Tools of Ignorance, a Giants Baseball Blog

Colorado’s capture of the National League pennant last season made it the best season in the organization’s existence. One of the accompanying narratives was that they were learning how to win in Coors Field. Another was the declining park factor in Colorado had allowed for a more stable pitching staff. While there is some truth to these, for me the Rockies are more than the product of an evolving ballpark-related dynamic. Rather, they are a perfect case study in proper player development. (more…)

We have word today that Eliezer Alfonzo, who was the Giants’ backup catcher in 2006-07, and is currently a Fresno Grizzly, has tested positive for a banned substance and been suspended for 50 days.  I still think that when all is said and done, most PED users will turn out to be the Marvin Benards and Eliezer Alfonzos of the game, rather than the Barry Bondses and Mark McGwires.  It’s these AAAA guys, on the bubble between AAA and the majors, who have more incentive to seek any edge, including PEDs.  I also wonder whether to date more pitchers haven’t tested positive, which also puts Bonds and McGwire in some perspective.  Many want to “asterisk” the sluggers’ hitting numbers without thinking about how many juiced pitchers those sluggers were facing.

This same rush to judgment came up recently when Miguel Tejada was implicated in the Mitchell report.  Folks told me knowingly that this explained his drop-off in production over the past couple of years:  Once he got off the juice, his slugging fell.  I pointed out, remembering the rumors swirling around Tejada since he was signed by the Athletics, that it could be the result of aging, and a not-unexpected drop-off linked to that.  Now we know Tejada is 33, not 31.

Fans, and particularly the major media covering the game, need to acknowledge that we don’t know exactly how and to what extent steroids or testosterone or human growth hormone effect the performance of ball players.  Keeping our perspective, allowing for what we don’t know, can lead to more informed and reasoned discussions and solutions based on facts rather than conjecture or assumption.

The toughest time for me, from a writing standpoint, is April.  It’s just too easy to fall into the trap of putting far too much stock in a minimum of information, proffering analysis of nothing, solutions to nonexistent problems, and writing things that look ridiculous two months down the road.  (I almost did just this with a post I wrote about Dusty Baker’s tenure so far in Cincinnati when I realized that Baker had actually fixed one the problems I was blaming him for.)  As I read through each day’s baseball news, I see so much coverage that bugs me, from overanalysis of a few innings of pitching to overreaction to a two-week slump to ascribing far too much importance to three games.

I can’t help but cringe when I see one of the key lessons of sabermetrics — that small samples of baseball are not valuable analytically — has made such little penetration into the mainstream.  That Philip Hughes has had two bad starts, or David Ortiz two bad weeks, or that the Diamondbacks swept the Rockies, just doesn’t mean a whole lot for what those entities will do going forward.  We have more information than that, and whether the new information runs counter to our beliefs or supports them, it’s important that we keep it in perspective.

The important information at this time of year comes from the manager’s office, comes from the trainer’s room, comes from the GM’s chair.  How is playing time being distributed?  What roles are being shared, are being changed, are being defined well or poorly?  What are teams doing in reaction to injuries?  What are they doing in reaction — or better still, in non-reaction — to small samples?

Take a look at what Bruce Bochy has done.  An injury to Dave Roberts has cleared a path for Fred Lewis to start in the veteran’s absence.  Eugenio Velez is chipping away at Ray Durham’s playing time at second base.  The next logical move is to bench or release Rich Aurilia and let Dan Ortmeier play first base.  It’s not that the younger players are stars-in-waiting; in each case, though, they are better than the veterans in their way, and have better chances to contributing to the Giants beyond 2008.  Bochy may finally be coming around to that mindset.

It’s not about performance in April, not on the field.  The wins and losses count, the homers and hits all go into the final record, but because all players can do just about anything in a month of play, the numbers don’t have meaning.  To learn in April, one has to follow the lineups, and the reactions by management, and the way roles change.  That’s the stuff that is meaningful, for good and bad. 

I tuned into the Giants game on April 7 and April 12 and each time was confronted with a scene that, I believe, provides a foretelling of the San Francisco season in microcosm. There was Matt Cain, struggling away in the fifth inning of a 0-0 game. (In the game on April 12, Matt actually had a no-hitter through five innings.) Better get used to those goose eggs, Matt–a year of non-support from your teammates is your lot.

Through 19 games, the Giants have scored 61 runs, least in the National League. When a team’s cleanup hitter is Bengie Molina, a 33-year-old catcher with a career .410 slugging average, isn’t it hard imagining them scoring even 500 times this season? That’s much too extreme, of course. It’s been ages (36 years, actually) since a team scored way down in the low threes–or under–per game. In 1972, one National and four American League teams were under 500 runs. (You see why the designated hitter came about?) Without starving to that extent, the Giants do seem like a good bet to break into this list of modern era clubs that have scored the fewest runs:

Lowest runs per game since 1996
3.54: 2003 Dodgers (574 runs scored)
3.57: 2002 Tigers (575)
3.65: 2003 Tigers (591)
3.80: 2004 Diamondbacks (615)
3.83: 1998 Devil Rays (620)
3.87: 2002 Brewers (627)
3.92-3.99: Eight teams (634 to 650)

San Francisco right now is scoring runs at a rate of 3.21 per game, which puts them at the top (bottom?) of this list. If AT&T Park were no longer almost neutral and suddenly started playing like the pitcher’s haven it was during its PacBell infancy, then we could almost guarantee a Giants appearance on this list. While I loathe extracting too much from a season’s first three weeks, the Giants so far are certainly fulfilling everyone’s fears of a season of offensive deprivation. Scoring zero runs (they’ve done it twice), one run (three times), or two runs (four times) is bound to be the rule and not the exception.

