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| My Hero for the Week |
GENERALLY, I don’t write that much about baseball on a day-to-day basis here on the blog just because there is so much losing going on that it’s hard to keep track. But now that we’re at the halfway point of the baseball season (and yes, I know that’s it not technically the halfway point, but it’s close enough so don’t get smart), I thought we would go back, revisit my preseason thoughts and further comment and pontificate:
• As pointed out by Friend of the Lose Jeff Sullivan (a long-suffering Mariners fan whose work I’m a big fan of), the team WAR of Chicago White Sox position players in July is 0.0 – and that’s the best month they’ve had all season. The Lose was quite skeptical of the offseason spending sprees by both the White Sox and the San Diego Padres, both of whom chased after every bright and shiny object available and wound up with veritable Islands of Misfit Toys for ballclubs. The White Sox offense has been so bad that, again using the WAR metric, their 5th-most valuable hitter so far is Jeff Samardzija – who’s a starting pitcher. In San Diego, meanwhile, almost everyone they acquired in the offseason – Matt Kemp, Will Middlebrooks, Wil Myers, James Shields – hasn’t been very good and now the Padres will look to be sellers at the trading deadline, but probably the only guy the Padres can actually move – Justin Upton – is the only guy on the whole team they might actually want to keep. Kemp, in particular, has been horrible, and even though the Dodgers paid $30 million to San Diego to have them take Kemp off their hands, it’s looking like money well-spent.
• Nothing cures your ailing club quite like the Phillies coming to town. They were in San Francisco this past weekend and got swept, outscored 27-7, and at no point in any of the three games did I think the Phillies had even the remotest chance of winning, not even when they were up three runs in the 6th on Saturday. And this is against a Giants team who’ve had so many injuries this year that guys keep showing on the roster that I’ve never heard of. The Phillies had so many balls bounce off fielder’s gloves today that I wondered why were even bothering to bring them with them on the field. The Phillies are now on a Houston Astros sort of pace for losses and desperately need upgrades at pretty much every position, but with Ruben Amaro still vastly overvaluing his own players and holding out for dumb trades like this, don’t hold your breath.
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| How have I not used this gif all season? |
• Speaking of the Astros, they’ve been one of the more bizarro teams I’ve ever seen in the first half of the season (and are probably personified best by the weird season of Luis Valbuena). The Astros have been wildly entertaining with their approach to the game, which is basically to swing from the heels and run like hell. The ’Stros, along with the Twins and the Rays, qualify as pleasant surprises in the first half of the season but I’m not really sold on any of those teams, and would attribute a fair amount of their success to the fact that, other than Real Ciudad Kansas, the American League kind of sucks. A good number of supposedly decent teams in the AL more or less took the first half of the season off, yet are still only a good week’s worth of games out of the playoff picture, which should make for an interesting last few months, since so few teams seem to be playing with any sort of consistency.
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| ... aaand the Rockies are terrible, in part because they do stuff like this |
• From the “lies, damn lies, and statistics” department: by advanced sabermetrics of baseball, both the Toronto Blue Jays and the Oakland Athletics should be murdering their opponents. Instead, the Jays are only a .500 club and the A’s have been mired in last place for most of the season. (And notice in that FanGraphs link where a lot of the mystery wins are going. The White Sox, with the worst lineup in baseball, have exceeded expectations by 7 wins in the first half of the season, making them by far the luckiest team in the majors.) I make fun of stat nerds on this blog quite a bit, even though I’m more like them than not. I find most of the “conventional wisdom” of sports to be tired, clichéd, and often not backed up by any empirical evidence. (Dear NFL, please stop punting so much.) But there is not one catch-all statistic you can cook up which will always work to explain why one team wins and another loses. Games are multifaceted and complex, composed of hundreds of pitches and hundreds of plays. The numbers are recordings of what happened. They are not necessarily predictors of what will happen next. (If the .106 hitting Kurt Nieuwenhuis can go yard thrice in a game, all bets are off.)
