Category: Baseball 2005

A reference post explaining the status of Established Win Shares Levels as of March 2005.

Continue reading EWSL Explained

*Jaap Stijl over at Archie Bunker’s Army had a good long post on Thursday about the Mets’ exhibition opener; I liked this point:

[T]he way the shirts read Nationals across the front gives me the creepy feeling I’m watching the National League All Star team sans the All Stars. It’d be much less confusing and infinately cooler to have NATS embossed across the front.

*While there’s not a ton of new stuff there, it’s always worth checking out Rich Lederer’s three-part interview with Bill James (conducted in December) here, here and here at Lederer’s new home, https://baseballanalysts.com.
*The “Derek Jeter Center”?

Back in November, I took an initial look at how Established Win Shares Levels correlated to 2004 performance, grouping the results by age. But, the data I was using was the raw EWSL – i.e., actual three-year Win Shares totals at the major league level – not the adjusted figures I had used for making the team-by-team EWSL computations. To refresh your recollection, I had included in those calculations:
1. Adjustments for players who hadn’t played any significant major league time in 2001 or earlier, calculating EWSL by ((2002 WS * 2)+(2003 WS * 3))/5;
2. Adjustments for players who hadn’t any significant major league time in 2002 or earlier, just slotting in their 2003 WS; and
3. Arbitrary WS totals for 2004 rookies: 10 WS for players projected to have everyday jobs, 5 for projected rotation starters, 3 for projected bench players, and 2 for projected relief pitchers.
If I’m going to add an age adjustment to EWSL, I would presumably want to do it after including these adjustments for the limited data – and so, to evaluate the accuracy of last year’s figures, I recalculated them based on the adjusted figures. Here’s the new chart:

Age	#	Avg EWSL	Avg 2004 WS	+/-	%
20	1	5	0	-5	0.00
21	5	8	9	+1	1.11
22	13	6	11	+5	1.75
23	11	8	10	+2	1.29
24	26	8	10	+2	1.24
25	39	7	10	+3	1.37
26	70	8	8	0	1.06
27	60	9	9	0	1.03
28	60	9	11	+2	1.18
29	49	9	8	-1	0.88
30	62	11	10	-1	0.92
31	51	9	8	-1	0.85
32	53	10	9	-1	0.89
33	41	10	7	-3	0.70
34	34	8	7	-1	0.87
35	21	14	7	-7	0.52
36	26	10	9	-1	0.84
37	19	11	9	-2	0.81
38	17	9	8	-1	0.86
39	11	13	11	-2	0.84
40+	9	11	11	0	1.00

As you can see, the improvement by young players is considerably less dramatic if you adjust for the fact that many of them don’t have major league track records (in an ideal world, I’d use MLEs of minor league Win Shares, but I don’t think those exist anywhere). Also, I broke out the 20- and 21-year-olds, since the one 20-year-old I listed last year was Edwin Jackson, who I had mistakenly thought was ahead in the race for a rotation job, so his lack of playing time in 2004 doesn’t really say much about the method itself.
Will I use these factors for age adjustments? I think this year I will – as well as publishing the raw and pre-age-adjusted EWSL figures – and just tweak the figures over time, but I’m going to think long and hard about the age-35 number. I don’t think it’s actually realistic to project players to lose half their value at 35, even if that’s exactly what happened to a sample of 21 players last year.
What, specifically, about the arbitrary adjustments? There were 6 rookies who I had penciled in as regulars (average age: 25), and gave them an arbitrary 10 WS. In fact, led by Khalil Greene, the six averaged 12 WS (74 WS for 6 players), reflecting the high quality of player who gets handed a regular job as a rookie in spring training (the other five were Kaz Matsui, Bobby Crosby, Aaron Miles, Adam LaRoche, and Joe Mauer).
Then there’s the rookie bench players, given 3 WS in last year’s system. There were also six of them (average age: 27), and they averaged 5 WS in 2004 (28 for 6), mostly due to Termel Sledge (15) and Jose Castillo (8) snagging regular jobs by year’s end. But the number is 7 (26/4) if you leave out the two 30-year-old bench players, Kit Pellow and Cody McKay. The emergence to regular jobs of a few guys is relatively representative of bench players, so for now I’ll up the projection to 6 for bench players who are under 30, and leave it at 3 for 30-and-up minor league veterans.
There were just three projected rotation starters given a 5 WS write-in: Jackson, Matt Riley, and Tyler Yates (average age: 23). Riley and Yates were disasters, and the three compiled the grand total of 1 WS. That’s a small sample size, but this year I will cut the projection to 4 out of a desire to avoid over-projecting young pitchers.
The relief pitchers, on the other hand, fared well – there were four of them (average age: 26), and they averaged 5 Win Shares (21 for 4 players), led by Akinori Otsuka. Not every season produces a 32-year-old Japanese reliever, so I’ll just harmonize the rookie pitcher numbers by dishing out 4 WS for all rookie pitchers.
Anyway, EWSL will never be a true projection system, as opposed to just a systematic way of analyzing past performance. But I think tweaking the adjustments based on the first year’s experience should make it a little more useful in evaluating where teams stand in terms of the available talent in 2005. With my look back at the 2004 results wrapping up, I should be ready to start running the 2005 numbers shortly.
UPDATE: Yes, there are double-counting issues with the arbitrary plug-ins and the age adjustments, so going forward I don’t intend to apply age adjustments to rookies.

One of the great tantalizing hopes of the Mets farm system is 20-year-old Yusmeiro Petit, who needs a nickname – for now, “the Big Y” will do – until I can remember how to spell his name. Jason Mastaitis has links to this Newsday report:

Drafted as a 16-year-old, the beefy Venezuelan has rocketed to the top of the prospect list by jumping two levels last season. He was first among all minor-leaguers in strikeouts per nine innings (12.92) and ended his climb at Double-A Binghamton, where he is expected to start this year.

Petit’s minor league numbers are out of this world: in 214 career innings in the minors (all as a starter), he has posted a 2.23 ERA and averaged 5.73 Hits/9IP, 0.42 HR/9, 2.15 BB/9 and 12.00 K/9. Now, Petit has thus far thrown only 12 innings above A ball, so it’s premature to pencil him in for greatness. But everything I’ve seen about him suggests an obvious parallel: Sid Fernandez (Paul White makes the comparison here). Like Sid, Petit is a big guy – listed at 230 pounds in some recent sources – but lacks the high-grade heat usually associated with big strikeout pitchers, and thus his spectacular minor-league successes (like Sid’s) are sometimes written off as not able to be duplicated at the big league level. But, like Sid, he has a not-really-secret weapon that doesn’t show up on the radar gun:

A high-tech lab in Birmingham, Alabama, revealed why batters have so many problems hitting Yusmeiro Petit, even though he doesn’t reach 90 mph.
The slow-motion cameras, which take pictures more than 16 times faster than a standard video recorder, showed that Petit manages to keep the ball hidden longer than other pitchers.

Jason quotes a Baseball America blurb that confirms this impression:

“I just can’t hit him. You just can’t pick the ball up off him.” – Red Sox outfielder Brandon Moss

Sounds like a guy who’s built for Shea.

