Will it never stop?

I interrupt this paper writing spree to bring you this .  Seriously, will silly, easily refuted nonsense like this go on forever?  I’m too lazy/busy to look it up, but I’m almost certain that BP (among others) has done comparative studies on such things.

Okay, so relievers’ ERAs are lower than starters, as a rule.  There are obvious reasons for this.

1. Many of them enter games and allow current baserunners to score.  This goes on someone else’s ERA.  Often, that someone else is the starter, and starters also have to clean up their own messes.
2. Coming in for 1, 2, or 3 inning outings is much, much different than starting a game.  Both classes of pitchers go 100% all the time, but it manifests itself differently.  It’s why relievers come out blazing, starters like surgeons.
3. Even if a player is equally valuable on a per-inning basis (or even twice as valuable) as a reliever, top starters throw about three times as many innings.  Good relievers, in a season that could be classified in a range from “mostly healthy” to “completely healthy” over the course of a season, throw 60 to 80 innings, on very rare occasions hitting 100 innings a year.  Good starters, in the same range of health, will throw between 180 and 240.

Ugh.  I get really disappointed in journalism sometimes.  Or, more accurately, I find that a lot of journalists are mediocre-at-best, still others are fine writers/reporters but should keep their opinions/”strategery” to themselves, and some very rare breed are good writers and smart strategists.

Sheehan on the Series (EDIT)

Baseball Prospectus’s Joe Sheehan has posted his Prospectus Today article, and it’s a fine piece of journalism.  Read it here (not a subscription-only piece as of right now).

Basic premise:  The Phillies best chance in this series is to win when Cole Hamels starts and steal one or two other games.  Sheehan advocates using Hamels on short rest not just in game 4, but again in a potential game 7.  I’m with him wholeheartedly here – the Rays, as I said yesterday, are just the better baseball team, but Philly can maximize their chances of a Series win by getting Hamels on the mound as much as possible.

