someone already mentioned it, but while we’re using the Pirates as an example of bad teams that are too conventional, can we at least give them credit for signing cricket bowlers as pitchers?
That’s pretty novel, right?
The idea behind the words “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right” is false.
Actually, ‘your instinct’ is only one of many possible means of actions. You said it when you said we really don’t know anything. Essentially we are in the dark until something starts working. And if nothing is working, only hard work and no “black/white” opposite scenario is going to make anything better. Even when it concerns the Royals
Adam @48, it’s been a while between cricket bowlers, all right. The New York Club, a loosely organized group, brought in a cricket bowler for its match with the Knickerbocker Club, the first recognized baseball club, in 1846; this is usually considered the first game played under the ancestor of modern baseball rules. They sizzled the Knickerbockers 23-1 (the winner then was the first team to score 21 runs) because the bowler even underhand pitched faster than the Knicks could handle. Of course the pitcher could take a run-up then before throwing. Of course, there’s nothing to stop a pitcher now from taking a run-up.
It’s not the genius of Joe that keeps me coming back to his blog, it’s, well, this:
“My guess — and my experience — is that C would scare most people enough that they would not even try B. They would stick with A and stay home and watch War Games again.”
Something tells me Joe hasn’t watched War Games in a while. I watch it about once every year. His self-deprecating nerdiness is clearly an exaggeration, I think, but….it hits home to some of us.
I should’ve posted anonymously.
Mikey @47 is right. The first thing an innovative GM must do is actually get hired. What owner of a crappy team (like the Royals) would hire a guy who says he wants to field a terrible hitting, but great fielding, team? Or have a 10-man starting rotation? If he’s really, really open minded, he might consider this. If he’s not, which is sure to be the case, he will think that guy is crazy. He will hire a guy who has traditional (or even generally accepted sabermetrics-influenced) opinions on building a ball team because that’s what he understands. I don’t know if it’s about being embarrassed about trying something radical and failing. It’s probably more about owners not being as open minded as you are. Once a GM gets hired at a million or two a year, they’re not going to want to get fired by going against the very methods they were hired to implement. At the very least, they’ll justify their lack of success by saying, “It takes time to build a team.” That’s how they avoid getting fired.
You need a real visionary to go the “unconventional” route, and I’m afraid the Royals don’t have a visionary owner.
To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if Daniel Cabrera was almost single handedly responsible for the horrible +/- stats for the Orioles.
The current use of closers/relievers is a perfect example of your ABC phenomena.
Mr. James did a study once that showed if you brought in your best relief pitcher in the 6th inning of a tie game it increased your chances of winning from 50 to 60%, but if you brought the same pitcher in for the final three outs of a game you were winning by 3 runs, it increased your chances of winning from 98% to 99%.
But . . . in the first scenario, the manager’s choice means you still lose the game 40% of the time, whereas in the second scenario you only lose 1% of the time. No matter that in reality, the first scenario increased your chances of winning 10 times more than the second. That isn’t what the writers will talk about after the game if you go with #1. Instead you will be accused of managing a bullpen by committee. Everytime you lose using this strategy, it will be your fault.
So managers will never, ever stop using closers in the fashion they currently do.
While I will agree that Nick Swisher is a solid everyday player and take your word for it that he was the best player taken from 16 on (I don’t have the list in front of me) that’s hardly the story I remember from that part of the book. The most compelling thing I took from that draft is that Billy Beane was SURE that Nick Swisher wasn’t going to fall to him and openly mocked the Brewers for taking Prince Fielder, an overweight first baseman. Sometimes those “Baseball Men” maybe, sometimes know what they’re doing. I’ll also remind you that Nick Swisher was a resounding unmitigated disaster in Chicago and he was given away from Wilson Betimit and a pitcher named Marquez who isn’t even on the White Sox roster.
Nick Swisher is in the perfect situation with the Yankees. He can bat 8th on a good team that can live with him getting 4 hits over a 2 week span which he most certainly will at some point. He has solid power and yes he gets on base a lot. But if you’re looking for a guy to hit 3rd or 5th in a lineup you’re looking at a 75 win team.
