Tools of Ignorance, a Giants Baseball Blog

One of the qualifications Bruce Bochy brought to his job managing the Giants was no doubt his perceived cool and an implied ability to shrug off the circus that is the Barry-Bonds-home-run-record-chase, to keep that circus from overwhelming the team’s purported purpose — winning the National League west division. His larger task, though, and one at which he appears to be succeeding, is the care of his young starting pitcher, the man who, with Tim Lincecum, will anchor the Giants’ rotation for years to come.

Matt Cain had another wonderful outing on Saturday in Phoenix, giving up one hit and an earned run in 99 pitches.  By all rights he should have won the game. That he did not owed to two things: Bochy pulling Cain after six innings of one-hit pitching, and Vinny Chulk’s first pitch in the seventh inning, a sinker, not sinking. The Diamondbacks’ Scott Hairston, pinch-hitting for Nippert, crushed that non-sinker for a three-run homer, and a victory for Arizona.

Bochy is clearly treating 22-year-old Cain carefully, in sharp contrast to Felipe Alou, who once allowed Cain to throw 131 pitches in a game. All the research shows that professional pitchers are most likely to have career threatening injuries between the ages of 19 and 23, and that those injuries tend to happen after the 100th pitch in a game or at the beginning of the game following the game in which they threw more than 100 pitches. Bochy might actually be reading this literature.

“I want to look after the kid,” Bochy said after the game. “He’s just coming off a complete game. I just feel we want this guy healthy all year.”

He might have added, “For years to come, too.”

At one point early this month, the Seattle Mariners had had more games postponed (four) than they’d played (three). With a makeup-of-a-makeup wiped out, the Mariners left Cleveland having not played a game that counted in the standings in four days. The solution is not as simple as scheduling first-week games in warm-weather or domed parks. Teams would, all things considered, prefer to have home dates clustered in June through August, and sticking a segment of teams with a disproportionate number of early-season home games creates problems. Moreover, it’s a bad idea to create policies in reaction to a particular event. It’s unfortunate that the Seattle-Cleveland series became a bit of a circus, but there’s no solution to this issue that is going to be acceptable to enough people to enact. Well, you could start the season a week later and schedule six doubleheaders along the way, but good luck convincing MLB to go back to that.

One obvious solution to the immediate problem would be not to schedule a team’s only trip to a cold-weather city in the first week of April. The rainouts of two of the Giants three games in Pittsburgh last week would be hard enough to solve if the Giants were scheduled to revisit Pittsburgh. With a second trip not on the schedule, it becomes a minor nightmare, likely requiring extra home games for the Giants, or doubleheaders on travel days, or something equally confounding.

The more time I spend with the schedule, however, the more I see that it’s filled with odd quirks that particularly affect certain teams, if not quite so dramatically as being snowed out of a four-game series. It makes me wonder whether MLB has handled its schedulers the way an overbearing manager handles his bullpen: making constant changes until he finds the reliever who doesn’t have it that day.

I’m certain that this opinion is informed by my age. When I first began to follow National League baseball in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the schedule was a pretty simple thing, and remained that way through 1992. As a boy following the Atlanta Braves, I knew the Braves would fly all the way out to the West Coast three times a year, playing the Giants, Dodgers and Padres, always sharing the trip with the Astros and Reds. I can still remember when I, at maybe eight years old, figured out the NL’s scheduling plan with a pencil and paper at my desk at home. (“Five times 18, plus 12 times six . . . wow!)

Now, there’s no rhyme or reason to the schedule, no travel pattern that makes any sense. The Giants played (or tried to) a weekend series in Pittsburgh, but instead of trips to New York and Philadelphia on either side of that set, they played at San Diego before it, and then flew to Denver to face the Rockies after it. The Giants play eight series in the Eastern time zone this year, and they’ll make six separate trips into that time zone to get them played. How does that serve anyone?

The root cause of this is trying to play too many opponents in 26 weeks. The NL’s old version — 18 games against each of your division opponents, and 12 games against every other team in the league — was symmetrical in its way. Now, teams are playing 18, 19, 20 opponents, and added to that, playing some of those teams up to 19 games each. It’s virtually impossible to create a schedule that doesn’t have odd travel sequences, risky elements and a lot more flying than was the case twenty years ago.

MLB has simply tried to do too much with its schedule. I’m not sure you can reasonably play everyone in your league, play a clutch of interleague games, play a disproportionate number of games within your division, and do all that without making scheduling a Rube Goldberg contraption. There are already very good competitive reasons to oppose interleague play — take a peek at the interleague slates of the Mets and, well, any other NL team, as an example — and unbalanced schedules have been distorting wild-card races for nearly a decade. When you consider the travel and scheduling burdens these elements create, that should be the final nail in the coffin for this structure. Sensible scheduling should be a part of any good sports league. MLB doesn’t have that, and likely can’t have that, unless it gives up one of its two pet projects — the unbalanced schedule and interleague play.