EDIT:  The comments over there are quite good so far, too (7 posted as of now).  BP has a quite intelligent reader base, and the discussion on their newly added comment threads is top notch.

~~~~~~

Canceled classes are the best.  Get well soon to my World Poly prof.

So I just sent a message to Wyatt which included the following:

“I think during the summer, I get numb to bad baseball commentary because I watch so much ball through media where that sort of chitchat is common. But then I just spent the last month and a half just reading box scores and reading BP and like-minded news sites, and I had forgotten how bad some commentary could be. I learned this while watching the White Sox/Twins just now, as they said silly things about how Jon Danks, since he was young, could probably throw about 3.8 million pitches tonight on 3 days rest. Harold Reynolds also talked about how he always liked hitting 9^th because “you could do a lot of things” because the 1 and 2 hitters were up next – apparently this gave you license to go willy nilly on the bases.”

[end quote from my message to Wyatt]

When you think about it, White Sox-Twins is just about the perfect storm for bad commentary.  Why?  Thanks for asking.  The Twins have been ridiculously successful this decade by being really, really good at drafting and development (I’m counting the Rule V pick of Johan Santana as a D and D success).  That’s basically the entirety of why they have been great.  Oh, and because Brian Sabean had a fever and the only prescription was more AJ Pierzynski, even at the cost of Francisco Liriano, Boof Bonser, and Joe Nathan.  However, the mainstream media likes to make them a smallball story.  Sure, they don’t hit very many home runs, I won’t dispute that, but they have had really, really good pitching and defense during their success.  Having Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau in the middle of the lineup recently has helped, too.  But the Twins have won in spite of their Nick Punto/Christian Guzman-pre-LASIK/Luis Rivas/Carlos Gomez/Jason Tyner-@DH-occasionally jones, not because of it.

On the other hand, the White Sox of recent vintage have hit a lot of home runs (actually, it seems like the White Sox of every vintage have hit a lot of home runs, but I’m speaking especially of their recent renaissance years).  In reality, they’ve been just about the typical Weaver Ball team – pitching, defense, and the three run home run.  This year has been less about defense (23rd in the Majors in defensive efficiency, the percentage of balls in play converted into outs), so it’s even more true that this Sox team plays a style of game that many oldtimey media types do not find aesthetically pleasing.  Therefore, they make team quality judgments about it.  Obviously, people who hit home runs are lazy and don’t understand “the way the game was meant to be played.”  Actually, a guy I live next to just came in and said something to the effect of “all the White Sox do is hit home runs.”  I actually had to convince him that the team that allowed 15 fewer runs than the Twins this season was actually pretty good at pitching.

All this to say…I mean, there is a lot of room for error tonight based on surfacy player/team value judgments.

If I get some time soon, I’d like to post on the guys who would win my awards, provided I got a vote.  As it is, I’ll have to settle for voting in the Internet Baseball Awards, I guess.

Deadline Wrap-up

A few housekeeping issues before I start dispensing my thoughts on today’s action. First, slap a big, fat “Lance Manly Approved” sticker on the day Wyatt had today, keeping you posted on all the rumors and movement. Second, check out our new Contact Us page.

Okay, on to the deals.

Early this morning, the White Sox swooped in and grabbed Ken Griffey, Jr. from the Reds for second baseman Danny Richar and right handed pitcher Nick Masset. Richar’s career minor league line is .288 avg/.339 obp/.440 slugging, not bad for a second baseman. The thing is, the Reds already have Brandon Phillips, who happens to be a better hitter than that, and an above average defender. If Richar hits closer to his 2008 minor league line of .262/.321/.427, he’s still a nice player, but doesn’t fit with the Reds. The White Sox didn’t have a need for him as long as they have Alexei Ramirez and Orlando Cabrera in the middle infield and Chris Getz waiting in the wings. Masset looks like a back of the rotation starter or a low-leverage middle reliever, nothing more.
So the White Sox got The (38 year old) Kid for a couple of expendable parts, right? Right, except I just don’t think he fits with their team very well. Jermaine Dye and Carlos Quentin are better players than Junior in 2008, so that eliminates the outfield corners. Jim Thome is entrenched at DH, and The Paul Konerko Disappearing Act is playing first base. Apparently Griffey only approved the trade after some sort of handshake agreement that he would be the everyday centerfielder. In 1997, that would have been awesome, in 2008, that’s a scary proposition. No one except for White Sox GM Ken Williams Junior himself seems to think he can be an everyday centerfielder (I even mentioned his, um, “adventurous” defense after our recent trip to a Reds game), and even if he can, where does that leave Nick Swisher? It’s going to be interesting to watch this play out.

The Marlins pried lefty Arthur Rhodes from the Mariners for Gaby Hernandez. Wyatt saw this one coming yesterday. Hernandez has struggled at AAA this year, but he’s still only 22, has a high strikeout rate, and until this year, has kept his home run rate pretty low. He looks like a very real pitching prospect. Rhodes has always been one of the best lefty relievers in the game, able to handle whole innings rather than just one lefty at a time. Over the past couple of years, however, he’s definitely declined, and this year has only 22 innings in 32 appearances, a pretty typical “specialist” sort of ratio. You don’t give up real prospects for guys like that.

