Baseball Studies Archives

Yesterday's start by Johan Santana reversed his usual pattern; whereas he has thus far, except for his beating at the hands of the Brewers, basically had stretches of dominance interrupted only by too-frequent home runs, yesterday he was laboring with a lot of men on base but muddled through to allow just a single run and leave with a lead the bullpen then gave away.

Now that we are 7 starts in to the Johan Santana Era, I thought it would be interesting to look back at the first 7 appearances by prior mid-career arrivals to the Mets rotation. I tried to limit this list to guys who were slotted comfortably into the rotation, and left off guys who were not yet established starters (other than Rick Reed), guys who were obvious reclamation projects (Pete Harnisch, Randy Jones, Don Cardwell, Ray Burris), guys who started off in the pen (George Stone posted an 0.60 ERA in 7 relief appearances in 1973 to force his way into the rotation), guys who went down for the year with injuries before making it through 7 starts (Vic Zambrano), guys who came straight from Japan (Masato Yoshii) and guys who started with the team in its expansion years. Here, in ascending order of ERA, you can see the great, the hideous, and everything in between (Seaver is listed here for his 1983 encore). One or two of these guys made a few relief appearances in here, but they all started at least 5 of the 7 games.

I'm not sure you can generalize much here except to say that 7 games does not a season make - some of these guys stayed with the tone they set early, others saw their seasons turn around dramatically, whether for the better (Hampton, Trachsel) or for the worse (Astacio). Other notes:

*Note that the subsequent performance record of the guys who topped 49 innings is decidedly worse than the rest.

*Berenyi and Astacio were the only ones to get decisions in all 7 appearances.

*Yes, Santana's HR rate is bad. On the whole, Santana's had one of the better starts, but of course Viola was the only guy who arrived with comparable fanfare (Pedro and Saberhagen were surrounded by health questions from Day One).

*You forget quite how utterly dominant Pedro was in those early appearances.

*Remember that the league ERA has gone up a lot over the years; under the circumstances, the Mets were happier with El Duque on his arrival than they were with Lolich.

One of the interesting revelations about watching Johan Santana this season has been watching him hit. Pitchers, even ones who can swing the bat, usually have swings that are not that pretty to watch - they try to meet the ball, or take a butcher-boy approach to whacking it into the ground - but Santana's swing is relatively compact but with a sharp uppercut, a Mo Vaughn/David Oritz kind of swing, not at all what you expect from a pitcher who spent his whole career in the AL and isn't built like a burly first baseman.

And Santana's had decent results - he's batting .231/.286/.462 with 3 doubles in 13 at bats entering tonight's action, .250/.283/.386 in 46 career plate appearances, for a career OPS+ of 75, almost the level of a weak-hitting everyday catcher or shortstop.

The other reason this surprised me is that lefthanded power pitchers, in particular, have a fairly grisly track record at the plate. Some examples - bear in mind that you really need to work hard to get an OPS+ below zero; with 100 being the league average hitter, an OPS+ in the 20s is plenty bad (although by 2007, with pitchers falling further and further behind the average hitter, the NL OPS+ for pitchers was -3; in 1956 the Major League average for pitchers was 23) - I'm aware that not all these guys are known as power pitchers, but all of them were when they entered the league:

I included Waddell and Morris since they hale from an era when pitchers were expected to contribute more with the bat; Morris' presence shows that you can find this trend all the way back to the very first lefthanded pitcher to have a significant successful career (although his 1880s contemporaries Matt Kilroy and Toad Ramsey were much better hitters, with OPS+ of 72 and 42, respectively).

It's not all lefthanded power pitchers, of course; there's Babe Ruth, and there's also the following list of guys who ranged from dangerous hitters to fairly average hitting pitchers (Sabathia, like Santana, has limited hitting experience, just 39 plate appearances):

(I remember Sid being a better hitter than that but he batted .080 after turning 30).

