Embattled

I suppose that for the rest of Sam Perlozzo’s tenure as the manager of the Baltimore Orioles the adjective “embattled” will regularly be attached to his name. I’m not sure that it’s fair. Certainly when Perlozzo took over, nearly two years ago, there was a feeling that his time had come. At the time, Thomas Boswell wrote

In a sense, Perlozzo has stood in uniform, face pressed to the candy store window, ever since. Now, at 54, in one of those moments of pure baseball justice, Perlozzo is being allowed inside. The candy’s all his now. He’s manager of the Baltimore Orioles, at least for the last 55 games of this season. Nobody ever deserved a turn at the wheel more than Sam.The names that Perlozzo has worn on his chest include Reno, Tidewater, Toledo, Little Falls, Lynchburg, Hawaii and Jackson. Once, he was even a Yakult Swallow in Japan. Perlozzo hasn’t taken that uniform, which defines him, off his back for the last 28 years. But sometimes, those uniforms haven’t returned all the affection he bestowed on them.

However I might want Perlozzo to succeed, he hasn’t. His handling of the bullpen – especially his reliance on Danys Baez who’s allowed the winning run way too many times to earn any degree of confidence from the team. (Allowing him to pitch the ninth with a six run lead was not a bad idea though.)

It’s not good that he appears to be losing the clubhouse.

Perlozzo has been under fire recently because of several in-game managing decisions and clubhouse unrest. On Friday night, third baseman Melvin Mora became the third Oriole to publicly criticize the manager after he learned from a reporter that he was not in the starting lineup.

Until Perlozzo’s predecessor, Lee Mazzilli was fired mid-season, the team under Angelos had never fired any manager mid-season. (In retrospect, was Mazzilli that bad? Boswell got in his digs. OTOH, in 2004 the Orioles had two months of success and in 2005 three great months. Both times the hope faded quickly and the season ended as most Orioles’ seasons have ended for the past decade – in 4th place ahead of only Tampa Bay.)

Ideally, I’d hope that the team would wait out the season. The Orioles do not have the offense to win much more than 81 games, so changing managers isn’t going to be the difference whether or not the team reaches the post season.

According to the Pythagorean projection the Orioles are only 1 game below their expected record. So Perlozzo, despite his mistakes, can’t exactly be called a disaster.

Also with the pitching going well – especially reclamation project Jeremy Guthrie – can the team afford to alienate its most valuable coach, Perlozzo’s friend and pitching coach, Leo Mazzone? Mazzone came to Baltimore to be his friend’s right hand. Would he stay with the team if Perlozzo left? The team’s better off waiting out the season.

Unfortunately with the latest buzz, I don’t think that Perlozzo will last the season.

According to two club sources, the Orioles will give serious consideration to bringing back Davey Johnson if Perlozzo is let go during his second full season as manager. Johnson’s highly successful two-year run as manager ended in 1997 when he abruptly resigned because of a conflict with owner Peter Angelos after the organization’s last winning season.Johnson, who couldn’t be reached to comment yesterday, was 186-138 with the Orioles in 1996 and 1997 and directed them to back-to-back American League Championship Series. He hasn’t managed in the majors since leading the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1999 and 2000 seasons.

He was the bench coach for the U.S. team in the 2006 World Baseball Classic and is managing the American team in its quest to qualify for next year’s Summer Olympics.

To this point, the Orioles, according to sources, have not had significant discussions with Johnson or any other potential candidate, including former Florida Marlins manager Joe Girardi, who also is well-regarded by team executives.

Angelos didn’t return calls seeking a comment, but one club source said the owner is intent on giving Perlozzo every opportunity to get the team back on track. The Orioles entered last night’s game with the Oakland Athletics a season-high six games below .500.

I have no idea who those two club sources are. Flanagan and Duquette refused to discuss Perlozzo on the record. Did they speak off the record too? Once names like Davey Johnson and Joe Girardi are being discussed it’s not a good sign.

Perlozzo, certainly has his faults as manager. And as much as I wish that Davey Johnson hadn’t been shown the door, I don’t see what he can accomplish with the season underway. (He quit when Angelos refused to extend his contract.) Let Perlozzo finish out the season, then sort things out. Frankly, the Orioles have bigger problems than their on-field management.

IDIC

A few weeks ago, Colossus of Rhodey.Hube reported on a recent study that finds that NBA referees are – prejudiced. Not in any conscious way mind you. He even proposes a solution to the problem.

