Tidbits
I wrote this up earlier and it got erased. It was probably me being stupid. This version is abbreviated.
Following up on my earlier entry, Felix Diaz has been called up by the White Sox and will start Thursday. I'm not predicting a star career for him, but he's a rare Giants prospect that makes it to the majors as a starter.
Edgardo Alfonzo has been getting on base like crazy the past few weeks (over .400 OBP since April 30). He's out of the lineup to today again for Pedro Feliz. Wouldn't it make sense to hit Alfonzo in front of Bonds when he's in the lineup, and bench Snow for Feliz for good if Felipe feels he needs the "power bat" of Feliz cleaning up for Bonds? Alfonzo's about the only real table-setter with Durham out. Snow just doesn't hit enough. On that topic - why hit Grissom in front of Bonds when Grissom is about the only guy on the team capable of knocking Barry in? I swear this stuff just isn't that complicated.
To touch on the Pirates' second-base situation briefly, Bobby Hill is still getting on base a lot, but not hitting much. Jose Castillo is hitting a little but not getting on base all that frequently. I still say send Feliz to Pittsburgh for Hill and set the table with Durham, Hill and Alfonzo (assuming God has spoken to Felipe and told him that the 11th commandment is that Bonds must hit fourth). Make one of them play shorstop. I don't really care who.
For those who are interested, I'll be out of the country starting tomorrow. I don't know how much access I'll have to the internet, baseball news, or time to post here. I'll do my best, but no promises. If anyone wants to post a guest entry, email it to me and I'll put it up, assuming it's any good. Just kidding. Go Giants.
The price of a certain strategy
For the entirety of the Sabean era, the Giants have been playing under the same strategy: Draft a lot of pitchers, fill the lineup with veterans, trade for help midseason by dealing away minor-league arms. It appears to have worked fairly well thus far, mostly because so few of those arms have actually developed into major-league pitchers. If the Nate Bumps and Jason Grillis had been turning guys like Josh Beckett and Roy Oswalt, the strategy would, in hindsight, look a lot weaker.
I read the following blurb on a website this morning:
"Felix Diaz is considered the leading candidate for a start this Saturday against Minnesota when the White Sox need a fifth starter."
Remember Felix Diaz? He was a top Giants prospect a few years ago, a right-hander who threw gas and projected as a #2 starter. He was not the Giants top prospect, but he often got mentioned in the list of the bounty of arms in the Giants' system. Diaz was traded in 2002 as part of the deal for Kenny Lofton, who played a few months with the Giants, helped the Giants get to the World Series, and then insisted on playing the field despite having a hernia that limited him defensively, sending the all-glove, no-bat Tsyoshi Shinjo into the DH spot for the games in Anaheim. As I recall, the Giants had a real "players' manager" back then, who wasn't about to tell the veteran Lofton that his claim that he could only hit when he played the field and couldn't concentrate when he was DHing were completely ridiculous, and that he was hurting the team by being a prima donna about playing the field when he was hurting, and when Shinjo was better anyway. As a sidelight, if the Giants had even one decent hitter on the bench that year who could reasonably DH, the contours of this dynamic would have been very different - as it was, we were getting Lofton and Shinjo, it was just a matter of who played the field and who DH'ed.
Diaz was playing for AA Shreveport when he was dealt in the Lofton trade. He was 21 years old, young for the level, and was 3-5 with a 2.70 ERA and 48 Ks in 60 innings (that must have been a very bad team) at the time of the trade. He finished the season with the Birmingam Barons and was successful there as well (4-0 with a 3.48 ERA and 30 Ks in 31 innings). Overall, 2002 had to look like a serious breakout season for Diaz, posting an overall line of:
7-5; 18 GS; 91.0 IP; 2.97 ERA, 1.21 WHIP, 78 Ks to 31 BBs
For a 21-year-old in AA that's very nice performance. He followed it up with a solid, if unspectacular season in AAA last year (3.97 ERA, 83/33 K/BB ratio in 115.2 innings). It was the type of year for a 22-year-old pitcher that will look like a different thing based on what happens to him. If he becomes a major-league pitcher and has some success, it will be looked at as a consolidation year. If he doesn't, it will be looked at as an example of him getting exposed at higher levels.
That being said, he's absolutely on fire this year:
5-0; 6 GS; 39.1 IP; 1.83 ERA; 32 K to 5 BB
As the note I read above said, if someone on the White Sox gets hurt or isn't performing well enough, it's likely Diaz that gets the nod and will be a starting pitcher in the major leagues. Renting Lofton helped the Giants that year, and even if Diaz turns into Javier Vazquez, he was a AA pitcher at the time. Still, the point is that the Giants haven't had to feel the pain associated with this strategy because, in hindsight, they've been dealing away non-prospects for these veterans rather than actual prospects. If and when some of these guys (Foulke, Diaz, Liriano, etc...) start turning into good major league players, the price of doing business this way becomes a lot clearer.