Even recognizing that this is more an anecdotal than a systematic study, I don't have a good single explanation here. Clearly some of these guys were not great athletes, but Koufax, for example, was an excellent basketball player; some of these guys are latter-day AL pitchers, but the pattern precedes them back to the early days and has continued in the NL. I suppose the ability to throw hard as a lefthander probably means most of these guys got identified as pitchers earlier in their baseball-playing youth than your typical stud athlete who plays a lot of SS and CF before settling into a single position; that seems to me the most likely reason.

This should be the last post from my preseason Established Win Shares (EWSL) division previews, and it's one I have been meaning to do in past years: a look at the amount of roster turnover. Each year, I identify 23 players who are projected to play roles for their team - 13 non-pitchers and 10 pitchers. That's not the whole Opening Day roster, but it pretty closely corresponds to the number of people who have something like a steady major league job, given the insecurity of life as a 12th pitcher or last man on the bench.

So, comparing the 2008 23-man rosters to the 2007 ones, how much turnover was there? 173 players were listed last season but not this year, an average of almost six per team. In percentage terms, 173 out of 690 - that's a 25% attrition rate in a single year even for guys who had made it all the way up the professional pyramid and shimmied up the greasy pole at the top to have one of those scarce jobs playing major league baseball. I'm not making any excuses for anyone when I say that you should remember figures like that the next time you read about ballplayers taking steroids, lying about their ages, corking their bats, scuffing the baseball, concealing injuries, or whatever other edge they think they need to get a big league job and contract and cling to it.

Not all these guys dropped out of the big leagues - some just slid from 10th pitcher to 11th, some are on the DL but could well be major contributors again by midseason, some are youngsters who got sent back for a little more minor league seasoning, some were guys I was just mistaken in thinking last year they'd have jobs. Some, in fact, are already back in a regular job a month later. The under-30 crowd in particular is dominated by injured pitchers. That said, the bulk of this list is guys who fell victim to the dog-eat-dog competition for scarce Major League jobs, most of whom will not return to that perch, and others of whom face an uphill battle in reclaiming those jobs from eager youngsters. In the main, they are a reminder that many more Major League careers end with a whimper than a bang.

The average age of the dropouts? 31.8. Average Win Shares earned show a pattern: 5.8 in 2005, 5.4 in 2006, 2.5 in 2007, with an age-adjusted EWSL of 3.4.

Here's the full list by age (sorted among age groups by declining EWSL) - each and every name on this list is a story of a guy who, at a minimum, started 2008 with less hope and optimism about his future than he did a year earlier:

Now, lest I be accused of predicting the major leagues to finish above .500, I noticed that if you add up the W-L records in my preseason EWSL reports add up to have all of MLB over .500. The reason for that, of course, is as follows:

1. EWSL - by rating only 23 players per team, whereas the average team uses something like 35-40 players in a season - tends to underreport the total number of team wins.

2. To fix this in converting team EWSL to a W-L record this season I applied an average adjustment of plus 12.853 wins per team. That's the average number of wins you get from 1/3 of the average number of Win Shares per team earned in 2005-07 from players I didn't rate in a team's preseason 23-man EWSL roster.

That's a reasonable enough fudge factor, and I was doing one division at a time; but now that I have all 30 teams done, I need to rebalance the numbers to get them all out at .500. Also, I made two adjustments for roster changes between the writing of the previews and the start of the season: I replaced Kelvim Escobar, who is out for the season, with Dustin Moseley, thus dropping the Angels team EWSL from 250.31 to 247.08, and I replaced Reed Johnson (who got rated on both the Blue Jays and the Cubs) on Toronto's roster with John McDonald, dropping the Jays from 209.93 to 207.68. I stayed away from less drastic tinkering, but of course you can expect a downgrade on Detroit's full-season outlook, for example, from being without Curtis Granderson for the early part of the year (not that I'd blame his absence for everything that's gone wrong so far for the Tigers).

