Baseball: Past and Present

1.  Los Angeles Dodger broadcaster Vin Scully will, for the first time in memory, actually talk about the game at hand, foregoing his usual distracting, infuriating and irrelevant digressions about anything and everything. He will also finally be assigned a color commentator, someone who will keep Vin focused and lucid. Vin will now be unable to digress about the use of the number three in ancient Rome or the day mankind first walked upright.

2.  The Texas Rangers will trade Michael Young hoping that their new multi-million dollar third baseman, Adrian Beltre, will play at least 80 games and hit .260 with 10 homeruns and 60 RBI. He won’t. At least not until the final year of his current contract. Michael Young will go on to win a batting title and the “best guy in the clubhouse” award for his new team. Texas will then try and trade for a player who is a good influence, plays hard and hits .300. Someone like Michael Young.

3.  The Pittsburgh Pirates will win 30 games by November 1. Also, Pedro Alvarez will raise his average vs. lefties to .130 and strike out only 300 times.  Pittsburgh, stating their new and sure-to-work philosophy, will fire manager Clint Hurdle saying that he is too outgoing and express a desire to hire a manager who is quiet and unemotional. Ryan Doumit will be the new Pirate shortstop, management citing a lack of offense from that position the previous season. The Pirates will then move to Heinz Field citing winning traditions and fan support.

4.  It will be revealed that Bryce Harper is really 60 years old and has already hit 900 homeruns, his best season being 1969 when he hit 80 homeruns for the Montreal Expos. It is then revealed that this record may be tainted as his consumption of Canadian beer gave him the strength of ten while not increasing his hat or shoe size. It is also revealed that Harper has the same last name as the Canadian prime minister, forcing him to change his name to Bud Selig III. A statue in Bud’s likeness will be erected and displayed in Bryce Canyon the new home of Harper and the Oakland A’s.

5.  The New York Mets will be sold to Albert Pujols who will become the first active player to make $40 million per game and own his own team. Pujols will complain that the Mets players make too much money and will sell every player on the team and play for both the Cardinals and Mets. Bud Selig will declare this change of ownership to be in the best interests of the game but insist that Pujols must bat left handed three times each game. The new Mets owner will then lock himself out rather than sign a new collective bargaining agreement and hire Tim McCarver as his media spokesperson. By day, Pujols, will talk, act, and look more and more like embattled Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi. And play like him, too.

6.  FOX will broadcast a game which lasts under four hours. Also, FOX will broadcast a game which does not feature the Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees. FOX will broadcast a game which will, finally, completely fill the screen with painfully obvious information and which will enable the viewer to see nothing of the actual game. The games themselves will be shortened to two non consecutive innings to allow FOX to feature even more commercials and reveal their exciting new, completely unrelated to baseball programming, all starring Joe Buck as himself.

I’ll travel anywhere, anytime to debate anyone that no player in organized baseball has ever had four better back-to-back-to-back-to-back offensive seasons than Smead Jolley.

The issue is beyond dispute. Playing for the Pacific Coast League San Francisco Seals from 1926 to 1929, Jolley batted .346, .397, .404, and .387 with 138 homers in the four years. His .397 led the league in hitting in 1927 and his 163 RBIs led the PCL. In 1928, Jolley led in almost every offensive category to win the Triple Crown (.404, 45 homers, and 188 RBIs).

Readers inclined to dismiss Jolley’s Herculean feats as the stuff of watered down minor league pitching should remember that the PCL’s quality was always considered to be just a notch below the bigs.

Over his sixteen year minor league career, Jolley hit .367 and won two additional batting titles with the Texas League’s Corsicana Oilers.

Astonishingly, in 1928 and 1929 Jolley played in 191 and 200 games while batting 765 and 812 times and recording a mind-boggling 309 and 314 hits. Throughout the PCL’s history, very long seasons were common. Since the players were paid by the week and could often earn more in the PCL than in the big leagues, many of them preferred to stay on the West Coast where both the money and the weather were better.

The rap on Jolley was that while he could hit, he couldn’t field worth a lick. Jolley, while acknowledging that his fielding left plenty to be desired, took umbrage at the intensity of the criticism direct at him.

