"In today’s offense-minded world, it’s nice to see that you can get a spot in the lineup playing both sides of the ball: you can hit it, and you can catch it."
The player they’re discussing — Ryan Raburn — is hitting .288 / .352 / .533 / .885, including 2-for-2 so far tonight. Sure, he’s good in the field, too, but this is not your slap-hitting utility infielder. Ryan Raburn is all the Tigers have going for them on offense other than the Drunken Master.
For comparison, Evan Longoria is OPSing .889 this year. But thank God he can catch the ball, too, or they might not put him in the lineup!
October 6th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
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Or so says Kevin Kaduk, who wrote:
The Tigers are traveling to Minnesota for Tuesday’s AL Central tiebreaker and if they have any organizational backbone, they’ll tell Miguel Cabrera he’s not playing in the game.
Actually, if I were Detroit GM Dave Dombrowski, I’d go one further and tell the first baseman his services won’t be needed for the rest of the season. Yes, even if the Tigers beat the Twins and advance to play the Yankees.
Does that seem like an intelligent idea to you? If so, I’m going to have to assume you haven’t looked at this lately. If you bench Miguel Cabrera, you probably end up playing Aubrey Huff at 1B for the game against the Twinkies. And Aubrey Huff’s been good in the past, but this year his OPS+ is a whacking great 79. You sure that’s a good idea, Kevin? Are you sure it’s more important to make an example of Miguel Cabrera — which example is, I guess, "don’t get drunk" — than it is to, like, make the playoffs after you’ve been in first place since May 14? No? You’re sure, now? Okay. Did I mention that Miggy is better defensively than Huff, in addition to being twice as good a hitter? What do you say now?
Pulling a Milton Bradley on the Tigers’ best positional player and franchise cornerstone might seem drastic, but the truth is that Cabrera’s actions over the weekend rank much, much worse than badmouthing one’s own team through the media.
Well, not that I’m trying to trivialise domestic violence, but does that have anything to do with baseball? You know, just asking, because talking shit about the club to reporters kind of does. And it wasn’t an isolated incident with Miltie, and he wasn’t hitting, and the Cubs didn’t bench him until they were out of playoff contention. Those also are differences.
Detroit needs to send a message that Cabrera’s decisions simply aren’t tolerable, no matter how much money he makes (eight years, $153 million) or what type of numbers he put up during the regular season.
And to whom does it need to send this message? ‘Cause it can send it to him by, like, literally sending him a message. Or maybe Jim Leyland can have a stern talk with him. Or maybe they can fine him. But benching him won’t send the message you want, Kevin. In particular, the message it will send will be personalised and hand-delivered to his teammates. It will be written on lavender paper and tied with a purple ribbon, and it will say "Dear Gerald Laird, Placido Polanco, Adam Everett, Brandon Inge, Ryan Raburn, Curtis Granderson, Magglio Ordonez, Marcus Thames, Justin Verlander, and especially Jim Leyland: Fuck you. Nobody cares about your hard work, your hopes for playoff contention, or, in the case of Leyland, your job. We are punishing Miguel Cabrera through the most inane, knee-jerk method we can come up with, because what he did makes us feel real bad and we’re big dummies who don’t think much. We can’t tell that punishing the whole team for Cabrera’s indiscretion is incredibly stupid. This is similar to how we can’t tell that wins and RBIs are team-dependent stats. Love, Kevin Kaduk and the Moral Outrage Brigade."
By reportedly heading out for a night of drinking with the opposing White Sox on Friday night before returning home early Saturday morning and getting into a domestic dispute with his wife, Cabrera abandoned both his team and fans in some of the worst ways possible.
Thank God he didn’t abandon them in all the worst ways possible, such as actually abandoning them and thereby not being present for the tiebreaking game. Like you’re trying to make him do.
How can anyone trust or root for him after he blew a Breathalyzer test (.26) that was double the number of hours remaining until a Saturday night game that could have prevented the need for the Twins showdown? (The Tigers lost, 5-1.) How can Dombrowski continue to play a player he had to pick up from the police station that morning?
