Brawndo the Thirst Mutilat

Since 1980, pitchers have won just 13 of 58, or just 22%, of all possible AL and NL ROY awards. Something to think about when handicapping the races this early. I'll take Wieters over Price in the AL and would give you the field of pitchers in the NL if you'd give me both Gamel and McCutchen.

You know -- if I could be certain that Macha's motivation for starting Hall when he has good numbers vs. a pitcher was entirely as you describe (namely, that Hall might think he's likely to succeed even though Macha knows full well he isn't any more or less likely to succeed against those guys than against RHP he's hit .000 against) -- I'd actually have zero problem with it. If you've decided you have to give him a few more chances against RHP (because of his contract, preservation of team morale, loyalty, whatever...) and want to spread them out, assigning the starts based on vs. pitcher x splits is no dumber than just doing it randomly. Since Hall probably has some recollection of whether he's hit a pitcher or not, you might even be scoring some brownie points with him by "putting him in a position to succeed". Unfortunately, the rationale for Hall's insertion in the lineup is relayed to us through Haudricourt. He either fully believes in the relevance of these numbers, or believes it's his job to believe in them, since we, the dumb fans, believe in them. Thus, we have no way of knowing whether Macha actually thinks they have predictive value or not. And we never will, since the next time this issue comes up, it will still be Haudricourt telling us why player x is bewilderingly in the lineup today.

Willie Hernandez also took both the MVP and CY for Detroit in 1984. Fun fact: he pitched 140 innings that year, without making a single start.

Who uses batter vs. "pitcher type" splits though? I mean, above and beyond the totally obvious one (platoon differential)? Has anybody even been able to demonstrate meaningful differences (i.e. differences that can be expected to continue to be present in future performance) in batter performance against, say, power 4-seam flyball RHP as opposed to 2-seam groundball RHP? To my knowledge, no one has. And unless the Rays or Red Sox or A's or somebody has this data and is using it proprietarily and completely in secret, I don't think any major league teams are using such splits. I agree, in principle, that you could probably get a large enough sample of PAs against a pitcher category such that you'd have statistically significant performance differentials. I just don't know that anybody's succeeded in showing that such differentials actually exist (again, beyond platoon differential).

Seriously...can the Brewers please, at some point in my lifetime, hire a manager who understands how fantastically useless batter vs. pitcher splits are? If I were a GM, I'd be tempted to hire a manager who is old-school enough that he doesn't even know how to use a computer just so that I could take these things away from him. I have more respect for the "I went with my gut" defense for why a terrible player gets inserted in the lineup on a given day. Imagine how laughable you'd find it if Macha said that Hall played yesterday because he is batting .450 this season on Thursdays, so long as the Thursday falls on an even day of the month, and Macha had eggs and toast for breakfast that day. If true (I made that up), that would have the same predictive power as 3-6 against a particular pitcher does. i.e. None whatsoever.

To quantify this difference a bit -- Of Parra's 32 starts last year, he threw more than 100 pitches just 9 times and more than 110 just twice, with a high of 116 pitches. All told, he averaged 93 pitches per start. Of Prior's 30 starts in '03, he threw more than 100 pitches 17 times and more than 120 pitches 9 times, with a high of 133 pitches (in his very last start of the season, no less). Perhaps worst of all, in September he threw over 100 pitches in every start and was over 120 pitches 5 of 6 consecutive starts (perhaps, in this respect, it was fortunate for Parra that his performance meltdown at the end of the year prevented the Brewers from piling mileage on an already tired arm). He averaged 113 pitches per start, a figure Parra exceeded a grand total of one time last year. Prior was just 22 years old at the time -- not even old enough to have graduated from what is sometimes referred to as the "injury nexus". If you want to see the insanity of Prior's usage pattern that year summed up in microcosm, behold this game.