Dave Konig at NRO enthuses about Willie Randolph, comparing him to Gil Hodges.
Hey, it’s march. We can dream.

Mike Carminati and Aaron Gleeman both make the case for Barry Larkin as a Hall of Famer, and I’m in complete agreement. Carminati lists the 20 Hall of Fame shortstops by career Win Shares: the average of the group is 330. Larkin finished with 346, compared to 318 for Alan Trammell and 269 for Dave Concepcion; the only higher WS totals for non-HOF shortstops are Cal Ripken, a sure inductee, at 427, and 19th century glove wizard Bill Dahlen at 394.
Larkin was the best shortstop in the National League for a decade and the best in baseball for about four years (1992-95). Larkin’s reputation for being injury prone, while somewhat deserved, is also a bit overblown; for the 1990s, adjusted for the shortened schedules of the 1994 and 1995 seasons, Larkin averaged 135 games and 578 plate appearances a year – not great, but not a guy who was always hurt, either, and Larkin’s career stretched over 19 seasons. As the star of a small-market team with unstable personnel, Larkin managed to play for a World Champion in 1990, a division winner in 1995 and a 96-win team that lost a 1-game playoff in 1999; he won 3 Gold Gloves and an MVP Award and played in 12 All-Star Games. I’d put him in.

Imagine if the top five players in the league in slugging looked like this:

Age	Pos	SLG
22	RF	.724
29	CF	.633
22	2B	.631
23	3B	.626
21	CF	.621

You’d say that’s a league with some young talent. In fact, that’s the American League slugging leaders in 1909, just with the slugging averages adjusted from 1909 terms (league slugging: .309) to 2004 terms (AL slugging: .433). The players: Ty Cobb, Sam Crawford (this was the last year before Cobb and Crawford switched between center and right), Eddie Collins, Frank “Home Run” Baker, and Tris Speaker, all on their way to Cooperstown.
If you were going to pick a time and place in history to be a baseball fan, you’d be hard pressed indeed to pick better than the early teens, especially the American League. Just focusing on the young talent bubbling up, look at the young players coming into their own by 1911, many of them on their way to long and successful careers, including a bevy of inner-circle Hall of Famers. First the AL, ranked by age and Win Shares:

Player	Team	Age	WS
Harry Hooper	BOS	20	23
Stuffy McInnis	PHA	20	18
Joe Jackson	CLE	21	39
Joe Wood	BOS	21	26
Walter Johnson	WAS	23	31
Tris Speaker	BOS	23	27
Ray Caldwell	NYA	23	23
Ping Bodie	CHW	23	20
Donie Bush	DET	23	18
Duffy Lewis	BOS	23	15
Hippo Vaughn	NYA	23	7
Tilly Walker	WAS	23	6
Ty Cobb	DET	24	47
Eddie Collins	PHA	24	35
Clyde Milan	WAS	24	27
Jack Barry	PHA	24	16
Ray Collins	BOS	24	15
Frank Baker	PHA	25	35
Larry Gardner	BOS	25	18
Jack Graney	CLE	25	14
Vean Gregg	CLE	26	28
Burt Shotton	SLB	26	11
Chief Bender	PHA	27	18
Ed Cicotte	BOS	27	11
Russ Ford	NYA	28	28
Jack Coombs	PHA	28	23

Bear in mind, this was an 8-team league. Even accounting for the tendency to have younger players in those days, this is something else, as evidenced by how many of these guys were still going a decade or more later. Then the NL:

Player	Team	Age	WS
Vic Saier	CHC	20	6
Max Carey	PIT	21	14
Lefty Tyler	BSN	21	3
Fred Merkle	NYG	22	18
Dick Hobliztel	CIN	22	18
Pat Ragan	BKN	22	9
Claude Hendrix	PIT	22	7
Fred Toney	CHN	22	3
Fred Snodgrass	NYG	23	23
Bob Harman	STL	23	23
Doc Crandall	NYG	23	20
Josh Devore	NYG	23	18
Zack Wheat	BKN	23	16
Grover Alexander	PHI	24	34
Larry Doyle	NYG	24	28
Rube Marquard	NYG	24	26
Heinie Zimmerman	CHC	24	22
Dots Miller	PIT	24	16
Ed Konetchy	STL	25	26
Fred Luderus	PHI	25	20
Buck Herzog*	TOT	25	20
King Cole	CHC	25	15
Nap Rucker	BKN	26	31
Sherry Magee	PHI	26	19
Slim Sallee	STL	26	18
Art Fletcher	NYG	26	17
Owen Wilson	PIT	27	22
Bob Bescher	CIN	27	20
Jake Daubert	BKN	27	20
Wildfire Schulte	CHC	28	31

* – Giants and Reds
You can see the seeds here for why the AL came to totally dominate the decade, winning all the World Serieses between 1910 and 1920 except for the 1914 “miracle” and the 1919 fix – the NL had a more normal age distribution, a few less immortals, and a lot of the talent concentrated on the Giants. (Also, a lot of guys named “Fred”). Presumably the difference was that the AL, having started in 1901, had less top-flight older players by 1908-09, and thus AL franchises were hungrier than, say, the Cubs or the Pirates.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Braves had Cy Young playing out the string at age 44 (2 WS). A good time to be picking young players to follow for years to come. Of course, the league was still segregated, and the rise of the Negro Leagues in subsequent years would begin to show how much fans of the majors were missing. And the problems already bubbling under the surface would emerge later – the gambling scandals, the salary squabbles that drove the Federal League revolt, the war in Europe that would eventually call a number of these players to service. But the early teens hadn’t been marred by that yet. A great time for baseball.
(Steve Treder has more thoughts on the era here)

