May 6th, 2007 → 9:00 am @ Seth Mnookin
More on Coco’s defensive proficiency and his effect on the Sox: yesterday, Baseball Musings’ David Pinto took a more statistically-minded look at the number of plays CC has been making in the field and found that, over the previous seven games, Coco’s been averaging about five putouts per game, compared to about three per game in his first 15 starts of the year. As Pinto points out, there’s not a lot of context there; a chart Pinto puts together goes a good way towards providing that context…and does, indeed, show that, as Bill James observed, Coco’s pulling down everything hit anywhere near him.
A couple of hours later, Pinto added to this knowledge base by examining the probability of his putouts using last year’s probabilistic model range and found that thus far this year, “Crisp caught nine balls that weren’t caught last year” (or wouldn’t have been caught, anyway); after further parsing the data, Dave found that the vast majority of these plus catches were in the past two weeks.
Even if the above sounds like elfin to you (unless you happen to speak elfin…and yes, I’m looking at you, Eric), know this: based on a couple of weeks, Coco’s been playing significantly better defense than at any other time since he’s set up shop in Fenway. It’s hard to know what to pin this on: last year’s injuries? Discomfort on a new team? But it strikes me that, unlike an offensive tear, it’s harder to “hot” at a defensive position like centerfield, a position that requires a good read on balls, excellent athleticism, and no small sense of self-confidence. Whatever the cause, it bears watching…
Post Categories: Bill James & Coco Crisp & David Pinto & Defensive metrics
May 5th, 2007 → 12:44 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Last year, lots of time was spent discussing Alex Gonzalez’s defense…and indeed, in the several decades I’ve been watching Red Sox baseball, I’d never seen a shortstop make so many challenging plays look effortless. (I’m not the most trained viewer, but at times Gonzalez’s grace reminded me a bit of the beauty that was Carlos Beltran when he patrolled center field for the Royals.) A-Gon was, in the field, a sort of anti-Jeter, who should get some kind of lifetime award for making routine plays looking insanely difficult.
Coco Crisp, on the other hand, received a fair amount of criticism for his play. Outside of at least one mind-blowing, game-saving, head-first diving catch, he looked a little lost (which mirrored how he looked at the plate). In late August, Baseball Think Factory rated him dead last among AL center fielders (tied, oddly enough, with Gary Matthews Jr., who also made an all-time highlight reel grab in early July); around the same time, ESPN’s Zone Ratings also had him at the bottom of the heap.
Things have looked different this year. Coco’s been on a bit of a hot streak at the plate — a fact that’s been much discussed. He’s also been on a bit of a hot streak in the field. I’ve seen this mentioned a couple of times in the internetoblogosphere, but it hasn’t gotten much mention elsewhere.
That’s about to change. This morning, Bill James wrote in an email, “It seems to me that the BIGGEST factor in our team’s performance over the last week or so has been that Coco has been just unbelievable in center field…he’s just catching EVERYTHING that looks like it might be trouble. There’s been no gap in right center, no gap in left center, nothing getting over his head and nothing has been landing in front of him.” Want an example? Take the ninth inning of last night’s game. The first batter Papelbon faced was Justin Morneau, who crushed a ball to dead center. It could have headed out…except Crisp made a nice play at the fence. It didn’t look spectacular, but it sure as shit had a huge impact. If Morneau’s ball had been a four-bagger, suddenly Pap’s given up two home runs in his last two outings; Okajima is on ice for the night; and Romero and Donnelly are already out of the game. Oh, and now it’s a one-run game with no outs. (If the Sox had lost the game, that arguably would have been the least of their problems, because the entire region would have been gripped in a frenzy of Papelbon-induced panic. Also, Tim Wakefield might have shot himself in the head due to lack-of-run-support induced insanity.)
As Bill wrote, “It’s not that he’s been making spectacular catches; it’s that he’s been making plays that had me scared shitless look they were no problem.” Sort of like A-Gon did last year. The thing is, nobody expected A-Gon to have anything but a noodle bat. That’s not the case with CC; perhaps that’s why his performance has gotten little-to-no recognition.
