Earl Weaver had one sign in the Orioles’ clubhouse and he said he got it from Mr. Rickey: "It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts." Every clubhouse could use one of those.

Mr. Rickey never claimed to know it all. He often started a speech: "If anybody says they know baseball, they don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve been in it all my life. There’s a fascination in baseball, and I am trying to learn this game every day."

Rex Barney’s Thank Youuuuu, Rex Barney with Norman Macht (1993), p.47

It’s a consolation to me to hear Branch Rickey, one of the most knowledgeable baseball men of his era, say that he never learned all of baseball. I spent the first 40 years of my life as a casual fan, believing all the tropes and reciting numbers of wins, saves and clutch hits. Only recently (I’m 44) have I attempted to learn the game more seriously and it feels like everything I learn shows me twelve things I don’t know. Me and Branch Rickey. Okay.

Reading Barney’s autobiography showed me another catalogue of my ignorance. First, I knew nothing of the career of Rex Barney. I grew up on Rex as the voice of Memorial Stadium. We imitated his voice as we stepped to the plate in wiffleball games. If you made a nice grab of a foul ball at a game, Rex became your agent. Once, I think, my older brother said that Rex had been a ballplayer back in the day.

Turns out, back in the day Rex had an ascent to the majors that is stunning to imagine today. In 1943, with WWII drawing down the MLB talent pool, Barney was scouted in high school by the Yankees and Dodgers. Both approached his parents as soon as he graduated, with Rickey coming personally to seal a deal with Brooklyn. He went to the Piedmont League, where he played briefly for Buzzie Bavasi’s Durham Bulls and roomed with Gene Mauch. He was wild, wild, wild but he threw smoke. Demand for credible wartime pitching pulled him quickly to Montreal and then Brooklyn. March – playing for your neighborhood Catholic HS in Omaha. August – Ebbetts Field.

It didn’t last. Rex couldn’t control his power. He spent ‘44 & ‘45 in the war and struggled with the big club in ’46 & ’47, mostly relieving and starting the tail end of doubleheaders. But Rickey couldn’t give up hope on the promise of that wicked fastball and kept him on the club. Like Weaver would later, Rickey intuited what we now follow statistically. He asked Rex:

"Do you know how to gauge a pitcher?"
I said, "Sure, earned run average."
"Wrong,’ he said. "If you can give up fewer hits than innings pitched and strike out more than you walk, you’ll be up here a long time." (p.50)

Rex put that together for one year in 1948: 246.2 IP and 193 hits. 136 K vs. 122 BB. That’s still an eye-popping number of walks, but it was the one time in his career that the ratio leaned the right way. He turned that into 12 complete games, 4 shutouts, 15 wins and a 3.10 ERA in 34 starts. One of the shutouts was the pinnacle of his career – a no-hitter against the rival Giants. Again, it didn’t last. In ’49 & ’50 he returned to his struggles and then left baseball when they wanted to send him all the way back to the Piedmont League to start over.

I was twenty-seven. I was finished. I get weepy thinking about it now. It’s a part of my life I cannot forget, ever. When you have to face yourself with that memory every day of your life, it’s not very pleasant. (p.156)

But the Dodgers kept him restricted until 1960, fearing someone else would pick him up and somehow fix him.

The broadcasting and announcing story that followed Baltimoreans know. But the book is a study of a question that haunts the Orioles now and for the last decade. Why do incredibly gifted pitchers not turn out? In Rex’s case there are several explanations floated around.

Did the wartime rush ruin him? If he had a steady development through the minors and arrived at Ebbets field in three years rather than three months, maybe it could have been different. Was it a failure to focus? Rex confesses he loved the NY nightlife, making the scene at Toots Shor’s to hang with DiMaggio and movie stars. Was it the pressure of the media? The photo section reprints one of the half-page cartoons the papers carried of ‘Borneo Barney.’ That would be hard to take. Did too many people try to fix him? Everyone had an idea to help to him – throwing programs on flat ground, against fences, through string targets, etc. Rex, desperate, tried all of them.