Hey, let’s apply an education “solution” to the NBA problem here: Multicultural training for all NBA referees. [White] refs need to realize that what may be a foul in white culture isn’t necessarily a foul in black culture. After all, since blacks tend to play more “street ball” when growing up, that kind of play tends to be more “freelance,” hence a bit “rougher.” Fouls aren’t called as often. Therefore, white refs need to consider this before blowing the whistle against a [black] player.

Kidding aside, one question is how the league will deal with the problem? How will those diverse front offices deal with the challenge before them? That’s right, on the heels of the study showing that the league’s refs are (unconsciously) biased came another study showing that the league front offices are the most diverse in all of sports. As Richard Lapchik an author of that study writes:

We correctly laud the progress made by the NFL with its recent head coaching hires. However, 40 percent of the head coaches in the NBA are African-American, and that’s more than double the percentage of any other league. At the end of last season, the New York Giants hired Jerry Reese, giving the NFL a total of five African-Americans in positions the NFL says are the equivalent to general managers (some teams use titles like VP for player personnel). By contrast, there were eight African-American general managers in the NBA when the regular season ended last month.Many celebrate the fact that two African-American head coaches faced each other in the 2007 Super Bowl — the Colts’ Tony Dungy and the Bears’ Lovie Smith. That happened in the NBA’s counterpart to the Super Bowl — the NBA Finals — all the way back in 1975 when K.C. Jones and the Washington Bullets met Al Attles and the San Francisco Warriors for the league championship. To date, four African-American head coaches have won NBA titles: Attles, Jones, Russell and Lenny Wilkens. Through the end of this season, the league has had 53 African-American head coaches. Major League Baseball is a distant second with a history that includes 25 managers of color, including African-Americans and Latinos.

So Lapchik plays down the referee issue:

So in that big-picture context, the possibility of an officiating bias based on race seems less consequential. Thirty-six percent of the referees in the NBA this season were either Latino or African-American, which puts the NBA far ahead of any other sport in that area. Is it possible that white referees make more calls against African-American players? Wolfers says it is more than a possibility. If he is right, his study tells us as much about society as it does about the NBA because there are so many other areas where this sort of “taste-based discrimination” happens, such as corporate executives making hiring and promotion decisions, or police officers, prosecutors and judges making decisions in which preconceived images may play a role in their “calls.”

To Lapchik, it’s not an NBA problem; it’s society’s problem.

In his post on the study of officiating bias, Colossus of Rhodey.Hube joked about the paucity of white players in the NBA. That’s because the way players are hired is based on merit even though the result is that a disproportionate number of of African Americans are hired to play the game. (Believe it or not, once upon a time, the NBA was a very Jewish league.)

But perhaps one of the reasons race relations are still an issue in society is not the subtle unconscious discriminations but that fact that we have people whose job it is to study diversity. Given that it’s their field of study, they need to validate their existence and maintain that problems still exist. Once gains in diversity are accepted unconsciously instead of being heralded self-consciously race will be much less of a contentious issue.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Wright is the wrong excuse

I like Ken Rosenthal. In the past decade or so he’s transformed from a standard issue baseball columnist to one who is informed by statistics. And he knows how to use statistics, they’re not just an adornment to his column.In assessing the possibilities of different managers getting fired this year (either during the season or after) he writes this about the state of the Orioles

…but the team probably is doomed anyway after losing starting pitchers Kris Benson, Jaret Wright and Adam Loewen to injuries. A managerial change is more likely after the season.

This is not up to his regular standards. The loss of those pitchers have little to do with the Orioles’ problems this year. For one thing, last year the Orioles had a 5.35 ERA; this year the team ERA (so far) is nearly a whole run lower at 4.43. (The team’s batting average allowed is nearly 30 points lower too; and the strikeout to walks ratio is improved too.

And that’s without Benson, Wright and Loewen.

When Benson was injured the Orioles quickly countered by signing his former Mets’ teammate, Steve Trachsel. Last year Benson pitched to an ERA ; this year Trachsel’s been a pleasant surprise with an ERA of 3.94. (While he has a respectable WHIPS of 1.34; his strikeout rate and strikeout to walk ratios are poor and indications that his luck may run out soon.) Last year Benson pitched to an ERA of 4.82. His WHIPS was 1.40 and his strikeout and walk ratios were not great, but better than Trachsels’s this year. Though it may be fleeting, for now Trachsel is a step up over Benson.

On its own, I can’t see what the Orioles expected from Jaret Wright. Wright has not been both effective and healthy in the same year since 1997, except for 2004. True that’s the year when Leo Mazzone was his pitching coach. But doesn’t it strain credibility to assume he could work this miracle twice? Counting on Jaret Wright is a failure of the organization. Not specifically of the manager.