At least not from the hoi polloi; the same obviously isn’t true on Yawkey Way. “If Coco had been 11-for-20 with the bat over the last week, everybody would be talking about that,” Bill wrote in his email. “If he’d had a few good games as a reliever, like Okajima, everybody would be talking about that. But he’s just had this unbelievable streak in center field, and…nobody has noticed. Nothing about it in the papers, guys on TV haven’t said anything about it (that I’ve heard), radio guys haven’t said anything that I’ve heard. I tried to find his defense day-by-day to see how many putouts he has had in the last week, and I couldn’t even find THAT, let alone some up-to-date information about how many catches he’s made that were difficult plays that could have killed us.” (Baseball Musings author David Pinto points out that Crisp currently has a centerfield rating of 123 from Baseball Prospective, which translates into Crisp being about 38 runs better than average over the course of a 162-game season.)
It’ll be interesting to watch how this plays out, both on the field (is the first month of the season an accurate indicator of Coco’s true talent level in the field?) and in the press. Stay tuned…
Post Categories: Bill James & Coco Crisp & Defensive metrics
May 4th, 2007 → 9:49 am @ Seth Mnookin
An early favorite for 2007’s biggest (or best, depending on your perspective) baseball-related headline boner of the season:
“Royals to Get a Taste of Angels’ Colon”
(It’s unclear if angels even have anything stored in their colons. That’s definitely not the case with this particular colon…)
Post Categories: Bartolo Colon & Human anatomy & Sports Reporters
May 2nd, 2007 → 11:52 am @ Seth Mnookin
Like I said below, I’m going to be getting to some things a bit late…
A month into the season, we’ve seen a bunch of interesting things.
* The Yankees have been sucking. They also appear to have picked up the pesky black plague bug that infected the Sox last August.
* There’s going to be lots of talk about whether or not Joe Torre should be fired as long as the worst $200 million team in history stays in last place. Or third place. Or second place.
* Last night notwithstanding, the Sox’s bullpen has been lights out.
* Hideki Okajima is a stone-cold stud.
* Despite some disappointing performances at the plate — i.e., everyone in the starting lineup save for Youk, Ortiz, Drew, and Lowell — the Sox are, overall, doing fairly well offensively.
* This whole Schilling-Beckett-Dice K thing could work out pretty well.
And now for some quick thoughts on the above:
* Brian Cashman is getting some heat for the Yankees roster and it’s age/failure to produce. That’s not entirely fair (although not entirely unfair, either). The injury thing is hard to predict — Mussina is getting on in years, sure; on the other hand, but Wang could have reasonably been expected to stay healthy. And while Cashman has exhibited some creativity/flexibility in jettisoning some of his overpaid veterans, he’s still saddled with guys like Jason Giambi — and Giambi, at least according to almost everyone surrounding the Yankees — was one of those Steinbrenner “I have to have him RIGHT NOW” players that Cashman seemingly had little to do with.
* The Torre defenders out there are right when they say there’s only so much he can do — he’s not out on the field. But — and this is a big but — two areas that Torre most definitely can effect are a) bullpen usage and b) keeping a bunch of spoiled brats (er, I mean athletes), focused and motivated over the course of a long season. In regards to a), Torre has a Dusty Baker-esque tendency to abuse his bullpen, a practice that cost the Yankees at least one trip to the World Series (in 2004, when the Yankees had to depend on the ghost of Tom Gordon) and could very well lead the team down the road to ruin this year. As for b), I’m a firm believer in the notion that sometimes good managers need to go just because a team needs a change. Torre’s been very good at keeping a highly efficient and generally successful team on course. His laconic style might not be so good for a team in crisis. (Quick digression: I also put some of the blame on Captain Intangibles, who, much like Jason Varitek, seems to view his role solely as someone who sets a good example on the field. Jeter could, and should, have stepped up any number of times this year. Take spring training: the best things he could have done for the team were defend Pavano when Mussina was whining and embrace A-Rod to quell the ongoing talk about conflict there.)
And…I gotta run. Looks like I’ll have to address the Red Sox part of this equation later on.
Post Categories: 2007 Season & Brian Cashman & Injuries & Joe Torre & Yankees
May 2nd, 2007 → 11:26 am @ Seth Mnookin
Yes, I’m getting to this a bit late — I’m about to get to a lot of things a bit late — but I want to make one last comment about the whole Schilling/bloody sock imbroglio. In his always entertaining, usually insightful blog, Schilling couldn’t help but use his brush to paint reporters with some broad strokes. “If you haven’t figured it out by now, working in the media is a pretty nice gig,’’ he wrote. “Barring outright plagiarism or committing a crime, you don’t have to be accountable if you don’t want to. You can say what you want when you want and you don’t really have to answer to anyone.”