For some incredibly strange reason I'll never understand, baseball writers decided a long time ago to promulgate the notion that things like velocity and movement on pitches are physical attributes while the ability to locate pitches precisely is a mental attribute. I've never bought that, at least not as a rigid dichotomy. Parra doesn't have Steve Blass disease or anything (and even if he did, sports psychologists haven't been much help to his forerunners in that department, so...), he's just struggling a bit with his control. That could be related to mechanics, a new or previous injury, or any number of purely physical problems just as easily as it could be related to the tangled web of neuroses he, like each and every single one of us, is carrying around upstairs. Issuing walks doesn't mean he's a coward, or a thin-skinned sissy, or on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or any such thing. Which isn't to say he isn't on the verge of a nervous breakdown -- for all I know he might be, but I'm at least willing to admit that I cannot gain any special insight into a person's character, mental state, or emotional state just by watching a brief stretch of his failures at a dumb game, or by piecing together a bunch of quotes that honestly seem to me to sound like somebody telling somebody else exactly what they already believe, want to hear, and would doubtless end up writing whether you feed it to them or not. At least this way, Parra gets to pretend that he knows why his command is off and knows how to fix it. The alternative (that it's a physical problem) is clearly a lot scarier to an athlete.

Plus, he should be quite cheap. Cheap enough to bring back for another year of 4th OF duty if a better alternative can be found in CF. By my count he's got one more arb year left before FA, and he probably won't be able to get much (if anything) of a raise on the $1.8 mil he's making this year. The atrocious numbers he's posted the first 1/4 of the season in SD, especially considering how little playing time he'll likely get here, will be quite the drag on his final numbers even if he hits like a madman here.

Fangraphs is the best site on the net for recent statistical info. Here's a link to their page of 2009 2B overall WAR leaders. The tabs at the top let you pull up different positions, years, and also the more familiar traditional stats.

Terrible news. If the majority of the starts go to Hall at 3B and Counsell at 2B, this is a pretty big blow to the offense. If the "soft platoon" that we've seen so far is moved over from 3B to 2B and Gamel is the everyday 3B, this is a big to potentially enormous blow to the IF defense. I'm still with everybody that wants to go with the latter option. It's probably a bit more of a gamble, but Gamel might already be the third best hitter in the organization. Another thought they'll likely never seriously entertain is a defense/offense platoon arrangement of sorts where Gamel plays behind the high K and/or flyballish pitchers (Gallardo, Parra, and Bush) and CounsHall or maybe eventually Escobar plays behind the low K / high GB guys (Looper and Suppan, maybe sometimes Parra if the opposition tends to put the ball in play a lot).

Exactly. Pujols is easily the best hitter in the game, but he isn't the best hitter since Babe Ruth, and maybe even better than Babe Ruth. And even better-than-Ruth Bonds, with the likes of Benito Santiago, Edgardo Alfonso, et.al. hitting behind him, wasn't good enough to statistically justify the extent to which he was pitched around. I remember a number of analysts looking at this, and invariably they all reached the same conclusion -- most of the intentional walks Bonds was issued were dumb. On the other hand, if I was an actual MLB manager, I would have to weigh the statistical incorrectness of walking guys like Bonds and Pujols against the MSM's unquestioning belief that "you don't let the other team's best guy beat you", and in most situations in which the IBB was pretty close to the break-even point, I would probably have to go with that strategy if I cared about my job security.