As the spring training camps creak slowly to life – most of the news these days is sportswriter-generated “controversy” with no shelf life – many of us prepare for another rite of spring: the Rotisserie Baseball draft. Mine is March 12, which is unpleasantly early (I’ve had way too many experiences of players getting injured between Draft Day and Opening Day), but it’s harder as you get older to schedule these things.
Anyway, it’s a traditional roto rules AL league (8 categories, $240 for 23 spots, 12 owners, auction-style draft). Seeing as this is the 12th year I’ve done this, and I’ve had my share of successes and failures, I thought I’d offer a little advice on drafting:
1. Preparation + Access: Preparation, of course, is key; if you try to improvise going into the draft, you’re in trouble. In particular, you need to know the depth charts – who’s got an everyday job, projected closers, etc. But as any good trial lawyer will tell you, it’s not just what information you have, it’s what information you can reach. Thus, it’s equally important to have as much key information as you can get (and as little you don’t need as possible) in a format you can scan quickly during the draft. In theory (depending how much time I have), I like to have both a set of depth charts for each AL team and a top-to-bottom list of players by projected prices, so I can cross them off and see who’s left at particular positions as well as who’s left to draw out the big money.
2. A Crappy Pitcher With A Closer Job Is Still A Crappy Pitcher: Yes, it’s true that you pay for playing time as much as for quality. And with relief pitchers, you pay a “closer premium” for anyone who has a closer job, or a smaller one for a guy with part of a closer job or a shot at winning one.
The closer premium, however, should be discounted heavily if the pitcher is a bad pitcher. I’ve learned this one the hard way (*cough* Brian Williams in 1996 *cough*). You can’t remind yourself of this often enough: bad pitchers lose their closer jobs. Then you’re stuck with a guy with a double-figure salary who pitches 4 innings a week with an ERA that would look better as a winning percentage, and who probably didn’t convert a ton of saves before that.
3. Never Mind the Gimmicks: It’s like spotting the sucker: every year, someone decides to “go naked” with nine $1 pitchers. Once in a blue moon, someone makes that strategy work, but as a percentage move it’s just awful, as I’ve seen team after team go down in flames by deliberately short-changing the pitching staff. A variation on this is the one-ace-pitcher theory, which is also risky because you spent $30 bucks on Pedro and then had to absorb hundreds of innings of guys with 5-plus ERAs to meet the innings minimum. We used to have a guy in our league who used the opposite strategy: tank HR and RBI, draft a few high-average base thieves to corner the steals market, and spend the rest on pitching. This strategy similarly failed more often than it worked, plus these days there are too few dependable base thieves left to make it work, especially in the AL.
4. Playing Time, Playing Time: At the opposite end of the pole, one strategy that seems to work quite a lot, although it’s easier said than done, is largely eschewing top players to load the lineup with guys who play every day. This is a sure-fire way to run the table in RBIs. The downside: bring in a few injuries, and you have holes you can’t plug and no desirable trade bait.
5. Flexibility: One thing I’ve learned is that each draft is different, as the league personnel changes, the AL’s personnel changes, and strategies change. Top closers went for $40 plus in the mid-90s, and don’t touch those prices today. Some years, starting pitching is at a premium. Don’t be paralyzed by your projected prices; watch how the draft is going.
6. Follow the Money: This one’s pretty basic, but if you’re a beginner, make sure you closely track how much money everyone has left, particularly once a lot of rosters are nearing half-full. If there’s someone you really want, you don’t want him coming up while there are one or two guys left who can bid everyone under the table.
7. $14 for Paul Assenmacher: Not sure why I remember that one – I believe he was released by his owner before the end of April that year – but every year somebody winds up paying a silly-high price for their last player because they saved too much money to the end. Don’t be that guy.
8. Three and Three: Although I’ve gravitated more to strategy #4 above in recent years – when I first started I used to blow my money on a few huge sluggers and bank on finding bargains to fill the lineup, which has gotten harder to do – I usually wind up with a basic alignment of three good starting pitchers and three guys who can crank out 30 HR apiece. The closer I get to that, the happier I am. Ideally, you want the pitchers at less than $20 apiece – last year, I put $51 on Barry Zito and Roy Halladay, with catastrophic results.
9. Big Prizes Early: Whether you’re looking for bargains or trying to fob off duds, it just never seems to work to bring up anyone in the first few rounds who isn’t a stud. People have enough money to prevent huge bargains, but they won’t bid very far on lesser mortals while they’re hunting for franchise players.
Strangely, there are often bargain opportunities in the first two or three players to be bid on, as people are still gunshy about blowing their wad right away. This depends to some extent on where enthusiasm for A-Rod is in your league this year.
10. $10-20 for Catchers: Catcher is the easiest position to get stuck with guys who don’t play at all or don’t hit at all. But there’s also a tendency to go to $15 or $20 for a guy who’d be a $10 player as a first baseman, and that’s a waste. The ideal team spends between $10 and $20 total on catchers.
Anyway, those are initial thoughts (more to come if I think of them). Of course, you can probably deduce a lot of my specific player-evaluation ideas from reading this site.

David Pinto points to this interesting (as always) Studes analysis over at Hardball Times attempting to quantify the Doyle Alexander for John Smoltz trade, and reaching the conclusion that the deal was a good one for the Tigers (nobody disputes that it was a great deal for the Braves). Like David, I’ve always thought this was a deal you had to make if you’re the Tigers, even not knowing Alexander would post a 1.53 ERA and the team would win all 11 of his starts, and even knowing that Alexander was a crummy postseason pitcher.
The 1987 Tigers were the classic win-now team. Darrell Evans, the team leader in homers for the third straight season (103 home runs between 1985-87), was 40. Lance Parrish had left before the season as a free agent, Jack Morris was held on the roster only through collusion, and Kirk Gibson would leave as a free agent after the season. Numerous contributors to the team were 32 or older: centerfielder Chet Lemon was 32 and would have just one more good season, Frank Tanana was 33, DH Bill Madlock was 36 and having his last hurrah, nearly the whole bench was 32 or older. And Alan Trammell was in the middle of a career year. The Tigers were seeing the window of the 80s close, and they knew it; two years later they would lose 103 games. 1987, when they had the best record in baseball, was the time to go for it.
I ran a composite age for that Tigers team, weighted by Win Shares (i.e., so the age of the biggest contributors figured most prominently); the Tigers averaged 30.81 years, or 30.59 if you leave off Alexander. That’s not an old team, actually – Trammell was still 29, and a few key guys were still young, 23-year-old Matt Nokes, 25-year-old Mike Henneman. But Nokes would never again match his rookie year, as the Tigers may have suspected. It was clearly a team that needed to make the big move, and you can’t blame them for it.
(An aside to two long-running Hall of Fame debates: the Tigers lost in the ALCS that year in large part because Bert Blyleven beat Morris in Game 2 and Alexander in Game 5. Make of that what you will).

Aaron Gleeman is – surprise! – satisfied that the Twins are getting a good deal keeping Johan Santana. Is Santana really worth twice as much as Kris Benson? Wait, don’t answer that.

As I noted in 2002, 2003 and 2004, baseball season isn’t really here until we get promises of a new, mature Darryl Strawberry.

An ugly legal dispute brewing between Major League Baseball and fantasy baseball league operators. See this in the Roto Times, and David Pinto’s response. Baseball’s owners and the union are both in on this – a very bad sign.

An early start to the Pedro Era.

Why is Danny Garcia off the Mets’ 40 man roster, and how did the Mets pull this off without losing him? (via Jeremy Heit)
Assuming that Kaz Matsui and Jose Reyes are healthy, the fate of Garcia seems a small thing. But that’s a huge “assuming,” plus the Mets aren’t really in a position where they should be giving away useful young players like Garcia, who for all his flaws seems like at least a usable spare part, a 25-year-old infielder who can run fairly well and led the team in on base percentage (.371) last season even as a sometimes-struggling rookie.
Would some other team be interested in Garcia? The A’s gave an everyday job last season to Marco Scutaro, a similar player whom the Mets gave away for free, and the teams with the two best records in baseball last season gave everyday second base jobs to Tony Womack and Miguel Cairo. So yeah, there should be a market.

What’s more important to outfield range – positioning or speed? David Pinto makes the counterintuitive case that Sammy Sosa turns more batted balls into outs than Ichiro Suzuki because Sosa takes fewer chances and positions himself more consistently where the ball is likeliest to be hit. (Warning: Math alert! And double-dog math alert on tangotiger’s analysis in the comments, in which he pokes at the issue of whether Pinto’s conclusions are over-influenced by park factors or other conditions that result in Ichiro being measured against a much higher bar than Sosa. The comments are worth reading).