This shows, more than anything that a) Curt would do well to do what I try to do when I get really upset: write down the first thing that pops into my head and then throw it away (I’m not always as successful as I might like) and b) he has very little understanding of the media.
There definitely are reporters that seem to have a questionable relationship with reality, just as there are those reporters who appear to use their columns to grind their assorted axes — I’ve been railing on Murray Chass for both of these sins for some time now. There are also those situations, and they seem to occur more frequently in the sports pages, where accountability is lacking. (Anyone remember when Jayson Stark said the Kenny Rodgers-Dirtgate controversy would rival steroids?)
But for the most part, there’s an enormous amount of accountability in the media — more so, I might add, then in the world of professional athletes, whose whims are catered by any number of people. (The whole media accountability thing is a subject I know something about.) And working in the media is, more often than not, not a pretty nice gig. Take baseball beat writers. Their hours suck: 3pm to midnight. Their people they cover (and are surrounded by) view them as annoyances…or worse. They’re fed an endless diet of stunningly unappetizing food and spend countless days crammed into coach and countless nights in crappy hotels. They make a couple of trips to Cincinnati (or Arlington, or Kansas City, or Detroit) every year. And their audience either thinks they’re supercilious pricks or pathetic suck ups.
All this for the privilege of working in an industry that looks to be in a death spiral. Oh, and earning about 140 times less per year than people like Curt Schilling. If they’re lucky.
Can reporters screw up? Of course. Can they be unscrupulous? Absolutely. Are they ever careless with the facts? Well, duh. But Curt’s blanket statement is about as accurate as saying my saying that working as a professional baseball player is a pretty nice gig because you get paid tens of millions of dollars to shoot up with ‘roids.
Post Categories: 2004 Playoffs & Broadcasting & Curt Schilling
April 26th, 2007 → 10:49 pm @ Seth Mnookin
The Orioles are home to two of the biggest punks to wear a Red Sox uniform in the past half-decade: Jay Payton, whose agent actually warned the Red Sox that Payton was planning the throw a fit to ensure his release in 2005 (this because he was upset about his playing time), and Kevin Millar, who did his best to seize the whiny little bitch crown Payton left behind by using former Herald reporter Howard Bryant to anonymously “call out” Schilling. (Think about this: there’s so much crap about Millar I don’t even need to remind people that last year he actually left a bag full of dog shit for Terry when the Sox visited Baltimore.)
So I wasn’t surprised when the tired, pathetic, bloody-sock-or-not debate reared its tired, pathetic head courtesy of a tired, pathetic Orioles broadcaster. (I actually don’t know if that last part is true.) And even though the whole thing has apparently been taken care of — one big misunderstanding, blah blah blah — I’m also not surprised that Doug “Devil Dog” Mirabelli was somehow in the middle of all this. There were some Red Sox I liked, some I felt indifferent to, and some I both admired and was annoyed by. Mirabelli was the only guy I just felt was a flat-out jerk. Except that’s not the language I normally use to describe him.
Post Categories: Curt Schilling & Doug Mirabelli & Jay Payton & Kevin Millar
April 26th, 2007 → 10:29 pm @ Seth Mnookin
I’ve been a WMP cheerleader since last August, when he put an absolute hurt on the ball; less than two weeks ago, I once again was pleading his case.
He hasn’t been making me look good. In the days after my post, Wily Mo did indeed get into a few more games, and then, with Coco’s injury, a few more…and he looked god-damned awful. Coming into tonight’s game, he was hitting — and no, this isn’t a typo — .120. His slugging percentage was a pathetic .240. Sure, he’d only gotten 25 at bats…but he’d struck out in more than half of them.
All of which is to say I would have walked Varitek to load the bases and put Wily Modesto at the plate in the top of the eighth of tonight’s game. You had better then even odds that he’d be back on the bench without putting the ball into play, and even if he wasn’t whiffing with such frequency, you’d be setting up a possible double play with one out and a one-run lead.
Pena, of course, didn’t strike out, nor did he ground weekly to short; he did blast a game-winning granny…which should, at the very least, quiet the Fenway boo-birds for a couple of games. Unless, of course, he strikes out with the bases loaded and the Sox down a run in one of this weekend’s Yankees games…
Post Categories: Wily Mo Pena