Better question: why do I need to trust him? I didn’t ask Miggy and A.J. Pierzynski to watch over my expensive imported scotch, Kevin. I don’t really need to trust anything. And as for Dave Dombrowski, I can see by looking at the box score on obscure web site Yahoo Sports that Dave Dombrowski somehow found it in his heart to play Cabrera that same day.
The answers are 1) no one can and 2) he shouldn’t.
No, the answers are 1) no one needs to, and 2) he’d rather go to the damn playoffs and keep his job than strike a blow for your politics.
Opponents will argue that taking Cabrera’s bat out of Detroit’s lineup will only punish everyone further, but there’s no guarantee that Cabrera will produce. He went 0-for-7 after showing up to Comerica Park on Saturday with fresh scratches on his face and his mind will be a clouded and distracted one. You can throw out season totals when a player enters a situation like this one, so let the players who were fully on board with winning a division title get the playing time.
Players like Aubrey Huff and his 79 OPS+? Or did you mean Carlos Guillen, who is a little bit better at the plate but plays replacement-level-or-worse defense at first base?
Miguel Cabrera is not the first player in all of history, you’ll be shocked to hear, to go hitless in seven consecutive at-bats. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that exactly zero such players were utterly and irrevocably ruined by their seven hitless ABs. You’re right about one thing, though: there’s no guarantee that Cabrera will produce. That’s baseball, Kevin! But you don’t win at baseball by assuming that, since there are no guarantees, are actions are of exactly equal value. Miguel Cabrera can be expected to be about twice as valuable at the plate as Aubrey Huff, and about 60% more valuable than Carlos Guillen, and he’s more valuable on defense than either of them. Maximising value is how you win, you crazy man.
Cabrera, of course, isn’t the first baseball player to get tanked the night before a game or to fraternize with the opposing side. Both likely happened thousands of times this season.
I… agree. So what’s the point of this whole rant again?
But it should go without saying that Cabrera’s misstep is monumentally magnified because of the circumstances, which is why Detroit should take decisive action.
By the "circumstances," you mean Detroit’s tight race with Minnesota, a better team? Those circumstances? If you care about those circumstances, Kevin, you don’t bench your best hitter because of off-the-field conduct. You see how this works?
If he needs help for a problem with alcohol? Go out and get it for him. If he or his wife have anger or relationship issues? Make sure that they get the counseling they need.
Now you are making sense. These are all rational things that the Tigers could do that would be much better for Cabrera and much, much better for the team than arbitrarily benching him.
Still, Cabrera should be watching the rest of the year from the sidelines. There’s no defense for him ditching his team and fans, especially on a weekend when they needed him most.
And now you are, once again, declaring that you will punish him for inexcusably, and figuratively, "ditching his team" by getting drunk the night before a game by forcing him to literally ditch the team in a game they really, absolutely need to win. Crushing logic.
Recalibrate the thinker, Kevin. Just because FJM isn’t around anymore doesn’t mean the rest of us will let you get away with this nonsense.
October 5th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
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Just attempted to bunt in the top of the seventh, with Todd Helton on second and nobody out.
Todd Helton on second.
On second.
Second base. Not first base. WTF is wrong with you, Jim Tracy?
Postscript: Tulo pops the bunt foul, and then hits a towering home run on the very next pitch he sees. See why that bunt was stupid, James? Aren’t you glad he didn’t get it down?
Comedy addendum: Dave tells me the Rockies announcers were talking about how the bunt would have been a good move, so the Rockies could "move the runner along." Todd Helton may not be the fastest guy, but I’m pretty sure he can score from second on a home run just fine, guys.
October 3rd, 2009
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Darien |
Baseball |
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A baseball article in New Scientist? It’s about how pitchers aren’t as clever as they think they are, and their attempts to mislead batters exhibit really noticeable patterns. Also they say some stuff about football; I guess dudes should pass more? I don’t know anything about football, but every time I watch football, I find myself thinking they should pass more. So the scientists agree with my guts and my well-developed scouting eye, so that means they must be right.