The Yankees and Nationals made a minor league swap, the Yanks getting Jhonny Nunez and the Nats getting Alberto Gonzalez. Nothing too exciting there, move along.

Ah, now for the big one. The Red Sox sent Manny Ramirez and the remainder of his salary to the Dodgers and Craig Hansen and Brandon Moss to the Pirates; the Dodgers sent Andy LaRoche and Bryan Morris to the Pirates, and the Pirates sent Jason Bay to the Red Sox. This is the sort of deal everyone wins, in a way.
The Red Sox have to be happy that they moved their biggest headache, and while Bay is not quite the name that Manny is, he fits nicely into this Red Sox team – another lefty might have pushed them too far left, as they already have David Ortiz and JD Drew in the middle of the order. Plus, while Manny’s raw rate stats are slightly ahead of Bay’s (.299/.398/.529 vs. .282/.375/.519), Baseball Prospectus’s park-, league-, opponent-, and era-adjusted numbers give Bay the slight edge (.308/.400/.601 vs. .290/.395/.577). A lot of that is probably due to the Green Monster, which can turn some routine fly outs into hits and turn doubles into homers. Bay’s defensive translations look really ugly, but I don’t think you’ll many people in baseball who actually think Manny’s a better defender than Bay. Boston’s centerfielders – Coco Crisp and Jacoby Ellsbury – are both significanly better defenders than Nate McLouth, too. Once upon a time, Craig Hansen looked like Boston’s closer of the future, but now it’s hard to see why. He’s probably got a career as a serviceable middle reliever ahead of him. Moss really had no place in Boston, where he was a fifth outfielder. He can hit a little bit and defend an outfield corner pretty well, but the Sawx will be okay without him.

The Dodgers outfield before this trade was any three of Andruw Jones, Juan Pierre, Andre Ethier, and Matt Kemp. The trade makes it so that there is an obvious starting three: Ethier, Kemp, and Ramirez. You just can’t make a good argument for either of the other two to take much playing time from the lead three, so it will be interesting to see if Joe Torre makes the right call there. If they were going to continue to treat Andy LaRoche like he was expendable, better that they moved him before he lost all sorts of value, I suppose, but I just never understood why he didn’t have a place in that organization. Bryan Morris is still in class A, but also only 21, and the Dodgers are loaded with arms in a way few teams outside of maybe the Twins and Rays are.

The Pirates must be pleased with the deal, too. As I mentioned, I like LaRoche quite a bit; he looks like the sort of guy the Pirates can put at third for the next few years and just not worry about; he’ll be one of the Pirates four best position players the minute he puts on a uniform unless something goes terribly wrong. In the NL Central, the only third baseman clearly better than him is Aramis Ramirez; he might be in the same class as Troy Glaus and Edwin Encarnacion right now, in my opinion.
The other guys are a little less exciting; as I said, Hansen looks like a middle reliever, Morris is significantly far from the Bigs, and Moss is a stopgap corner outfield solution. However, all three of those guys can be a part of the next good Pirates team, and trading Bay gives them some payroll flexibility for next year.

Thus ends the 2008 non-waiver trade deadline; We’ll continue to cover any interesting player movement during August. Thanks for reading.

Odds, Ends, etc.

“Electric Feel” by MGMT is a big time kind of jam.  Wyatt gets some credit there, he was loving it before me.  It’s the best disco song that no one who lived through the disco era has ever heard.  Just thought you oughta know.

Wyatt and I caught the Sunday afternoon Mets/Reds game in the ‘Nati.  Thoughts from that:

• I have never, ever been to a hotter baseball game.  It was just blazing.
• Skyline Chili dogs are hard to beat.
• Your typical Reds fan will find any opportunity to boo Adam Dunn.  In the middle innings of Sunday’s game, a line drive fell in front of him for a single, and the fans booed heartily.  The next inning, he smashed a Mike Pelfry offering down the line to cheers.  Thankfully, some loudmouth behind us pointed out everyone’s hypocrisy.
• Your typical Reds fan will find any opportunity to cheer Ken Griffey, Jr.  Sure, Wyatt and I both loved him as much as anybody during the late 90s, but he’s not that player anymore.  He hasn’t even been that player since he came to the Reds.  Sure, he seems to be an appreciative, gregarious guy, but at this point, Dunn is the better player at the plate and in the field.  Griffey has first basemen’s speed and seems to take exceptionally adventurous routes to balls.  If a fan’s issue with Dunn is a low batting average, then they should take issue with Griffey, too; they’re both hitting under .250, and Dunn’s secondary skills are way ahead.
• Jose Reyes is really, really fast.
• David Wright is really, really good.  There’s nothing he can’t do.
• Edwin Encarnacion just seems like a guy who would end up in Dusty Baker’s doghouse all the time (spotty defense, doesn’t scream “scrappiness”), but he’s avoided it all season, to the benefit of the team.
• The Reds should have some really nice teams over the next few years, with a core of Jay Bruce, Joey Votto, Brandon Phillips, Encarnacion, Edison Volquez, and Jonny Cueto.  They can certainly compete for some playoff spots in the next 5 years or so if Walt Jocketty can support that.
• The next few years for the Mets will go in the opposite direction unless Omar Minaya can supplement their core with healthier (or just plain better) secondary players.

Also, it’s free preview week at Baseball Prospectus.  You should absolutely check that out for yourself.

Lastly, it’s probably time to start using the Wyatt Watch tag again.