For me the most important part of Billy Beane’s success with the A’s has little to do with his focus on On Base Percentage over batting average. Gene Michael was preaching this same thing for the last 25 years as have many people that follow baseball (ever remember hearing “a walk is as good as a hit” in Little League”). To me the most valuable lesson that I learned from Billy Beane as a willingness to trade players before their career went off a cliff. Conventional wisdom is “you win with veterans” and the biggest mistake most teams make is in overpaying for past performance. While it didn’t work out perfectly, who besides Beane would’ve been willing to trade Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson at their “peak”? While they may not have gotten a treasure in return (though Dan Haren was a stud), the more important thing is that they didn’t mortgage the future tyring to “hold on” to guys that were most likely never going to reach the heights they had already reached.
Payroll flexibility and the willingness to roll the dice with guys that haven’t yet reached their pinacle is, to me, what Moneyball was all about, not ignoring “Conventional Wisdom” about pitching and hitting. It’s not that defense and speed aren’t useful baseall assets, the point I took away is that Baseball was OVERPAYING for those skills relative to things like On Base Percentage. Now that the rest of baseball is on to this, it’s possible that speed and defense may have become undervalued (as your point about the Mariners points out).
Finally, in regards to your point about “professionalism” and doing things differently if you’re the pirates and Royals, I don’t think you need to blow up everything we know about baseball in order to succeed (see the TB Rays). The bottom line with KC and Pittsburgh is that they’ve done a TERRIBLE job of drafting and developing talent. I thought the Rays recent trade of Kazmir was a perfect example of how to manage a small market team like this. It’s not that Kazmir isn’t a good player but the Rays made the determination that his current market value (trade value) was higher than what the value to the Rays was to keep him (when you factor in his age, his health, his long term production and the money he is owed).
Running a solid baseball team is the same if you’re running the Yankees or the Pirates. Don’t overpay for assets (ie. Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright, Jason Kendall, et. al) and do a good job of identifying talent and projecting production. Grant it, the Yankees have a HUGE leg up on everyone else, no question about it. And the system is far from perfect but a team that is consistently bad and drafts in the top 10 for 5 or 6 years in a row has the opportunity to compete. Can they compete by buying Free Agents? Of course not, but they can compete by doing the same things required of everyone. Identifying talent, not overpaying for it, and being honest about the about the abilities and future of players on the current roster.
[Sorry! I mistakenly posted this in the wrong thread.]
As much as Joe loves to rip on JP Ricciardi, he DID try to experiment with a 4 man rotation a few years ago. It didn’t get too far primarily because the pitchers and their agents were very much against it and also the media (national media not just Toronto media) was very hostile to the idea by in large.
Seems like if you were going to implement a 4 man rotation you would need a bunch of scrubs without much leverage and an owner that didn’t care about media criticism.
I wonder if there’s been a study about how much a 4 man rotation would really help different teams, how much effectiveness loss could we epect, how many more injures how many wins on average would you get by starting your better pitchers more?
I think the large ballpark has more potential. It would be interesting in a ballpark like that, could pitchers relax more and “pitch in the pinch” as Mathewson said?
It would definitely change the game and give the right kind of team a huge home field advantage.
I was hoping SafeCo,PetCo and Comerica would start a trend of bigger ballpark construction because I like pitching and defense. I was hoping these teams would be successful to encourage more teams to build parks like this. So far it is a mixed bag but at least CitiField seems to be continuing the trend.
You would have to overpay for hitters to come to such a park as free agents but pitchers may give you a discount and I would argue that an ace free agent pitcher is almost always a better FA pickup than any hitter not named Pujols or Mauer.
‘
Also a few knuckleballers on a staff would be interesting. When I look at what Wakefield has done for the Red Sox I don’t know why a low budget franchise doesn’t specialize in developing knucklers.
I definitely think the Red Sox need James. He has helped them a lot to think outside the box and not just continually try and fail to beat the Evil Empire at its own game.
Many don’t realize that the difference in Payroll between the Yankees and the Red Sox is higher than the difference between the Red Sox and the Royals.
The Yankees are the ONLY big market team. everyone else is medium or small market.
I believe the 2006 Cardinals-Tigers WS proved the importance of good fielding pitchers.
Really a great article. It still amazes me that people in high ranking “sports analyst” jobs still claim that Moneyball is a joke, even though the A’s were competing pretty much every year for a 4 or 5 year stretch.
Also, it’s pretty amazing that in 2004 the Cardinals were 3.5 wins better than the royals due just to pitchers fielding.