The Giants’ South Atlantic League affiliate is off to a 12-1 start, playing a game that looks more like something from 1907. The team has scored 76 runs while at the same time hitting just two home runs in 425 team at-bats. What they have been doing is reaching base at a decent .352 clip, and running every chance they get, stealing 36 bases in 46 attempts, including a minor-league-leading 12 by shortstop Brian Bocock. At the same time, it’s not the offense that’s winning games, it’s the pitching. Using anything but a prospect-laden staff, the Green Jackets have given up just 25 runs in those 13 games, with a 1.82 team ERA, allowing just 89 hits and 23 walks in 114 innings. It’s not baseball we’re used to seeing, but it is an entertaining brand of the game.

On Friday night, I was sitting in traffic on the 280 when Pirates rookie Juan Perez was thrown out there to start the ninth inning in a game the Pirates were losing to our heroes, 8-2, and proceeded to walk four of the first five batters he faced.

Fortunately for him, the middle batter in that sequence was a leading contender for the highly-coveted title, “Slowest Man in the Major Leagues.” (Also known as “Slowest Member of the Molina Family.”) Bengie hit into a double play; Russ Ortiz would thus come to the plate with the bases loaded and two out, and when he flied out Perez had escaped the inning without allowing a run to score.

How often does this happen — a pitcher walks four batters in an inning without allowing a run? It’s pretty rare. With help once again from retrosheet.org, I found that Perez was just the 7th pitcher to accomplish the feat in the last 10 seasons (notice the current and former Giants on the list):

Date        Pitcher          Inning 

04/13/07    Juan Perez       9th

08/05/04    Vinnie Chulk     8th

05/14/04   Kazuhisa Ishii    1st

05/04/04   Eric Dubose       2nd

04/09/04   Jon Garland       4th

08/12/00   Shawn Estes       5th

04/24/00   Chuck Finley      1st

Here is an interesting study done on catcher’s masks. I hope we’re going to see some real changes here, and quickly.

I keep saying to myself it is only a week into the season, and I remind myself not to come to conclusions based on small sample sizes, but so far, the Giants are playing to form, showing sometimes excellent starting pitching, but some atrocious “hitting.”  Certain numbers say it  all:  the team is 29th out of 30 MLB teams in runs scored though Sunday, with 14.  (Seattle, at number 30 with 12 runs, is forgiven since they’ve had four games postponed due to snow!)  The team on-base percentage is .307, 22nd in MLB.  Team slugging is .330, good for 28th in MLB.  They have yet to hit a sacrifice fly.

I went to the game Saturday against the Dodgers, the one where Russ Ortiz actually kept our heroes in the game for five innings, and the Giants lineup hacked away at anything Derek Lowe threw their way. Admittedly, Lowe is an extreme groundball pitcher, perhaps the most extreme such in the majors, with a sinker that is deadly when he is on.  Yet the Giants seemed eager to help Lowe out, swinging early in the count, and swinging at some bad pitches too.  (The Giants are saying all the usual things about “trying to make something happen.”)  Lowe got three outs in one inning on six pitches, and by the end of the sixth, had only thrown 70 pitches.  This aggressiveness at the plate, so prized by Dusty Baker and Felipe Alou, is disastrous for any team trying to score runs.  I hope it is a blip on the season, and not Bochy’s conscious effort to mimic his predecessors.

Aggressiveness has shown up on the basepaths, too.  The Giants through Sunday are four-for-six in stolen-base attempts, which is not at the 75% success rate most analysts consider the minimum necessary to make steal attempts worthwhile for the team.  In Friday night’s 2-1 loss to the Dodgers (do Giant pitchers fear that giving up any runs means a loss for the team?), catcher Russ Martin threw out Omar Vizquel trying to steal second in the first inning, emptying the bases for Barry Bonds.  An inning later, Martin caught Ray Durham on a 3-2 pitch to Ryan Klesko with no one out.  Klesko struck out to make it a double play.  Pedro Feliz got thrown out at the plate trying to make it home from first on a Randy Winn double in the fifth inning.  There were, at the time, no outs.  Earl Weaver spins in his grave over first outs made at the plate.

Andre Ethier plays the outfield for the Dodgers.  He’s young and costs little to employ.  He might be a better hitter than any Giant except Durham and a healthy Bonds.  He is being platooned and hit seventh in the Bums’ lineup on Saturday.  James Loney, a better-hitting first baseman than any of the hydra-headed entity the Giants have at that position, rides the pine behind Nomar Garciaparra.  Any chance the Giants could con Ned Colletti into making like his mentor and trading a quality young prospect for some aged guys in steep decline?  Just a thought.