Thanks for the patience if you're back here reading, I realize it's been a little while. I had meant to write another "offseason" post for the Giants, but the truth is, that's not really my expertise. There are people better equipped and better connected. My Coles' Notes version:
Need: outfielder or two, starting pitcher or two. Hope: resign Tim Lincecum (it's a personal attachment, and I don't love the idea of seeing him on another team, unless it's the Blue Jays), bring in a big outfielder, and maybe a mid-tier starting pitcher. Keep the even year magic going. OK, on to the next. I was reading an article from Rob Neyer about the possiblity of a 3-man rotation, which he was reading about on Bill James' site. (by the way, maybe I'll come up with a links column shortly. Now that it's offseason, a weekly one is probably not necessary, but biweekly or monthly might work). In it, they suggest needing at least a 12-man pitching staff, possibly 13 (shudder), and how that might break down. I wanted to look at it a little bit methodically and try to keep it to at most an 11-man pitching staff. How did I see this happening? First of all, limit the starters to 18 batters faced. As Mike Petriello reiterates, the third time through the order penalty is very real. He talks about revolving relief pitchers with minor league options who can come up and down, keeping the bullpen fresh, and limiting most starters except possible aces to 15-18 batters faced. But if you want to make a 3-man rotation work, keep it to a straight 18 batters faced (at most - if your pitcher is struggling, cut it to 15 or something). From there, I did a bit of basic research, and found that the league WHIP this year was just a hair under 1.30, and that the average pitching staff faced 6121 batters this year. (This makes rough sense - if you play 162 9-inning games allowing 1.3 base runners per inning, you get to 6270 batters faced, but the average pitching staff went a little less than 9 innings this year). This equates to about 39 batters faced per game, which again makes reasonable sense - 27 outs plus 12 baserunners and you have a pretty average pitching staff. So I set the baseline at 6270, because if you can get there, then you can cover most outcomes. Only 3 teams faced more batters than that this year, and 2 of them were the Phillies and Rockies, who allowed 4.99 and 5.21 runs per game, respectively. I thought then, if you're going to have an 11-man pitching staff, with 3 starters, then maybe try to have 3 short relievers or specialists, leaving 5 "long-relief" pitchers. After a bit of experimentation, the following model actually works remarkably well. Three starting pitchers - each pitch every 3rd game for the first 18 batters. This would probably be 65-75 pitches Five long relievers - each pitch every 3rd game, that is, in 2 of 3 games, 2 of them will pitch, and in the third, just one of them will. By the way, if you wanted to really make this work, the long men don't necessarily have to pitch right after the starting pitcher if it's a difficult situation, or at least if you're using two of them, they don't necessarily have to pitch consecutively. Three short relievers - each pitch 4 times every 9 games, in roughly this pattern - 6 batters faced, day off, 3 batters faced, day off, 3 batters faced, day off, 6 batters faced, two days off. On the game where only one long reliever goes, you can get two 6-batter outings out of this group, and on the games where two long relievers pitch, you can get one 3-batter outing out of this group (and here it could even be between the two long relievers, if needed). If you had one or two of the long relievers as lefties, and at least one of the short relievers, you would have a pretty versatile staff. So you'd see every configuration every 45 games (if you kept to it strictly, which might not happen due to some changes). In a 45-game stretch, you'd see: Each starting pitcher starts 15 games, faces 270 batters (about 63 innings each). Each long reliever appears in 15 games, faces 135 batters (about 31 innings each). Each short reliever appears in 20 games, faces 90 batters (about 21 innings each). By the way, for a starting pitcher in a 5-man rotation, 63 innings in a 45 game stretch would be 9 starts of 7 innings each. Those innings totals are based on a 1.3 WHIP. Your mileage may vary. How does this look, innings wise for a season? Each starting pitcher would get 54 starts, and at a 1.30 whip, pitches about 226 innings (about 46% of total). Each long reliever would pitch in 54 games, and at a 1.30 whip, pitches about 113 innings (about 45% of total). Each short reliever appears in 72 games, pitches about 75 innings (the remaining 9-10% of the innings). Is it radical? Kind of, though in the playoffs stranger things are done already. Could it work? Maybe, but probably not right now, people would need to buy in slowly. Would I try it if I had that kind of power? Sure, why not? You'd get good performance out of your starters facing just 18 batters. You'd probably get the most out of your "long relievers", guys who would likely be number 4 or 5 (or 6) starters in your average staffs by just getting them through the order once. And you'd have your relief aces at the back end. MLB teams: your move!
