Parity in the NL

During the last 15 years, and especially during the last five, major league baseball’s central office’s policy has made it easier for a bad team to be good, and more difficult for a good team to be great. Successive collective bargaining agreements have entrenched a redistributionist tax scheme; slotting in the amateur draft has discouraged rich teams from buying up the best amateur talent; the equal split of online revenues has left some teams (and not just the Yankees and Red Sox) with more money than they can spend, and the advent of the wild card has made playoff spots cheap and plentiful. These policies have worked. Only nine teams haven’t played in October this decade, and only one team has won more than one World Series.

Right now, all a team needs to compete is creative intelligence. This may be a good thing in the abstract, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into great baseball. The National League this year essentially comprises the Mets, seven rebuilding or badly run teams with little hope of a playoff spot and little need to worry that they’ll truly embarrass themselves, and eight 85-win teams.

Just as a function of random variance, some of these eight teams will make the glorious rush to 91 wins that no National League team managed last year, and some will end up struggling to break 80 wins. Any of these teams could be this year’s Colorado Rockies. Any of them could just as easily list through the season. Which will be which is anyone’s guess, but there are at least signs to look for as spring training concludes.

In the NL East, the Mets’ main competition will be Atlanta and Philadelphia. The defending division champion Phillies are a known quantity; as long as their three MVP-caliber players are healthy, they should be fine. Atlanta is a more interesting team. John Smoltz and Tim Hudson may be the best one-two in the league, and each infielder, including catcher Brian McCann, should be among the league’s better hitters at his position. Their problem is their mystery outfield, and there’s no way to tell what to expect from it. Matt Diaz, although he hit .338 last season, is a merely decent hitter by left-fielder standards. He won’t hit .338 again, but can he hit .320? Will right fielder Jeff Francoeur, formerly an object of mockery for his free-swinging ways, break out after managing to draw a walk every fourth game last year? Will Mark Kotsay continue to bear an unnatural resemblance to oft-injured Darin Erstad?

In the NL Central, the whole game is between Chicago, which doesn’t have a closer, and Milwaukee, which doesn’t have a defense. The Cubs, like the Phillies, are going with a modestly improved version of last year’s division winner, which makes good sense; their biggest issue is seeing whether or not Kerry Wood can adapt to the closer’s role. The Brewers have a more interesting problem — a surfeit of infielders who can’t field at all. Ryan Braun and Corey Hart, who came up as third basemen, are both true butchers, and both will end up in the outfield, with Bill Hall, a shortstop, at third, and Rickie Weeks, another butcher, at second base. Brewers pitchers won’t be amused.

In the NL West, parity (or mediocrity) reaches its apotheosis, as four all but indistinguishable teams vie for the crown. Last year, Arizona and Colorado each won 90, San Diego won 89, and Los Angeles could have made a case it was the best of the lot. Colorado is a very good young team and boasts Troy Tulowitzki, who may be better than any of the East’s vaunted shortstops. The Rockies issues mostly revolve around the comings and goings of their starters’ marginal stuff. San Diego’s worries revolve around an outfield that features Jim Edmonds and Brian Giles, better fits for a contender in 1998 than they are in 2008.

The power in the division, though, probably rests with Arizona and Los Angeles, in each case because of the embarrassment of young hitters. Arizona made the playoffs last season despite shortstop Stephen Drew, 25, and center fielder Chris Young, 24, posting on-base averages of, respectively .313 and .295. If those two and 20-year-old prodigy Justin Upton hit, and if starters Brandon Webb and Dan Haren demonstrate that their Braves counterparts aren’t all that, this team could be ridiculously good. Los Angeles is the biggest question mark of all, simply because it’s not clear that new manager Joe Torre will play his best players. If Nomar Garciaparra gets playing time at the infield corners at the expense of a healthy Andy LaRoche and/or James Loney, or if Juan Pierre starts in an outfield spot at all, the Dodgers will have sunk themselves. In the Bronx, Torre proved that he was quite good at breaking in young players, and also that he could be quite reluctant to do so. In a league where some of the talent gaps can be measured in inches, that kind of reluctance could lead a team a lot closer to 80 wins than to 90.