Now, some would make the argument that, with impressive numbers in the run differential and the Pythagenpat, the fact that the A’s and the Jays aren’t winning more may just come down to some bad luck. Baseball is a game where we split hairs, of course. The difference between a great team and a lousy one is more win a week over the course of a season. I would suggest instead that it’s less a case of bad luck and more a case of bad timing.
The anti-analytics crowd had a field day with the NHL this year when the stat-geek darlings, the L.A. Kings, missed the playoffs. The Kings had the best puck possession statistics in the NHL in 2015 in terms of time, and they took 733 shots more than their opponents, and they wound making tee times come April while two of the worst puck possession teams, the Vancouver Canucks and Calgary Flames, were playing one-another in the first round of the playoffs. The big bugaboo for the Kings in the 2014-15 season was extra time – the Kings were 1-7 in O.T. and 2-8 in shootouts. Even with all of the loser points they racked up (which kept them in the playoff race longer than a sub-.500 team deserved to be), giving away 15 possible points after three periods is probably what did them in – especially when you consider that the Calgary Flames, who nicked the Kings for the final playoff spot and who did quite a lot of things not particularly well on the ice (they were -847 in shots), did do one thing spectacularly well, which was handle “six attacker” situations at the end of games. The Flames were -1 for the season with a 6th attacker of their own (10 goals scored, 11 empty net goals allowed), and +11 for the season when opponents had 6th attackers (12 empty net goals scored, 1 allowed). Those 10 goals the Flames scored with 6 attackers translates to 10 games which went to OT that otherwise wouldn’t have, meaning 10 more points in the standings. Likewise, the 12 empty net goals scored likely sealed victories, meaning even more extra points in the standings. Those are all last-minute plays which cement results. And while being +10 in those situations is a little out of whack statistically, the fact is that, whereas the Flames were making plays at the end of the game to maximize points, the Kings were making plays to give points away. And in a sport where anywhere from 20-25% of the games are going into OT these days, if you suck in OT, you’re dead. Mistakes happen all the time in sports, but in a 3-2 league like the NHL, you can’t afford to make the last mistake.
Furthermore, so long as the NHL is going to keep settling games with cheap skills contests, it would behoove you to go out and find guys who are actually good in those situations. The Kings shot 5-for-35 in shootouts this past season, which is hideous. All of your ability carrying the puck into the zone in 5-a-side situations means nothing at that point. If it’s a skill required to be successful, then by god, go out and find someone who knows what the hell to do.
So let’s bring this idea back to baseball. The Jays and the A’s can both score runs in bunches. So why aren’t they winning games? Well, the obvious place to look would be on the mound, a perpetual source of migraines and malaise north of the border. And as is per usual, the Jays can’t pitch, so that makes things dicier than it should.
The A’s are even more curious, in that they have some good starters, if not excellent ones. But their bullpen has been terrible, and was particularly terrible at the start of the season when they dug themselves a hole they’re not likely to get out of. (More on that in a minute.) Baseball in the modern era is a game of specialists. Starters go six, you bring in set-up men and maybe LOOGYs or other specialists in the 7th and 8th, then you turn it over to your closer. Every team plays the game this way nowadays in the MLB. In the modern game, if your bullpen sucks, not much else really matters. You’re going to lose. Simple as that. You’re going to give away runs too late in the game to mount comebacks, you’re going to squander leads and turn wins into losses, and also go a long way towards killing the soul of your teammates in the process. (Look at any truly long stretch of bad baseball, and you’ll find a few blown saves mixed in there.) When it’s not going well – which happens a lot in baseball – the last thing you need to have happen is to have your bullpen constantly blowing games. As is the case in hockey, in baseball, you simply cannot afford to constantly make the last mistake.
To make matters worse, the A’s have a terrifyingly bad defense that gives away too many runs and too many extra bases. The end result is that a lot of good work done by the offense and starting staff is being undone by noodle arms in the bullpen and the Dr. Strangegloves in the field. In that light, I wouldn’t say the A’s are unlucky at all. In a dead ball, pitching-and-defense era, they are actually poorly equipped to compete.