Rethinking Peter Happy?
Nice Giants win yesterday 6-1 over the Reds. Of course, it was the Reds...
Probably the most notable item in my view was Pedro Feliz' attempt to make me look like an idiot for bashing him so much. (Yes, Rueter's terrific game is also notable, but after pitching so poorly it's not so surprising that he would have a great start eventually - for those who think it's just a theoretical concept, that's what regression to the mean looks like, folks) After Bonds drew his 4,825th intentional walk of the year Feliz crushed a Cory Lidle breaking ball at the bottom of the strike zone and sent it into the center field seats. He also hit a ground ball for a single later in the game. His OPS is now up to .784 (I figure if I'm going to post frequent updates to this I can't just do it on days when he goes 0-4).
I have no doubt that if I listened to KNBR I'd hear a parade of people declaring this game to be Peter Happy's coming out party, that the Giants are now finally prepared to make opposing teams pay for the sin of walking Barry Bonds. It goes without saying that I think that this is wildly optimistic. I have said all along that if given 500 ABs Feliz would probably hit 25 home runs and sure enough he's currently on pace for 464 ABs with 22 home runs. His power is certainly real, but his approach hitting ... I just don't understand why any pitcher would ever throw Feliz anything close to the strike zone. Lidle had Feliz 0-2 yesterday, and I was expecting a quick strikeout. Why Lidle didn't throw that breaking ball in the dirt is completely beyond me - Feliz committed early to swinging, which was the only reason he was able to lunge out and dig that breaking ball out from the bottom of the zone to lift it. It's a strikeout or harmless dribbler if the ball is lower.
And this is what worries me - Feliz is like Damon Minor was in 2002 and like Marvin Benard was his whole career. He only hits mistake pitches. Cory Lidle is pitching in the NL for the first time and never saw Pedro Feliz before this. I think that Lidle, like most pitchers (but not all Giants catchers apparently), will watch film of his start yesterday, and he'll see where he went wrong when he faced Feliz. Same goes for the rest of the pitchers in the league. Feliz can hit the ball really hard - but he's an easy out, and it's only a matter of time before pitchers figure that out.
Aligning fandom for a player like Feliz is interesting. I don't think he's going to be good, ever. He's too old and makes too many outs. He can't tell balls from strikes. I also don't think the 2004 Giants make the playoffs. Which makes it difficult to know what to root for when Feliz stands in. On the one hand, I always want the Giants to win and their players to do well. On the other hand, I don't want to see the team commit even more than they already have to a player that I think stinks. In an ideal world, I'm rooting for Feliz to get really hot, be hitting .325 at the all-star break (with a .330 OBP) and see him get traded to a contender for a good prospect or two (which would never happen). I don't think he's genuinely an upgrade for too many contenders, but there are a lot of GMs out there whose eyes light up at a high batting average and some nice home run stats. Of course, to be fair, it bears mentioning that if Feliz could consistently hit .325 he actually would be a valuable player, since with so much batting average built in his OBP wouldn't be a killer and his power numbers would be very nice. If Feliz could hit .325 he'd be Garret Anderson.
But more likely, I see his .300+ batting average wearing away and as it does his lack of secondary skills will become more and more pronounced. Worst of all, but thinking well into the future, Feliz is going to be eligible for arbitration at the end of next season, and the arbitrators have long shown that they don't really understand performance analysis. They're going to see Pete Happy's homers and RBI (both of which he'll get if he's let out there every day for the next two years) and annoint him a league-average or better third baseman and pay him accordingly. And based on the way the current Giants regime spends money, they'll choose to pay Feliz.
The elder statesman
Once upon a time Barry Bonds was a really good defender. Many gold gloves kind of defender. He never had a cannon arm (which is why he's always played left field), but he was fast and no one got better reads on fly balls. Barry had an impressive ability to just be in the right place at the right time for a given hitter (partially because I think one element of his game that routinely gets ignored is just how smart a guy he actually is).
Now, at age 39, Bonds isn't a particularly good defender anymore. He doesn't make a lot of errors, because the mental part of his game is still in place, so he usually gets good reads and doesn't do anything stupid (I'd still rather watch Barry play defense than Marvin Benard), but his speed is reduced and he doesn't try to make plays that are on the margin. This gets characterized by some as a lack of hustle, but in my view it's the result of a carefully conducted cost-benefit analysis of the likely outcome of the play. The potential benefit if Barry dives for a fly-ball? He catches it and the hitter is out. Maybe the Giants win a game they wouldn't have won. The potential cost? The 39-year-old who hits better than anyone else in the game hurts himself and winds up on the disabled list for a month. Bonds is right not to try to be Jim Edmonds or Darin Erstad out there. The criticism is silly.
