March 29th, 2007 → 11:06 am @ Seth Mnookin
On Wednesday, the Houston Chronicle ran the following caption on a picture illustrating a story about Anna Nicole Smith:
“..the model could barely right a sentence.”
On a different story, a critic for that same paper recently produced this gem, “She looks a bit uneasy when she bears her breasts to the camera.” (This was obviously not about ANS, who never looked uneasy when she was baring her breasts.) (Warning: that link is neither safe for work or family friendly.)*
It makes one think. Rarely is the question asked: is our newspapers learning?
(The original link — not the Anna Nicole Smith one — via Romenesko.)
* Neither “right” nor “bears” was misspelled; however, a Chronicle columnist recently spelled diminished “disminished,” prompting one of the paper’s readers to comment, “You’d think spell checker would catch that type of mistake.” You’d think, right? And I’ve thunk. But for some reason that I still don’t understand, newspapers are unable to use a feature that’s been built in to word processing programs for the last, say, 20 years.
You’d think spell checker would catch that type of mistake.
disminished
Post Categories: Anna Nicole Smith & Houston Chronicle & Media & Romenesko
March 29th, 2007 → 10:48 am @ Seth Mnookin
A quick break from baseball (and free books) (and Murray): my brother, the estimable Jake Mnookin, will, after a multi-year Teach For America stint and a degree in public policy, be starting a public charter school in New York City. At least he hopes to: he’s been hired (by Building Excellent Schools — also worth learning about) and all that, but right now there are a whole mess of anti-charter school provisions in a bill making its way through the New York State Assembly. If this is an issue you care about (and if you’re a resident on New York State), take a moment and check out this page from the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence – there is a backgrounder on anti-charter provisions, among other things. And then, if you’re so inclined, click on the links for letters to Governor Spitzer, Senate Majority Leader Bruno, and Assembly Speaker Silver.* And finally, if you’re still so inclined, send them off one of those letters. I will be forever indebted to you. Along with my brother. And the children of New York City.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programing, in which we do our best to block out the outside world and focus our attention on grown men hitting small balls with wooden sticks.
* But do it quickly: the bill is going to be voted on on April 1.
Post Categories: Charter Schools & Jake Mnookin & Public advocacy
March 28th, 2007 → 11:32 am @ Seth Mnookin
He’s taunting me. That’s the only explanation I can possibly come up with.
The “he,” of course, is our old friend Murray Chass. He’s finally moved on from his Ahab-esque obsession with the J.D. Drew signing. (At least Moby Dick was an actual whale; Chass appears to have come up with the object of his obsession in his own muddled mind.) But he has not, to absolutely no one’s surprise, been able to move on from the Red Sox.
To wit:* today’s gem, titled “Boston Got What It Wanted, Or So It Seems.” Give Chass credit for one thing: he is consistent…in his ability to use odd, unnamed sources to prove a point, even when it’s contradicted by both the evidence and any number of people who are willing to be quoted on the record. Today, he writes that the Sox’s main motivation in bidding for the rights to negotiate with Dice-K was that they wanted to keep him from the Yankees. How does he know this? Well, supposedly one of the Henry-Werner-Lucchino trio told “a person who works as a consultant in Major League Baseball that had they been unable to sign Matsuzaka to a contract, they would still have considered the enterprise a success because he wouldn’t be on the Yankees.”
This remarkably thinly sourced item — and to call it sourced at all is generous — is apparently worth a column. Despite the fact that John Henry told Chass this was “malarkey” and “utter nonsense.” So to review: someone who is a “consultant” to MLB told Chass the Sox wanted to keep Dice-K out of New York. Not a consultant to the Red Sox, mind you. Not an MLB official. A “consultant.”
That’s not even the best part of the column. Check this out: “The Red Sox, according to the account that Henry is denying, figured that they would get the negotiating rights to Matsuzaka but would probably be unable to negotiate a deal for him with his agent, Scott Boras, who can be particularly tough to deal with in high-profile bargaining.”
This would seem to be a problematic formulation, and does nothing so much as to refute the entire premise of Chass’s column, because, of course, the Sox did sign Dice-K. How to explain that? According to good ol’ Murray, “[a]s the negotiating progressed, the Red Sox grew intrigued, and they offered more than the $5 million to $6 million a year they had originally planned as their ceiling.”
Wow. This is a player the Red Sox spent years scouting. For most of last season, there were two team employees who followed Dice-K more or less full-time. Never mind all that; Murray’s convinced, on the basis of absolutely nothing, that it was only as the negotiating progressed that the Sox grew “intrigued.”