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The Blue Jays are in a position that they haven't found themselves in in quite some time. The last time they were trying to return to the playoffs was after the 1993 season. Now, to be fair to them, they didn't definitely fail that year -- technically nobody made the playoffs, because there were no playoffs. But besides the fact that they were under .500 when the season ended, they also failed to make the playoffs in every season from 1995-2014, a 20-year span. It's been noted (but might be worth a reminder) that the Blue Jays actually had the highest payroll in the league in both 1992 and 1993, but haven't been there since.
The teams ownership has raised payroll to a fairly healthy level recently, as they came into 2015 with the 10th-ranked payroll in the league. If you take out the absurd payrolls of the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, they look pretty competitive with a number of teams in the league. As of the end of the season, they have $71 million guaranteed to 5 players for 2016 (Tulowitzi - $20M, Martin - $15M, Bautista - $14M, Dickey - $12M, Encarnacion - $10M). Three of those (Bautista, Dickey, and Encarnacion) will be free agents at the end of the 2016 season. They do have another 23 players who are arbitration or pre-arbitration eligible, including potential American League MVP Josh Donaldson. They have also given Marco Estrada a qualifying offer (which would pay him just over $15M for 1 year if he accepts, unless he signs an extension - which is apparently in discussion). With expected arbitration and minimum salaries added, their likely 2016 salary commitments so far are at just under $110M (without the Estrada contract included). There are rumours that they might be willing to raise payroll for 2016 up to the $140M range. In short, they may have room to add up to $30M in payroll at the moment. If they resign Marco Estrada to a 2 or 3 year contract for less money (say around $10M per year), then that might leave them with around $20M. These facts say that bringing back David Price is very unlikely (though not impossible. I have no inside information, I'm just reading what's online. He may indeed have loved his time in Toronto). Now, free agency isn't the only way to add players, but they don't have a lot of prospects available for high-profile trades it would seem after bringing on Price and Tulowitzki this year. Both of those, in hindsight, were very good moves. They got the Blue Jays into the playoffs, and into the second round of the playoffs. Flags fly forever, and it would have been nice to have won the World Series, but they should come into 2016 with a good chance to come back to the playoffs and maybe go further this time. In terms of needs, I think for now it will be mostly on the pitching front. They're in pretty good shape on the infield, especially if Devon Travis comes back healthy. While Ryan Goins acquitted himself well this year, he is probably not the answer as a starter, but can be an important part of the team. And the offense, obviously, wasn't the problem this year. It is possible they could try to upgrade themselves at 1B or LF, but for now those may not be at the top of their priority lists. Interesting question - will they keep Encarnacion and Bautista and try to resign them, or will they consider trading one or the other of them (at ages 33 and 35 they may be past their greatest production anyway) to a team a little more desperate for offense? On the pitching side, they can probably use some help, particularly with David Price likely to leave. If Estrada comes back, they can start with a rotation of Stroman, Estrada, Dickey, and... who? Tehy could consider moving Aaron Sanchez or Roberto Osuna back to the rotation, but the way bullpen management has been going lately, that may be less likely. An additional relief pitcher could be helpful as well, though spending too much on one may be unwise. Remember Yovani Gallardo? He's a free agent, and could be brought in at a semi-reasonable price (and is only 29 years old). Scott Kazmir at 31, Brett Anderson at 27 are interesting names in free agency as well. Needs - Starting pitching, relief pitching Upgrades possible - Left Field, First Base I'll come back with more about the San Francisco Giants soon. There have been a number of these pieces written lately, and tweet storms from some of its former writers. I'm coming at this as purely a fan, and as somebody whose writing style and desire to write have been pushed by what was on Grantland. A week ago today, on October 30, ESPN announced suddenly that they were suspending operations of the website effective immediately. The death spiral probably began when ESPN also announced suddenly (and not directly to the person effected - a pattern here) that Bill Simmons, the creator and editor-in-chief of Grantland, would not have his contract renewed. That was also on a Friday. Though he had several months left on his contract he never wrote or produced another word for ESPN.