 

Oh, Those Wondrous Youngsters

Spring training is upon us, and typically at this time of the year, my thirst for baseball is of such long-standing that my normal cold-bloodedness deserts me. I eagerly follow the doings of the pitchers and catchers (although I don’t quite assume Bengie Molina really believes the team can get by scoring so little as last season). I await the arrival of the young position players, the Frandsens, Ortmeiers, Schierholtzes and Ishikawas. I hope Bruce Bochy will pronounce Frandsen the greatest second-baseman he’s ever seen, not excluding Joe Morgan. Dan Ortmeier fields like J. T. Snow, Tim Lincecum is another Lefty Grove, and Carney Lansford says his man, Rajai Davis, is the next Pete Reiser. We can dream.

 

Recent Transactions

The Giants may be in last place, but these latest exchanges certainly have promise. Getting Dave Roberts back certainly makes it a little easier in the outfield, as well as the lineup on paper, as Bochy will undoubtedly slot him back in the leadoff role. Doesn’t look as if they’ll kick his leadoff replacement, Randy Winn, back down to the eighth slot, considering that he’s produced while Omar Vizquel and Pedro Feliz have not. The more speculative situation is what Schierholtz is up to do. Is he merely manning the fourth slot until Fred Lewis is again healthy? Is his hot start (.347/.347/.518) a meaningful development, or another Fresno fiction? Will he adapt to the routine of spot starts for Barry Bonds and a lot of wool-gathering on the bench, or will that undermine his prospects as much as it seemed to for Todd Linden?

More interesting are the changes to the bullpen. I’d rather have Messenger than Benitez for the rest of their active careers, while swapping out Russ Ortiz for Jonathan Sanchez adds yet another quality arm to the Giants’ relief options. I’m not a big believer that Brad Hennessey is going to hold down the closer’s job, which makes it possible that anybody could step up and claim it — including Sanchez and Messenger. I’m particularly intrigued by the idea that Sanchez might have the stuff for it, perhaps in a way akin to how Adam Wainwright and Jonathan Papelbon did, with just as much possibility that he either sticks in the role or eventually moves back to rotation work. What should be clear is that he’s too good to sequester in situational duties; lefties who throw consistently in the low 90s, and who supplement it with a plus change, simply don’t grow on trees. It’ll be interesting to see how Bochy sorts through his options.

 

Is the Bell Tolling?

Brian Sabean is absolutely right about Armando Benitez’s share of the blame for the Giants poor play thus far this season. The Giants’ lineup, and their inability to hit, bears far more responsibility than any pitcher. He points out that in Benitez’s last game as a Giant on Tuesday, in which he blew the save, Durham and Klesko were not available. He notes that despite that, Barry Bonds took the night off.

Asked about a potential trade for a bat, an “agitated” Sabean said, “Ask the guys who can’t answer the bell every day. . . . We need guys on the field, and as usual, we’re not getting it.”

It is here that Sabean tries to have it both ways, here that the train of his logic runs off the tracks. Of course we need players who can play every day. But those aren’t the players Sabean chose to sign this past offseason. He knew as well as anyone that Ray Durham’s legs need constant attention from the trainer and periodic time off; he knew that one of Bonds’s knees has bone scraping against bone, so that he would need time off; he knew that Klesko’s bad back was one of the reasons the Braves unloaded him on the Padres several years ago; he knew the rap on Dave Roberts was that he couldn’t hold up long enough to be an everyday player. These injuries, and the rest our veteran lineup needs, is the predictable result of having the oldest lineup in the history of major league baseball.

One of the troubling aspects of team sports is the ethic that encourages players to play through pain. We see them do it all the time, often to their detriment. Pitcher Mark Prior of the Cubs endured criticism from writers and fans for complaining of pain and having to go on the DL several times over the past few years. When his shoulder was finally cut open a couple of months ago, doctors who saw the damage to his labrum and rotator cuff were amazed he could even lift his arm, much less throw a baseball. Teams, including the Giants, who under Sabean have always had a top-notch training staff, have realized that winning demands preventing and managing injury. Given that, and given the age of the Giants’ roster, doesn’t it make sense to occasionally rest the aged and infirm? Shouldn’t Dave Roberts, in whom the team has invested millions, be commended for telling his team he needs surgery to remove the bone chips in his elbow so that as much of their investment is preserved as is possible? Isn’t it wise to let Ray Durham and his hamstrings rest a couple of days rather than try to play through tightness but end up spending 15 days on the DL?

If Sabean wanted guys who play every day, he should have fielded a team with less gray in their beards. He didn’t. Maybe he’s the one who isn’t answering the bell.