I’m a big fan of Magglio Ordonez, and I’ve thought for much of the winter that somebody might get a great bargain on him if Ordonez turned out not to have long-term problems stemming from his knee injury. But the 5 years and $75 million dollars (plus two extra option years that vest automatically if Ordonez hits playing time targets) given to Ordonez by the Tigers is not a bargain – it’s closer to the market value of a healthy Magglio.
The Tigers do apparently have an escape clause:

Under the complicated deal, Detroit would have the right to void the contract after the 2005 season if Ordonez has a reoccurrence of the left knee injury that hampered his production with the Chicago White Sox for most of last year and the reoccurrence lands him on the disabled list for 25 days or more.

That’s a savvy way to hedge against the risk of a recurrent injury. But it does nothing to solve the problem of what happens if Ordonez can play, but not well. Plus, there could be litigation down the road if Ordonez’ agent, Scott Boras, thinks the Tigers are holding down his playing time to get out of the option years. I know Detroit is desperate, but really.

The Tigers’ pitching coach thinks that Carl Pavano signed with the Yankees because he couldn’t handle the pressure of being the ace of the Tigers’ staff. (Hat tip: Jason Mastaitis).

Blez at Athletics Nation has a great three-part interview with Billy Beane (it says something about Beane that he’ll do an interview with a blog) here, here, and here. I really envy bloggers who do interviews; even if I bought the necessary tape-recording equipment I just don’t type fast enough to transcribe something of this length.
You really should read the whole thing; I excerpt some of the highlights. Beane on blogs:

I’ve always felt this incredible support from the cyber-world. We joke about it. Myself and Paul (DePodesta). The one thing I have that Paul hasn’t really acquired yet in Los Angeles ’cause it takes time, is that kind of support. . . . [Getting beyond knee-jerk reactions is] what I love, for lack of a better word, about the blogger’s world. There is a tendency to really analyze things in detail. Ultimately, because there is so much conversation and investigation on a site like yours, people may not ultimately agree with it, but they stumble onto what you’re trying to do. Someone emailed me something written on a Cardinals’ blog, and they had nailed all the things we were talking about. The economic reasons, the personnel reasons and the reasons we made the exchange. The world of a Web log will lend itself to a lot of investigation. And you will often stumble across the answer more than someone who has to write in two hours to meet deadline just to make sure something is out in the paper the next day.

I think the most interesting thing, in terms of deviation from the conventional wisdom in many sabermetric circles, is Beane’s conviction that the business realities don’t allow him to strip the team down to nothing to rebuild from scratch, and that this is precisely why you start the rebuilding process while you still have the horses to win:

I’m not sure it’s good management as a GM to rebuild, rebuild probably isn’t the right word, but to start to make changes only after you’ve hit rock bottom. Because it takes five, six, seven years to get out of that in a small market. . . I’m not sure that any of our fans want me to stand up at the podium and say, “Hey, we’re getting rid of everybody. We’re going to lose 100 games over the next three years, now come and enjoy the show.” What we’re trying to do is make sure that any dip in performance doesn’t happen for five or six years and I’ve seen professional sports franchises do that. . . Back in 1992, . . . [w]e made the mistake of trying to bring the entire team back and it took us seven years to recover. Our market is not going to handle that. Understand that attendance percentage is basically based on winning. Everything you can do to make sure that any dip in your performance in a year, you minimize that. Because when you put together back to back to back losing seasons, then you’ve created a very apathetic situation that’s very difficult to recover from. If you’re worried about what a couple of sportswriters say and let them make the decisions for you, you’re an absolute coward and a fool.

MORE:

Continue reading Obi-Wan Speaks

The Dodger Stadium grounds crew could be even busier this summer.
Yesterday, Scott Erickson, the former 20-game winner and (as the Associated Press dutifully reminds us) loving husband of sportscaster Lisa Guerrero*, agreed to a minor league contract with Los Angeles and received an invitation to spring training. This signing, while financially low-risk, came with its share of questions. After all, Erickson only pitched 27 innings last season, as he battled back from shoulder operation. His injuries, combined with his age (36), hardly made him a prototype for a Dodger pitching staff that had Brad Penny, Darren Dreifort, and Edwin Jackson go out in pain.
But, at the same time, we shouldn’t be surprised to see Paul DePodesta roll the dice, given the statistic du jour: groundball-flyball ratio. Derek Lowe, last year’s AL leader in grass destroyed, is a prime example of how the Dodgers are valuing this category. So are Jose Valentin and Jeff Kent, both of whom have a penchant for hitting the ball in the air (indeed, the former had the lowest G/F in the majors at 0.53). Erickson, as some of us may recall, is himself adept at inducing grounders. In 1997 and 1998, he led the AL with ratios of 2.88 and 2.85. In 2002, his most recent full season, he posted 2.31 against a league average of 1.16. For his career, the number stands at 2.44.
It remains to be seen whether Erickson will find renewed success under Jim Colborn’s tutelage, just as Wilson Alvarez and Jose Lima have. But, if he makes the team, Erickson can at least add to DePodesta’s sample size and help the team figure out just how significant G/F truly is at Chavez Ravine.

Continue reading Our Man Scott Erickson

So the Mets missed out on Carlos Delgado. I’m disappointed, but after the Pedro and Beltran signings, you can’t win ’em all. The bad news is that he’s signed with the Marlins. Frankly, I didn’t like the idea of the Mets offering Delgado a fourth year, and I gather they only did so because he was talking to a team in their own division.
Instead, in a deal that will give fits to transaction-column proofreaders everywhere, the Mets traded A-ball first base prospect Ian Bladergroen for Doug Mientkiewicz. (Hint to beat writers: Alt-M. Trust me on this one). Minky was, in my view, the best of the available first base alternatives: younger and healthier than John Olerud (who’s coming off surgery and even before that couldn’t beat erosion in a foot race), and without Travis Lee’s long record of being an awful player. It’s possible that Minky could bounce back with a big year: recall that Olerud was coming off three straight disappointing seasons when he came to the Mets, and Sean Casey, another similar player, was stuck in reverse for two years before last season. Then again, Olerud was 28, Casey 29; Minky is 31.
Minky’s Established Performance Levels entering 2005:

G	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	R	RBI	BB	K	SB-CS	AVG	SLG	OBP	GIDP
135	436	116	30	1	8	56	50	61	58	3-2	.266	.394	.360	10

Not encouraging numbers, but if Minky can bounce back by about 3% and get to a .400 slugging and .370 OBP, he’ll be useful. Yes, you’d like a first baseman who can bop, but at least he gets on base, which is a skill the Mets are in much greater need of, and unlike Olerud he’s not a complete clog of the basepaths. And I like the idea of adding yet another top-shelf defensive player; except for Floyd’s range and Piazza’s throwing arm, this should be an exceptional defensive team.
Of course, I don’t know much about the about-to-turn-22 Bladergroen, who’s coming off an injury and who will ultimately be the guy who determines whether this is too expensive a deal for a stopgap first baseman. Baseball America is high on him:

Don’t forget about Bladergroen just because a wrist injury (ligament damage) ended his season in July. The 6-foot-5, 210-pound slugger was doing it all in a .342-13-74 season for low Class A Capital City. “He was aggressive and would chase a bit like a young slugger,” said Charleston (W.Va.) manager Ken Joyce, “but he had a real nice swing and legitimate big-time power. His swing path put the bat in the (strike) zone for a long time.”