I don't remember exactly when I started to find Bill Simmons' work on ESPN. I'm relatively certain it was when he was writing for "Page 2", which was supposed to be, I think, the edgy part of their site. I've been following his writing and his podcasts ever since. I believe I loaded up Grantland on or near its first day to see what it was about. A lot of people have tried to deconstruct Simmons and figure out why he was and is so popular. How did a guy who started out as basically a blogger before we had words for that, writing mostly about Boston area sports, come to be probably the biggest name at ESPN, the "Worldwide Leader in Sports"? People have criticized his writing style for different reasons, and I'm not going to call him the greatest writer I've ever read. I like him because he has fun. He writes about sports by connecting it to his experience as a fan, by connecting it to other things that interest him (here's the pop culture part of it). I found his writing as a teenager, so it's hard to talk too much about what came before him (I wasn't paying that much attention). But I think a lot of it would get focused really on the sports, or maybe the athlete themselves. Some of the best writers who still write that way are able to deeply humanize some of the athletes we root for, or the way a team affects the city or region they play in. Bill seems to really focus on what the experiences mean to him as a fan, and to others as fans. He's not a former athlete, he never really had a team beat where he traveled with the players or did interviews in the locker room. He really focuses on what it's like to go to games or watch your favourite teams on TV. Whatever you think of his style, it has been immensely popular (see his 4.7 million Twitter followers, or better than half a million Facebook followers). But if Grantland had just been Bill Simmons-land, it probably wouldn't have been that interesting. Instead, he hired some of the best editors and writers he could get his hands on and let them write about all kinds of things. They went deep on some crazy subjects, they went super in depth on sports minutiae. Their subjects weren't all for me (reality TV, professional wrestling), but that was ok. They managed to go both wide and deep at the same time. Grantland was appointment reading. Every weekday morning around 8 or 9 o'clock I would start checking the site for something new. If something happened in sports or pop culture, I wanted to hear what one of their writers had to say about it more than one from most sites. The only difficulty sometimes was trying to avoid some of their headlines or articles on the day after a big TV show (Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad) when I hadn't had a chance to watch yet. But once I watched, I wanted every word. It is no exaggeration to say that Grantland was my most read and probably most refreshed website over the last 4 years, and got me into reading more about things I would never have expected to. Sometimes even if I didn't have any interest in the subject, just knowing who had written it got me to read it. The quality of the writers made me more interested in things I was already interested in. This is very much true of baseball. They had great fun takes, and great statistical dives into new information, and often combined the two. Without those writers and that quality, I don't know if I'd be writing on this blog, really. They also ignited new interests, taking basketball from a sport I was mildly interested in to probably my second favourite professional sport (this largely thanks to Zach Lowe and Bill Simmons). I read the site even as my interest in hockey and football withered (for some similar and some different reasons). They wrote brilliantly on some amateur sports and the Olympics. And of course, on the pop culture side, it wasn't all things I was interested in (here's my old man on the porch stance: I don't love a lot of current pop music. But here's my non-old man stance: I'm a lot more ok with that than when I was younger). But they wrote brilliantly about a lot of things there too, be it music, movies, TV, and more. Several writers from Grantland (including Jonah Keri) related that when they were hired, they were told that Grantland had just one rule: no a**holes. By every account I've read from former writers, they all liked each other, they all pulled for each other, and they were all pushed to be better by the hard work of their peers and editors. More than a few former writers have said that it was the best experience of their professional careers (until the final days anyway). Grantland pushed long form sports journalism to a place that it didn't usually get to outside of a couple of select magazines (Sports Illustrated when it was really working, for example). Sites like SB Nation which do that now probably followed that lead. Grantland helped podcasting explode as well, giving voices to all kinds of different interests. It's not exactly accurate to say that I'll miss the writers who were there as most of them will continue to work somewhere (even for ESPN in some cases), but it will be hard to find such a collective, and I'll have to go digging to find some of the specific ones as often. Some of my favourites included Jonah Keri, Brian Phillips, Zach Lowe, Wesley Morris, Rembert Browne, Shea Serrano, Andy Greenwald... too many to remember very accurately. If you have the time or inclination, dig around in their archives, which are still around at Grantland.com. But in the meantime, I'd like to leave you with a selection of some of my favourites on a variety of subjects, plus some links to similar articles from other sites around the internet. Be warned, these are not short. But they are all worth reading at some point (or repeatedly). In sports:
In subjects beyond either of those two (and this is where they really shone):
This got longer than I expected, and yet is still by no means exhaustive. Enjoy any and every one you look at, come back to it if you want. If nothing else, it's a nice reference for myself. As you are all now no doubt aware, the Kansas City Royals won the World Series on Sunday, finishing off the New York Mets in 5 games. First, some links to some good stories about it, and then some thoughts.