So, hey. Interesting stuff about baseball and game theory. But that’s outside the scope of this blog, where we’re more interested in making fun of people who say dumb things. Luckily for us, along comes John Wooders right at the bottom of the article to add some unsubstantiated crazy, under the awe-inspiring heading "What about intangibles?":
John Wooders of the University of Arizona in Tucson calls the finding "interesting" but questions whether it is a true test of the minimax theory. In particular, he points to the way that Levitt and Kovash measure the payoffs for each sport. "The objective of a team is to win the game," he says. "At the end of the day, they don’t care if they win by five points or 10 points," he continues.
So all we know about this John Wooders is that he is "of" the University of Arizona. I’m guessing he’s an undergrad, or maybe a janitor, because he’s displaying a pretty sharp ignorance of context. He’s right if you’re a bonehead, because, yeah, in any given game it really doesn’t matter how much you win by. But the obvious thing he’s totally ignoring is that, over the course of a season — which runs, need I remind you, 162 games — scoring more runs and allowing fewer runs will translate into winning more games. It won’t make you win the exact same number of games but just do it by wider margins. That is, in fact, a very weird idea in the first place, and I think even a janitor would be smarter than that. So John Wooders is an undergrad or maybe works in admissions.
Wooders, who was not involved with the study, has concerns that using OPS as a measure of a batter’s payoff doesn’t adequately capture his contribution to his team’s win or loss.
I’d like to mention that I love that he’s not involved with the study and he doesn’t know anything about baseball, and yet they still went to him for the counterpoint. They should have gotten some tribesman in like central Africa instead. At least then they’d be offsetting Ken Kovash’s Mozilla experience with a dude who was involved with Ubuntu!
That said, well, maybe John does know something about baseball after all, since he’s right: OPS is not the most rigorous of statistics. It’s quick and easy and gives you a reasonable idea of a batter’s value, but it doesn’t account for baserunning or defense or pitching at all — it’s purely a batting stat. It also values SLG more highly than it should. So, okay, it’s not the most sophisticated available stat. That’s what John’s about to say, I’m sure, right before he suggests using VORP or EqA or MLVr instead.
"There are a lot of ways that a player can help his team that don’t show up in numbers," says Wooders.
Ah… or, I guess, he could go that way.
Let’s keep this simple so even a homeless dude who makes his gin money by selling pencils out of a cup outside the U of A campus centre can understand it. No, John, you are wrong. While it is undeniably true that there are many ways a player can help his team that don’t show up in OPS — I named a few up above there — it is completely false that baseball is full of stuff dudes can do that doesn’t show up in any numbers at all. You know why that is? Can you guess, John? Real quick, just go to this page and tell me what you see. Why, it’s numbers! Numbers as far as the eye can see!
That whole page of numbers, John, is entirely concerned with the batting performance of exactly one player. And it’s not all-encompassing; over here you will find some overlap, and you will find some entirely new numbers. The point of all this? There are a lot of numbers recorded and calculated about baseball. Like, a shitload. I live in Massachusetts, where we have the University of Massachusetts Lowell Baseball Research Center, where actual scientists calculate lots of numbers about baseball. There’s the Society for American Baseball Research, the aforelinked Baseball Prospectus, and many, many others. Believe you me: if it has happened in or near or at the same time as a baseball game, somebody’s captured it in numbers. We may not have complete data for the real old-timey players like Old Hoss Radbourn, but, holey moley, look at all those numbers we do have even though he hasn’t played a game of baseball in 118 years. (Meanwhile, it’s possible to get from Old Hoss Radbourn to Young Hoss Randy Wells in only eight moves, even though Radbourn hasn’t played in 118 years).
So, hey, thanks for playing, John! Do a little reading about all the amazing things we’ve learned about baseball, and stop whining that there are no numbers that can calculate Derek Jeter’s inspirational aura or Barry Bonds’ hovering cloud of doom.
October 2nd, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
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