His full stats are here, adding up to .313/.505/.376 in a full season’s worth of professional at bats, all in A ball. Which looks like a guy who’s not a star-caliber player at the moment, but definitely has that potential in a few years if he doesn’t develop a Nick Johnson-like penchant for wrist and hand injuries.

After this morning’s comment about the Mets not having a leadoff man, I decided to take a look at how many true leadoff hitters are out there, or at least at my general sense that there aren’t as many as there used to be. To come up with a profile of a true leadoff man, I decided to look for guys with a good OBP (.375 or better), not so much power they’d be moved to the middle of the order (below .450 slugging), and decent speed (20 steals a year, not a lot but enough to indicate some foot speed), in a decent number of at bats (400 a year). Using Aaron Haspel’s search engine – which, if he’s not going to update, he should consider selling to Baseball-Reference.com or somebody – and filling out the rest at ESPN.com, I ran a list of players who met that criteria season by season, then – to deal with the fact that there were often as few as 2 or 3 a year and never more than 8 in a season, I grouped them in four-year periods:

Years	#
1969-72	6
1973-76	8
1977-80	21
1981-84	8
1985-88	13
1989-92	22
1993-96	15
1997-00	21
2001-04	8

.375 on base percentages are much easier to come by in high-offense years, which skews the usefulness of these types of comparisons over time and says a lot about why you see more guys do this in the late 90s than the early 70s. Also, the numbers were depressed for the 1981 and 1994 strike seasons and to a lesser extent the shortened 1995 campaign. Still, you can definitely see a dropoff in the last four years in the number of guys who fit the traditional leadoff profile.

Mike’s Baseball Rants looks at the Mets roster if they sign Delgado and sees 87 wins, based on projections from 2004 Win Shares totals. I’ll have to get to work on all the adjustments to my Established Win Shares Levels formula to give my own assessment, but that sounds fairly reasonable. There’s a lot of “ifs,” but at least the Mets are entering a season where as many of the ifs are about young players as old ones.
I should add, however, that the Mets still have one glaring absence they haven’t even tried to remedy: a leadoff hitter who gets on base.

Don’t forget to drop by Jay Jaffe’s place and check out the final Defense Independent Pitching Stats (DIPS) Numbers. (via Pinto)
Buyers of Al Leiter, beware!

Bill Simmons has the fascinating tale of a Red Sox fan who recently emerged from a coma having missed the entire playoffs and World Series.

Chris Lynch notices Bud Selig adding his son-in-law to the MLB payroll.

One of the key issues with projecting Carlos Beltran, as I’ve noted in comparing him to similar players from the past, is whether he can sustain his improved plate discipline over the past two years. A similar issue arises in the Mariners’ signing of Adrian Beltre; as I’ve noted before, Beltre’s decline in 2001-03 was accompanied by a regression in his plate discipline, a trend that was reversed with his great leap forward in 2004. (As I’ve also noted in the past, improved plate discipline has benefitted sluggers far better than Beltran or Beltre). Take a look at both players’ BB and K rates, prorated to 600 at bats*:

Year	Beltran BB	K	Beltre BB	K
1999	42	111	68	117
2000	56	111	66	94
2001	51	117	35	104
2002	67	127	38	98
2003	83	93	40	111
2004	92	101	53	87

Obviously, Beltran is a better bet than Beltre to hold onto his gains in this area because he’s shown consistent improvement over a three year period, rather than a 1-year recovery from a 3-year slump. (Not that Beltre is a bad gamble, given his apparent youth and tremendous power).
* – Yes, prorating per at bat rather than per plate appearance does magnify the changes in walk rate.

Jim Caple asks the timeless question of peak vs. career value, “Who would you rather have, Sandy Koufax or Bert Blyleven?”:

Say you are a general manager in an alternate universe and you can choose a clone of either the 19-year-old Koufax or the 19-year-old Blyleven, knowing ahead of time that both will perform exactly as they did in our major leagues. Wins, losses, ERA, innings — all those stats on the backs of their Topps baseball cards will be exactly duplicated. The key aspect to keep in mind, however, is that free agency is still banned in this alternate universe. In other words, you’ll not only get the pitcher for the start of his career, you will have lifetime rights to him (just as the Dodgers did with Koufax). He’s your indentured servant for as long as his arm can still pitch.

It’s a worthwhile debate, but of course, in the real world, you know and I know that any GM would choose Blyleven. Why? Well, both pitchers came up at age 19, bringing the best curveball of his generation to a winning team – Koufax for the Dodgers, winning their first World Championship, Blyleven for the Twins, winning their second straight division title. But from age 19 to age 24, Bert won 95 games (while losing 85), throwing 1611.1 innings with a 2.78 ERA (ERA+ of 134). Over the same age period, Koufax won just 36 games (while losing 40), throwing just 691.2 innings with a 4.10 ERA (ERA+ of 101). Any GM would take the instant payoff.
Then, of course, Koufax became Koufax. Interestingly, through age 30, when their arms gave out, the two had about the same number of career wins: Blyleven 167, Koufax 165. That’s hardly to suggest that they were even: Bert had lost 148 games to Koufax’s 87, and had a 2.95 ERA (ERA+ of 128) in 3000.2 IP to Koufax’s 2.78 ERA (ERA+ of 131) in 2324.1 IP. In other words, the volume vs. quality debate was already in place.
The difference: Koufax retired after age 30. Blyleven, who missed most of his age-31 season (1982) with an arm injury, had modern medicine on his side, and returned to be the best starting pitcher in the AL in 1984 (19-7 for a last place team), be the last man to throw 290 innings or 20 complete games in 1985, pitch for a World Champion in 1987, and go 17-5 as late as 1989. In short, Blyleven had a second act to his career that Koufax never got, and had several of his best seasons in his 30s. You wonder, had he pitched 10 years later, how that would have been different.

Hey, wait, when did Bob Raissman shave?

The Mets put the extra money on the table to nail down Beltran, 7 years, $119 million. Yes, it’s too much money – as ESPN notes, this is the first deal to crack $100 million since Jason Giambi in December 2001, and we know how that went – and yes, as I’ve noted, the Mets will live to regret that seventh year.
One thing I like here is the idea of the superior outfield defense the Mets will have when Mike Cameron returns from injury and can play next to Beltran. Although Cameron is the better defender, I assume he’ll be the one to move to right field, given Beltran’s youth and larger contract. Of course, they’ll still have the largely stationary Cliff Floyd in left, although Floyd at least is fairly dependable on the balls he can get to.

Last night’s deadline came and went and the Astros didn’t sign Carlos Beltran, leaving the Mets in the driver’s seat. It’s time to close the deal. I’m excited by this – the Mets’ moves under Omar Minaya haven’t been brilliant – to the contrary, they’re expensive and fraught with risk – but at least adding Pedro Martinez and pursuing Beltran are the right kind of risks, chasing after top-of-the-market talents, in Beltran’s case a guy who’s still young, healthy, durable, in good shape and a good defensive player: the anti-Mo in every way.