Jolley eventually made his way to the Chicago White Sox and the Boston Red Sox where he hit a solid .305 during his four years from 1930 to 1933. But, in 788 chances with the two Sox teams, Jolley made 44 errors for a .944 fielding average.

In an interesting footnote to his career, Jolley’s last game pitted him against Babe Ruth who, since the Yankees had lost the pennant to the Washington Senators, decided to pitch. Jolley went one-for-five while Ruth hung on for a 6-5 win.

In 2003, the Pacific Coast League Hall of Fame elected Jolley.

According to an excellent essay written by my Society for American Baseball Research colleague Bill Nowlin, after baseball Jolley worked for many years as a house painter for the Alameda (California) Housing Authority. When he died in 1991, Jolley’s ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean not far from where he performed his incomparable slugging for the Seals.

• On a serious note, to anyone who hasn’t seen it, there was an 8.9 earthquake in Japan and tsunami warnings and advisories are in effect for the West Coast. Here is a map of the effected areas.

Baseball articles worth reading:

• Library of Congress receives recordings of about 10,000 baseball games from 1957 to 1979. A friend and I were talking the other day about how good of a sport baseball is on the radio. I prefer it there over television. The person who recorded these games must have felt similarly.
• My friend Rory Paap offers Best. Link. Ever. For Giants fans, at least.
• The fear of unorthodoxy: a new model of player development
• One more reason I love Josh Wilker: References to would-be hippie communes and post-collegiate angst in a season preview for the Brewers.

What he did: The 1960s was bleak for hitters, a decade where pitchers dominated and offensive numbers were at arguably their lowest point since the Deadball Era. One of the great forgotten bats of this time is Matty Alou. His career batting average of .307 won’t get him in Cooperstown, and his OPS+ of 105 rises just above mediocrity, thanks to his limited power and ability to get on-base (he hit 31 home runs lifetime and never walked 50 times in a season.) For a few years, however, Alou approached Roberto Clemente, Pete Rose, and maybe a few others as baseball’s best hitter. Like those men, he might have hit .400 in a different era.

Era he might have thrived in: Alou started off his career as a platoon player for the San Francisco Giants and subsequently did his best work as a Pittsburgh Pirate at vast Forbes Field, which may have suited him as a contact hitter. Thus, we’ll give Alou another large stadium in a far superior offensive age to the one he played in. We’re making him a New York Yankee in 1998. On a team that somehow won 114 games and the World Series with starting left fielder Chad Curtis hitting .243, Alou would make it still better.

Why: Admittedly, many players may have been an upgrade over Curtis in 1998. How he started for the Yankees is beyond me, his WAR of 2.7 being just above replacement level, his OPS+ of 90 the worst of any Yankee starter. Though his team scored 965 runs, Curtis batted in just 56. He also had the worst batting average, slugging percentage, and number of home runs. In baseball history, Curtis has to be one of the worst starters on a great team, though perhaps he offered something that doesn’t come through in stats. I do admire Curtis for being one of the few players to speak out against steroids at the height of their popularity in baseball. He’d be the kind of veteran presence I’d want in my clubhouse.

Alou might not match Curtis’s fielding, as he posted negative defensive WAR rankings ten of his 15 seasons. But his bat would almost certainly be more than enough to compensate. The stat converter on Baseball-Reference.com has Alou’s 1968 season, where he hit .332 in the Year of the Pitcher, translating to a .380 clip for the ’98 Yankees. His 1969 year, where he led the National League with 231 hits, would be good for a record 265 hits on the ’98 Yankees to go with a .362 batting average and 129 runs. He’d be like Ichiro Suzuki minus the glove, and either converted season would easily give him the AL batting title over teammate Bernie Williams, who somehow won it that year hitting .339.

Seeing as Alou had WARs of 5.2 and 4.7 in ’68 and ’69 respectively, the thought here is that he would give the Yankees another 2-3 wins. And he’d probably do more in the playoffs than Curtis, who only played in the ALCS against the Cleveland Indians and went 0-5 over two games. The net result would be the same, of course, with the Yankees still triumphing in the World Series, so maybe this wouldn’t make any major difference to them. But for Alou, who received 1.3 percent of the Hall of Fame vote his only year on the writers ballot in 1980, it could lead to much more.