This reminds me of William Blake’s quote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
Wash away your perception of what makes a great baseball player or even that time and space are constant and the possibilities are limitless.
CONSTANZA
Heck, sometimes a coach will be criticized even if the risk WORKS. I’m an LSU football fan and there is still criticism directed towards him for throwing a last second touchdown pass when he could have kicked a potential game tying 40 yard field goal. A) it wasn’t that risky as he could have still kicked the FG and B) the play worked.
Miles has this reputation as a crazy gambler because of this play, he has faked a few punts, and he once went for it on fourth down five times in one game — all on short yardage when he was blessed with a bruising fullback in Hester. The team converted all five and more importantly, beat Tebow by keeping him off the field. It was perfectly sensible, but now he’s somehow the Mad Hatter.
People will laugh at the high school loser, even if he gets the date to prom.
I think you could probably put together a case that there are more injuries because of having too much rest between starts. I think at the very least you could go back to having your 5th starter be a swingman to cover when there is no day off (as they used to do) and give a consistent 4 days rest. Keep to the same routine for your top 4 guys.
Oh, I forgot. Long relievers are slowly becoming a thing of the past as well.
I have to agree that the moneyball draft did not pan out whatsoever. The only players that made the big leagues for any part of time were highly regarded by the conventional teams too.
I’m now of the opinion that almost all of Beane’s success was due to Alderson’s drafts and the pre-free agency years of those players.
I would love to see you do a blog analyzing this.
@25 McKingford: The book you’re referring to is The Diamond Appraised, co-authored by Craig Wright and Tom House, I think in 1989. A really great book for its time, written in the form of “the analyst and the former player”, with the two men writing alternating sections, and I still look at from time to time. I think it’s the first book (or maybe just the first one I read) that argued, with lots 0f evidence, that pitchers with the most longevity were the ones whose arms were not over-used before the age of 25.
thank you, Joe – good one.
I understand that there are human beings involved here who do indeed have agendas that may or may not contribute to success – another one is the owner who wants the “shiny diamond” – the name player.
A couple of things come to mind (which could be explained by the above I guess): the first is that if I were an MLB GM, and I was contemplating signing someone for $100 million, I wouldn’t just ask a Bill James, I’d be going to old scouts, new scouts, soothsayers, the hotdog vendor, my aunt Tillie – everyone in sight. No, you can’t predict the future, but within reason, a misinformed signing seems preposterous.
The other is the, whatever it’s called – the auction fallacy or something. Which is that in open bidding, the team that most overvalues the player will sign the player. A player has a “real” value, but that team that is most wrong on the high side will get that player. The corollary then gets into Beane territory – your theoretical 500 pitchers cost you pennies. If you take this into the realm of “conventional valuing” vs “unconventional valuing”, then you have a motherload of choices. But you see, the conventional becomes entrenched – the A,B,C becomes “truth”, as opposed to “opinion” – it’s not even a reasoned decision.
I know you said all that already, but I think it bears repeating. And remember – Jack Dunn only signed a good lefthander, and that’s all the Red Sox bought. How many people were completely clueless in predicting history there?
Joe, I love your stuff and I hate to be a know-it-all (actually, I love to be a know-it-all) but by my calculations, if astronauts travelled at 99.99…% of the speed of light, did a quick U-turn and came right back, it’d take them a shade under 2.5 million years, not 100 years. M-31 (commonly known as the Andromeda Galaxy) is 2.5 million light years from the Earth. QED.
Boise State is the prototype of doing it differently and having success. Blue turf, odd ball extra point formations, trick plays to win bowl games..They understand this concept. Will a BASEBALL team, hidebound in the tradition that baseball brings, ever be that bold, probably not, but could the Royals at least come close…I hope so!
Joe, your point is all well and good, and well-taken, however if a team were to do some unconventional things such as that, I would be willing to bet that you’d be leading the charge of talking about what a joke of an organization that team was for doing “goofy” things.
Some of these ideas being kicked around could work better if you don’t go whole-hog on them.
Take the excellent defensive team concept– you don’t HAVE to have only all glove/non- hitters on that team, that would be dumb. There’s no need to only have a bunch of .180 hitters.
If you can find a couple players that are good hitters AND are amazing fielders, so much the better. Add in a couple more guys who are decent hitters/excellent glove men, and you would really only have a couple of all-glove types in the lineup. (And even those guys should be at least major league hitters, there’s no need for any Tony Pena-esque hitters on any team Pena’s not even that good of a fielder anyway.)