It’s impossible to tease these things apart 60 years later, and surely all of them had some effect. But my sense is that the lack careful instruction early and the haphazard instruction late was the one-two combination that knocked Rex Barney down. Having a relationship with one pitching coach who could work steadily and incrementally with his delivery may have been the difference maker. As the Duquette O’s say the right things about player development, I’d like to tell them this story to underline it. The other direction is really sad:

…once in a while something with jar me and I’ll think, "Why couldn’t I do it? Such an easy thing, to throw the ball over home plate. … It was all such a big part of my life, how can I just discard it? I wouldn’t even try. I relive it all, the nightmare and the good times. And one of those good times was the last half of that 1948 season, when I didn’t believe anybody would ever beat me. Ever.

Sometimes I dream that I am fifty years old and I’m making a comeback…. I know it’s goofy. But I still have that dream. (pp.253-254).

Another thing I learned is how little I know about SABR. I knew it as the first two syllables in sabermetrics and assumed it was entirely a group of statistical analysts. Then I saw that the co-author here, Norman Macht, is a member of SABR. I was puzzled. Turns out they also have a baseball biography project (http://bioproj.sabr.org/) listing 1710 bios to date: "The primary goal of the Baseball Biography Project is to enliven the people behind the statistical records that are so readily available." This book, as an autobiography, doesn’t count but Macht is on the list of authors associated with the project. Talk about uncovering your ignorance – over 1700 books I haven’t read.

I began thinking and writing about this subject weeks ago, but life happened and I couldn't finish the post then. Life continues to happen, but I don't care. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, so I have to stop and write it down.

It started simply enough. In an Open Thread, snotboogie posted this link.  It's about the long toss debate. Several folks made comments along the lines of Osfan21's "nobody really knows yet whether certain mechanical traits are more likely to result in injury." That's true. But I thought ‘why not?'  It seems like an empirical question with an on-going natural experiment. Some organizations are using 360' toss, others not -- compare the outcomes. There are too many uncontrolled variables for something that rough to lead to any conclusion, but if there is a significant difference it could be a pointer toward the value in studying it more.

This glance toward experimental analysis would likely have passed in a moment, if a day or two later 2632 hadn't linked to Jon Shepherd's Camden Depot post on the Science of Baseball.  I was pleased to see that some folks are thinking in a scientific way about injury, but noticed that the subjects are all at the HS and college level. Why isn't MLB injury the subject of scientific study? Publication of such studies would give away a lot of proprietary information, so realistically I don't expect to see it such things show up in journals. But I don't hear anything that leads me to think it happens at all.

The moment that fixed this subject in my mind came when, in response to my last pitching post, the right honorable higgins pointed me to Buzz Bissinger's 2007 Times article on Kerry Wood. I was just knocked out by this quote:

To get a better idea of how much time pitchers lose to injury, consider that 244 of the pitchers who played in the majors in 2006 have been on the disabled list at least once in the past five years. Their injury time adds up to 27,351 days, the equivalent of 149 lost seasons.

149 seasons! To me, that says one thing. The money to improve the situation is stacked all over the table and falling down onto the floor. Given the average 2011 player salary is $3.3 million dollars, that's roughly $492 million wasted over 5 years. Call it $3 million per team per season.

So try to avoid wasting some of that money.  Invest some comparable amount of money in developing an improvement program to reduce your injury losses on pitchers. Say it's your extra 2%. If you have $100 million payroll, set aside another $2 million toward a science of pitching injury.

Since we're starting from "nobody really knows," the initial investment would be all about data collection. I'm thinking that you would want to collect the following, for each pitcher at each level of the minor leagues:

Throwing program information - kinds of throwing used (long, short, bullpens), frequency of sessions and number of throws

Training habits - have players or training staff record the types, reps and frequencies of non-pitching workouts

Pitch f/x data - if these cameras are not constantly running in the minors, they should be

Data on mechanics - this would be the hardest. But I think you could crack it by videotaping every pitcher in every outing from standard camera angles. Then have trained staff play the video in slo-mo/freeze frame on touch screen computers, using a stylus to tap-enter the positions of the pitchers joints at standard intervals through their delivery. Resource limitations would determine how much of this data you could input, but you would at least have mountains of primary data available.