With the Mets currently agonizing over whether to give Carlos Beltran a six or seven year contract, I thought it would be useful to take a season-by-season look at the career paths of the most-similar players to Beltran through age 27, as determined by Baseball-Reference.com. Looking at the comparable players, I eliminated 5 of the 10 who didn’t, on a closer look, seem genuinely similar: Harold Baines and Gus Bell just weren’t the kind of 5-tool athletes Beltran is, Jack Clark’s legs were breaking down on him by age 27, Johnny Callison’s career was already in decline at that age, and Gary Sheffield was always too good a hitter to be a useful comparison to Beltran. That leaves me with 5 guys who seem like much the same kind of all-around player as Beltran: Dave Winfield, Andre Dawson, Reggie Smith, Bobby Bonds, and Shawn Green. Beltran is a year younger than Winfield and Bonds were when they came to the Yankees and Smith when he left Boston for St. Louis, a year older than Green when he left Toronto for Los Angeles, and a few years younger than Dawson when he left Montreal for Wrigley. Let’s look at how these five fared, on average, over the seven seasons from age 28 to 34 (leaving off Green after his age-31 season in 2004).

Age	G	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	R	RBI	BB	K	SB-CS	AVG	SLG	OBP	DP
28	149	560	160	27	6	29	98	93	70	91	22–7	.286	.511	.365	10
29	148	549	154	29	4	27	87	97	72	92	14–6	.281	.495	.363	17
30	135	507	140	27	4	22	70	82	49	83	13–6	.276	.475	.339	15
31	142	534	145	25	5	27	83	89	54	96	16–8	.272	.489	.340	15
32	150	560	168	26	4	33	98	104	67	93	17–9	.300	.538	.374	12
33	147	552	158	29	4	26	90	93	58	99	19-10	.286	.495	.353	11
34	107	362	91	17	4	15	58	59	44	73	9–5	.251	.445	.332	11

Notes – I multiplied Winfield’s 1981 stats (age 29) by 1.5 to adjust for the strike. OBP includes HBP and SF, which are not displayed here.
Now, you can quibble with some of the particulars of the comparisons here – certainly none of these guys other than Bonds was the kind of base thief Beltran is, and Bonds got caught stealing about five times as often. Dawson also drags down the group’s OBP. But overall, I think this is at least a useful experience-based look at how a guy like Beltran might age (especially when you factor in that if he came to Shea he’d be moving to a tougher place to hit, just as Smith, Green and Winfield did), and while the overall picture is one of consistent productivity, it’s not spectacular.
None of these guys was as consistent season-to-season as they were when averaged out, not even Winfield – they had higher highs and lower lows. But one thing is clear: while it may be a business necesity to offer Beltran a seventh year to seal the deal, as a strictly baseball matter, you would really rather avoid paying him at age 34 if you can avoid it.

Scott Miller is right – with the losses of Jeff Kent and Wade Miller already under their belts, and having traded Octavio Dotel for a few months of Carlos Beltran, if the Astros can’t re-sign Beltran and Roger Clemens retires, things are really going to look grim for the Astros. With Jeff Bagwell in gradual decline and Craig Biggio a few steps ahead of him, the days of title contenders in Houston may be going in to eclipse for a few years. Which is, of course, every reason to suspect that the Astros won’t go quietly from the Beltran sweepstakes.

I don’t generally do rumors here – I have enough trouble finding time to follow things that actually happen – but it certainly looks like the Mets are at least making a serious run now at Carlos Beltran. Of course, I’ll believe that deal closing when I see it.
UPDATE: Dr. Manhattan sends along a link to NYFansites, which claims to have Mets sources who say that Beltran to the Mets is a done deal.

I agree with Matt Welch that the Hall of Fame voters need some serious education on why, when next year’s weak roster of new candidates comes up, they should elect Bert Blyleven and Goose Gossage and under no circumstances put Andre Dawson in the Hall.
Here’s my take from 2003 on, among others, Dawson, Ryne Sandberg and Gossage, and here’s my Blyleven opus from 2000.
UPDATE: And, of course, my contribution to the mainstream of Dawson-bashing can be found in Bill Simmons’ Hall of Fame column.

You will recall that last month I took a look at the best pitchers in baseball history by ERA+, translated into a common 4.50-league-ERA environment, ranging from Pedro Martinez at 2.69 to a couple of pitchers at 3.46. But I decided to look at the other end: of the pitchers in the Hall of Fame, which ones fare most poorly in measuring their ERAs relative to the league and park? I came up with a list of 13 pitchers with ERAs that would be no better than 4.00 (an ERA+ of 112 or worse). Here they are, the least effective pitchers in the Hall of Fame, ranked from the bottom up:

#	Pitcher	ERA	IP
1	Rube Marquard	4.37	3306.2
2	Catfish Hunter	4.33	3449.1
3	Herb Pennock	4.25	3571.2
4	Early Wynn	4.25	4564
5	Burleigh Grimes	4.21	4180
6	Jesse Haines	4.17	3208.2
7	Don Sutton	4.17	5282.1
8	Pud Galvin	4.17	6003.1
9	Red Ruffing	4.13	4344
10	Jack Chesbro	4.09	2896.2
11	Waite Hoyt	4.05	3762.1
12	Chief Bender	4.02	3017
13	Nolan Ryan	4.02	5386

A few of these guys are truly embarrassing Hall of Famers – Marquard, Haines, Chesbro. Hoyt, Pennock and to some extent Ruffing are in the Hall mainly because of Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio, and in fact, Chief Bender was also the beneficiary of spectacular offensive support, while carrying workloads that were unremarkable for his day.
The case against Catfish just grows: his numbers look good at first glance, but only because he bunched all his best years in a row and had them pitching for a great team in a pitcher’s park in a pitcher’s era. For his career, Catfish Hunter was 129-79 with a 2.70 ERA at home, but just 95-87 with a 3.92 ERA on the road. There’s little doubt that Catfish would have ended up nowhere near Cooperstown if he’d pitched for the teams that Nolan Ryan, Bert Blyleven, Tom Seaver or Steve Carlton pitched for between 1970 and 1975 (there’s a reason, even besides his ERAs, why in 27 years in the major leagues, Ryan never once finished as far as 7 games over .500).
In my view, some of these guys still merit a spot in the Hall due to their extreme durability outweighing their less-than-greatness: Galvin, Ryan and Sutton all cleared 5200 innings and 320 career wins, with Ryan enduring for 27 years, Sutton scarcely missing a turn in the rotation for more than two decades, and Galvin averaging 55 starts and 481 innings over an 11-year period, a consistently heavy workload even for his day. You could make a similar argument for Wynn.
Also, if you’re wondering, here’s how five of the major pitchers on the Hall’s outside looking in stack up:

#	Pitcher	ERA	IP
1	Bert Blyleven	3.81	4970
2	Luis Tiant	3.95	3486.1
3	Tommy John	4.05	4710.1
4	Jim Kaat	4.21	4530.1
5	Jack Morris	4.29	3824

Yet again, Blyleven does well, Morris poorly and Tiant better than you might think when you look at their ERAs, and Blyleven stands at the fore in innings as well, coming in just south of the 5000 inning mark.