With those two adjustments made, we get a major league total of 6193.10 EWSL, which is enough for 68.81 wins per major league team. Now, there are two ways I could get that up to 81 wins per team - proportionally, as I did in 2005 and 2006, or by sticking with the straight addition per team approach. I'm using the latter because (1) historically, I have not observed any notable positive relationship between a team's preseason EWSL and how many WS it generates from players outside the 23-man roster and (2) adjusting proportionally gets us into some question-begging issues about the unbalanced schedule...I just don't want to get into that. So I'm now using a standard adjustment of plus 12.188 wins per team. Of course, for all that math it's an adjustment of less than half a win per team, so the end results here should not be all that dramatic.

Without further ado, here are the final standings according to EWSL:

NL Wild Card: Phillies.

AL Wild Card: Indians.

A few final notes, bearing in mind that in the division previews I already went through where I subjectively expect particular teams to depart from their EWSL baseline expectations. As noted in the divisional previews, EWSL is furthest out on a limb, compared to the general consensus among preseason analysts, in being pessimistic about the Red Sox, Cubs and Rays - the Cubs mainly because of their age, the Rays mainly because of their reliance on unproven youngsters, the Sox because of a mix of the two. The disadvantage of a system like EWSL that is not at all individualized is that it can't target the particular players who are likely to do a lot more than their prior major league accomplishments, as more refined systems like Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA system can. But prediction isn't an exact science anyway; in looking over where things stand entering a season, there's something to be said for considering the discipline of a remorselessly depersonalized system such as this one, which cautions that unproven youngsters should be valued as such until they show us otherwise, and that age cuts down everyone sooner or later. The early injury to Matt Garza is perhaps one indicator of the wisdom of this approach. That said, as an empirical-testing matter, I'll be interested to see whether EWSL turns out to be a better guide as a whole to the direction of those three teams.

The last of six division previews, using Established Win Shares Levels as a jumping-off point. Today: the NL Central. Notes on the EWSL method are below the fold. Amazingly, for once I have finished all six divisions before the season is underway in earnest.

Key: + (Rookie) * (Based on one season) # (Based on two seasons)

Milwaukee Brewers

Raw EWSL: 195.83 (65 W)
Adjusted: 220.43 (73 W)
Age-Adj.: 224.43 (75 W)
2008 W-L: 88-74

Subjective Adjustments: None.

Also on Hand: Non-Pitchers - Eric Munson lost the initial backup catcher battle to Rivera, but may be back. OF Laynce Nix and Russell Branyan were in camp, as were 3B Abraham Nunez and young 2B Joe Dillon. Pitchers - Chris Capuano, who had hoped to see if better defense could help him recover from last year's catastrophic falloff, faces an uncertain prognosis and may yet need Tommy John surgery. Don't bank on him. The Brew Crew has also been sentenced, like Sysiphus, to the potential of Seth McClung and Guillermo Mota. Chris Spurling and 39-year-old Brian Shouse are other relief options.

Analysis: The status of preseason favorite in the NL Central is a desirable one but by no means prestigious. The Brewers won 83 games last year, a bunch of their key guys are young, they brought in some veterans like Cameron (once his suspension is up), Riske and Torres...they will compete, and somebody's gotta win this division.

The rotation is far from imposing in the absence of Capuano, who has to be a longshot to reclaim his old form even if he is able to muddle through. If Sheets somehow stays healthy and Gallardo makes no return trips to the DL (he's on it now, recovering from offseason knee surgery), they could have a good 1-2, but the rest aspires merely to adequacy. The guys with real upside here are Weeks and Braun, if they can somehow avoid wrecking the defense again, and also the potential for a revival by Hall and Gagne.

88 wins sounds about right. That could be enough.

Houston Astros

Raw EWSL: 202.17 (67 W)
Adjusted: 223.93 (75 W)
Age-Adj.: 198.61 (66 W)
2008 W-L: 79-83

Subjective Adjustments: None.