The Giants have a host of problems that could lead them to a franchise record for losses (previous mark: 100, set in 1985) this year. They cannot score, their aging defense will allow many extra hits, and outside of Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum, they don’t have the pitching to work around these issues.

What we’ve learned during this first homestand is that they aren’t going to win many games from the dugout and coaching boxes, either. Bruce Bochy, whose tactical failings were a common complaint of Padres fans during his time in San Diego, has made the kind of small moves –- the wrong ones -– that shows a lack of understanding of how to manage your 25 pieces in a way that gives your team the best chance to win a baseball game. (more…)

The Arizona Diamondbacks won the West last season, shooting past a poorly-directed Dodgers team and the twice-defending division-champion Padres, while keeping just barely ahead of the surprising Rockies. I’ll toot my horn a bit and reveal that in an office pool in March 2007 I picked the Diamondbacks to have the second-best record in the National League. However, if you’d told me then that the Snakes were going to allow more runs than they scored, I’d have said they wouldn’t be a contender.

As explained here, teams’ won-loss records generally reflect their run differentials. A team that allows more runs than it scores is almost always going to have a losing record. The Diamondbacks allowed 732 runs last year and scored just 712, yet still won the division with a 90-72 record. So the Snakes’ record was nearly 11 games better than their run differential would have suggested.

What the Diamondbacks did last year goes against our accepted beliefs about how baseball teams win. The relationship between run differential and overall record is so consistent that it has created a measure of certainty among performance analysts. When that relationship is fractured to the degree that it was by the Snakes last year, we’re tempted to write it off as a fluke, but if we take a closer look, we can see how they managed to undermine sabermetric orthodoxy to such an alarming degree – and perhaps get a picture of how well we should expect them to play in 2008. (more…)

My friend OmbudsBen oversees an annual pool in which participants rank the teams in each league, from best to worst, and then are assigned points based on how far off each of their picks is from that team’s actual finish. (You can see OmbudsBen’s picks in last season’s pool here and here.) I won the pool last year, which means of course that I won’t place in the top five this season. I actually try to estimate the number of runs each team will score and allow and then use a simple formula to derive their likely winning percentage. My picks:

American League: New York, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Tampa Bay, Los Angeles, Oakland, Toronto, Chicago, Seattle, Minnesota, Kansas City, Texas, and Baltimore.

National League: New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Arizona, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Colorado, Cincinnati, San Diego, St. Louis, Washington, Houston, Pittsburgh, Florida, San Francisco.

Yes, it’s going to be a long season for Giants fans. But look at what fans in Tampa Bay can look forward to!

The Chronicle headlined Gwen Knapp’s column this morning “For those who think Zito is a bust, here’s the evidence.” Yes, Zito’s performance in yesterday’s opener was bad, but it was only disappointing to those who ignored evidence readily available on the day Zito was signed in December 2006. At the time, Brian Sabean evidently thought the twenty-eight-year-old Zito was coming into his prime, but Zito had actually been on a downward trend since 2004. In his first four major-league seasons from 2000-2003, Zito was 61-29, with a 3.12 ERA in 119 starts, and boasted nine-inning rates of 7.2 hits, 10.9 baserunners, 7.2 strikeouts, and 3.4 walks. Over the subsequent three seasons, Zito went 41-34 with a 4.05 ERA in 103 starts and his nine-inning rates were 8.3 hits, 12.5 baserunners, 6.6 strikeouts, and 3.7 walks. The Giants are paying a number-three starter $80 million over seven years. Do you think Johan Santana’s agent used those numbers as a starting point in his negotiations with the Mets as the New Yorkers attempted to sign the best starter in baseball?

Similarly, the Giants are never going to get their money’s worth from the Aaron Rowland contract (five years at $60 million). On the plus side, the signing gives the pitching staff the double break of replacing Dave Roberts in center with Rowand, and Bonds in left with Roberts. Since the only real point to playing the 2008 season will be to let Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum do their things, building a better defense isn’t such a terrible bit of off-season work. But I expect the Giants to be almost as rudely disappointed by Rowand’s hitting outside of Philadelphia as they are with Zito’s pitching away from Oakland. In only two full seasons of play has Rowand been an above-average hitter, and his numbers in the vastness of AT&T Park will not look so good as his numbers in that bandbox in Philadelphia. Given the abandon with which Rowand plays center, the chances that he lasts the full five years while playing every day seem pretty slight to me. What I don’t get is Rowand’s decision, since it involves paying California taxes and leaving playoff-picture relevance for the balance of his career, but as he’s already 30, we can at least acknowledge that he did choose a lovely place to play out that career.