A couple of weeks ago, Murray got some attention (and not just from me) when he bragged about his insistent ignorance regarding baseball. Now, once again, he’s come up with a column that is contradicted by all the facts and has no real sourcing. And so once again, I’m left wondering: why does the Times print this dreck? And will they ever get sufficiently embarrassed to pull the plug? Past history doesn’t give us much reason to be optimistic. But I’m holding out hope…
(As reader scotthp49 points out, I left out the best part of the article, where Chass points out that Wakefield “had a losing record last season that might have made the difference between the Red Sox making and not making the playoffs.” The Sox finished 11 games behind the Yankees and nine games behind Detroit for the wild card; Wake, who started 23 games, ended the year with a 7-11 record. (It’s worth noting that his peripherals weren’t that out line with the past couple of years…but we know Murray doesn’t much care for “numbers.”) Which means, assuming Wake got the same number of decisions in his starts, he would have had to put up a 15-3 record. (It’s 15 wins and not 16 because one of those losses was to Detroit, meaning if Wake won that game, the Sox would only need to make up 8 games total.) Clearly, the fact that Boston didn’t make the playoffs in 2006 was Wakefield’s fault.)
* Nevermind…
Post Categories: Daisuke Matsuzaka & Murray Chass & New York Times
March 28th, 2007 → 10:58 am @ Seth Mnookin
There are five days left until Opening Day. What better way to get excited than another Feeding the Monster prediction contest? Instead of a single winner, this time there’ll be (a minimum of) three lucky winners. Here are the categories:
* The player who hits the Sox’s first home run. Include game and inning.
* Dice K’s pitching line in his first outing. Include innings pitched, hits, walks, strike outs, runs, and earned runs.
* The date of J.D. Drew’s first RBI. Include game and inning.
The lucky winners will get a signed, personalized copy of Feeding the Monster, shipping and handling included. (Or, if you’d rather read about the Times, a personalized, autographed copy of Hard News.) For simplicity’s sake, every component of each guess will count equally, so someone who gets Dice K’s IP and hits correct but is off by a walk, 2 K’s, and 2 earned runs will get a -5, the same as someone who is off by 2 innings and 3 earned runs.
I’m going to cut off the entries at 100. Post your predictions in the comments section of this post by April 2 at noon, EST. One entry per person, etc etc etc.
Post Categories: 2007 Season & Contests
March 27th, 2007 → 5:22 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Last Friday, I posted some quick thoughts about the Pap to the pen move; I also promised to post a historical lesson that would provide some insight as to why installing the Baby Faced Killer as the closer was a good idea simply because of the distraction it would cause if the Sox blew so much as a single game in the first weeks of the season because Tavarez (or the corpse of Mike Timlin) was closing.
And yes, at the time I promised that second post would come “in a few hours.” So here I am, sticking to my word…so long as you’re willing to consider 100 or so “a few.” Anyway, without further ado, here’s an excerpt from Feeding the Monster^ that takes us all the way back to Opening Day, 2003…a quaint and innocent time that feels like it was several lifetimes ago. Theo was the newly appointed GM, Jeremy Giambi was ahead of Ortiz on the depth chart, and the Sox’s “closer by committee” experiment was being derided even before the season started. It only took one game — one blown Opening Day game against the Devil Rays, to be precise — to fire up the populace’s bloodlust. But did that game actually say anything about the possibilities of a closer by committee? Nope. It did show a lot about the stupidity of Grady Little. Read and learn…
^I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to point out that FTM is available from Amazon for only $17.16 (cheap!) and that free signed and personalized bookplates are here for the asking. It’s a perfect gift for Opening Day. For yourself, even.
***
The Red Sox began the 2003 season hundreds of miles away from their Fenway home, in Tampa’s Tropicana Field, a domed stadium that housed the moribund Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The first inning of Opening Day seemed like it could serve as a microcosm for the two teams. In the top of the first, the Sox scored three runs off of two Tampa Bay errors, a pair of singles by Nomar Garciaparra and Kevin Millar, and a two-run double by Shea Hillenbrand. In the bottom of the inning, Pedro Martinez retired the Devil Rays in order, with a strikeout sandwiched between a pair of groundouts. For most of the game, that was as exciting as it got. The Red Sox scored again in the fifth, and Tampa scratched out an unearned run off of Martinez in the seventh. After finishing that inning, Martinez’s night was complete, and he seemed to be in prime form. He’d thrown 91 pitches, striking out six while allowing only three hits. Ramiro Mendoza came in on relief to retire the Devil Rays in order in the eighth, and Boston was three outs away from its first victory of the season. With a three-run lead against a team that had finished in last place every year of its existence, it was the perfect opportunity to test out the Red Sox’s closer-by-committee approach in a low-stress situation.
With three left-handed batters coming up to the plate, lefty Alan Embree was the first pitcher summoned out of the Boston bullpen in the ninth. Embree, a former member of the Padres, had been picked up by the Red Sox on June 26, 2002, four days after he struck out seven of ten Yankees—including the last six in a row—in a game in San Diego. For the remainder of the 2002 season, he had thrown well, pitching in 32 games for Boston with a 2.97 ERA. Epstein was hoping that, in 2003, he’d become one of the linchpins of the Red Sox’s bullpen.