I tend to agree that his minor league BB rates are a cause for optimism. It's also almost certainly true that he won't have long-term success with a BB/9 well over 5 like he's posted so far this year. But it isn't impossible to be an excellent major league pitcher with a BB/9 around Parra's 4-ish career mark. Some guys can do it by striking out a ridiculous amount of hitters. Examples include Rich Harden and Scott Kazmir (at least up until this year). I doubt Parra's going to jump up into the 10+ K/9 range, so this avenue is probably closed. Others do it by combining a good amount of strikeouts with the ability to induce lots of grounders. Carlos Zambrano most years and Ubaldo Jimenez are good examples of this type. Parra has a really good shot at keeping his GB% high enough that this career path is a definite possibility. His 52% GB mark last year exactly matched his career minor league numbers, and was good for 15th best in all of MLB among pitchers with at least 100 IP. This year, it's down to 45% but has been climbing (bottom graph) all season. Basically, his recent success coincides with the stupendous amount of line drives he was getting hit with in his early starts morphing into his usual distribution of lots of grounders and a few flyballs. Now, if he can both get the walk rate down to around 3-ish (a bit better than MLB average) AND keep the GB% up above 50%, I think he could be even better than Gallardo and emerge as a legitimate ace. But as long as his K rate doesn't slip, I think he'll be a darn good SP if he can pull of either one of these two tricks, or even kinda sorta pull off both of them (e.g. BB/9 down to high 3s, GB% remains around 45% or so).

wOBA also includes runs generated by SB and lost by CS. That's another reason Upton's wOBA rates him better than his OPS, especially relative to DeJesus, who was caught stealing nearly as many times as he was successful in 2008.

It's basically that the 9th hitter getting on base more gives the top of the order more opportunities to knock in runs. Usually the stat-nerd speak for this relationship is something along the lines of "positive interaction effects with the top of the order" having sufficient value to overcome the negative value associated with giving the pitcher's spot a handful of extra PA every season. This is especially true if you are willing to go the extra mile and put your best hitter (or second best) in the two-hole instead of third. Another small benefit is that most teams' top few PH options are better hitters (and usually much better sluggers) than their worst positional regular, so for the last 1-2 PA in every game, batting the pitcher 8th gives you a slightly better chance at sustaining a bottom of the order rally. It should be noted that most estimate the difference between the two lineups to be quite small -- usually less than 10 or so runs/season. I wanna say that Brian and/or Bill claimed on broadcasts last year that the Brewers stat dept. thought batting Kendall 9th could net 30-40 runs or some similarly ridiculous amount. I've seen no statistical evidence that this is a justifiable claim. Perhaps Kendall is hitter uniquely suited to this arrangement (a decent OBP guy in theory at least, but with almost no extra base hits, ever), but I still seriously doubt that would be enough to get to 30-40 runs.

I'm not either of those guys, but the defense has been better. Fewer unearned runs is probably not the most elegant way to look at that though, since you can make fewer errors and still be worse defensively. Also, the pitchers share some portion of the blame for unearned runs in terms of what they've done before the error to put runners on base or what they do after the error to fail to strand them. Not to mention the perpetually stupifying scoring decisions you see, and the fact that the actual rules about what can count as an error (no mental errors, for example) seem like they were crafted with the deliberate intention of making errors and fielding percentage less effective than they could be at measuring what like they are theoretically supposed to measure (i.e. how good is your defense). On the other hand, UZR has the Brewers as the second best fielding team in MLB so far at plus 11.6, behind only the Rays who are lapping the field at plus 23.7. Assuming they are able to keep up this level of defensive play, that puts the Brewers on a pace to earn roughly 4 more wins with the leather this year than they earned last year, when they were plus 13.8 for the entire season. I've watched most of the games and I guess my eyes agree with yours. The defense does seem better. I don't know if it really seems 40 runs/season better, but it's a nice thought that it might be.

And how. Among Brewer hitters that got significant playing time in 2004, the second best performance was basically a two-way tie between Brady Clark and Keith Ginter (Overbay was best, Jenkins had a down year). That said, as big a Sheets mark as I always have been and continue to be to this day, it is important to remember that he was 1/9 to blame for his lousy run support by being such a spectacularly inept hitter. In the seasons he insisted on having Chad Moeller as his personal catcher, he was 2/9 to blame.