And to be honest, I think they’ve been better than I expected, given that Billy Beane decided to hold a Smoke Damaged Furniture Sale in the offseason and unloaded the core of talent this team had a year ago. I’ve been ripping Billy Beane perpetually for the dumb Yoénis Céspedes trade at the deadline a year ago, after which the A’s went into a complete tailspin and went from being the best team in baseball to almost missing the playoffs. Apparently, he hasn’t learned from his mistakes. The returns for his off-season spree have been less than stellar, although not entirely awful. Marcus Semien certainly can hit, but he’s been terrible defensively at the shortstop position. Meanwhile, the swapping of 3Bs with the Jays – Josh Donaldson for Brett Lawrie – was one of those classically bad baseball trades where you deal a known commodity for someone who has the potential to be really good but you’re not quite sure he will be. Sure enough, Donaldson is playing at a near-MVP level yet again in Toronto, while Lawrie’s not produced at anywhere near that level. What made it even stupider was that Donaldson had four more years before he became a free agent, while Lawrie only has three. Giving up a superstar with such a team-controlled and friendly contract situation, when you’re a club without a lot of benjamins in the bank, strikes me as even more foolish. That trade struck me as one that was far too ego-driven, since apparently Donaldson and Beane had clashed. I’m sure Donaldson had something like this to say before he left:
And whereas you might suggest that the A’s have been somewhat unlucky this year, given that they seem to hit the ball extremely well and have not so much to show for it, and you might suspect that they are prime candidates for getting their shit together and figuring it out and turning their season around, this team as it’s constructed may not get that opportunity. The A’s are 8½ games behind the
• And while we’re still on the subject of the A’s here, a note about “by-the-book” thinking in baseball. At what point here does someone actually figure out that the “by the book” way of building a pitching staff is no longer working and start doing something else? I mean, if you’re bullpen sucks, what good does it do to keep going to that well?
Think about a team like the Cincinnati Reds, for example. The Reds are 39-47 and 15½ games out of first place, so they’re obviously going nowhere. The Reds also have Aroldis Chapman on their roster, who throws 104 mph and is one of the most terrifying closers in all of baseball. Chapman has 18 saves this season in 19 opportunities. But the key there is that he’s only had 19 opportunities to close in 86 games, because the Reds are terrible and lose a lot. But he’s your best pitcher, for godsake. What good is he if you don’t put him in the game? Hell, why wait until the 9th inning? Put him on the mound in the 6th with two on in a 1-run game.
The Lose wonders if, at some point, managers and pitching coaches start tinkering a little and trying to redevelop how they use bullpens. Certainly, the logic behind the development of bullpens into what they are now makes some sense. It’s well-documented that starters lose their effectiveness hugely which each pass they make through the lineup, so why not hit the opposition with a fresh live arm their third or fourth go-round? But if that ‘conventional wisdom’ isn’t working – and if you’re the Reds with Chapman or the Phillies with Papelbon, it clearly isn’t working because those guys aren’t getting into games at all – then why not try something else? More specifically, why send out bad relievers earlier in the game to render your closers moot?
One of the things you see in the playoffs from time to time are these strange sorts of hybrid relievers being developed on the fly who turn out to be just devastatingly effective. Many times, they are starters who do not fit into the short rotations you have in a playoff series. In 2012, Tim Lincecum was that way for the Giants – he would come into the game at any point from between the 4th and 7th innings and he just mowed people down. But also, it can simply be a case where you just want to get your best guy on the mound in any critical situation that arises. Alexei Ogando was the über reliever for the Rangers teams which made the World Series twice. He’d come in during the 7th or 6th or even the 5th inning and just wipe out the opposition. But I’ve yet to see anyone try to create a role such as this for an entire regular season. Certainly, there are concerns about overuse of such a guy during a season, but it seems to me that roles have become so clearly defined in baseball now that, if someone isn’t cutting it on a particular day, teams don’t really feel as if they have a Plan B. I’m not sure what a revisionist idea of a bullpen would exactly look like, but you’d think someone like the Oakland Moneyballs would consider it, given that they supposedly think differently over there on the other side of the Bay.