Also on Hand: Non-Pitchers - C Humberto Quintero, who had a good spring and presumably would step in if the Astros finally realize that Ausmus is finished; Tomas Perez, David Newhan, Reggie Abrecrombie, Victor Diaz. Pitchers - Wesley Wright, a wild young lefty with good K numbers but little experience above AA, made the roster; Mark McLemore, with similar numbers last year in Houston, didn't. Dave Borkowski, Chad Paronto and Mike DeJean are also around; Woody Williams was a late cut (a terrible spring at 41 after posting a 5.27 ERA will do that; Williams can still throw strikes but I suspect he just has nothing left).

Analysis: For the second year in a row, EWSL seems unaccountably optimistic about the Astros, but I suppose optimistic is a relative term, when a lineup with this many quality veterans, a solid closer and a major ace pitcher is still projected to finish below .500. The new but not improved rotation seems unlikely to be competitive beyond Oswalt, but you never know; maybe this will be the year Backe is finally healthy. The bullpen is totally rebuilt, but in some cases with less than the most consistent relievers. Valverde is solid, but the Win Shares system may overrate him just a bit because of the extreme number of close games the D-Backs led in last season (not that he doesn't deservie his share of the credit for that).

Geoff Blum is ailing, and it's not like he's Mike Schmidt when he is healthy. Matsui is too, but we won't get into that. Ausmus is the emergency infielder, and that about says it all.

Chicago Cubs

Raw EWSL: 185.83 (62 W)
Adjusted: 216.63 (72 W)
Age-Adj.: 196.25 (65 W)
2008 W-L: 78-84

Subjective Adjustments: None. Felix Pie hit too poorly last season to deserve any sort of bump until he proves himself.

Also on Hand: Non-Pitchers - Alex Cintron lost out on the middle infield reserve job. Matt Murton will almost certainly be traded unless there's an injury that presses him into service very soon. 2B Eric Patterson is also on hand. Pitchers - The Cubs have them in reserve if needed - Neal Cotts, Jon Lieber, Sean Marshall and Carmen Pignatiello.

Analysis: Why is EWSL so down on the Cubs, when everyone else in the universe seems to have ceded them this division? Age is a big factor: the age adjustments take a big bite out of 30-and-up players like Lee, Ramirez, Soriano, Howry, and Lilly, and those add up. Nobody on the team rates more than 18 EWSL; Arizona, Toronto and the White Sox are the only other teams with pretensions at contending that don't have a 20 EWSL player, and the D-Backs are deep in young talent and pitching, in ways the Cubs aren't, while I'm less than impressed with the other two. Some guys may be underrated here; Marmol, like Fausto Carmona, is rated in part on his dismal 2006, since I can't and won't just make it magically vanish, but Marmol in particular seems likely to come closer to last year's 11 WS than to the projected 8, just as Derrek Lee does seem likely to stay healthy enough to turn out 20 WS, as his 2006 injury was a fluke. The main upside here is in players who are unproven or a crapshoot - Wood, Soto, Pie and Fukudome. But EWSL is designed to deliver the bad news: by banking on each of them, the Cubs are banking on hope of something that has not happened at the Major League level before. I can see expecting the Cubs to outpace their EWSL record by several game; I can't see projecting this team as likely to cruise to 90+ wins, even with a boatload of games within a dreadful division.

I don't know any more about Fukudome than you do. He's listed at 6'0" and 190, so he doesn't quite have Hideki Matsui's size, and thus may be less reliable in preserving his HR power (and Matsui himself lost quite a few homers in translation). Fukudome's had great OBPs in Japan, it remains to be seen whether pitchers will work around him as much if he hits for less power here.

Cincinnati Reds

Raw EWSL: 192.00 (64 W)
Adjusted: 211.53 (71 W)
Age-Adj.: 193.18 (64 W)
2008 W-L: 77-85

Subjective Adjustments: None.

Also on Hand: Non-Pitchers - Jay Bruce, of course, is the elephant in the AAA outfield. Juan Castro is rehabbing from Tommy John surgery (how many times have I written that in these previews this year?) Also OF DeWayne Wise, C Paul Bako and INF Jolbert Cabrera. Pitchers - Homer Bailey got passed on the way up by Cueto; Bailey still has great stuff but has apparently not proven all that swift a le