Actually, he's thrown 44 IP at AAA. This is still a valid point, but you can also look at over 130 IP in A ball, and over 160 IP in independent leagues, most in the Northern League (which is thought to play between A and AA) and a few in the Atlantic (between AA and AAA). The critical thing in looking at his numbers from the low minors is recognizing that the same stuff that has made him successful in his 60 IP in the high minors has been working for him all along -- very high K rates, very low BB and HR rates. I'm not trying to say that everyone who posts a low ERA in the low minors and independent leagues could succeed in the majors -- most absolutely could not. What I am trying to say is if you have success everywhere you go, and that success is invariably a result of incredibly good peripherals, and those peripherals do not tail off as you are promoted to AA and AAA (in fact, they actually improve at the higher levels)... ...well, I'll just say that while I can't know (without more data) that Swindle is, in fact, a major league quality pitcher, based on what we know so far, I'd say it is an excellent bet that he is. Especially if he's used as a LOOGY. He's struck out 51% of the LHB he's faced at AA and AAA. Not 51% of his outs are Ks, 51% of the lefty hitters he's faced have struck out. He hasn't surrendered a HR to a LHB in over 3 years. Video game numbers.

That should read opportunity, singular. He's pitched in one game. Considering how utterly unhittable hitters in the upper minors (especially left-handed ones) have found his stuff, to be dismissing him on the basis of that one appearance (for instance, as another poster stated above, "not a major league pitcher") strikes me as totally bizarre. But then, most posters here said the same sort of stuff about DiFelice because his first appearance stunk and his radar gun readings were spectacularly unimpressive, so I guess it shouldn't be surprised. Now, though nothing whatsoever has changed about the pitches he throws, most seem to want DiFelice in the starting rotation. What changed?

That's just sadistic. I think it would be fun to do the other people involved in this hypothetical wager. I'll take rluz -- he has to write a 1000 word essay on the importance of chemistry and intangibles in roster construction, arguing that no true contender can be built without proven veteran leadership. I came up with that by thinking of the essay I would least like to be forced to write as a result of losing a bet. Somebody else should think of one for logan.

It probably isn't terribly fair to use raw linear weights, as barring injury, Kendall looks like a lock to get significantly more PA. He starts 4 out of every 5 games and is not PH for by the 7th inning. I don't know how you'd weigh the injury risk, since each of the individual pitchers are much more likely to miss some time, but all the eggs are in one basket on the Kendall side of the wager. I suppose he could also stink badly enough to lose the starting job at some point. Why not just use wOBA? No playing time worries that way. It probably would give the same result as 1.8OBP+SLG, but in the unlikely event that it doesn't, wouldn't it be better to use the more sophisticated and accurate metric? Aside to FTJ: Dude, you're really working hard to find someone to bet you about something. I'm tempted to say something outlandish in some thread just to see if I can get any action.

I'm very glad that Macha seems to be a bit less married to assigned innings for relievers than Yost was. I'm also glad that he's willing to use the guy he seems to think is the best reliever in the highest leverage spot, even if he is nominally the interim closer. It will be interesting to see whether those trends continue when Hoffman is back. I confess I sorta doubt they will. I guess I don't really want to see Hoffman try to go 2 2/3 IP anyway. However, I'll second Russ's suggestion that Coffey isn't anything special, so even though it worked today, I'm not sure its the right move tomorrow or next Tuesday. Coffey has over 200 MLB IP suggesting that he's a GB pitcher who gives up way too many HR to be anything more than just another guy in a decent pen. Some of that was no doubt related to Cincy's silly ballpark, and some of it was probably bad luck (nobody's really homer-prone enough to yield 25+% HR/FB rates), but you'd have a heck of a time convincing me he's any better than a 3.75 - 4.00 or so ERA short reliever in the long run, 17 scoreless IP or no. Letting Suppan hit in the top of the 7th if his leash was only one baserunner was totally indefensible, Dusty Baker-level dumb managing. Overall, I've been fine with Macha so far. Don't care about Hart / Hardy 2 vs. 5, and really don't care about Suppan on opening day and the rotation order stuff, and those seem to be the chief complaints people have against him to this point. Today, however, I was pretty unimpressed, results notwithstanding.