Any player/Any era is a Thursday feature here that looks at how a player might have done in an era besides his own.

Others in this series: Albert Pujols, Babe Ruth, Bad News Rockies, Barry Bonds, Bob Caruthers, Bob Feller, Bob Watson, Denny McLain, Dom DiMaggio, Frank Howard, Fritz Maisel, George Case, Harmon Killebrew, Harry Walker, Home Run Baker, Ichiro Suzuki, Jack Clark, Jackie Robinson, Jimmy Wynn, Joe DiMaggio, Johnny Frederick, Josh Hamilton, Ken Griffey Jr., Lefty O’Doul, Michael Jordan, Nate Colbert, Paul Derringer, Pete Rose, Prince Fielder, Ralph Kiner, Rickey Henderson, Roberto Clemente, Sam Thompson, Sandy Koufax, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Stan Musial, The Meusel Brothers, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays

My hackles went up before a single out was recorded in the first spring training game I watched.

With the Pittsburgh Pirates hosting the Toronto Blue Jays in Bradenton and with runners on first and second, no one out, Jose Bautista hit a sharp ground ball off starter James McDonald directly to third baseman Pedro Alvarez.

Let me clarify “directly”. Alvarez didn’t have to take a step in any direction. The ball hit him square on his glove. Alvarez muffed it. Instead of playing the ball cleanly as any major leaguer should, he kicked the ball around a couple of times before locating it in the dirt between his legs. As a result, a run scored.

Broadcaster Bob Walk wondered out loud if Baustista’s grounder would be scored a hit or an error. But I hadn’t the slightest doubt: Hit!

When Walk announced the official scorer’s decision, he offered the age old baseball excuse that Bautista’s easy out was “too hot to handle”.

Later in the game, Bautista was credited with a double when left fielder Matt Diaz butchered a pop up. Really, you would be disappointed if you Little Leaguer didn’t make the play Diaz mangled.

More than the nonsensical save, the laughable “quality start,” or the absurd pitch count, nothing annoys me more than the watered down official scoring wherein any hard hit ball or any fly that turns an outfielder around is automatically designated a hit.

I don’t know when or why it happened but generous (to the batter) scoring is baseball’s unspoken disgrace. There’s no explanation because while it may, in my example today, help the terrible fielding Alvarez maintain an artificially high fielding average or give Bautista’s offensive stats a boost (a single and a RBI), it also works to the detriment of the pitcher, in this case McDonald, who should not have been charged with an earned run.

Here’s an exercise for those of you who score or are casual observers of baseball games. As the game you’re watching progresses, make a notation of how many balls put into play that should be converted into outs are scored as hits. Your total will vary from game to game but by the end of the season, I’ll estimate that you’ll average at least two.

Since baseball has developed a whole new set of statistics for pitching and hitting, the time has come for different and more realistic official fielding standards too. Bill James has his Fielding Bible which, it strikes me, is too complex for the average (or even advanced) fan.

This, for example, from James’ overview of his Plus/Minus system:

“The computer totals all softly hit ground balls on Vector 17, for     example, and determines that these types of batted balls are converted into outs by the shortstop only 26 percentage of the time. Therefore, if, on this occasion, the shortstop converts a slowly hit ball on Vector 17 into an out, that’s a heck of a play, and it scores at +.74. The credit for the play made, 1.00, minus the expectation that it should be made, which is 0.26. If the play isn’t made—by anybody—it’s -.26 for the shortstop.”

I have in mind something much simpler. In Alvarez’s case, it would be BEGB [HH]/CTR= Booted Easy Ground Ball [Hard Hit]/Cost Team a Run.

I’ve never delved in to win shares on my own blog, but will here today. But first, what are ‘Win Shares’?

Win shares are the creation of the master himself: Bill James. They are a really fun and outstanding metric James first introduced in his 2002 book Win Shares. Bill uses his system to assign a certain number of win shares for each player on a particular team, based on that player’s offensive, defensive and pitching contributions to the team. The statistics are also park-adjusted, league-adjusted and era-adjusted. Of course, Bill is also dealing in advanced metrics – sabermetrics – and not in RBI, wins, etc.

