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.

Jay Payton and the State of the Orioles

Yes Orioles fans, your team is ahead of the Yankees, the Blue Jays and the Devil Rays, one game behind the front running Red Sox. Yet it is April and the season is a long hard slog. But when your squad has not found the postseason in a decade, you celebrate the little victories.

Soccer Dad knows of what I speak.

This comment reported in today’s Washington Post, though must terrify serious as well as casual O’s fans.

Payton’s presence gives the team more versatility. As the Orioles shopped around for another outfielder this offseason, Payton was, “exactly what we were looking for,” vice president Jim Duquette said. He can play anywhere in the outfield or bat anywhere in the lineup. As he showed Sunday, he can lead off, and last season in Oakland he batted behind Frank Thomas for protection.

The mere idea that Payton, with a career rate stat line of .285/.330/.439. OPS+ is a state that compares a players OPS to the league average. Payton on his career has an OPS+ of 99 – a tick below average. Which Jim Duquette says is “exactly what [they] were looking for.”

If Baltimore needed an outfielder to go alongside Corey Patterson and Nick Markakis, wouldn’t Carlos Lee, a big bopper to hit behind Miguel Tejada be a good fit, and exactly what the Orioles might need. At least Lee, with a 113 career OPS+ and only one season below 100, can be considered an above average hitter. An inexpensive alternative with less stick would be David Delucci. A speed guy like Dave Roberts was also on the market and could hit atop the lineup with Roberts, Markakis and Tejada behind him to drive him in.

The Orioles with their incessant band-aid responses to bigger problems have poised themselves for another year of mediocrity as an also ran in the American League. With the Yankees pitching scuffling an opportunity existed for a different team to claim the title in the East. Most experts would award that crown to Boston, the runner up for the last billion or so years. But why not the Orioles, who had held first place in the East with a vise like grip for the first half of 2005 before the wheels came off. The injury to Kris Benson gave Baltimore the opportunity to find a creative solution tot he roster hole, instead plugged with Steve Trachsel, last seen being run out of Queens.

Oh well, another pedestrian solution. Should the Orioles can continue to suffer along and not make any effort to put a real winning franchise on the field, the fans protests will continue to grow louder and teams like the Red Sox and Yankees with their large traveling contingents will enjoy a quasi home field cheering section when visiting Charm City.

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.

O’s what a relief it is

Back in February Geoff Young wrote in the Hardball Times

This was simply a case of a guy who had been good before finding health and returning to previous levels—sort of like Soriano, but with more of a record of success. Ironically, while his team gave Soriano away this past winter, Bradford cashed in with a long-term deal from the Orioles, who spent most of the off-season pursuing expensive bullpen options. If you want a primer on how not to build a bullpen, just look at Baltimore’s moves over the past several months.

However yesterday Baseball Musings noticed that the spending might have been high but so far, it’s been working out very well.

The relievers struck out four and walked one, giving them 51 K and 18 walks in 53 1/3 innings. I’ll take that from any bullpen.

A few days ago, Baltimore Sun Columnist John Eisenberg noticed the same thing.

While it’s still too soon to make a definitive judgment, things are looking up for the Orioles’ bullpen. It has a 3.35 ERA after last night’s game in St. Petersburg, Fla., as opposed to last season’s 5.25 figure. Throw out the April 7 fiasco in New York and this year’s number is really low.

Closer Chris Ray is happy

“It’s unbelievable,” said Ray, who has allowed one base runner in six appearances since surrendering the walk-off grand slam to New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez on April 7. “My job is a heck of a lot easier when you have all those guys before me going in there, setting the tempo, and keeping the momentum on our side and keeping the score the same when it gets to me. I’m throwing just one inning instead of an inning plus. The guys behind me are getting guys out left and right.”

Going back to the original article it’s pretty clear that the Orioles overpaid for their relief help, however as John Eisenberg observed

As I said, it’s still early and there are going to be hiccups, but protecting a larger percentage of their leads could propel the Orioles close to .500. The fact that they had to overpay doesn’t matter. After years of botching patches, the sight of a solid bullpen is priceless.

Overspending can be forgiven if you’re winning. Last year the Orioles had 20 blown saves. They had a clear problem and so they addressed it.

I’m no fan of the team’s management, but so far the relief upgrade seems to be working. The biggest caveat is that they’re throwing a lot of innings right now. If the starters don’t start going longer the relievers could find themselves wearing out too soon. At the best I don’t expect the Orioles to do better than .500. But given the past 9 years, that would be something.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.