What occured to me recently, though, is that Bonds isn't just old for an outfielder - I'm pretty sure he's the oldest starting outfielder in the major leagues. There are only a handful of players his age still in the game. Of those who are older than he is a few are pitchers (Jamie Moyer, Roger Clemens) and the majority are first basemen or designated hitters (Julio Franco, Edgar Martinez). When I initially thought about this question, the only starting outfielder I could think of was Steve Finley, who still amazingly plays center field every day. And Finley is close, but he's six months younger than Bonds. After that, you're talking about Craig Biggio (38), Moises Alou, Marquis Grissom, Kenny Lofton, Jeff Conine (37) and a bunch of guys who are 36 (Reggie Sanders, Luis Gonzalez and others).
It's something to think about when considering that Bonds takes days off or sometimes appears to let a ball bounce in front of him rather than go all-out and dive for it. The guy is the oldest starting position player in the major leagues other than Barry Larkin, who can never stay healthy. Most players never make it to Barry's age, and most of those who do have long since become designated hitters. Bonds himself allowed for that possibility in a recent interview (cue reference to Plan B - someone call the A's). For a 39-year-old starting outfielder in the national league, Bonds has done a pretty good job over the last few years of keeping himself on the field. And that is and should be his #1 priority.
Fun with old predictions
There are some current events moderately worthy of discussion. The Giants lost again last night (a loss? In a game started by Tomko? nah...), Barry made some comments about retiring after next season (and also that he'd play as a DH for a California-based AL team), and that he might retire before breaking Aaron's record. Fine, fine.
I was flipping through my old 2001 baseball books (mostly Baseball Prospectus, which everyone who reads here knows I think is an invaluable source of information and evaluation). What I thought would be interesting would be to randomly look through and see how some of the comments wound up turning out. It's fine to make predictions based on certain past events (in the case of sabremetricians, often concrete data, rather than scouting reports), but it's useful to sanity-check those by seeing how they turn out.
Bobby Estellala is a fine ballplayer who is only going to get better...He will be at least a reasonable MVP candidate at some point during the next five years.
He's a shaky defensive third baseman who has drawn a grand total of 105 unintentional walks in seven minor-league seasons. You want to be a good player in the majors? Get on base. You want to get on base while drawing less than a walk per week? Hit .350. Feliz won't.
Ballplayer. Ramon Martinez swings hard and can play any infield position well enough to be a defensive replacement. On another team I'd be clamoring for him to at least receive a shot at the starting shortstop or second-base jobs.
The Giants can carry JT Snow because of Aurilia, Bonds, Kent and Estallela, but imagine the offense with a true bomber at first base like Jason Giambi, Carlos Delgado or Frank Thomas.
Tony Torcato is a good athlete... There's an overriding problem here, though, and I don't mean just with Torcato but throughout the Giant organization: these guys have no plate discipline! ... I wonder what Torcato would look like at this point if drafted by, say, the A's.
Many Giant fans think Kurt Ainsworth is a prospect like Rick Ankiel or Ryan Anderson. He's not, and he's not close.
Ryan Vogelsong's numbers and stuff are promising, but if you watch him pitch it's hard to imagine him having a really bright future.
I prefer Jerome Williams to Ainsworth; if he can avoid the dreaded injury nexus, I think he'll have a major-league career.
This stuff all came from a book published between the 2000 and 2001 seasons. There's a lot of other interesting stuff in there, including a prediction that a single-A masher named Albert Pujols might be starting for the Cardinals before anyone thought possible. They missed a few above (obviously they didn't see Estallela's injury-induced fall from the majors) but for the most part I think those look pretty good with almost four years of hindsight. I find the comment about Ainsworth particularly illustrative - the comment was, at the time, true. Ainsworth wasn't the prospect that Rick Ankiel or Ryan Anderson was. What's interesting is that of those three, all considered top or near-top prospects, only Ainsworth is still in the majors, the other two having succumbed to injuries (and in Ankiel's case, control problems). This is just a general comment on pitching prospects and should probably be considered relevant to a team that only seems to draft pitchers.
Some other tidbits that have come to my attention:
Damon Minor is outhitting Snow and Feliz by a lot right now: Remember Minor? Old non-prospect who mashed the ball in Fresno but couldn't do a whole lot with it when he got called up for a couple hundred ABs. Well, the 29-year-old is currently putting up a tidy little .333 / .425 / .613 batting line for Fresno. Of course, it's over only 75 ABs, so expectations should be tempered a lot, but this is a guy who hit pretty well in the minors for a lot of seasons and costs nothing. What is JT Snow doing? .217 / .327 / .313. I don't care how deeply you discount AAA stats to MLB stats, no translation equates these two. Feliz (.299 / .304 / .416) is outhitting Snow too, but Tiny is outhitting either of them.