First, probably the craziest number: From the 7th inning on the the playoffs, the Royals outscored their opponents 51-11. The other 9 playoff teams combined to score 55 runs from the 7th inning on. Or another take on it: the Royals scored 40 runs in the 8th inning or later. No other playoff team scored more than 5. That boggles the mind. Seriously. Using Fangraphs win expectancy, the Royals had 8 different games that at some point they had less than a 35% chance of winning, historically, and won all 8 of them. Drilling down further, in 6 of those games they had less than a 20% chance, and in 4 of them they had less than a 10% chance. That just doesn't happen. Specifically, in the World Series, the Royals won 3 games which they trailed in the 8th inning. Which Jayson Stark says has not happened in the previous 110 World Series. I've read a lot about the Royals lately, and listened to some podcasts discussing them (shout out to Jonah Keri and Mike Schur/Ken Tremendous on a sort of "Grantland goodbye"). There's a lot out there about what to take from the Royals. Professional sports are notorious for copycats. Everybody wants to emulate the kings. Sidebar before going too far into that: Moneyball is now pretty well known to people even who aren't necessarily baseball fans thanks to the Brad Pitt movie. A lot of people over the years have taken the lesson that "Moneyball means walks and OBP" and so a team like the Royals would seem to be anti-Moneyball. That's the wrong lesson. Moneyball was (and is) about taking advantage of market inefficiencies. The Oakland A's of the early 2000's (who baseball writers have noted were blessed with having 3 great young pitchers, which had a lot to do with their success but was sort of passed over in Moneyball) were financially unable to compete with teams like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and many others, but still found themselves in or near the playoffs for a good run. The author (Michael Lewis) revealed that they were one of the first teams to really embrace "analytics" and try to find how players could actually contribute to "wins" (basically WAR) and what skills were not valued as highly as they should be. Batting average, RBIs, and home runs were valued. Walks and on base percentage were not as valued at the time, but Oakland realized that they should be, and built a very competent offense on this basis. Walks and on base percentage are very highly valued now. They are no longer an inefficiency. Back to Kansas City. They've done a few things that seemed unorthodox, but maybe now are revealing some truths and some "market inefficiencies" that they had taken advantage of. For one, and you'll find this in many articles, they've really tried to build a culture of good people in the organization and on the team. By all accounts, this is a group of players who like each other, and who love baseball. Alex Anthopoulos of Toronto apparently realized about a year ago that "character" was actually pretty important for the team and the fanbase (and whether that lesson was learned much too late is a discussion for another time. There have been teams in the past that were known for "25 players, 25 cabs", as in, nobody did anything together. If you have enough money to get great players, maybe that works for a bit. But maybe Kansas City's method is a lot more sustainable. The San Francisco Giants are known to be a pretty good clubhouse with a manager that is well loved by the players, and this has been a pretty good decade for them. The 2004 Red Sox famously crowned themselves "the idiots" and seemed to have a lot of fun playing. Fun can't be the only part of playing professional sports, I imagine, but in a long season, it probably helps. And for a team like Kansas City who has now been to the World Series 2 years in a row, that growing success is probably not an accident. To that "culture" as well, take another look at that Eno Sarris piece, or the Joe Posnanski one (or both really). The Royals were mocked over the years for their "5-year plan" which turned into a 6-year, 7-year, 8-year... and eventually, as it turned out, 10-year plan. Dayton Moore, their GM, was mocked many times for his decisions, but as it turns out, his moves over the last 4-5 years have been largely outstanding. And above all, they have been very, very patient. Alex Gordon was a high draft pick who hit poorly and fielded poorly at 3rd base, eventually got sent back down to the minor leagues, learned to play left field, and came back as a strong hitter and a gold glove fielder. Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer were supposed to be great in 2012, but both struggled (Moustakas in particular) before seeming to really settle into what they are. Alcides Escobar was one of the worst hitters in the league THIS YEAR, but he plays a very good shortstop, and seemed to really hit well in the playoffs (and that making contact on fastballs thing really made a difference). Lorenzo Cain didn't start playing baseball until late in high school when he was cut from his basketball team. He was a good fielder with some speed who hit for some average last year, then added power and really turned into a star this year. Salvador Perez was signed as a 16 year old and brought up as their starting catcher as a 22-year-old. A lot of bi9 market teams would not have had the patience to let some or all of these players grow and find their level. Maybe this was an advantage of being unnoticed for years. Frankly as a fan, I'd love to see a team build something out of good young players, even if it hurts at first. Houston may be on the fast track to this particular part of the Royals success, and the Giants have been doing it for the last 5 years. Another thing which has been discussed a lot lately is the value of making contact. The Royals lead the league in not striking out. They also didn't walk a lot, leading to kind of an average offense. But it was a very difficult to stop offense. Strikeouts having been going up for years now, and walks are starting to go down. As starting pitchers pitch less and presumably maximize their effectiveness and more and more guys throw hard in the bullpen, the ability to hit the ball and give yourself a chance probably is very valuable now. Home runs and walks are getting harder to come by, so a good single can be a difference maker. They've also built an exceptional defense with some great athletes around the field (at most positions anyway), and take advantage of their large home field by letting some of their pitchers (the starters at least) put the ball in play and trust that their fielders will take care of it. Chris Young is an extreme contact and fly ball pitcher. That would be a terrible strategy in Yankee Stadium or Coors Field, but in Kauffman Stadium, it can really work. And of course, they have that great bullpen. Now, bullpens are traditionally volatile and guys who were great one year can be decidedly average the year after that (or worse). Kansas City experience some regression (and then a season ending injury) from Greg Holland this year, but Wade Davis and Kelvin Herrera were excellent again, and helped shorten every game they were in. Remember, 51-11. It may be instructive (and I think it is), that Wade Davis and Danny Duffy are both former starting pitchers (Danny Duffy may be a starter again) whose stuff played way up in the bullpen. Even the aforementioned Chris Young struck out a lot of guys out of the bullpen for a guy with a high 80's fastball. If you want to make a greater point out of that, probably the best short reliever of all time (Mariano Rivera) came up as a starter before getting converted. This is something for teams to think about rather than maybe overpaying strict relievers. I may have more thoughts on ideal team building in another post at another time. In any case, I liked the Royals and their story last year (though, as a Giants fan, I was more than happy with how it ended - Bumgarner forever), and was impressed with how they built on it this year (almost no "experts" or predictors even had them back in the playoffs this year), though a little less a fan after the Blue Jays series and the way a couple of their players acted (Ventura in particular). But they earned this. And hey, in a league of 30 teams, every team should have a chance at one championship in 30 years. So we'll see the Royals back in 2045. I've been a bit slow on posting lately. Mostly for reasons of life being busy, but with the baseball season ending, I've been trying to put together a few ideas for the next little while on here. Over the next little while, I'm hoping to write about:
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Greg JacksonA baseball fan in general. Interested in statistics and analytics. Usually follow the Giants and Blue Jays, fan of all MLB in general. |