More to the mechanics of it, a win share is a third of a team win. So when the Giants won 92 games in 2010, they had 276 win shares to go around. We won’t go into the complicated formula, we haven’t the time, and so you’ll just have to buy the book. The basic idea is to determine how many win shares each player on a particular team deserves, to determine how valuable each player was. Often, we give too much credit to the offense while taking away from the importance of defense. We won’t do that here, not today.

This brings us to the topic of the day: Most Valuable Player awards. There’s always a lot of debate on this subject. Should it go to the leagues best player? Should it go to the player that was most valuable to his team? Does that player get extra credit if his team makes the playoffs? These are all very fair questions. I won’t bore you with my own convictions.

When the award comes out, there isn’t always consensus on who should have actually won… “There’s no way Ryan Howard should have won, Albert Pujols had a way better season!” It happens. It happens often. A lot of the time, though, the player that loses comes from another team that just didn’t play as well overall; the deserving player was simply overlooked. But how often do they give the award to a player that wasn’t even the best player on his own team?

You’d think it’d be a whole lot harder to overlook a better player when he’s on the same team as the guy that won the award. I assure you, though, it’s not. Would you believe, since 2002, it’s happened close to 20% of the time? With win shares, I’ll show you.

I looked at each season’s voting from 2002, the year of the release of James’ transcendent book, to the present.

There have been 18 MVP winners since 2002, nine American League winners and nine for the National League. I love symmetry. The NL winners, in order: Barry Bonds, Bonds, Bonds, Pujols, Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Pujols, Pujols, Joey Votto. For the AL: Miguel Tejada, Alex Rodriguez, Vladimir Guerrero, Rodriguez, Justin Morneau, Rodriguez, Dustin Pedroia, Joe Mauer and Josh Hamilton. Note: Bonds, Pujols and Rodriguez are greedy buggers.

From 2002-2005 we had some close calls, but the better player on the same team at least won the MVP. In 2006, that changed. Since 2006, I can find three out of ten players (30%) that won MVPs that weren’t even their club’s best player.

Justin Morneau is an excellent player. He had an excellent season in 2006. It just wasn’t that excellent. There were probably upwards of 10 players who had better seasons, pitchers and hitters included. One of those players was Grady Sizemore. Another was teammate Joe Mauer. Go figure.

According to Baseball-reference, Mauer was worth 7.0 wins above replacement (WAR), Morneau just 4.2. Mauer had a slash line of .347/.429/.507 (AVG/OBP/SLG) while winning the batting title — his first of three so far — and playing the much more important position of catcher. Morneau hit .321/.375/.559 while playing the far less important first base, and really not all that well if we’re keeping track of that sort of thing. But Morneau drove in 130 runs to Mauer’s 84 and took home the AL MVP.

Bill James Online (subscription) shows Mauer was far and away the better player with 30 win shares to Morneau’s 26. We have our first flub.

The voters wasted no time and did it again in 2007. Jimmie Rollins is another excellent player. He just wasn’t as good as perennially underrated teammate Chase Utley, at least not that season. It’s also worth mentioning that Pujols was the best player that season with 8.3 WAR, but I guess the voters decided he can’t win every season.

Rollins played every game that season for the Phillies, won a Gold Glove and hit .296/.344.531 with 94 RBI. Teammate Chase Utley hit .332/.410/.566, drove in 107 and did not win the Gold Glove — he’s been hosed more than once, never won one. It’s hard to say why they missed Utley, but they did.

Well, it’s not that hard when it comes down to it using James’ win shares. They each finished with 28 (Utley had 28.04 and Rollins had 27.79). This one isn’t such an egregious mistake, but still.

Again, wasting no time at all, it happened once more in 2008, this time again in the AL. The city: Boston. Joe Mauer probably deserved the award with a ridiculous 8.7 WAR to lead the pack in the AL, but Dustin Pedroia won it.

Everyone loves a gritty, small player that’s way better than he should be. Everyone loves David Eckstein, and he’s not even very good. Pedroia is. He’s really good. He just wasn’t as good as teammate Kevin Youkilis who was worth 6.0 WAR – Or Twins catcher Mauer, as I mentioned.