So even without Benson, Wright and Loewen the Orioles pitching is fine. The team’s ERA is right in middle of the pack.

The problem is the hitting. The Orioles as a team have a .718 OPS. Currently on Kansas City and Chicago in the AL are worse. They are one of only six teams with a slugging percentage below .400.

I suspected that at the end of the year when the team was lamenting a 75-87
record that some official would point to the unavailability of Wright. Ken Rosenthal did it a few months early. While the injury to Wright is a sign of an organizational failure, it is not what ails the O’s. What ails the O’s is a power failure.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Globalizing sports

In Foreign Legion, the Baltimore Sun explores the growing globalization of American sports through the lens of the signings of major international stars by American teams. Specifically it looks at the cases of Daisuke Matsuzaka, Yao Ming and David Beckham.

Of Matsuzaka, the article considers the costs, risks and benefits of the Red Sox signing. Right now the financial benefits remain elusive.

The immediate economic benefits to the Red Sox may be more limited. They already sell out every game and charge more per ticket than any team in the league. They spent $103.1 million ($51.1 million for his rights and a six-year, $52 million contract) on Matsuzaka primarily because they wanted an ace for the next six years.”It was first, second and third a baseball decision designed to give us a better team and a better rotation,” Red Sox president Larry Lucchino said. “There are some ancillary benefits, but they are just that — ancillary. The notion that there’s some enormous pot of marketing gold is illusory.”

And I guess, if the Red Sox overpaid, it was also to keep Dice-K away from the Yankees. Still there are some benefits to the signing from a marketing standpoint.

The Sun has an accompanying list of the most prominent signings of foreign players by American sports teams.

In the case of Yao Ming, the article points out that international players are already a significant presence in the NBA, but that China was a real prize.

The league appears on 51 Chinese television stations and has accrued a viewership of 428 million this year. China accounts for 20 percent of the traffic on NBA.com, and the Rockets’ Mandarin-language Web site ranks among the most viewed sports pages in the world. NBA merchandise sells in more than 20,000 Chinese stores, and the league will open 10 NBA-specific shops in the country by the end of the year.

The benefits of the LA Galaxy signing David Beckham may not be realized only on the soccer field.

MLS receives scant mainstream attention in the United States, but it’s suddenly on the pages of People and on the lips of Access Hollywood anchors. Children in Asia and Europe who’ve hardly given a second thought to U.S. soccer will wear Galaxy jerseys. If the league can attract more international stars, it might connect deeply with immigrant populations that live in the United States but live and die with soccer teams from their original countries.

Some 30 years ago an the NY Cosmos of the NASL signed an international star. That did not work out as well.

In the 1970s, the New York Cosmos signed Pele and other international stars in hopes of popularizing soccer in America. The formula worked for a while as the Cosmos drew more than 40,000 fans a game at Giants Stadium and earned the North American Soccer League a television deal. But the NASL’s other franchises never matched the Cosmos’ aggression, and the league folded less than 10 years after Pele signed his contract.

Globalization can help a team discover new talent or a new fan base. Investing in the former could very well help develop the latter. Smarter teams are going to take advantage of the global market. Or they will risk being left behind.

Incidentally, there’s another side to the globalization of sports. There are the United Soccer Leagues in the U.S. that is affiliated with England’s Premier League. Though the leagues have been operating in Northern America for 20 years, I was unaware of them until a local club – Crystal Palace USA started advertising.

This leads to another question. When will other American major sports leagues follow the lead of NFL Europe and start partnerships with international leagues or teams? This would also extend the marketing reach (as well as the talent pool) of teams and leagues that participate.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

Decline of horse racing in Maryland

Two years ago the Washington Post ran a story “Making hay in a horse based economy” The gist of the article was that there are plenty of horse farms in Maryland and that it remains a growing industry. The subtext of the article is that it doesn’t matter if Maryland is losing racing to neighboring states, because the horse farms will prosper anyway. Given the anti-slots approach of the Washington Post this is an important case to make.However as this article in the Baltimore Sun makes clear, the failure of horse racing in Maryland will hurt horse breeding in the state.

The breeding industry is also suffering. Cricket Goodall, executive director of the Maryland Horse Breeders Association, said the industry “is at a tipping point where people aren’t going to hang on much longer.”"If the MJC follows through with stated plans to cut more racing days to maintain the purses, it will cut into our revenue stream and limit the amount of money we have to reward Maryland-bred horses,” she said. “If Maryland-breds don’t have the opportunity to run and make money, they’ll be encouraged to run somewhere else.”