The Giants might actually have some players in AA this year: Yes, call this irrational exuberance based on a month's worth of stats. As a Giants fan who is pretty sure his team isn't going to go Plan B and actually rebuild the minors, I have to look for hope where I can get it.
With Todd Linden doing his best Orlando Palmeiro impersonation at AAA for the second year in a row (.304 / .368 / .391 in a hitters' league), we turn to Daniel Ortmeier (is that a baseball name or what?) as the guy who might come save us all from the chimera-like beast of Jeffrey Tuckermohr. Ortmeier is 23 and is big, strong, not too old and seems to be able to tell balls from strikes and hit the ball hard. His .295 / .370 / .505 line in 95 ABs at AA Norwich isn't quite enough to call exciting, but it's encouraging.
Also in the "remember that guy" category is Carlos Valderrama, who at 26 is clearly old for his league. Still, this is a guy who I've always sort of liked. Why? Because even when he wasn't hitting much (which has been relatively frequently) always maintained his batting eye. Players who can tell balls from strikes can learn to hit for average with a lot greater success than Feliz / Niekro types can learn to take pitches and draw walks. Valderrama is currently pretending to be a power hitter at AA (.361 / .417 / .557) with 8 steals (in 8 attempts) in 97 ABs. I've always liked that Valderrama consistently draws about one walk for every 10 ABs. If there's a problem right now it's that he should just emphasize the leadoff skills he naturally possesses and not try to be a power hitter. He's striking out too much, which doesn't bother me much, but it probably bothers coaches and scouts. If he could cut his strikeouts and increase his walks, it would be worth it, even if the cost was a loss of power. A guy with his profile doesn't need to have a .200 point IsoP anyway. If he could hit .300 and draw a bunch of walks, steal a bunch of bases and play defense, he'd have a future on this club. He should try to be Dave Roberts or Juan Pierre more than Carlos Beltran or Bobby Abreu.
Who is Mike Cervenak? He's old (27), was drafted by the A's, and appears to have been part of the Norwich roster when the Giants acquired the team from the Yankees (still not sure how this works, btw). He's currently hitting .352 / .434 / .670. The batting average isn't real (.289 career in the minors) and there's little to suggest the power spike is totally real either, but it could be. I guess call me in a month - if you're still slugging over .550, we'll talk.
Chris Begg appears to be done with AA and made a AAA start last week. He was moved from A to AA last year, and was 2-1 with a 3.05 ERA and 16-2 K-BB ratio in 20.2 innings. He didn't go too deeply into games, which leads me to believe he's young for his level (I can't seem to find that info) but his first start at Fresno was a 7-inning shutout. Someone to keep an eye on.
Simply because my brother once played with him - Jay Pecci is actually in the Giants organization now, and is hitting the cover off the ball in a very small number of ABs. Pecci is 27, was drafted by the A's, then bounced to the Mariners and then to the Giants. There's not much in his history that suggests he can really hit (the A's took him in the 11th round because of his .407 OBP at Stanford in 1998), but he's currently hitting .382 / .447 / .559 in 34 ABs at AA.
What I find sort of interesting is that these guys, some of whom are actual prospects, are down at AA while Fresno appears stocked with a bunch of guys who are just there to be roster filler when the Giants need help. I've heard it said a few times that AA is where a lot of teams are keeping their real talent. I'm hoping this is true of the Giants as well.
Money well-spent
I'm late to the table on the topic of the four-year, $48 million contract the Angels gave Garrett Anderson to play for them from 2005 through 2008. This topic isn't Giants-related and probably seems all but obvious to those who think in the terms that commonly populate this space.
We're told constantly and from many sides that "baseball is a business". We're told that by certain owners to justify spending eight times the amount other teams spend on their teams in order to produce wins, arguing (correctly, in the case of the New York Yankees) that investing more money in the team brings in more revenue, and is thus a smart business decision. We're told the exact same thing by cheapskate owners who *don't* want to invest money in their team, because they believe the team should turn a profit. We're told by players (and their union) when they are trying to justify ever-escalating salaries. Of course, in the most nominal sense of it, it's true - baseball is a business. Which is why I'm often surprised when a baseball owner makes a decision that seems fairly senseless from a business standpoint.