If the team is in the AL, then add a good DH. Try to get some decent bats for the bench, because you’d be pinch hitting a lot when you’re behind. Put that together, and you could have a decent offense to go with a fantastic defense.
Looking at the Dewan defensive leaderboards, here’s a random team of some very good fielders who don’t make much money that wouldn’t be an offensive disaster:
1b: Lyle Overbay (+11 runs this year)
2B: Jamie Carroll (+9 runs)
SS: Marco Scutaro (+20)
3B: Joe Crede (+17)
LF: Carl Crawford (+28)
CF: Franklin Gutierrez (+37)
RF: Ryan Church (+15)
Those players have saved their pitchers 137 runs so far this year.
(Dewan doesn’t list catcher +/-)
Add a good DH and a couple decent hitters for that team’s bench, and you wouldn’t be too bad offensively, and that defense would make the pitching look much better than it is.
A team in real life that targeted exceptional defensive players ought to be able to put together a similar squad. This seems to be pretty similar to what the Mariners did this year, and they’ve improved a bunch by doing it.
As for the only under 90-mph pitchers– there’s no need to just exclude every pitcher who throws over 90, that’s just pointless. But it’s certainly possible to ignore radar readings when it comes to evaluating pitchers, and just select pitchers who have had success in college or the minors, as well as good command and movement. If a guy has all that and throws 83, great. If he has all that and throws 93, that’s fine too– you shouldn’t exclude that guy from your pool in favor of a pitcher who has less command but throws SLOWER.
If you just ignored radar readings, you’d end up with more pitchers who threw under 90, but you’d probably still have a few in your system. Along with lots of sidearmers, knuckleballers and crafty lefties.
Ignoring the radar readings makes far more sense to me than using them to enforce a rule that excludes pitchers who throw too FAST.
If anybody is curious about crazy inovation, check out the A11 offense. It will blow your mind.
http://a11offense.com/
Fantastic post Joe! I would love to see a team try more unconventional things.
My suggestion is that when it comes to unconventional game ideas, such as a four man outfield or whatever, why not put it into practice in the minor leagues? It seems to me this is the perfect place to try all kinds of crazy ideas. For one, not as many people will be paying attention if you fail. It could also work to help raise atendance, come see the … play tonight as they try to win by (insert unconvetional idea here).
Surely the whole point of the minor leagues is to groom players for the bigs or to let them develop into players capable of playing in the bigs. Well why can’t this logic be applied to in game management? You try and adpt new ideas in the minors before getting your MLB team to do it.
Don’t Herzog’s running redbirds get any love here?
They were the ultimate turf team, a bunch of slick fielding switch hittter’s who ran like the wind and had only Jack the Ripper as a slugger.
#72 Interesting that you would bring up the 80’s Cards since BP just published an article today which referred to those teams:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=9493
Here’s a relevant excerpt:
“…but all the flash obscured the point: all three Cardinals pennant-winners led the league in on-base percentage. Even with their general lack of power, the Cards would have scored a reasonable number of runs without the frenetic basestealing, and to some degree achieved what they did in spite of it.”
[...] Jones and Rogers situations reminded me of a great piece Joe Posnanski wrote this week on how more sports teams should try being unconventional. It’s a topic I’ve pondered [...]
[...] Joe Posnanski is the best baseball writer working, so I’m an avid reader of his blog. He had a great post this week in which he contrasted the stunning — indeed, previously unimaginable — breakthroughs [...]
[...] maybe. But maybe not, says Bill James via Joe Posnanski (he who wrought the Disco [...]
This is why I root for Pat Venditte to have success more than any other young player in the game.
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Love the article, as usual. I have wondered much the same thing over the years but usually with the understanding that Goliath simply needs to be smart enough to adapt to the unconventional approach.
For example, the 12 year old girls’ opponents could press back or Goliath could deny insurgents the ability to decide where battles take place by sitting in a few places and leaving the rest of the area uncontested.
Of course that rarely happens because Goliath also sets the rules for Goliath as well as for Goliath’s opponents
Which is precisely why anyone in baseball not going with the book is viewed as a moron. Which in turn means he will need immediate success and sustainable success (because one year won’t get past the laughter or the disdain) and that doesn’t happen often.