(MJC is Maryland Jockey Club and it’s the governing body of the horse racing industry in Maryland.)

There is a trickle down effect. The big money in horse breeding is in racing. If the racing industry in Maryland collapses, resources for raising horses will go elsewhere and the horse farms – even for non-racing purposes – will leave the state too.

It’s not likely that the industry will survive unless the purses can match those of neighboring states. That won’t happen unless slots are approved.

I’m against subsidies to any industry. I’m also not convinced that slots are a great idea. It might just be it’s time to let horse industry in Maryland die.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Paint ball

So was the bloody sock really bloody?

Gary Thorne, calling the Orioles-Red Sox game Wednesday night, sparked a huge debate when he claimed that the infamous bloody sock of Curt Schilling was actually paint and that BoSox catcher Doug Mirabelli told him so. Mirabelli vehemently denied doing so.

Baseball Musings, for his part, doubts Thorne.

Everyone associated with the Red Sox and this story, Mirabelli, Schilling and Francona denied it was paint. Having seen Thorne screw up on the air many times with ESPN, I have no doubt that the Red Sox are right here. I try very hard not to dislike people, but I have strong professional dislike for Thorne. In the early days of the STATS/ESPN relationship a number of people were upset that ESPN didn’t use Elias. Gary was one of these people. One day, he called STATS out during a broadcast for supplying incorrect caught stealing statistics. What Gary failed to realize, however, that the report we provided only dealt with caught stealing by catchers, where the report his friends at Elias gave him dealt with all caught stealings. Gary was forced to apologize on the air. 

So I’m biased about Thorne. In my opinion, he’s sloppy. And in this case he’s very likely wrong.

more at Ballbug.

UPDATE: see the previous entry. One of the comments at Baseball Musings points to this item from the Boston Globe’s blog. Dr. Bill Morgan who performed the surgery on Schilling said

“Anyone who’s ever had stitches knows there’s going to be oozing from the wound. I put a bunch of stitches in the guy, and then he had to go out there and pitch at a professional level. The sutures were tugging at the skin, it opened up a little bit. The thing expanded right before our eyes.”

UPDATE II: Unsurprisingly, Curt Schilling has now weighed in. In the aptly named, Ignorance has its privileges, first he argues that the issue of the sock, is mostly of the media’s making.

The only problem I have is this. If you look back, from the day of game six in the ALCS, through today, you won’t find a newspaper article, radio or TV interview in which I offered the blood, the sock, the game, any of it, as a topic. I haven’t talked about it since the post game interview room that night. 

People have asked and I have answered, but the mileage the media got from the incident is all of their own making. When I walked into the room for the post game interviews and offered up my first response to the questions about the game I basically said that the night was a revelation for me. That my faith in God that evening showed me things I’d never believed.

As I uttered those words I could see pretty much every person in that room roll their eyes and smirk. That’s not what any of them wanted to hear, truth or not. That was not good copy. They needed more and what I didn’t give them, they got themselves.

 

And this general shot at the profession of journalism/broadcasting/media

If you haven’t figured it out by now, working in the media is a pretty nice gig. 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. You can always tell the bigger culprits by the fact you never see their faces in the clubhouse. Most of them are afraid to show themselves to the subjects they rail on everyday.

 

Before he finishes, he puts things in perspective:

The saddest part in all of this is the following. Yesterday, as I was warming up for the game, I got to see a young kid, could not have been more than 20, who had served in Iraq. He was being honored by the Orioles and threw out the first pitch. He was a double amputee who’d lost the lower portion of both of his legs serving his country. He refused to use his cane and getting to see him do that was incredible. 

Instead of finding this kid and writing a story that truly matters, something that would and could truly inspire people, the media chose to focus on a story that was over two years old and a completely fabricated lie. What a job.

 

Finally he puts it on the line:

Someone gave me a great idea to end this once and for all. No one will ever need to bring it up again. I’ll wager 1 million dollars to the charity of anyones choice, versus the same amount to ALS. If the blood on the sock is fake, I’ll donate a million dollars to that persons charity, if not they donate that amount to ALS. 

Any takers?

 

The question now is, why did Gary Thorne say it? (Schilling suggests that he mis-over-heard something.) And will the Orioles take any action?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Sammy Weaver?

I’ve never thought Sam Perlozzo to be a sabermetric manager like Earl Weaver or Davey Johnson. I went to a game last year where he twice followed up leadoff doubles with sacrifiec bunts, giving up unnecessary outs.

