More than 50 percent, and you're a ground-ball pitcher. More than 55 percent and you're an extreme ground-ball pitcher (if not quite Brandon Webb).Well I wasn't completely convinced, so I decided to do this for myself. I used Baseball Prospectus's ground ball statistics and defined GB% as GB/Batted Ball (as they do). Here is a graph of GB% since 1950:
by Jason Wojciechowski
You've seen this a couple of times before, so you know how it goes. Today, we examine the mediocre team with the best stadium in the game, the Pittsburgh Pirates. They're not the sad-sacks they used to be, what with some young stars and a well-regarded front office that's causing better things to come, but they're not really going to be competitive this year, either.
The Baseball Prospectus depth charts, the place I start, has the Pirates coming out 72-90 this year, fifth in the tall stack of the N.L. Central. Their lineup of position players doesn't look terrible, with no Jimmy Paredeses hanging around, but the pitching, which features such luminaries as Jeff Karstens, Kevin Correia, and Charlie Morton, is not impressive. Still, I think we're better off trying to squeeze extra wins out of the position players than the pitchers because the former, at least, have some youth and upside to their credit.
As before, I cheat right off the top: we'll count on five wins of run-distribution luck over the course of the season, leaving us needing to find eleven wins on the roster to get the team to the Holy Grail of Respectability, 88 wins.
Ex-Twins star Torii Hunter said some Twins players were beaten before they started, which finally confirms what has long been suspected: that the Twins are intimidated by the Yankees.... Hunter recalled one 2004 ALDS game the Twins lost where they had a runner on third with one out, down a run against the great Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, and Twins manager called on a young righty hitters to bat against Rivera, and Hunter recalled that hitter turning down the pinch-hit assignment. "You need a righty hitter against Rivera with his cutter,'' Hunter recalled. But according to Hunter, Ford shook his head no. So Gardenhoire used another kid, Jason Kubel, a lefthanded hitter, who Hunter recalled getting jammed. "Kubel wasn't afraid, but he's a lefty hitter,'' Hunter said.That's a really compelling story, undone only by the small problem that it never happened. At least not like Torii Hunter said it did. Kubel never pinch hit against Rivera in 2004 (his first year in the Majors), and Lew Ford started three of the four games, and in the one he didn't start, Rivera faced six batters, and none of them were (or should have been) pinch hit for.
by Jason Wojciechowski
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| They're cooked Photo by Rik Panganiban |
Midway through this self-assignment to figure out how each of the crummy MLB teams could be respectable and win 88 games, I've come to my hardest test: the Houston Astros. The Astros aren't a team with a ton of young talent that projection systems don't like but everyone thinks could be good in two years. (They're not the Royals, that is.) They're just a really bad team.
PECOTA sees the Astros having the worst offense in the National League, and it's not even close. Their .243 projected team True Average is nine points below the next contender, the Pirates. For context, if you had two players with those TAvs (you'd have two crap players, but that's an aside), over the course of a season (650 PAs), the Pirates' player would be worth 6.5 more runs than the Astros' guy. A team, of course, amasses a lot more than 650 PAs in a season.
On top of the offense, PECOTA sees the team allowing, through a combination of bad defense and weak pitching, more runs than anyone else in the National League. Including Colorado. Who play on the moon.
But hey! The team has a new owner who's hired a new, more progressive front office. So hope is rising. Is there any hope for this year? Let's get this team to 88 wins.
PECOTA and the BP depth charts have the team at 60-102 (another aside: it's astounding that a team can be projected to over 100 wins), so we need to find 28 wins. As always, I'll lop five wins off of that figure due to good run distribution luck, leaving me needing "only" 23 on the roster itself. Unlike with other teams, there's no picking and choosing here. I'm going to need help from every single player and position.
by Jason Wojciechowski
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| It’s a port Photo by Daniel Ramirez |
Having knocked out the Seattle Mariners yesterday, today sees my attempt to get the other half of the bottom-feeding portion of the A.L. West up to 88 wins and respectability. As you know, I'm an A's blogger, but I'm honestly not sure whether that helps or hurts this exercise. It's very likely that previous posts in this series have been unreasonably optimistic about some player or some event occurring such that fans of the team are silently laughing at me. Here, I'm more likely to silently laugh at myself.
Anyway, the baseline. PECOTA and the Baseball Prospectus depth charts currently have the A's finishing third in the West at 73-89, ahead of the Mariners but not even in hailing distance of the two division leaders. They feature an offense full of guys who project to be within a respectable distance of average, one star hitter who will be suspended for the first fifty games of the year, and one well-above-average guy who's never played in America. The pitching, by contrast, and contrary to what you've come to expect from the A's, looks poor. Brandon McCarthy is good, but behind him, there's nobody you can count on for 200 innings of solid baseball.