Embree gave up a single to Travis Lee, the first batter he faced, prompting Tampa manager Lou Pinella to send up the right-handed Terry Shumpert to pinch-hit for the Devil Ray’s lefty designated hitter, Al Martin. Shumpert, in his 13-year Major League career, had only 47 home runs and had batted only .235 in 2002. Before the game, the Red Sox advance scouting team had prepared a report on Tampa Bay and left it for Grady Little. With regards to Shumpert, the instructions were clear: Shumpert was all but useless at the plate so long as you don’t, under any circumstances, throw him an inside fastball. Embree soon demonstrated that Little had either never read the report, or never shared the information with his pitching staff, and Shumpert hit one of Embree’s inside fastballs for his 48th home run (and the second to last of his career).* After Embree gave up another single, this one to right-fielder Ben Grieve, Little summoned Chad Fox to the mound.
Fox struck out the first batter he faced, and then, with one out and a man on first base, induced a bouncer up the middle that looked like it would result in a routine, game-ending double play. But after stepping on second base for the force out, Nomar Garciaparra fumbled the ball as he prepared to throw to first, leaving a man on with two out and the Red Sox clinging to a 4-3 lead. After a seemingly rattled Fox walked pinch-hitter Marlon Anderson, Carl Crawford, the Devil Rays’ leadoff batter, came to the plate.
Crawford fouled off four straight pitches, putting him in an 0-2 hole. Fox’s fifth pitch was high, bringing the count to 1-2. His next pitch was low and inside, exactly where he wanted it, but Crawford got his bat around on the ball, golfing it in to the right-field stands for a game-winning, three-run homer.
It was a tough loss, but it didn’t predict anything one way or another about the Sox’s bullpen plan. Save for Garciaparra’s bobble, Chad Fox would have been out of the inning, and the pitch Crawford hit to end the game was an excellent one. Still, the reaction in Boston was swift and harsh. After a grand total of one game, the Herald’s Jeff Horrigan dubbed the Red Sox’s bullpen experiment “loser[s] by committee.” The Globe said the opening night loss had given “rise to the darkest fears of the scheme’s architects” and reported that a 73-year-old woman had been prompted to call the paper for the first time in her life. She relayed this message: “I’m so disgusted. What’s with this closer by committee?” Dan Shaughnessy wanted to “start with a memo to Bill James: Perhaps the seventh inning is not the most important inning to hold a lead.” After an offseason “spent reinventing baseball,” Shaughnessy wrote, “young Theo saw it all implode in the hideous confines of Tropicana Field.”
The bullpen brouhaha was just one of the distractions that would occupy the team during the first half of the season. In April, soon after his $17.5 million contract extension for the 2004 season was picked, Martinez seemed to falter, sparking a round of hand wringing and second-guessing. When the team’s relievers continued to struggle, the closer-by-committee experiment was more or less discarded, as Grady Little announced that Brandon Lyon and Chad Fox would, until further notice, both serve as the Red Sox’s closers. And in late May, after Martinez landed on the disabled list with a strained muscle in his back, Epstein succeeded in swapping an increasingly bitter Hillenbrand for some pitching help, trading him to the Arizona Diamondbacks for their 24-year-old Korean pitcher, Byung-Hyun Kim.
* One member of the team’s baseball operations staff said of that night, “That’s when I had a feeling Grady wasn’t going to work out.”
Post Categories: Feeding the Monster Outtakes & Grady Little & Jonathan Papelbon
March 26th, 2007 → 11:25 am @ Seth Mnookin
Yes, baseball season is (almost) upon us, which means, of course, a glut of all things Red Sox-related. And if Boston needs anything, it’s more commentary about the team…and I’m here to fill the void. Specifically, I wrote a piece for this month’s Boston Magazine — the one with Big Papi’s smiling mug on the cover — about how the Sox, um, got their groove back. (Note: writers to do not get to write their own headlines.) (Another note: props to reader djarm18 for the story link; for some reason I couldn’t find it online earlier.)
So: go pick it up. You’ll get an excerpt from the Papi/Tony Maz book, which I haven’t read yet, but hey, it’s Papi, so I’m sure it’s worth at least checking out. And feel free to tell me what you think in the comments. I’m ready for the abuse…
Post Categories: 2007 Season & Boston Magazine & David Ortiz
March 23rd, 2007 → 11:37 am @ Seth Mnookin
So much for Papelbon’s short-lived career as a starting pitcher: yesterday, as everyone living within 500 miles of Boston undoubtedly knows, Jonathan Papelbon was named the Sox’s 2007 closer. At first blush, it’s hard to argue with this decision: Papelbon, a fourth round pick in the ’03 draft, was, for 5/6’s of the ’06 season, the best closer in the league. And lord knows I’m glad we’re not going to be watching Mike Timlin jogging out of the bullpen in the bottom of the ninth.