But tonight he went against the conventional wisdom and showed a bit of guts. With the Orioles down 5 – 1 and two outs in the eighth inning and Aubrey Huff due up, Bob Geren called for lefty Alan Embree. Perlozzo did not do the expected, and kept righty Kevin Millar on the bench and stuck with Huff.

 Radio guys, Joe Angel and Jim Hunter noted that Huff had 4 hits in 16 at bats against Embree, but that Millar had never faced him, and assumed it was that lack of experience that tipped Perlozzo’s hand.

Huff ripped the first pitch from Embree into the stands cutting Oakland’s lead to 5 – 4. (Each team would score once for a final 6 – 5 Oakland.)

Angel and Hunter started discussing that Perlozzo looked like a genius. Clearly he went against their expectations, but was the manager’s decision simply about experience with the pitcher?

So I did some checking at ESPN.

Millar’s OPS

vs lefties 2004 – 2006 – .745

                       2007 – .606

vs righties 2004 – 2006 – .837

                       2007 -1.055

Huff’s OPS

vs lefties 2004 – 2006 – .745

                       2007 – .565

vs righties 2004 – 2006 – .832

                       2007 – .528

So it appears that if one went back to the previous three years, there was no distinct advantage in using Millar in place of Huff. Huff had the same platoon splits as Millar. True Millar’s doing better this year so far, but it doesn’t appear that the decision to stick with Huff was as unusual as the announcers thought.

It appears that Perlozzo was doing his homework.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

What’s baseball got to do with it?

via BallBug

Forbes has an article about the Business of Baseball. Given that Forbes is a business magazine not a sports magazine its list of baseball 10 best general managers will be the subject of some debate.

Being an Orioles’ fan, I hardly think that Mike Flanagan (#10 according to Forbes) deserves to be anywhere near the top of this list (yet.) He works for a difficult owner and as a fan I haven’t seen a good product for an entire year during his tenure. If this year turns out well, as it appears it might right now, there’s still little hope for long term success here. The Orioles have one of the weaker farm systems in MLB and the team isn’t especially young. (Overall that is. There’s Markakis, Cabrera, Loewen and Ray, but most everyone else of significance is 28 and up.) Success this year isn’t likely to extend more than two years unless the team’s scouting improves drastically.

I realize that this ranking is primarily from a business not a baseball standpoint, that’s why stathead favorite GM’s without much success (so far) like Mark Shapiro and Doug Melvin don’t rank. (Forbes does have metrics for evaluating them, but success on the field isn’t necessarily one of them.) Still how can Mike Flanagan make the list but not the likes of Kenny Williams, Brian Cashman, Bill Stoneman or even Tim Purpura whose teams have been in the World Series in recent years. Or Kevin Towers and Terry Ryan whose teams have made the playoffs?

And how does John Schuerholz rank below Brian Sabean or Pat Gillick?

Shouldn’t baseball have something to do with it?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Message?

via BallBug

Honestly, I don’t know how a baseball team “sends a message” but apparently the Orioles aren’t intending to send any as they swept the Blue Jays. At least not yet.

The Orioles, almost to a man, insist that they’re not trying to send any messages. Not to opponents, not to the rest of the league, not to all of baseball. If they beat a division rival, the only significance is that they’ve won another game. Each one counts the same. Leave it to everyone else to find special meaning in a three-game sweep of the Toronto Blue Jays, which they completed with today’s 7-3 victory before 27,285 at Camden Yards. Or the five wins in six tries against the Blue Jays and New York Yankees. And let’s not forget their hold on second place in the American League East. “We’re just going out and trying to play good baseball,” manager Sam Perlozzo said. “It’s April. When it’s August and we’re still whipping up on somebody, then we can talk about sending a message. We’ve got a long way to go.”

In 2004, the Orioles had two good months (including a number of odd Thursday comebacks). In 2005 they were good until the end of June. But the result both years was the same. They collapsed and ended up in the purgatory of 4th place. In 2005, they were one of the best teams. Second to the White Sox during those months. The offense led by Tejada and Roberts was tremendous and the pitching was also excellent.

 A quick look at the current stats shows that the Orioles have the 7th best offense in the AL (by OPS). (#1 for what it’s worth are the Yankees. Think they miss Sheffield?) In pitching the team is #5 in the AL in pitching according to ERA and #4 by OPS allowed.

My guess is that the O’s offense is probably where I’d expect it to be, but offense seems down across the AL. The average OPS last year was .776 and in 2005 it was .754, right now it’s .728.

 My guess is that sooner or later the offense will return to a somewhat higher level and that O’s pitching will decline a bit and the offense will remain where it is. Right now my hopes for a .500 season seem good if premature.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.