From the outstanding Mariners’ blog, USS Mariner, a simple system for scoring how happy or sad your baseball team has been making you this season. The top five:
Rays: +155
Philadelphia: +154
Yankees: +145
Reds: +132
Twins: +127
And the bottom five:
Mets: -126
Nationals: -130
Mariners: -149
Pirates: -149
Cubs: -237
Get the whole list at USS Mariner. I don’t know if the system is truly accurate, but it definitely confirms what I would expect with the Rays, and Phils at the top, and the Cubs at the bottom. I’d love to do some historical Misery Indexing. Quickly, for fun, in the 1960 World Series, with the famous Mazeroski homer, the respective indexes (for the series only):
Yankees: -41
Pirates: 41
Obviously, any two teams playing each other will have zero sum Misery Indexes. But the huge gulf there I’d say pretty well captures a series with four tight wins and three wild blowouts.
Joe Posnanski wonders who has been more important to the Yankees: Derek Jeter, or Mariano Rivera:
The more you dig, the more you realize that this is kind of a Ginger and Mary Ann type thing. It really is, as writer Michael Schur (Ken Tremendous) says, a brain vs. heart thing. The brain makes a pretty clear case for the every-day shortstop who has come up to the plate more than 10,000 times since 1996, who has reached base approaching 4,000 times, who has fielded more than 5,000 ground balls and had more than 3,000 putouts and driven in more than 1,000 runs and scored more than 1,500. The sheer numbers of Jeter weigh on you and weigh on you — all those important hits and all those important runs and all those important plays, the brain says you have to go that way.
But then the heart leans toward those pressure-packed ninth innings, when the crowd is on its feet, when victory seems so precarious, when the New York tabloid headline writers are at the ready for disaster… and there’s Mo, the Sandman, a picture of calm, armed with his superhero pitch. There are so many splits that give you a sense of how dominant he has been, but perhaps none better than this: In those late & close moments, the league has hit .212/.263/.289 against Mariano Rivera. When the game is on the line, Rivera turns every player into Steve Jeltz.
The heart is duly impressed and smitten.
In a way, Joe is utterly correct here. Mariano Rivera pitches upwards of 90 innings every year, and nearly every one of them is highly leveraged. Jeter is there at shortstop for all of Rivera’s innings, and also there at shortstop for the innings of every other Yankee pitcher. When the game is close and late, there is Mo. When it’s close, far, late, early: there is Jeter. That said, seeing that Jeter has a 70.2 WAR and Rivera only a 36.1 doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story.
Joe thinks it’s only the heart that tells you that Rivera kills you. Well:
This is to say, that over the past 15 years, when Rivera has entered a game, the Yankee odds of victory rose measurably. When Jeter comes to the plate or fields a grounder, the Yankee odds also rose, only less so. I like WPA a lot as a stat. I don’t know how useful it is for predicting future performance, but it does seem to measure with serious efficacy how “significant” a player was.
Post-script: At the beginning of Joe’s post, he writes, “I think Ruth represents a Yankee mystique and overbearing nature that a lot of people cannot tolerate.” To which I retort: nonsense. Babe Ruth represents baseball and cigars and the Roaring Twenties and flappers and excess. Much of that, of course, is Yankee-dom, but Babe Ruth is bigger than the Yankees. Really.
I’ve been down on the Ruben Amaro era for a while, fearing, especially after the Cliff Lee trade, that Amaro had learned more from Ed Wade than from Pat Gillick. But now he’s traded for Roy Oswalt and a bunch of money in exchange for a middling starter (JA Happ) and two guys so far from the majors they might never make it (Anthony Gose, Jonathan Villar), and Amaro seems like a genius. When the rumors came in last night that the Phils were trading Singleton and Cosart–two of their best prospects–for Oswalt, I was ready to write the sequel to this bit of ancient history. Reports became clearer, and our GM has robbed Houston of a fine pitcher by giving up a few things that no one is ever going to miss. This is what is feels like to be on the other side of, for instance, the Bobby Abreu trade, and it has people talking not just about the trade, but about the state of the, ahem, phranchise.
And finally (I mean it this time), another word about the Phillies. Remember when everyone was saying how foolish they were for trading Cliff Lee last winter? Well, they traded Cliff Lee because they thought they could stock their farm system without seriously damaging their chances for another National League pennant.
Be honest … Did you think they were wrong at the time? I didn’t. I had the Phillies winning their division this year, and so did almost everybody else.
It didn’t quite work out that way. So they’ve adjusted, and instead of having a great chance of winning with Cliff Lee in 2010, they’ve got a great chance of winning with Roy Oswalt in 2010 …and in 2011.
Is there a smarter, more effective front office in the National League right now?
Here is where I give you my unedited opinion. The Phillies are a model franchise, and if you can’t appreciate what they are doing, then I think you’ll never appreciate anything the franchise does. 3 straight division titles. A World Series ring. The best pitcher in baseball begging to come to your team and signing a below market level deal. A stocked farm system. One of the best scouting departments out there, which consistently finds under the radar bargains and steals in the draft, and a Latin American program churning out solid prospects for $100-300K a pop, while other teams are spending huge 7 figure amounts and seeing less for their return. A packed ballpark, and a payroll near the top of baseball. 10 years ago, the Phillies had to beg overpriced, average free agents to come to the team. Now, players can’t wait to play here. This trade sets the Phillies up to make a big run at another division, another pennant, and another world series ring. And they kept their best prospects. This was an awesome trade.
Somehow, the Phillies I grew up with, who could rarely get a good thing going and were bound it screw it up when they did, are dead and gone. This Phillies team–this organization–is frigging awesome.
In 1974, Dock Ellis became the third Pittsburgh Pirate to throw a no-hitter. Above is the story, told by Dock hisself. Now here is the petition to have the MLB Network broadcast the game. Sign this petition.
Phuture Phillies is hosting a regular column written by Clearwater Threshers closer Michael Schwimer. His latest entry talks about evaluating performance using new technologies:
Sabermetrics is the first piece of baseballs statistical revolution, but most of its new stats (FIP, OPS, BsR etc) are simply a combination of old stats. My vision is to move one step closer by creating brand new stats based on the results that technology and innovative cameras can provide.
Schwimer is correct, largely, and what stats exist from new technology remain somewhat esoteric (what it means to be +20 in Dewan’s system is a mystery to me). What I’d like to see, as far as new stuff, is Distance Traveled. Using cameras and whatever else, calculate how far the fielder had to travel to field the ball, and how quickly he had to do it. The stat would have several pieces of information:
Starting location of fielder (point A)
End location (location the catch was made/grounder picked up) (point B)
Distance from point A to B (on a straight line)
Distance traveled (since it’s unlikely the fielder traveled in a straight path)
Time elapsed
With some bonus information about the fielder traveling, say, 30 feet, then camping in one spot and catching a popup. Basically, I want to see some numbers about how good a player’s jump is, how good their routes to the balls are, and how much their speed is helping them.