The move, according to everyone from Papelbon himself to the ticket takers in Ft. Myers, came after Paps himself requested he return to the bullpen, which, on a certain level, makes the whole discussion of whether or not this is a good idea moot. (After all, when you have a young stud offering to fill the team’s most glaring hole, it’s hard to marshal a good reason to deny him his request.) But will Papelbon be more valuable coming on in the ninth than he would be if he’d taken the mound every fifth day? That’s a trickier question. There’s undoubtedly a big psychological boost that comes with having a lights-out flamethrower set to slam shut the door at the end of a game. But let’s say Julian Taverez — who’s more than a little nuts — fills the fifth starter role to the tune of, say, a .500 record and a 4.43 ERA. And, for arguments sake, let’s say Papelbon would have put up a 10-6 record with a 4.07 ERA.
Actually, that’s not arguments sake: that’s Papelbon’s and Tavarez’s PECOTA projections for the ’07 season. (You’ll need a Baseball Prospectus subscription to view those PECOTA links; for an explanation of just what PECOTA, or Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test, is all about, here’s BP’s PECOTA glossary and the PECOTA Wikipedia entry.) Those numbers are a bit off, because they’re assuming Papelbon would be in the starting rotation and rack up 147 innings, while Tavarez was projected to be in the pen and amass a mere 50 innings (and everything else being the same, more innings=more value). But those stats give Papelbon a 30.1 VORP (value above replacement player), worth 4.5 wins above replacement player; they give Taverez a 7.6 VORP, good for a 1.2 WORP.
Now let’s compare two closers from last year: Mariano Rivera and Todd Jones. Jones, finishing games for the pennant-winning Tigers, ended the year with 37 saves; Mo finished up with 34. But according to PECOTA, Mariano was a lot more valuable, with a 34.9 VORP, and a 7.1 WARP; Jones’s numbers were 12.2, and 3.2. (For those of you who are interested, PECOTA has Pap as more valuable than both of them, coming in at 38.6 and 7.3)
And this means what, exactly? Well, for one thing, it shows how mutable relief pitching can be. (Anyone who bets that Jones is likely to repeat his ’06 performance is likely to lose his money. Lest anyone forget, Joe Borowski looked like an elite reliever last year.) They also give an indication that Papelbon will be a more valuable closer than he will be a starter. But that doesn’t us a complete answer as to our question; for that, we’d need to subtract Tavarez’s value as a starter from Papelbon’s value as a starter and add that to Papelbon’s value as a closer subtracted from that of whomever would have been the closer (or closers) had Paps remained in the rotation. If that number ends up being positive, then Jonathan and the Sox made the right call; if it’s negative, they made the wrong one. (Actually, it’s even more complicated than that, because you’d need to figure out the PECOTA figures of the replacement closer(s) versus their PECOTAs when they’re not closing, and also predict the likelihood that Papelbon will get injured when starting versus reliever, and add in some projections as to whether Manny is more or less likely to be paying attention when his buddy Julian is on the mound, and then try to determine what Papelbon’s presence in the rotation would mean for, say, Lester and Clement, and finally throw in whether John Henry & Co. would be more or less likely to go after Clemens in each imaginary scenario…well, you get the idea.)
This, of course, is the type of hypothetical argument that takes place in a vacuum, and it’s the type of number-crunching exercise that makes Luddite’s like Murray Chass wince. But it’s interesting, and the fact that this kind of analysis is getting little (read: no) attention in what those kooky wingnuts in the blogosphere like to refer to as the MSM is indicative of the extent to which baseball reporting by the mass-market professionals lags behind baseball analysis by specialized writers and amateurs alike.
And to get back to the main point of this here post, it’s the absence of this type of discussion that helps show why precisely this is such a good move, numbers be damned. Even if Papelbon performed above expectations as a starter — say, 13-6, 3.60 — if the team’s closer(s) blew a handful of games, they’d be cries for blood. If, on the other hand, Tavarez goes 4-10 with a 4.79 ERA, there’ll be bitching about his performance…but precious little discussion as to whether the Sox made the wrong move by putting Papelbon back in the pen. Which means that Paps in the rotation has the potential to be huge distraction. And that would be bad for everyone.
In a couple of hours, I’ll offer up an historical example of just how distracting that type of situation can be. And — surprise! — Grady Little plays a central role in that tale.
(Update: the good folks over at SoSH have started a thread on the relative value of relievers versus starters thing; I’m about to run out so I haven’t had a chance to fully check it out, but it’s bound to be interesting.)
Post Categories: Jonathan Papelbon & Julian Tavarez & Red Sox Fans & Sosh & Sports Reporters & Statistics