 

Focusing on Benitez Misses the Point

I’m not going to defend Armando Benitez’s performance in last night’s loss to the Mets.  He lost his poise after a questionable balk call allowed Jose Reyes to advance from first to second with no outs in the twelfth inning.  Reyes, later at third, conned Benitez into another balk that allowed Reyes to tie the game, and then Benitez gave up Carlos Delgado’s second homer of the night.  End of game. 

Closers aren’t supposed to lose their poise the way Benitez did last night, but let’s face it, his mistake was not the first balk.  It was going 3-0 on Reyes and then walking him.  Once Reyes was walked, we knew he would get to second, probably by stealing the base against a pitcher who takes too long to get the ball from the mound to the catcher. 

I think, though, that the fans’ lamenting Benitez’s shortcomings or the inadequacy of the bullpen is misdirected.  Most of the time, in fact, the Giants’ bullpen has done its job.  The team is 20-4 in games in which it leads after seven innings.  What sticks in our memories are the failures, and some do stand out.  But it is important when making judgments about ballplayers and teams that we look past what our eyes see, which we are likely to remember vividly, and look at what actually happens on the field.  Sometimes what happens on the field is revealed in the numbers.

Despite its imperfections, the Giants’ glaring weakness is not their bullpen.  The weakness is on the other side of the ball.  They have scored 219 runs so far this season, good for 22nd in the majors.  (Detroit leads in this category with 289 runs.)  Lowly Colorado has scored only one fewer run than have the Giants.

Why so few runs?  Well, the Giants aren’t hitting.  But why aren’t they hitting?  The big reason is that opposing pitchers are just not having to waste a lot of time getting them out.  The Giants as a team see 3.67 pitches per plate appearance, which looks to be 27th in the league.  Only the Angels, the Dodgers, and the Mariners rank lower.  Take Barry Bonds and his extreme patience out of the mix, and the Giants fall somewhere between the Angels and Dodgers on that list.

Why are pitches per plate-appearance so important?  Bonds’s secret is that he only swings at balls he can drive.  (He sees 4.02 pitches per plate appearance.)  He does not waste time on balls out of the strike zone.  He is perfectly happy to have a pitcher expend energy on thowing balls that aren’t worthy of his swing.  His discipline in this regard is remarkable.  Call him the anti-Pedro Feliz.  (Feliz sees 3.4 pitches per plate appearance, which while not Randall Simon bad, should be something that would keep him from being an everyday player on a major-league team.)

Look at the teams that lead the majors in pitches per plate appearance.  Cleveland (3.98), Oakland (3.97), Boston (3.93), the Yankees (3.86), Philadelphia (3.83).  Cleveland and Boston are of course two of the best-hitting teams in the majors, and the Yankees and Phillies are not far behind them.  Oakland’s patience tells me that their hitters will turn it around over the course of the season; we should expect them to score runs at a greater clip from here on out. 

Patience at the plate, and ability to judge what is and is not a pitch that can be hit hard, is the key to scoring runs.  This sort of patience was actively discouraged under the Baker and Alou regimes, where “aggresiveness” at the plate was prized.  (Dusty Baker, while at Chicago, said he didn’t like guys who took walks since all they did was “clog up the basepaths.”)  I’m still willing to give Bochy a pass since he comes from an organization that at least takes such information as pitches per plate appearance into account when making personnel and lineup decisions, and since he came over with little input into what his roster would be this season.  But so far, the numbers are not encouraging. 

 

A Silver Lining?

Having been swept by the Rockies, let’s suppose that the Giants are done — that they not only have nearly no chance of winning the National League West, but that the last two months of mediocre play and bad luck, and the fact that three teams in their own division probably have more talent than they do, will make it impossible for them to win the wild card as well. Even if one doesn’t grant this premise, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that it’s so, and that the collapse has come. This leaves a simple question: Is it necessarily a bad thing?

The winter after the 2006 season should have been when the Giants made hard decisions, but they didn’t, instead persevering with their strategy of signing veteran “presence” to surround Barry Bonds. But this year and next year were also always going to be a time of transition for the Giants, even in the best of circumstances. After this season, Bonds, Omar Vizquel, Armando Benitez and Pedro Feliz are all free agents. Next year will be nearly as busy: After the 2008 campaign, the Giants will be done with their commitments to Ray Durham, Matt Morris and Rich Aurilia.

For the Giants, the complex of decisions and opportunities presented by the expiration of so many contracts is more important than the question of whether or not they make the playoffs this year. After all, they are a relatively rich team, and they have young pitching talent; falling short this season is not going to doom them to irrelevance. It would, though, allow them the chance not taken last year — to make decisions based on the long-term interests of the team. Even better, it would allow them to think about what those long-term interests are.