Wade Boggs and Ryne Sandberg get the nod to Cooperstown. Bruce Sutter also reached 2/3 of the vote, which likely puts him in next year. Scandalously, Goose Gossage got just 55% of the vote, and Bert Blyleven is not even among the top candidates listed by ESPN.

Unless you take the strong libertarian position – that there should be no restrictions on what ballplayers can ingest regardless of the impact on themselves or the game – the debate about what to do about steroids in baseball really revolves around three questions:
1. Does taking steroids help make you a better baseball player? (If not, there’s no point in banning them).
2. Is taking steroids harmful to your health? (Again, if not, there’s no reason to ban them)
3. Is there a feasible way to test for steroid use or otherwise enforce a ban?
I recognize that there are serious people who disagree about the second and third questions. But I submit that, if you think about it honestly, what we do know about the first point is quite clear: steroids* can and do help performance in baseball, and specifically help in hitting for power.
* – I refer here colloquially to “steroids” to include other hormone-altering performance-enhancers like human growth hormone. As often happens in debates about drugs, precise definition of the substances involved is itself a whole sub-field of debate.
The Available Types of Evidence
Part of the confusion over the link between steroids and performance derives from the different types of evidence we use to answer these types of questions. To illustrate, let’s compare this question to one with a settled answer: whether throwing the ball faster will help a pitcher strike out more batters.
Direct Evidence
One sometimes hears the argument made that we can’t and don’t have direct evidence of how steroids help performance. This is true enough, as far as it goes. For example, we can show directly how velocity helps a pitcher get strikeouts: you can measure batters’ reaction times and show how increasing velocity makes it harder to make contact. Or, you can simply watch a guy who throws 95+ blow pitches even past guys who are looking for them. That kind of “see the causation with your own eyes” evidence doesn’t exist for steroids and performance in baseball.
Statistical Proof
Where direct evidence of causation isn’t available, of course, statistical proof of correlation can be good enough. A classic example of this from the intersection of law and medicine is the fact that we still don’t have direct evidence that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer (i.e., scientists can’t show how it happens), but the statistical evidence shows a fairly overwhelming connection between smoking and increased likelihood of getting lung cancer.
Statistical proofs of correlation are pervasive in baseball – to use our example above, it would be easy to do a study showing that pitchers who regularly throw above 95 mph get a lot more strikeouts, and are much more likely to generate large numbers of strikeouts, than pitchers who rarely or never crack 90+ mph. That correlation is so powerful that it will show up in almost any study.
Other correlations are trickier, which is why a reliable study has to use a large enough sample size to be able to generalize, and has to ensure that truly comparable players are being compared, so that different outcomes can’t be explained away by some other factor.
Here, there are two problems with studying steroid use. One is finding large and otherwise truly comparable sets of players (comparing the same player before and after isn’t useful because of the interfering factor of age, which ordinarily is, of course, very powerfully correlated with declining performance after about age 28 or so). But the bigger problem is that steroid use, by virtue of being illegal, is done in secret; we have so little reliable information about who uses what, when and in what amounts that for the foreseeable future, it will be impossible to do statistical comparisons with any degree of confidence.
Circumstantial/Inferential Evidence
The fallacy in many arguments over steroids in baseball is to note the lack of direct or reliable statistical evidence and declare the question unresolved. But this is not consistent with how human beings make decisions in everyday life, in law, medicine, politics or in baseball. When the best forms of evidence are unavailable, we look at what remains: at circumstantial evidence, and logical connections to be drawn therefrom. For example, even if we couldn’t see fast pitches going by hitters and read the evidence of the same in box scores, what we do know about hitting a baseball – you have to time your swing to make contact – is itself strongly suggestive of the fact that a faster pitch will be harder to hit.
I would submit that that evidence is more than sufficient to persuade us that steroids help performance in baseball. Let’s once again break this down to a few questions:
A. Do Steroids Help Build Strength?
This much is not seriously disputed, which is one reason why steroids are banned in the NFL and the Olympics, where physical strength and speed can be shown to connect directly to performance. There are certainly debates about precisely how and to what extent steroids help, but few serious people would debate that taking them helps build stronger muscles.
B. Does Strength Help In Hitting A Baseball?
This is really the crux of the argument. It is often said that you can’t take a drug to help you hit a curveball, which is true but totally beside the point. The issue isn’t whether steroids will help you or me become a major league ballplayer; the issue is whether guys with the pre-existing skills to play professional baseball will have those skills enhanced. To deny that, among other things, you have to argue that strength has no impact on the ability to hit for power. Of course, this is ridiculous. Since the introduction of the home run as a regular part of the game in the 1920s, it has always been the case that big, strong guys with powerful chests and arms have tended to be home run hitters, and skinny little guys have not. To deny that steroids have an impact on hitting for power in particular, you have to look at all the home runs hit by the Gehrigs and Foxxes and Mantles and Kluzewskis and Killebrews and all the singles hit by the Willie McGees and Vince Colemans and Nellie Foxes of the world, and argue that it is just a coincidence that physical strength has always been so strongly correlated with home run power. You have to not only look at Bonds and Giambi and all the other guys who have been placed under one sort of cloud or other and say that whatever they took or were given didn’t matter; you actually have to say that all the muscle Barry Bonds has added has had nothing to do with his power surge, that Jason Giambi’s increased power production as he gained muscle was just a coincidence. Sorry, I’m not buying that.
Basic physics: force equals mass times velocity acceleration. The force you hit a baseball with is affected by the weight and speed of the bat. Stronger players can generate greater bat speed, or generate the same bat speed with a heavier bat. Yes, bat speed is a variable affected by other factors – the arc of your swing, reflexes/reaction times . . . and yes, it’s true that muscle mass sometimes gets in the way of greater bat speed. But again: if strength has nothing to do with power, why have stronger players always, as a class, hit for more power?
C. Do Steroids Help In Conditioning?
Strength is the core of the debate. But correct me if I’m wrong here – I believe most of the analyses I’ve seen have similarly shown that steroids can assist more broadly in conditioning – beyond pure muscle mass – by assisting in the ability to train at greater length without injury, at least in the short run.
D. Does Superior Conditioning Help In Baseball?
The question, again, essentially answers itself, and doubly so for aging players seeking to stave off declining bat speed (or declining velocity, for pitchers, but pitchers and steroids are another day’s debate). Honus Wagner lifted weights; Ty Cobb was a conditioning fanatic. It could be a coincidence that they lasted into their 40s in a day when few others did.
The Bonds Issue
I would stress, again, that I don’t have anything but the sketchy information in the public record on what Barry Bonds took and when, and how it helped him. And it’s true: Bonds’ late career surge has had other causes, from better bats to a greater uppercut in his swing. But I’ve been disappointed at some of the efforts from otherwise reasonable people to obscure the fact that Bonds’ increased strength has had an impact on his unprecedented late-30s power surge.
I meant to get to this when it ran in mid-December: the New York Times editorial by Will Carroll of the Baseball Prospectus (discussed here on his blog). I like and respect Carroll from his work at BP, but the Times piece has some serious issues. One is the point I make above: Carroll essentially implies that he is agnostic on whether strength helps with power hitting, contrary to 85 years’ experience:

[W]e have little or no idea what these drugs accomplish. Do stronger players hit the ball farther, swing the bat quicker or throw the ball harder? Does using steroids reduce fatigue so that they can do any of those things more effectively than “clean” players?
While there is no doubt that these chemicals are effective at their stated goal, albeit with significant complications, the question of how their effects manifest themselves in a baseball game has not been answered. There are no credible studies that connect drug use to improved performance, nor any that determine what cost these athletes may be paying.