As always, I start the A's off with five wins of luck, pushing their record, before changes to the roster and individual players' expectations, to 78-84. I need to find ten wins.
by Jason Wojciechowski
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| Where's the rain? Photo by Michael Righi |
You'll forgive the long layoff between Path to Respectability posts. I poisoned myself this week with peanut butter, so I was out of commission for some time. To catch up, the Orioles were covered here and I wrote about the Royals here. After the Mariners, I'll go on to do the A's, Astros, Pirates, and probably the Cubs. Arguably bad teams that I'm skipping are the Twins (because Bill covered there at Baseball Prospectus), the White Sox (because in the Central, as a team that PECOTA sees winning 77 games, 88 could result just via schedule and some luck), the Mets, Dodgers, and Padres (78-to-79-win teams per PECOTA, too close to my target of 88 to make this exercise much fun). This is a shift from my original idea to take the worst team in each division, because that's less fun than looking at the actual bad teams. Like I said, pushing the Mets or Padres to 88 wins is boring.
Onward!
The basics on Seattle: PECOTA has them at 70-92, last place even behind the A's in the West, a full seventeen games back of Texas, on the "strength" of the second-worst offense (by True Average, BP's offensive value stat, which is park-adjusted) in the American League. The only real bright spots on the roster are Jesus Montero (2.8 WARP projection despite nearly all his playing time coming at designated hitter) and Felix Hernandez (you've heard of him).
Someone called me up last night and compared Roger Maris to Carlos Beltran. The difference? Maris ' 2 MVPs and WS rings #stlcards #mets
— Mark Healey (@MHealeyBaseball) March 13, 2012
You're here because you like baseball. You're also here because you have some advanced mastery of the Internet as well, which means you probably have all sorts of fancy technology that you can use to read ebooks. And you're here at The Platoon Advantage either by complete accident or because you actually like the things that we write here. Normandin and Kalkman launched the Kickstarter and within four days they nearly doubled their goal and have since surpassed their goal of $3,000 to start the project by 244%. So, this project is definitely happening and the Kickstarter remains open for 11 more days and there are different levels of funding that get you the opportunity for many exciting things--including an advanced copy of the ebook or your name on the dedication page.The Hall of Very Good is an ebook meant to celebrate the careers of those who are not celebrated. It's not a book meant to reopen arguments about who does and does not deserve Hall of Fame enshrinement; rather, it's meant to remember those who, failing entrance into Cooperstown, will unfairly be lost to history. It's for the players we grew up rooting for, the ones whose best years led to flags and memories that will fly together forever. Players like Bret Saberhagen, Will Clark, Dwight Evans, Tim Salmon, Wilbur Wood, Orel Hershiser, and literally hundreds of others.This is not a numbers-driven project (although our contributors lean analytical in their views). Our plan isn't to be overbearing with numbers and spreadsheets to convince you that these players are worth remembering. What we want to do, instead, is accomplish that same task through stories. Think of your favorite players growing up: they have their moments, games, seasons, quirks, personalities, and legends worth remembering and sharing. Now, combine the best of everyone's forgotten favorites, and you've got a Hall of Very Good. Ask the people who have those memories and love for these players to write essays about them, and you have a book on the same topic.
- R.J. Anderson
- Cee Angi
- Tommy Bennett
- Ted Berg
- Jon Bernhardt
- Jon Bois
- Grant Brisbee
- Dave Brown
- Craig Calcaterra
- Carson Cistulli
- Cliff Corcoran
- Chad Finn
- Steven Goldman
- Owen Good
- Jay Jaffe
- Christina Kahrl
- King Kaufman
- Matthew Kory
- Will Leitch
- Ben Lindbergh
- Sam Miller
- Rob Neyer
- Eric Nusbaum
- Bill Parker
- Jason Parks
- Jeff Passan
- Joe Posnanski
- Old Hoss Radbourn
- David Raposa
The list of contributors continues to grow as the Kickstarter funding increases, so the more of you that support the project, the more essays about under celebrated players there will be-- but you only have 11 more days before the Kickstarter expires. So, go check out the project (there's a video!), give them your money, and wait for the magic to happen.
- David Roth
- Jon Sciambi
- Emma Span
- Cecilia Tan
- The Common Man
- Wendy Thurm
- Jon Weisman
- Josh Wilker
- Jason Wojciechowski
by Jason Wojciechowski
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| Remind me to tell you the story Photo by Jimmy Emerson |
Yesterday, I looked at how we could get the Orioles to 88 wins in 2012. It wasn't easy, but with a little optimism here and there, we got there. Today, it's Kansas City's turn.
The thing about the Royals, who Baseball Prospectus projects to 71 wins, one fewer than the Orioles, is that their division doesn't have the behemoths that the East does. Detroit looks formidable, certainly, with boppers in the lineup and Justin Verlander on the mound, but they're not the Yankees, and behind Detroit, the Central isn't so pretty. Cleveland or Chicago is probably the second-best team in the stack, and nobody thinks that either squad will be fighting for a Wild Card come September, even with Bud Selig's Great Expanded Playoff Adventure coming to pass. Eighty-eight wins might, as we'll see, look unreasonable for the Royals, but it could, if things fall right, actually get the team into the playoffs. (BP has the Tigers projected to 86 wins, a number that might look low to you until you consider the team's outfield, a crew that makes up a full 1/3 of the batting lineup in any game.)
Like yesterday, I'm starting off cheap: the Royals get five wins on run-distribution luck, jumping them all the way to 76. Unlike with the Orioles, I don't see an obvious trade for the Royals to make to shore up a particular position. Any team could trade for a starting pitcher at any time, of course, but figuring that a team will make that kind of move is boring for the purposes of this exercise. So let's try to find twelve wins on the roster as it stands.