Garrett Anderson is a good player. He's not a five-tool player in the traditional sense. However he hits for average, hits for power and plays good defense. He doesn't run particularly fast or have a particularly strong arm. I would posit, as a sidelight, that we could rewrite the identity of these tools, and separate them into separate offensive and defense skillboxes, rather than toolboxes. I'm going to leave the defensive one alone for now, but clearly "fielding ability" isn't complex enough to really evaluate a player. I'd call the measurable tools the following:
1. Ability to get on base
2. Ability to hit the ball hard
3. Strike Zone judgment
4. Durability
These are a fairly obvious sabremetric reworking of the three offensive tools (hitting for average, hitting for power, foot speed) to correspond to OBP, SLG and GP rather than AVG, HR and SB. The ability to get on base includes the ability to hit for average, but doesn't ignore alternative methods for generating baserunners the way a focus on AVG does. The key statistic that measures this ability is OBP. The ability to hit the ball hard is different from the power tool only insofar as I prefer to shift the focus from home run power to extra-base power generally, specifically IsoP (SLG - AVG), which measures the portion of a hitter's total bases that are the result solely of extra-base hits. I've separated out strike zone judgment from the ability to get on base for the benefit of players with a low enough batting average that their OBP is still low, but who demonstrate an exceptional batting eye. The measurement here is OBP - AVG, or an Isolated Patience metric.
Finally, there's durability. A player who can stay healthy and play every game is valuable, and while there are some players who get unlucky with injuries, it's pretty clear that Cal Ripken Jr. wasn't just luckier than Rondell White. A guy like Miguel Tejada is valuable to begin with, but his value is at least partially derived from the fact that he can play every single day. Health is a skill, and should be viewed as such. Part of the problem with durability is that it needs to be valued for what it is, and not for what it isn't. Durability tends to be both undervalued and overvalued. It's undervalued in the sense that players who don't have it should be discounted and often aren't - a guy like Nick Johnson could be a great player for a decade, but he just can't stay on the field. It's overrated in the sense that it has secondary effects on a player's stats that should be attributed to durability, but usually aren't. Tejada is a good example of this. A player like Tejada has a big reputation as an "RBI man" or "run-producer" and it's true, he tends to collect a lot of RBI. But what gets lost in the shuffle is that part of why the guy has so many RBI relative to other players at his position is that he is in the lineup every single day. It's easier to hit 100+ RBI if you play 162 games than if you play 150. That seems obvious, yet it seems almost totally ignored. All of which is to say that durability is extremely valuable, but it should be understood that it doesn't actually make a player a better hitter on an AB by AB basis.
Which leads us back to Garrett Anderson. He has two of the four skills I mention above - he hits the ball hard and he plays every day. His critics cite his low OBP (typically hovers around .325) as a flaw in his game, and they're correct - it is a flaw in his game. I can't say for sure that Anderson doesn't have a good batting eye - watching him play, it seems like a conscious choice to trade OBP for more AVG. He swings at a lot of pitches trying to get that extra hit. He's a good hitter, doesn't strike out too much, and can sometimes make something happen when he gets a poor pitch to hit. Do I think he'd be better if he took those pitches and played a take-and-rake style? Yes, but he's pretty good the way he is now.
Which isn't to say his contract was a good idea. It wasn't. Anderson is a 31-year-old left fielder (playing center field because Mike Scoscia decided that Darin Erstad, who's basically the outfielder version of Neifi Perez, should now be playing first base - for the record if I ever see Neifi Perez playing first base for the Giants I believe my head will literally burst) who turns 32 on June 30, 2004. He'll turn 33 during the first year of this contract and 36 during the fourth year. Is it possible that he'll remain productive and durable through age 36 and justify $12M per year? Well, no, probably not - even during his best seasons he hasn't been worth $12M. But it's possible that he'll still be good at 36 (look at someone like Reggie Sanders for a 36-year-old who is still productive).
According to Baseball Prospectus, in Anderson's best season (2002) he was worth about 5 wins more than a league-average left fielder. That's a very good number. Figure that if a team of league-average players produces a .500 team you only need a couple of guys producing 5 wins over the average to create a 90-win team (this approach should sound familiar to Giants fans). Problem is, Anderson has only produced close to this kind of value in two seasons out of nine - 2002 and 2003. The Angels are banking on this spike in skills at age 29 and 30 being permanent, and it's pretty reasonable to assume that it isn't. BP thinks Anderson will be basically a league-average player by 2007, producing only 0.8 wins above a replacement-level fielder at that time. Essentially Anderson is an expensive but valuable luxury in 2004 and will be an absolute albatross by 2007.
The top comparable BP lists for Anderson is Tony Oliva, who played for the Twins from 1962 through 1976. He had some very Andersonesque seasons in there.
1969: .309 / .355 / .496
1970: .325 / .364 / .514
1971: .337 / .369 / .546
What happened to Oliva? He got hurt in 1972 at age 31 and was never the same player again. He retired at age 34.
