Overachievers, Yes; “Excellent,” No

Bruce Jenkins was at it again in the Chron today, writing about Billy Beane’s guts and “desperation” as he works to build a team to compete against the Los Angeles Angels, “baseball’s model of excellence, surpassing the Red Sox and leaving the Yankees in a little pile of dust.” I don’t know what criteria Jenkins uses to judge excellence, but he certainly doesn’t look at the numbers.

With a .622 winning percentage through Monday, the Angels are on a pace for 100 wins, the traditional mark for excellence in teams. They lead the American League West by 22 games with six games to go.

But the Angels, despite having baseball’s best record, aren’t nearly as good a team as they appear to be, because as strong as the Angels’ record is, it reflects too generously on a team that has had a great deal of luck.

 

Little to Analyze in April

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. 

 

Small Ball Is Usually Not Smart Ball

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.

 

Torre is easier to replace than A-Rod

Well, this is supposed to be a Giants blog, but a local sportswriter has gotten me off the immediate subject. This past Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle featured Bruce Jenkins’s hit piece on Alex Rodriguez, echoing the conventional wisdom (Mr. Jenkins is very good at this) from last fall to the effect that the Yankees collapse was the fault of Rodriguez, who is a “phony,” “oblivious to the acrimony that follows him around,” “a man at odds with himself.”

Jenkins, like many other writers, has bought into a myth certain Yankees created in order to absolve themselves of responsibility for their elimination from the playoffs this past season. Joe Torre and several players spent a season laying all failures at the feet of Alex Rodriguez, even going so far as to inspire and participate in a Sports Illustrated story furthering that storyline. Jenkins is just another of the media enablers in this sorry episode.

At any point during the last season, either manager Joe Torre or captain Derek Jeter could have come forward and said the obvious: Rodriguez is a great player, and in the worst season of his career he’s a star. Defining his season by his lowest points is a disservice to him, and the constant focus on his play is an insult to his teammates. Whatever Rodriguez’s performance issues, his overall contributions to the club were valuable. Beyond that, he’s one of the game’s model citizens, with barely a controversy to his name.

That statement, completely true, would have done more than anything else to alleviate the pressure on Rodriguez. They didn’t do so, instead allowing petty nonsense like his desire to please people (oh my!) and his performance in varied subsets (in Boston, in the playoffs, against certain pitchers, in 20 at-bats in July) to substitute for real information. They didn’t defend their teammate, and by allowing, even stoking, the situation, they absolved themselves and every other Yankee of blame for their fortunes. If they lost, it would be Rodriguez’s fault, no matter how the rest of them played.

Torre’s handling of the Rodriguez situation is the blackest mark on his record. Going so far as to bat Rodriguez eighth in a playoff game, a move guaranteed to make him a point of discussion, would have been the nadir had he not already reached that in the pages of SI. As far as Jeter goes, any claims to a captaincy and leadership are in doubt. His refusal to provide a full-throated defense of the player whose willingness to take his Gold Gloves to third base allowed the illusion of Jeter’s defensive prowess to grow to a point where he could get his own hardware is as much to blame as Torre. He could have stopped this with 50 well-chosen words. He didn’t, and it’s fair to wonder why.

Alex Rodriguez admitted he “sucked” against the Tigers. He’s part of the Yankees problem, but he’s not the biggest part, on or off the field, and I only wish sportswriters would take a good, long look at what happened last season before writing about it.