Much more problematically, Carroll uses some seriously misguided examples to imply to the Times’ readers that Bonds’ power surge is not so unprecedented:

It is true that Bonds’s performance over what many would expect to be the twilight of his career has been incredible. Instead of a slow decline as he approached 40, Bonds has done what can only now be described as superhuman. . . . The raw numbers, however, only reflect his increased home-run production; they do not say whether he hits more homers that fly significantly farther.
What of this late-career surge? Certainly we can point to that with an accusing finger, sure that Bonds’s numbers in the record books have been written with some “cream” or “clear” substance. It’s much easier to point than to find facts.
According to Clay Davenport, a researcher at Baseball Prospectus, Hank Aaron’s best year for home runs – when he had the most homers per at bat – was 1973, when he was 39. His second best was in 1971, at age 37. Willie Stargell had his best seasons after age 37. Carlton Fisk put his best rate in the books when he was 40. Even Ty Cobb had his best home run rate at age 38, though the end of the dead-ball era helped that. It is not uncommon, according to Mr. Davenport, for a slugger to change his mechanics as he ages, swinging for the fences as his ability to run the bases declines.

These are terribly bad examples. First of all, Aaron in 1973, Stargell in 1978 and 1979 and Fisk in 1988 all had one thing in common: none of them were full-time, 500+ at bat players any longer, as they’d been in their primes. It’s a lot easier for an older player to improve his production if he has a third to half of the season to rest as opposed to the years when he was playing every day, a fact that has absolutely zero to do with Barry Bonds.
Let’s take Stargell first, as he’s the most egregious example. Willie Stargell’s career best slugging percentages, both absolutely and relative to the league, came at the ages of 26, 31, and 33, well within the normal range. Stargell’s home run rate improved slightly in 1978-79, at age 38 and 39, but his doubles – also a key power stat – dropped off sharply from 43 in 1973 to 18 and 19 in 1978 and 1979. Was he really hitting for more power? Also, Stargell had another thing going for him: while he wasn’t, strictly speaking, platooned (his backup, John Milner, was also lefthanded), the decline in his playing time allowed him to see a much more favorable mix of pitchers: Stargell had 30.5% of his at bats against lefties in 1978 and 30.7% in 1979, as opposed to 39.5% in 1971 and 33.1% in 1973. For a guy with Stargell’s big platoon splits, that’s a significant advantage.
Then there’s Aaron. If you know the game’s history, you already know that Aaron’s late-career power surge was an illusion created by the improved offensive conditions of the 1970s as opposed to the 1960s, combined with his move in 1966 into homer-friendly Fulton County Stadium and out of pitcher-friendly Milwaukee County. Aaron hit 52 homers on the road and 37 at home in 1962-63; in 1971 and 1973, those figures were more than reversed to 55 at home and 32 on the road. But it doesn’t stop there; with just 392 at bats in 1973 at age 39, the right-handed Aaron saw 44.4% of his at bats against left-handed pitching, up from 30.9% in 1971 and 26.5% as a full-time player in 1969.
Then there’s Fisk, whose “best” home run season was 253 at bats in 1988. Do I really need to explain why a catcher might hit better playing half the time? And yes, the right-handed Fisk faced lefties 36.5% of the time in 1988, compared to 22.9% in his actual best season, 1977.
(Ty Cobb, whose career high in home runs was 12 but whose career high in slugging average was at age 24, is not even worthy of discussing at length).
None of these guys – indeed, no other player in baseball history – compares remotely to what Barry Bonds has done, and it does no service to the debate to pretend otherwise. Prior to 2000, Bonds was 34 years old and had a career slugging percentage of .559, with his two best slugging percentages (.677 and .647) coming at age 28 and 29. Since then, he has slugged .781, a 40% improvement on his career average and a 15% improvement over a five-year stretch compared to his career best season. Neither Carroll nor Davenport could find an example anywhere, certainly not outside of guys who straddled the arrival of the lively ball in the 1920s, of an established player who had anything like a 40% improvement in his power numbers from age 35 to 39. (Bonds has also batted .358 over the past three years, compared to batting above .320 just once through age 35, also nothing like a normal aging pattern).
Carroll’s argument would have been better served by recognizing the fact that what Bonds has done is totally unprecedented and clearly not unrelated to his dramatic improvement in physical strength in his late 30s. Pretending otherwise does no one any good.

Jurgen at Some Calzone for Derek suggests that I could take a look at the incoming and outgoing A’s (including prospect Dan Meyer, coming in to fill the Hudson/Mulder gap in the rotation) by Established Win Shares. He finds the A’s losing 21 wins worth of Win Shares and gaining 20, measured by last year’s numbers. How do things look from an EWSL view?
Leaving

Pos	Player	EWSL	Age
SP	THudson	20	29
SP	MMulder	16	27
C	DMiller	13	35
SP	MRedman	10	31
OF	JDye	9	31
RP	ARhodes	4	35
RP	JLehr*	1	27

Total: 73 Win Shares (24.333 wins)
Weighted Age: 30.43
Arriving

Pos	Player	EWSL	Age
C	JKendall	21	31
INF	KGinter	9	29
OF	CThomas*	9	26
RP	JCruz	4	26
RP	KCalero#	4	30
SP	DHaren#	1	24
SP	DMeyer	0	23

Total: 48 Win Shares (16 wins)
Weighted Age: 29.06
# – Rated only on 2003 & 2004
* – Rated on 2004 alone
Note that Meyer doesn’t figure in the weighted age because he has no established major league track record. It says here the A’s have lost 8 wins worth of talent this offseason; that sounds about right. Jurgen is underestimating that because he’s valuing Kendall and Ginter off of good years and Hudson and Rhodes off of weak ones.
That doesn’t mean that’s how it will play out on the field. Meyer could easily give the A’s anywhere from 5 to 12 Win Shares worth of performance – although young pitchers are tricky – and Thomas’ 9 Win Shares last season are a half-season’s worth of performance. Haren should also get an opportunity, although just looking at his numbers the past two seasons at AAA and the major league level I’m not that impressed with his odds of making an immediate impact:

Level	IP	ERA	H/9	HR/9	BB/9	K/9
AAA	173.2	4.35	9.64	1.30	2.18	9.59
MLB	118.2	4.85	9.78	0.99	2.96	5.69

Haren could well be another good long-term prospect, I just don’t see a guy who’s going to jump into the rotation without some real growing pains.
Overall, the arrival of Kendall, the fact that Thomas looks like a guy who could be an immediate improvement over the oft-injured Dye, and the bullpen help the A’s are getting should help soften the blow. But I don’t think you can deny that the A’s took a significant step backward this offseason.