• So the case may be that, as pertaining to the A’s and the Jays, the statistics are lying. The same cannot be said in Seattle, where the statistics don’t lie at all. They are as bad as the numbers would indicate. There have been plenty of disappointments so far this season – the BoSox, Tribe, and the Fish have all grossly underachieved – but no team has been quite as truly, depressingly, agonizingly, miserably, terribly disheartening as the Mariners, who’ve taken the lofty expectations from pre-season and flushed them down the drain.
The Mariners won 87 games last season on the strength of their starting pitching and the best bullpen in baseball. They got something of a bad break in their rotation with injuries, rendering them with only about 1½ functioning starters at any given time. As for the bullpen, well, bullpens are notoriously fickle. Indeed, one of the more remarkable things about the Giants’ 3-in-5 World Series success has been that the core of their bullpen has been unchanged and continued to produce. In Seattle, the bullpen completely cratered early in the year and half the guys who made it up a season ago are no longer with the club.
But it’s the offense which is truly disgusting in Seattle. The Mariners rank near the bottom in runs scored, average, OBP, and RISP – and this comes even with the addition of Nelson Cruz, who’s been terrific. They hit quite a few home runs, but almost exclusively solo shots, since they never get anyone on base. They’ve already had 10 games where they struck out more than 13 times, which is a club record and we’re only halfway through the season.
Offense has been going to die in Seattle for years, of course, but the Mariners response has always been to constantly load up on these 1B/DH type of guys who have power but who don’t get on base, don’t make contact much, and also don’t really have a position. YOU CAN’T WIN THAT WAY! If anything, it should’ve been clear from watching the playoffs last year that, in this era of baseball, teams that don’t strike out much, and put the ball in play, are more likely to be successful. The M’s don’t even need to have a good offense to be successful. They won 87 games last year despite getting shut out 19 times. In that park, with their usual level of pitching, just being mediocre ought to do the trick.
The M’s came into this season with platoon situations set up at LF, RF, and SS, only to abandon all of those because five of those six guys didn’t hit, two got DFA’d and a third spent most of his time in Tacoma. In order to just get a decent lineup on the field, 30-somethings Seth Smith and Nelson Cruz have had to play far too many innings in the outfield, meaning they had to go trade for another DH/1B/OF type – Mark Trumbo, who is pretty much the prototypical power/no contact/can’t play anywhere in the field guy the Mariners have been fielding (and the fans hating) for a decade, and to get him they gave up a decent backup catcher, Wellington Castillo, they’d had on the roster for all of about a week, thus further burdening starting catcher Mike Zunino – and he’s already burdened enough, given that he’s hitting .161 and striking out 36.1% of his at-bats.
I’d have to think this is the end of the line for Jack Zduriencik as the GM. He’s been there six seasons now and the club is more than 100 games under .500 during his tenure, and they’ve never been able to hit their way out of a paper bag. Not only are they bad, but they’re boring. And no matter what he does, it seems to blow up in his face. The Mariners have become somewhat notorious for botching top draft choices, and also for being terrible at player development – there are a stunning number of former Mariner draftees floating around in baseball, some of them quite successful, but none of them having had any success before they left Seattle.
My rooting interest in baseball has always been divided. I was rooting for the Giants when I first got into baseball, but I like to watch Mariner games, having grown up with that team, but it was during the month of June, when they averaged 2.5 runs and went two weeks without scoring more than three runs in a game, that I finally gave up. I just couldn’t take it any more. The Giants have been, well, meh for the most part, lacking a functioning and healthy outfield and cursed with a mediocre starting rotation. But it’s an odd-numbered year. I’m sure next year will be fine. As for the Mariners, well, I’m sure next century will be fine. Maybe. Nah, probably not.