I’m beating a dead horse at this point by stating that much of the blame for this year’s poor showing rests on the fact that the team is just old. Neither Durham nor Aurilia are slugging .400. Leadoff “hitter” Dave Roberts, currently on the DL, has a .283 on-base-percentage. Pedro Feliz gets on base at a .292 clip, which more than negates his .438 slugging. There are a lot of benefits to having All-Star players in their 30s, but older players are vulnerable to injury and abrupt decline, and when you count on a lot of older players, you’re susceptible to this sort of thing.

The 2005-06 Giants paid the bill for a long run of winning with veteran talent that had to be signed to contracts that took them well past their primes. Brian Sabean’s mistake for 2007 was trying to milk a couple more years from the same strategy. That doesn’t mean they were wrong to do so — we all enjoyed the winning — just that there are consequences for bringing in a brigade of well-seasoned talent every year to prop up a run at a pennant. The Giants under Sabean have never written a season off to establish a young player at a position and thus avoid having to make questionable long-term commitments, and since they haven’t had the kind of farm system that the Braves had during their run of division championships, it was inevitable that their reliance on oldsters would eventually catch up with them.

Yet another season when they miss the playoffs, then, might not be such a bad thing if the team takes advantage of the opportunity it provides to really assess what they want to do and how they want to do it. Do they want continue to take on bad contracts and commit to playing expensive veterans at the end of their usefulness? They were pressed into that in the past by circumstance, but now is the time to master circumstance. As well as he fields, and as classy as he is, for instance, Omar Vizquel is a 40-year-old shortstop. Would signing him even for a year really be the best idea for the future, or would it be better to sign a stopgap while looking for (or developing) a long-term solution? Do the Giants really want to lock themselves into paying a 42-year-old Barry Bonds a salary of something over $15 million just to watch him get his three thousandth hit next season?

There is another way to build a perpetual winner, though, one that values flexibility, one that tolerates the risks associated with young players in the knowledge that those risks come with their own rewards, and one that exhibits an awareness that there are worse things than having a losing season while executing such a plan. If this year’s disappointment inspires the Giants to embrace such an approach, Giant fans in 2012 just might look back at this year with a special fondness. Losing is bad, after all, but not learning anything from losing is worse.

 

Interleague Play: I Despise It

Like most sensible people, I hate interleague play. I can describe this hatred, but to explain it would do violence to the depth of my contempt for a misbegotten monstrosity. Like others, I’ve tried to make this visceral, irrational anger more respectable by claiming it’s caused by one of a number of implausible reasons. I have, for instance, said that I value tradition and thus don’t like seeing National League teams play American League teams in May. This is embarrassing. Baseball tradition is a concept rich men who own ballclubs use to make money, not something to be valued for its own sake. Notable baseball traditions of the same vintage as league demarcation include racial segregation, throwing World Series games, and alcoholism.

I’ve also claimed to dislike interleague play because it’s a new contrivance of modern magnates, who in their naked lust for money have prostituted the game’s integrity. This, too, is nonsense. Interleague play is an old idea. In 1933, William Veeck, Sr., as president of the Chicago Cubs, implored his fellow executives and owners to see reason and give the people interleague play. Twenty years later, his more famous son, Bill, owner of the St. Louis Browns, proposed the same idea. Six years after that, the American League owners actually voted in favor of it. (You can see why they’d so readily foist on us the designated hitter.) Anyway, as the younger Veeck rightly pointed out every time he had the chance, baseball has no integrity and would be useless if it did.

I’ve further based my dislike for interleague play on the ridiculous series that have to be played as part of the price for supposedly glamorous Yankees-Mets and Cubs-White Sox games. This is valid to a point — there is no reason for a Padres-Mariners game — but ultimately this point, too, is nonsense. Yankees-Mets games are offensive in their own right. If every small-market team had its own glamorous natural rivalry, this would change nothing.

There are many more reasons for hating interleague play. Some of them are credible. Along with Rockies-Royals games, we have to suffer the unbalanced schedule because of interleague play. The fates of baseball teams, like those of college football teams, are now subject to the vagaries of schedule makers. Teams can legitimately claim that they’re being rooked out of fair shots at playoff berths because they have to play tough teams from the other league while their rivals play patsies.

The distinctive and unique qualities of the World Series are gone because of interleague play, as is much of the prestige of winning the world championship.