Of course it doesn’t happen at all if people are too afraid to try.
Wish I could do italics for this one but the argument about dejesus not being a GG players is both correct and flawed. He isn’t the best LF in the AL (not close really) but the best LF should be the GG award winner, because it just seems right that each position get a winner and that there is no need to award 3 CF the GG just because they are better defenders. That would be true but moot because it should be one for one position for award.
Which I suppose is why I despise the DH so much as well.
First the typo (and I’m really tired from working so much at the first North American Discworld Convention that I may have missed some): “until Rush Limbaugh because Rush Limbaugh” because probably should be became.
Next, the public service announcement (from a guy teaching physics to game programmers): in Newtonian physics, the amount of energy a moving object has is equal to the mass of the object multiplied times the square of the velocity. Or e=m*v^2. The example I use is that even though a sword might weigh 100 times as much as a bullet, the speed of the sword squared is much less than 1% of the speed of a bullet squared. So the energy of a swung sword might bounce off a suit of armor, but the bullet will have much more energy and go right through it. Or in baseball terms, it is easier to homer off a fastball than a slower pitch because the fastball brings more energy to the collision between ball and bat. Seems a little counterintuitive? I mean, the ball is going faster AWAY from the fences, so why does it leave the bat faster towards the fences? All I can say is go to a pool table. Hit the cue gently towards the far cushion (a changeup pitch) and see how far the ball rebounds. Now hit it smartly; it goes much farther. There is physics about collisions that governs why, but that’s my easy example that should persuade you that a fastball is likely to go farther (if hit squarely) than a changeup. Of course, it’s probably harder to hit a fastball squarely because the batter has less time to react. But I digress.
In the equation e=m*c^2, Einstein postulated that the energy released from nuclear fission would be the mass of the material being destroyed times the speed of light squared. His genius in this equation was in concluding that the speed of light, being a universal limit (except in very strong gravity fields) could be substituted into Newton’s e=m*v^2. And IIRC, he was pretty close to correct. We should be grateful; some scientists thought the first nuclear bomb would have so much energy that it might destroy the whole planet. History shows that Einstein was right enough for jazz.
As for four man rotations, I think enough high level studies have been done that indicate that depending on the arm pitching and the mechanics of the pitch, pitchers have only so many pitches in them before parts of their arm start to wear out. Pitchers with great mechanics (e.g. Greg Maddux) generate little wear on their arm, and given the winter off that wear heals. Pitchers with lousy mechanics (e..g. Mark “The Bird” Fidrych) are going to generate a lot of damage, only so much of which can heal in the off season. I am sure that there are a number, possibly a large number, of pitchers who could handle a four many rotation. But I bet that the total number of pitches thrown over a career will be higher with the five man rotation for most pitchers even though they don’t have as many starts.
As for scouting nothing but slow pitchers, building a pitching staff involves creating contrasts. If a bullpen has nothing but lively arms all throwing around 92-96 mph, then the batters will get zoned into those kinds of pitches and start hitting them, unless they have very different kinds of movement on their pitches. A more effective bullpen has a mixture of hard and soft throwers, and maybe even some “novelty” throwers (side arms, knuckle balls, strange rhythms). The batters have to adjust more, and many batters cannot adjust that well.
What I *could* see is a team like the Pirates or Royals deciding that they need an edge (like the Red Sox hiring Bill James) and bring in Mike Marshall as the pitching coach. The guy has a PhD in kinesiology (how bodies work), he lasted 14 years in the majors with a hard on the arm novelty pitch (the screwball), and he won a Cy Young. He has some outlandish theories nobody is willing to trust. Well, I say trust him with many (most? all?) of your second tier pitchers, the guys who can’t beat 90 mph, the pitchers who will be willing to take a chance knowing that without something really good happening they probably won’t make it to the majors. Give Marshall a shot. Worst case, a bunch of non-prospects won’t make the majors. Best case, you develop a lot of pitchers.
[...] Stealing a little bit from Pos and one of his readers, Stuart, there are basically two ways organizations can approach a given situation. Option 1 is to do what is expected of you; what is the professional thing to do; what everyone else is doing. Win or lose, at least you won’t get laughed at. [...]
[...] Posnanski, who wrote a great piece towards the end of the 2009 baseball season. You can check it out here, but our favorite excerpt comes about halfway through: I mentioned Bill James again … you know [...]