Did I mention that Garrett Anderson is on the DL with back problems right now?
The Angels probably signed Anderson to this contract because he's liked by fans and because he's been in the organization so long. It was a reward for what he's done in the past. But I have to think he's not as much a fan favorite as David Eckstein, Troy Glaus or some of these new fellas like Vladimir Guerrero, and spending $12M a year for a guy who might just as well produce Garrett's 2001 season (.289 / .314 / .478) as his 2002 (.306 / .332 / .539) is going to seem really foolish down the road. Especially after Magglio Ordonez signs a contract that's not so different from this one. Isn't baseball supposed to be a business?
There but for the grace of Darren Oliver...
The Giants won 9-8 yesterday in the bottom of the 11th inning. They took 3 out of 4 from the Marlins, who entered the season with a league-best ERA and some hot hitters. So why don't I feel better about this?
Well, they took 3 out of 4 by scoring 30 runs and allowing 23. They got a quality start from just two starting pitchers in the series (Schmidt and Williams, of course). They played really terrible defense during the series. For a team whose most glaring weakness is its lineup, the team essentially slugged their way to a good series, scoring 7.5 runs per game against a very good pitching staff. It's hard to believe that anyone believes a series that was determined by such an outcome is meaningfully predictive.
What I thought this series demonstrated perfectly was the old adage that "every team wins 60 and every team loses 60", which obviously isn't literally true, but which has a large measure of accuracy - the vast majority of teams fall within that middle portion of the bell curve between 60-102 and 102-60. No one (well, not me at any rate) has claimed that the Giants are going to lose 100 games. The most negative claims I've seen have them finishing a few games under .500, which means sure, they're going to have some series like this one. Baseball, on the level of an individual game, can be pretty fluky. Infield singles that get caught in the grass, double play balls that spin strangely off the shortstop's glove, routine fly balls that a converted second baseman playing right field can't handle - we saw all of these, and for the first time this season a lot broke the Giants' way. And that's great, even though these games weren't very fun to watch.
But they're still playing really bad baseball. Three of the five spots in the rotation are still providing way too many 4.1 IP 5 ER starts. The defense is nothing like it was last year, so while some nice regression to the mean by some of the hitters who were doing nothing in April (AJ, Mohr, Tucker, Snow) is nice, and will provide some offense, nothing has really changed. This isn't a team that's going to score 8 runs in too many games. And Barry's walks continue to pile up (on pace for 274 as of today) because no one can protect him.
A few things about yesterday's game:
Where was Barry? With the bases loaded and two outs in the bottom of the 7th inning, Felipe Alou used Deivi Cruz to pinch-hit for the pitcher. With Barry Bonds on the bench. I heard rumors that Bonds wasn't suited up (he came in later as a pinch-walker and scored the winning run, of course), and if that's the case Felipe can't be taken to task too strongly (there were better options available, including Tucker, but choosing Cruz over Tucker can be safely placed within the purview of managerial discretion - choosing Cruz over Bonds cannot).
Felix Rodriguez appears to be back. He's not employing a breaking pitch the way it was reported he might, but he's using the inside part of the plate this year, which I don't remember ever seeing him do with any regularity. His 2.63 ERA / 0.88 WHIP to date are very encouraging, although his K rate continues to fall from a very high 10.47 in 2000 to a worrisome 4.61 this year. Still, he's clearly the best reliever on the team right now.
Et tu, Wayne Franklin? At what point do we believe that Sabean really is a genius when it comes to bullpens, and that Wayne Franklin, like a soft-throwing lefty Eric Gagne, was never meant to be a starter and is now in his proper role as a lefty out of the bullpen. Franklin has allowed struck out 11 in 11 innings pitched and given up just one homer. He's holding lefties to a .566 OPS in the early going. (Note to Sabean: I just gave you the sales pitch. Go call Hunsicker and keep this in your back pocket in case he doesn't want to take Christianson and his salary)
Big game for Yorvit Torrealba. A lot of people (myself included) believed that the smart move would have been to replace Santiago with the younger and cheaper (25 years old, $334k) Torrealba. Yorvit is never going to be Jorge Posada or Pudge Rodriguez, but in 363 career major-league ABs he has put up a line of .270 / .335 / .405, which makes him solidly above-average for a catcher, and if you take into account his youth and home ballpark it's not impossible to see him develop into a Ramon Hernandez type in a year or two. Of course, this type of reasoning is based on a view that Yorvit Torrealba represents an opportunity to get replacement-level (or better) performance from a young, inexpensive player, and we all know how Brian Sabean feels about such players. So instead, he went out and traded three young pitchers (including Twins closer Joe Nathan and lefty fireballer Francisco Liriano - Florida State League player of the week last week, and who is striking out more than a better per inning for Fort Myers) for AJ Pierzynski, then promptly went to arbitration with him and lost. Pierzynski now makes more than ten times what Torrealba does. The early results?