Pedroia hit .326/.376/.493 while leading the league with 213 hits, 54 doubles and 118 runs. It was quite a remarkable season for a second baseman. There’s no doubt about it. He also took home the Gold Glove. Meanwhile, Youkilis hit .312/.390/.568 with 115 RBI and 29 home runs while playing first, third and a (very) little outfield.

Again, James has Youk the best player on the team with 27 win shares to Pedroia’s 26. This is another close call, but the award didn’t go to even the best player on one team.

The award voters have wised up with the Cy Young award – Felix Hernandez won it for the AL in 2010 with just 13 wins to 12 losses — maybe they’ll reform when voting for the MVP too. But I won’t hold my breath. And, apologies to players like Utley, the Gold Glove voting is even further behind with the managers and coaches in charge of voting. They often go to the incumbents, the players with defensive reputations, and somewhat ironically, those players that performed well offensively.

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Rory Paap writes PaapFly.com and regularly contributes articles to this Web site as well as TheHardballTimes.com

While watching the Kansas City Royals vs. Los Angeles Dodgers on MLB.com the other day, the question entered my mind as to which road was better taken when building up a good baseball team.

I suppose the question really came to mind after listening to a conversation with Royals GM Dayton Moore.  The Royals starting line-up was made up mostly of “can’t miss” prospects, most of whom will begin the year in AA with (name of team).  The hope expressed by Moore was that by 2012, the year the Royals host the all-star game, most, if not all of these players, would be finding success at the major league level with the parent club.

We all know that the baseball landscape is littered with high draft picks who never found any sustained major league success or for that matter, any major league time at all.  The vast majority of high round draft picks never reach the majors let alone the lofty heights forecast for them by major league scouts and GMs.

Small market teams who have seen limited or no success in recent years, many with high draft picks, have little or no margin for error and must decide between the best available athlete or a player who could fill a pressing need a few years down the road at the big league level.  They stand to lose another year of system development if they make the wrong choice and more money which they can ill afford.

Big market teams with big payrolls can make mistakes as their resources and already at the big league level talent can, in most cases, compensate for what sometimes turns out to be an ill advised and wasted pick.

Signing free agents, while it has it’s own inherent element of risk, allows a team to add an established and more veteran player to their line-up.  A weakness can be addressed immediately or an area of strength can be protected against poor performance or injury.  The richer and more successful teams with few holes to fill can use this market to quickly jump back into competition or solidify their already dominant position.  Their farm system is a luxury which can be used to acquire veteran players to stabilize or improve a team as the season moves forward.

Their poorer or less successful brethren must decide between the two options or some reasonable balance.  They must decide if their long suffering fans will be able to endure more seasons of mediocrity while awaiting the promise of better days to come.  How long will these fans wait and what will be the consequences of yet another rebuilding five years or more process?

This is where the double edged Catch 22 syndrome can waylay the best laid plans of mice and GMs should the determination of those involved waver.  We have often witnessed the following scenario-as a farm system finally bears fruit and produces some genuine major league stars, those players when they become eligible for arbitration and eventually free agency, begin to demand monies commiserate with their abilities and track record.  Or they tire of toiling for unproductive teams and seek greener pastures with more successful organizations.

Pay them what they demand or trade them for prospects and begin the process once again?  The dangers here are panicking and overpaying or allowing those players to leave and alienating your long suffering fan base. If payment is your preferred option, a player who suddenly declines for reasons of age, injury  or  thanks for the pay check I’ll sit around and watch now will absorb much of your budget and will be
untradeable no matter how little is demanded in exchange for his services.  Starting over again can further alienate an already critical fan base and can lead to apathy.  Fans will turn to other diversions or simply stay at home.

The best choice seems to be ownership which cares enough to develop and nurture a productive farm system which can then be used to acquire veteran players as needed. A commitment to hiring baseball savvy GMs and organizational people and a love of the game are the key elements to such a plan.  A willingness to spend the necessary money to keep those star prospects which have been developed over a few years and the ability to differentiate between good player and bad.

I know-much easier said than done.

While researching my post about Big George Crowe, I learned that the Santurce Cangrejeros, one of the greatest Puerto Rico Winter League teams of all time for which many Major League stars played, is out of business.

