Well, Javier Vazquez looked better, but not exactly great, last night. He had a little more life on his fastball and the A’s were biting on a sharp slider. But he mostly wiggled out of trouble last night thanks to plays like the “look what I found” double play on a line drive at his head that the pitcher caught, doubling off the runner at first. Marte continued his mercurial ways, but Joba looked excellent and really may put to rest a lot of controversy with outings like last night–coming in with the base loaded in the seventh to strike out the clean up hitter, throwing fastballs well into the mid 90s.
Old Men Down the Road…For those of you who think past is prologue, or that the future is predetermined by the present, or that April statistics predict August performance, I point you to two Sabremetrically-minded pieces by Joseph Pawlikowski looking at the early season stats of Jorge Posada and Derek Jeter. I don’t think it all amounts to much–what a guy does in the first two weeks of the season doesn’t really bear any relationship to what a guy does in July or August: players make adjustments, opponents change, etc., predicting the future with stats (other than assuming that a veteran player will likely play to his career averages over a full season) is a hopeless task. What Pawlikowski’s stats show us is that Jeter’s hitting more ground balls than usual so far and that Posada’s off to a hot start, “seeing the ball well” and “on everything in the strike zone”–which is what the old timers called it when a player had a “high z-contact rate.” I guess it’s not bad to have a way to quantify that, but I don’t think the stat tells us anything we don’t know from watching, it just provides some specificity.
When Stats Lie…And speaking of Sabremetrics, the poster boy for the kind of Sabremetrical sophistry that allows geeks to argue that Nick Johnson is as good as Hideki Matsui because of Nick’s higher wOBA over the past couple of years, is off to what the old timers used to call a “lousy start.” There are some stats-obsessed fans who wear blinders and will argue, apparently without irony, that Nick Johnson is off too a good start because of his .407 OBP and 16 walks; that he’s doing just what the Yanks acquired him to do; that he’s performing well in his role as a number two hitter. But I’m sorry, a designated hitter, that is, a guy getting paid exclusively to hit, who is batting .146, who has fanned in 36% of his at bats, who is slugging .268, is not off to a good start. At Was Watching MJ Recanati asks “Is Nick Johnson Too Selective?” ; at A Train Baseball I’m asking, “Is Nick Johnson Any Good?”
A Run Scored is Worth More than A Run Saved…That’s what I say, if only because a run scored is tangible, a run prevented is, more often than not, theoretical. (Sure, if a guy knocks down a ball on the infield holding a baserunner at third, or like Arod last night, an infielder throws home to get the out vs. taking the easy out at first, then a run really is prevented; but statistical abstractions for how many runs-prevented a particular player’s defense is worth, are birds in the bush if you ask me.) Mike Silva comes to the same conclusion more or else in a good post on NY Baseball Digest regarding Red Sox GM Theo Epstein and his Sabremetrically-inspired “run prevention” plan for the 2010 Red Sox. Quoth Mike:
For the first time in his career this ballclub has Theo Epstein’s fingerprints all over it. Remember, the 2004 club was primarily Dan Duquette. The 2007 bunch had two players, Josh Beckett and Mike Lowell, who were acquired while Theo was hiding in a monkey suit. Most believe he never would have traded Hanley Ramirez and who knows if the Sox win without Beckett that season. My guess is probably not.
Is it time to panic? 4-9 for the Red Sox is a small “sample size” (tell that to the 5-8 Mets and Jerry Manuel), mainly because many in the media loves Theo Epstein. Many love advanced metric ideology even more. To say the Sox are “flawed” would be admitting the whole plus/minus philosophy isn’t all what it’s cracked up to be. Do you think even the best defense is going to stop the Yankees from scoring? Did it during the opening series? What the Sox could have used against the Yanks was a few clutch hits. Will Adrian Beltre and Mike Cameron provide that? Don’t hold your breath. Yes, the Yankees went with Brett Gardner, but only because they surrounded him with 8 other offensive players. Their main pickup, Curtis Granderson, plays defense but can hit 30 homers and drive in 100 runs to boot. If the Sox wanted a new outfielder other than Bay it was Granderson, not Cameron, they should have acquired.
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