Pierzynski: 76 AB, .263 / .291 / .303 ($3.5M)
Torrealba: 23 AB, .261 / .414 / .478 ($334k)
It is generally accepted by people who know more about this than I do that Torrealba is a better defensive catcher than Pierzynski.
Burnout worries. Giants bullpen threw 6 2/3 innings again. I'm assuming this worries people with a lot more ability to act on their concern than me.
Neifi led off again. I can't really say anything else about that.
It's only April...
I wish I had Jayson Stark's job, mostly because of his access to historical stats and people to crunch them for him. He's gone through and run an analysis that I would have liked to run if I had the tools, but since he's done it I'll just quote a bit from it here.
Note that the Giants were 10-14 coming out of April, and were 5 games behind the Dodgers.
Stark tells us that of the 120 playoff teams since 1982, only four (or 3.3 percent) finished April more than three games under .500. He also tells us that only three of those 120 playoff teams (or 2.5 percent) finished April more than 4½ games out of a playoff spot.
Does this mean that the Giants aren't going to make the playoffs? No, we already knew that. What this tells us is that April matters. The baseball season isn't like an NCAA pool, where the games at the end matter more than the ones at the beginning. Every game counts the same, and generally a team that plays poorly in April isn't going to make it to the postseason. Not every time, of course - just most of the time.
Those who wish to believe more than they wish to know will probably take umbrage with all of this. "The Dodgers and Padres are playing over their heads", they'll tell me. "The Giants are turning things around, and Pierzynski, Alfonzo and Tucker are starting to hit" they'll add.
There's some truth to that. Neither LA nor San Diego really have the pythagorean numbers to support their current records. Of course, the Giants are currently a game over their pythagorean projection as well, but that's neither here nor there. I think those claims are still specious. There are some crazy things going on in San Francisco too. Barry Bonds is hitting nearly .500 after a month of play and his OPS is still closer to 2.000 than 1.500. Grissom is still playing over his head (when he plays). And Ray Durham, the second-best hitter on the deal, is hurt for at least a month. The other thing, though, is that as maligned as they've been, check out some things about the San Francisco bullpen:
The three-headed lefty monster of Christianson, Eyre and Franklin has a combined ERA of 2.53. Is this going to last? No, not unless Damaso Marte, Eddie Guardado and JC Romero are currently wearing Christianson, Eyre and Franklin jerseys.
Matt Herges, despite an ERA of 4.70 and a WHIP of 1.50 has converted 9 of his 10 save chances (90%, for those who are really bad at math). Last time I checked, closers with those kinds of peripherals don't convert saves at a 90% clip for a whole season.
Jim Brower has an ERA of 2.93 and is on pace to appear in 101 games this year. Unless we really have the Brower twins who take turns appearing as Jim Brower on The Giants Show, he's going to have problems pitching this much.
I've said before that there are things this team could do to actually make the playoffs this year, but with Durham out the lineup is going to feature two of Neifi Perez, Deivi Cruz and Brian Dallimore (who it should be pointed out is likely to be better than either of them, and not just because he hit a grand slam in his first AB), Pedro Feliz every day and the now-familiar platoon-like object in right field, with Grissom playing CF most of the time except when Hammonds plays it. Unless the bullpen continues to sparkle and Rueter, Tomko and whoever is pitching in the 5-spot get a LOT better, a couple of wins in a row at the end of April and on May 1 don't make me really *believe* any more than I did this time last week.
Oh - and Barry Bonds (noted selfish player who doesn't care about the team) is currently projected to appear in 155 games this year, as he's put himself back into the lineup for a couple of games he'd ordinarily take off. I applaud him in more ways than I can list here, but after seasons of 130 and 143 games played the last two years, one of the few things I don't think he can do is play 155 games.
Win Streak
Look at those Giants - two game winning streak. Sure, they got a bit lucky today (AJ went 3-4, but one of them missed Alex Gonzalez' glove by six inches, another was a DP ball the marlins misplayed, and then Damion Easley dropped a routine fly ball for two more runs) but they only allowed three runs and made the Marlins pay a little bit for walking Barry so many times (he scored once anyway).
Of course, the Giants really ought to win a Jason Schmidt vs. Carl Pavano at SBC Park game, but let's not quibble.
The Pedro Feliz watch continues - after coming into the game late and going 0-1, the savior of the Giants offense currently stands at:
.286 / .292 / .400
I will reiterate the hard truth even for those who refuse to acknowledge it. This guy must play EVERY day. I just wish we had seven more like him.
