Keeping Cain Able

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.”

 

Scheduling Mayhem

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.

 

John McGraw Would Recognize This

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.

 

Fun With Numbers

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

 

Mike Matheny Inspires Student Engineers

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

 

It’s Too Early to Panic, But There Are Unsettling Trends

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.

 

Weaver’s Eighth Law: “The Best Place for a Rookie Pitcher is Long Relief”

I’m just leeching off other people’s work here, but Gary Huckabay recently wrote something at baseballprospectus.com (subscription required) that I believe applies to the 2007 Giants:

“When I first wrote that “There’s No Such Thing as a Pitching Prospect,” it meant two things, one of which has kind of become lost over time. Yes, it means that pitchers get hurt at approximately the same rate as that methheads swipe identities and lose teeth. That’s what pitchers do, not just prospects. But it also had another meaning — that guys who are totally blowing people away in the minors . . . are absolutely not pitching prospects — they’re already pitchers, and more time in the minors only means time off the living, pulsating clocks that are their labrums, rotator cuffs, and elbows.”

[emphasis added]

One thing that distinguishes young hitters from young pitchers is that young major-league hitters can pretty much count on making steady improvements from the time they start playing professional ball until the time they’re 26 or 27.   You might have a guy like Cameron Maybin who would be pretty overwhelmed if he tried to play in the major leagues today, but we can be fairly certain that he’ll be able to handle the big leagues in two years or so.  Cameron Maybin is a prospect.

The same is not the case with pitching prospects.  Although there are exceptions, in general there is no systematic pattern of improvement after the age of 21 or so.  Sometimes guys get better, of course, and sometimes they do so in a hurry — but you can’t take a young pitcher in a vacuum and expect him to improve the same way that you can for a hitting prospect.  Mark Rogers will probably never get his command sorted out, Yusemiro Petit will never add enough ticks to his fastball to become a useful major-league starter, Gavin Floyd will never learn how to keep the ball down, and so forth.  All of these things are possible — but they’re not very likely.

The flip side, as Huckabay also alludes to, is that young pitchers often take less time to become dominant big league performers.  Pitching, somewhat contrary to the mad-genius reputation of pitchers like Greg Maddux, is more of a purely physical skill and less of a learned behavior than hitting is.  Pitchers like Francisco Liriano and Jered Weaver and Cole Hamels weren’t just holding their own last year, they were among the very best pitchers in baseball.  Someone like Tim Lincecum might very well be as effective today as he’s ever going to be, before he’s had a chance for injuries and mileage to accumulate.

I understand why the Giants are preparing to send Lincecum down to Fresno.  They want him to start every fifth day, since starting is where his highest value ultimately is.  But Earl Weaver, who was a successful manager and wrote one of the best books on strategy and tactics, believed that the best place for a talented rookie was with the big club, pitching in long relief, making adjustments at the major-league level.  Given the apparent mediocrity of the Giants’ bullpen, and the probable struggles of Russ Ortiz (no, I’m not yet a believer, although I wish him well), doesn’t it make sense to get Lincecum back up soon?  Keeping Tim Lincecum down on the farm is not conservative — it’s a downright irresponsible way to run a ballclub.

 

The “Veteran” Lineup

We read in today’s Chronicle that Bochy is frustrated he cannot play all his regulars at this point of spring, ten days before opening day. Aurelia (groin strain), Roberts (strained clavicle joint) and Durham (hamstring strain) are out, and Bonds and Molina need periodic days off. While Durham might play today, Roberts is out until at least Monday and Aurelia will miss about a week. This is another sign that the Giants will, as in years past, deal with the severe downside of having a “proven” lineup.

It isn’t just that this iteration of the Giants is unusually old; the 21st-century Giants franchise is well-represented on the list of oldest teams in major-league history:

Average Age of Team Roster, Weighted by Plate Appearances

1 2006 San Francisco 34.53

2. 1998 Baltimore 33.32

3. 1999 Baltimore 32.56

4. 1982 California 32.46

5. 1985 California 32.44

6. 2005 San Francisco 32.43

7. 1945 Detroit 32.42

8. 2002 San Francisco 32.30

9. 2003 San Francisco 32.30

10. 2005 New York (AL) 32.24

Beyond this top ten, the 2004 Giants currently rank 21st on the all-time list, and the 2001 team is 25th. And notice that last year’s team holds first place by a mile over the ’98 Orioles.

Given the Giants’ moves this off-season, it does not appear that Sabean considers age to be a significant problem. The Giants will basically field last season’s team — Durham (35 in 2007), Vizquel (40), Feliz (32), Bonds (42) and Winn (33) are a year older. Alfonzo (27 in 2006) is replaced by Molina (32 in 2007) , Hillenbrand (30) by Aurelia (35), Niekro (27) by Klesko (36). They do get younger in center, replacing Finley (41) with Roberts (35).

The Giants’ shot at success this year depends on the old hitters taking their Geritol regularly and not falling apart. While Barry Bonds remains a force in the lineup — health and the U.S. Justice Department permitting — no one else provides any serious punch. The Giants were tenth in the league in runs scored last year, and there is no reason to believe the 2007 squad will do any better. If they lose Bonds for any reason, their offense will be anemic.

 

Blame Laid at Sabean’s Feet in Advance

Yes, the inevitable has happened. Peter Magowan has put Brian Sabean on notice: “We’ve had two disappointing years. We’re all accountable. I’m accountable. Everybody’s accountable for their performance. I think [Sabean] understands that.”

Well, we may all be accountable, but it is unlikely Magowan’s partners are going to kick him out of the corner office on King Street if (when?) the Giants don’t win the division in 2007. And, while Brian Sabean’s personnel decisions are not the one’s I like to think I’d make, there is no denying Sabean has done well while being saddled with Magowan’s own deal-with-the-devil. Sabean has followed an arguably smart short-term strategy every year since taking over the GM duties in 1997: he has relied on Bonds to carry a bunch of veterans, some of whom were actually exceptional players, into the playoffs. This has sometimes worked, and at any rate led to eight winning seasons in the past ten.

To make Sabean’s job security depend on the results of this season, however, does seem just a tad unfair. Magowan and his parnters are the ones who wanted Bonds back this season, and that decision took much of Sabean’s budget and many of his options from him before he had any time to actually improve the team. The results for 2007 are the same as in years past: Bonds surrounded by a crop of veterans. But Bonds is unlikely to perform as he did in 2001-03, and none of this season’s supporting cast is Jeff Kent.

That Magowan used the same method he used in putting Dusty Baker on the hot seat before the 2002 season (remember Peter’s “We should get to the World Series” speech?), is evidence that despite the fact “we’re all accountable,” the fans should direct their ire at Sabean. Sabean is not owed a contract extension, but he deserves better than this.

 

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.