Because of faltering attendance from 2000-2004, the Santurce team moved to two smaller island cities, first Manatí and then Arecibo. Now, with no games played during the 2010-2011 season and none scheduled in the future, it appears that the franchise is gone forever.

While I wouldn’t describe the passing of the Cangrejeros as significant as the demise of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants or the Philadelphia Athletics, it’s nevertheless a serious blow to baseball history.

From 1955 to 1960 when I lived in Puerto Rico, I saw dozens of outstanding big league stars on the Santurce squads including the incomparable Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda, Willie Mays and Crowe.

But Rubén Gómez, a marginally successful pitcher with the New York and San Francisco Giants, was Santurce and the Winter League’s most dominant player.  Over his amazing 29-year Puerto Rican career, Gómez posted a 179-119 mark while striking out 2,488. Both Gómez’s win total and strike outs are all-time records.

At 46, Gómez had enough left in his tank to shut out bitter cross-town rival San Juan.

Gómez attributed his durability to his outstanding athletic ability conditioning. Nicknamed “El Divino Loco” (the Divine Madman) because he used the tricky Sixto Escobar Stadium winds to his advantage, Gómez earned a master’s degree in physical education from the University of Puerto Rico and starred on the baseball and track teams.

When asked later in life about how his arm withstood all the innings pitched, Gómez said: “I lifted weights at home on a daily basis and at the university I would made 50 long throws of close to 400 feet from the outfield to home plate. That’s why my arm never bothered me. Even at 65, I didn’t have arthritis.”

Originally signed by the New York Yankees, the Bombers suspended Gómez for playing winter ball in the Dominican Republic. Eventually Gómez signed in 1953 with the Giants. One of the first Puerto Ricans to make his mark in the major leagues, Gómez broke in with a respectable 13-11 mark. He went 17-9 with a 2.88 ERA in 1954 and, with Johnny Antonelli and Sal Maglie, led the Giants to the World Championship over the heavily favored Cleveland Indians. In the third game, Gómez went the distance, pitching a four-hitter to dominate Indians’ starter Mike Garcia, 6-2.

Another Gómez performance was one for the ages. In 1958, the San Francisco Giants’ debut year after leaving the Polo Grounds, manager Bill Rigney tapped Gomez to pitch the first major league game ever played on the west coast. Gomez overwhelmed the Los Angeles Dodgers and Don Drysdale in a complete game masterpiece at Seals Stadium, 8-0.

Although Gómez last pitched for the Philadelphia Phillies in a cameo appearance in 1967, he was still a stand out in Puerto Rico. By the time his Winter League career ended a decade later in 1975-1976, Gómez had been on nine Santurce championship teams.

Gómez died in 2004 after a prolonged bout with complications from cancer.

• The series Bill Miller and I have been doing on great players on bad teams lives on at his new space. I wrote today’s installment, and it’s on Jimmie Foxx and the 1935 Philadelphia Athletics.
• There’s a longish, excellent piece in the new spring issue of The American Scholar on famed newspaper writer Ring Lardner and why he quit covering baseball after the 1919 World Series. It’s a great story for anyone who’d like a comprehensive look at baseball’s labor history, though I’d argue that Lardner abandoning the game for other subject matter wasn’t unprecedented. Heywood Broun did it later, Westbrook Pegler as well, and to some extent Damon Runyon, the only person I know of to cover a World Series and write a Broadway musical (Guys and Dolls.)
• Can John Thorn Finally Erase Abner Doubleday? The thought here: no, sadly. A fan, and particularly a baseball commissioner, must be willfully ignorant to still proclaim Civil War hero Doubleday as the founder of the baseball. Why does the game still need a creation myth in the 21st century? What is wrong with the very well-documented truth?
• The untold story by a 90-plus-year-old former ballplayer who caught Jackie Robinson’s ill-fated tryout for the Boston Red Sox in 1945. Part of being a baseball writer or historian is knowing there are so many of these stories out there that never get properly documented and die with the players involved. I’ll give a tip of my non-existent hat (since I rarely wear them) to the writer who contacted this player ahead of his death this last year.