Searching for Bobby Hill
I recently had a lengthy conversation with some Giants fans about Bobby Hill, currently a utility infielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates. I'm a big fan of Hill - he does a lot of the things I appreciate in a player (well, mostly he gets on base and steals bases well enough not to cost his team more outs than those steals are worth), is young, is cheap and is undervalued by both his current and former teams. In my Plan B team, he's the starting second baseman for the Giants (traded straight up for Pedro Feliz). I don't understand why this guy has had the career that he's had so far. I think he's been very unlucky and is currently underappreciated. It is from such situations that a profit of wins can be obtained.
Hill just tuned 26 on April 3. He was drafted by the Cubs in the second round of the 2000 draft to be their future at second base after an ugly contract holdout the previous year (the White Sox had drafted him, but Scott Boras had him hold out and go back into the draft - good job, bud). In 2002 he was supposed to start every day, but after 190 ABs that were nowhere near as bad as Don Baylor thought they were (Hill had a low batting average of .253 but his .327 / . 374 line wasn't so disastrously bad that the Cubs couldn't have waited it out), and Baylor benched him for Delino DeShields. DeShields got 163 ABs of .292 / .308 hitting before he himself was benched for the far superior Mark Bellhorn. Once Bellhorn started hitting, he never stopped, and Hill spent the rest of 2002 at AAA.
As recently as 2003 he was still viewed as the second baseman of the future for the Cubs, part of a youth movement that also included Corey Patterson and Hee Seop Choi, along with Mark Prior of course. And yet he broke camp in the minors again, after a poor spring defensively. The Cubs that year chose to go with Mark Grudzielanek who went on to have a career season and probably helped get the Cubs into the playoffs.
On August 16 the Cubs decided to call up some players from their AAA franchise in Pittsburgh, including a guy who was at one point considered likely to develop into one of the premiere third basemen in the game, Aramis Ramirez. Ramirez had an all-star season in 2001 (at age 23) but then had two off years in a row in 2002 and the first part of 2003 (only the first of which was really that bad) and at age 25 the Pirates decided to give up on him and send him to the Cubs. Part of what they got for him in return was Bobby Hill, who presumably had been somehow worked out of the Cubs' future.
And here's where I get confused. Hill came into spring training with the Pirates expected to win the second base job, as far as I can tell. He had an unbelievable spring training (he hit .339 with 5 home runs in 56 ABs and slugged .643) and yet ... isn't the starter. A younger prospect named Jose Castillo, who never played above AA before 2004, apparently beat Hill out by hitting a couple of home runs the first week or two of spring training and, presumably, with flashier glovework. So now Castillo plays second base, Chris Stynes plays third base and Bobby Hill is a backup, a situation which only gets worse when you realize that Freddy Sanchez (who's probably a better prospect than either Hill or Castillo) is coming back very soon from an injury. Playing time will be hard to come by for our hero.
And now Ray Durham is hurt. Not that I think the Giants are likely to contend in 2004 (I believe this position is well-established) but why not go get him now, put him at 2B while Ray is out and then use him as a sub at 2B and 3B (remember that he's traded for Pedro Feliz in my perfect world) until Ray can reestablish his health and then go assist the Twins in their attempt to win the AL Central this year? After that, Hill can take back over at 2B and learn to really hit major-league pitchers on the job in 2004.
This is a guy who just turned 26. He has 233 career major-league ABs and has put up a .262 / .344 / .365 line in those. At worst, he's Ramon Martinez (career .333 / .392 hitter) and at best he's a young Ray Durham (.353 / .431). He's hitting .306 with an OBP over .400 with the limited playing time being given to him by the Pirates this year. He makes $300,000 this year and won't be eligible for arbitration until (I believe) 2006, free agency in 2008. Around guys like this winning teams are built. Put enough Bobby Hills in your lineup (and by Bobby Hills I mean players who can put up league average or slightly above average performance (with the potential for growth into better players) for a low price) and you can go out and get one or two really expensive players who you know will perform at a very high level. Replace a Neifi ($3M), Tucker ($1.5) and Pierzynski ($3.5M) with three Bobby Hills of the appropriate defensive flavors and you suddently have $6M to play with. Combine that with the $1.5M the Giants pay JT Snow and you're looking at someone like Richie Sexson ($8.725M), Brian Giles ($8.5M), Derrek Lee ($6.15M) or Cliff Floyd ($6.5M). It's not just about spending money - it's about spending money well. $82M is plenty, if it's spent correctly.
By the way, for those who picked April 31 in your When Will Pedro Feliz' OBP Dip Below .300 pools, you got it right. Peter Happy currently sits at .290 / .296 / .406. An offensive juggernaut, to be sure.