Interleague play, though, is not to be scorned because of its evil effects. Its evil is fundamental to its nature. By its existence alone, interleague play marks out the rest of the schedule as unworthy of notice — filled with meaningless games of little consequence, mere prelude to the garish spectacles on offer at the beginning and midpoint of summer. The slow, comfortable rhythm and routine of the long season, into which we should just now be settling as May winds into its final days, is suddenly broken; the charms of small games against minor teams gives sudden, abrupt way to games of apocalyptic consequence.

We have now endured a decade of this, a decade during which baseball has become more popular than ever and baseball players and owners have made more money than anyone ever thought possible. We will endure it for decades to come. The public has its tastes, and for mystifying reasons, the public will rise to the customary pitch of warlike enthusiasm as the Giants and Athletics meet this weekend for their eighteenth exercise in reducing our national pastime to the level of a crosstown high school football rivalry.

There is no hope for those of us who know interleague play is an abomination. All we can do is ignore it, and the irksomely chipper rationalizations and half-honest proofs that seek to force us not only to endure it but to actively enjoy it, as best we can. It will pass. The unwelcome interruption of the season will end. Baseball, soon enough, will return.

 

How to Tell Your Team’s Lineup Is Not Solid

Oh my God! Pedro Feliz (.254/.286/.455) is hitting third in the Giants’ order today (Saturday) in Oakland!!! Doesn’t that say it all about our “solid” lineup?

 

Barry Bonds’s Legs

So the Giants have ended the Todd Linden experiment — 55 at-bats, 23 k’s. We’ll see if Linden makes it through waivers. (I’m betting, just as with Niekro, he will.  No one wants our “prospects.”) Under the Giants’ master plan, Linden, and now Lewis and Ortmeier, were intended to be Barry Bonds’s legs, pinch running or substituting defensively for him late in the game, sometimes spelling each of the starting outfielders.  But the fundamental problem here is that, just as with Neikro, these players are not prospects so much as organizational soldiers, subsisting in triple-A Fresno, available to be brought up in just such an emergency as Roberts’s surgery. Lewis and Ortmeier are both 26, Linden will be 27 next month. Genuine prospects are not quite so long in the tooth before making the majors.

A second-round pick in 2002, Lewis is an outstanding athlete whose baseball tools are still trying to catch up with his body. He has good patience and speed, but his batting average and power are a little on the low side. He’s fast enough to play center, but doesn’t judge the ball well, which limits him to the corners where his offensive deficiencies become less excusable. That certainly sounds like the profile of a fourth outfielder, doesn’t it?  Yet some scouts consider him the upper-level Giant prospect most likely to become a major-league regular.

Hard-nosed and oft-injured, Dan Ortmeier excited the Giants when he hit .274/.360/.463 with 20 home runs and 35 stolen bases at Norwich in 2005. He started 2006 in Fresno, but played himself back down to Norwich. His timing couldn’t have been worse. At 26, he’s near the end of the line.

The first problem the Giants have is that their lineup is old, prone to injury. The second problem is that the guys expected to pick up the slack are themselves old for their level, and just not that good. Sabean used a conscious strategy of trading away prospects and giving up draft choices while surrounding Bonds with “veteran presence.”  He — and Giant fans — are reaping what he sowed.

 

Correction Around the Corner?

I’m the first to admit that the Giants, starting today with a 17-15 record, are playing better than I had anticipated they would.  (In a friend’s pool, I have the Giants pegged at about 81-81, and I secretly feel they’ll need some luck to reach that equilibrium.)  Furthermore, their ratio of runs scored to runs allowed indicates that they should have a winning percentage of .532 — spot on their current .531 winning percentage.

Several things, though, make me think the Giants current winning record does not accurately reflect the teams’ underlying performance, and do not bode well for the future.  Their OBP is at .318, 12th in the National League.  Their slugging checks in somewhat better, 8th in the league at .406, but still mediocre.

Perhaps this lack of good hitting is redeemed by the starting pitching, something most (definitely including me) perceived to be a strength of the team going into the season.  Cain and Lincecum, barring injury, will be fine.  They are still learning some things about pitching in the bigs, but they are future stars.  Yet while Matt Morris (ERA 3.20) and Noah Lowry (3.29) are both doing pretty well at keeping runs off the board, the fact that both have walked about as many as they have struck out, — 4.1 and 4.0 per nine innings, respectively –suggests a correction is around the corner.