Swindle throws 5 pitches. Low 80s heater, mid 70s change, slider, and cutter, and the famous 55 mph curveball. Go here and here for some interesting Pitch F/x analysis of his pitches. I don't think it's anywhere near as rare as you think it is for LH short relievers to be pretty darn effective against righties. The wikipedia entry for "Left-handed specialist" has a list of 19 "famous" LOOGYs. I figured that was about as biased (in favor of your view) a place as possible to start looking at some data to see whether it's true that LOOGYs are seldom able to get righties out -- I mean, some of these guys (like Orosco) were instrumental in the very invention of the LOOGY role. 7 of the 19 pitchers (Cormier, Honeycutt, Lefferts, Orosco, Radinsky, Rhodes, and Schatzeder) had a career tOPS+ against RHB no greater than 110 and held righties to, at worst, something very close to a league average hitting line. So, nearly 40% of the guys that wikipedia-contributing baseball fans regard as prototypical LOOGYs were actually, at worst, average pitchers against righties over the course of their careers. A few I'd even call good against righties (Orosco, Radinsky, and Schatzeder). Now, some of the others (like Fossas and Shouse) were so bad against righties and so awesome against lefties that a true LOOGY role is not only the best way to deploy them, it's probably the only rational usage pattern for them. But the fact that guys like that are out there doesn't mean that every LH reliever with unimpressive stuff should be typecast and deployed in an obviously suboptimal fashion.

I've been wondering the same thing. His MiLB player page has him as a Sacramento River Cat (A's AAA team), but lists him as "reserve list (minors)". He hasn't appeared in any games yet. Rotoworld doesn't have any updates on him since he was DFA'ed to make room on the 40 man roster for Giambi. Anybody know if he's injured or what the deal is?

Bradford might not be the best example -- he's actually been pretty ineffective against LHB during his career. They've hit .313/.404/.446 off him vs. .240/.278/.299 by RHB. He's walked more lefties than he's struck out, and he's served up homers to lefties at a rate nearly 3 times higher than righties. To your general point though -- basically, I think teams are more likely to let righty sidearmers face LHB than vice-versa because they don't think of RH relievers as ROOGYs, even if their platoon splits would argue for a usage pattern that prevents them from facing lefties very often, if ever. On the other hand, everybody recognizes that LH relievers are routinely kept on rosters primarily just to come in and face one tough lefty, or a couple of them in a span of three hitters, etc. In fact, it seems to me that managers are tending to use lefty RP exclusively as LOOGYs more and more each passing season, even if the particular lefty RP on the team doesn't have a history of large platoon splits. The role defines the pitcher, rather than the pitcher's skills determining how he should be used. I don't have any idea why everybody seems to think Swindle can't get righties out. He's been pretty good against righties in the minors. His platoon splits are just a tad large because he utterly annihilates lefties. Over the last 3+ minor league seasons, LHB hit just .150 off him, have never once took him deep, and have struck out in a remarkable 48% of their PA against him. He has a better than 10 to 1 K/BB ratio against LHB. So, if you absolutely must have a LOOGY on the roster, he's your guy. But righties have only hit .228 off him, and his peripherals against righties are good enough that his MLE FIP vs. RHB over that 3+ year span is a totally respectable 3.53. There's no reason Macha should be afraid to let Swindle face righties from time to time. If I were the manager, both Swindle and Stetter would be conventional short relievers instead of LOOGYs. I'd just let the other team's lineup dictate which inning they pitch. If the other team's best two lefties are due up in the 8th inning, for instance, then that night either Swindle or Stetter is my setup guy. If the heavy LH portion of the opponent's lineup comes round in the 9th, well, guess who gets to be the closer tonight. I know it's a pipe dream that anybody would actually manage a MLB team that way, but it's just so much less silly than what they actually do. At any rate, hooray for Swindle! The bullpen just got significantly better.

The cult of the save is your answer here. He led the league by a fair margin, if I remember.