Pair those input variables with outcome measures of the type and severity of the various injuries (e.g. exactly positions where the fabrum bear nested and the depth of his den in millimeters) and have statisticians run regressions like mad. Somewhere in there you'd have to find inputs that appear predictive of increased injury.

I'm sure some of you are thinking ‘sure, and you'd have a list of correlations, but nothing about causation.' Exactly right. The predictive variables would be starting points for experimental manipulations in your farm system. Can you change, in a controlled fashion, the mechanics or training programs of pitchers of similar build and see a change in injury rates compared to the historical baseline? I have no idea how such experiments would actually be designed. I'm sure nobody in an MLB front office does either. So you would need to partner.

Imagine a city where there is a research-oriented university hospital within walking distance of the major league stadium. If it's not too hard to picture, imagine baseball fans use their parking lot. The MLB club offers access to this injury-science program to that university's physical medicine department to use in teaching research methods. Undergrads in the primary data collection practicum are tapping your computer screens in the basement. Grad students are writing up the results for simultaneous submission to the front office and the prof. The prof is shaping the design of the trials by suggestion to the grad students in the experimental methods class. And the cost of the whole program, especially the mechanics data, comes down a bit. $2 million plus a supply of free labor would get a lot done.

To me, it's an article of faith that careful observation like this would yield actionable knowledge that would save valuable arms and lower team ERAs. Maybe not, but if you run it for a decade and there's no indication of that, then you've spent what we're paying Brian Roberts to be dizzy for a year and you cut bait. If my faith is warranted, it could go radical places. Cue the fuzzy-screened dream sequence.

Once you had the pitching mechanics technology in place, you could push it both up and down from the minors. On the upstream side, when a pitching coach is scratching his head about a pitcher's struggles and can't eyeball any change in delivery from video, taking new data points and running them against historicals could improve in-season corrections.  Or someone monitoring changes to tell you when a pitcher is compensating for soreness even while succeeding.  On the downstream side, take James F's CamdenCast suggestion to videotape a lot more work by prospects before the draft. Use this same process and maybe you would draft smarter.

The biggest benefit of all could be that by reducing injury, you not only protect your current investment in your pitchers, but also make pitchers cheaper over time. Those 149 lost seasons inject a lot of scarcity into the pitching market, driving up prices. Reduce it and, fantasy of fantasies, maybe Kevin Gregg's price starts to align with his value. Maybe he can't get a job at all. Isn't that a goal worth investing in?

Does anyone know a good book about pitching?  I took two swings at it recently and whiffed badly both times. I would still like to find a good analysis on the subject, but I'd rather not strike out in the process.

Admittedly, when I started reading Boomer Wells' autobiography Perfect I'm Not, I didn't expect to learn anything about pitching. I expected it to be what it is -- a goofy book about baseball hi-jinx. How easy it is to intimidate opposing Little League batters when all your fans down the sidelines are Hells Angels. The sordid nighttime exploits of young men stranded in western Canada playing for the Blue Jay's farm in Medicine Hat. The disgusting living conditions that come with playing winter ball in Venezuela.

But then Wells snuck up on me. He gets to the part of the story where he's made the Bigs with the Blue Jays and he has a realization. With Dave Stieb, Mike Flanagan and Jimmy Key around, he might learn something:

We talked about pitch selection, and strategy, but more often than not, those guys gave me free psychology lessons. ...With a combined 749 years in the bigs, Stieb and Flanagan knew from good and bad experience how most sluggers, and pull hitters, and contact guys, and free swingers ticked.... These guys could hack into a batter's head at any time, pull out that guy's probable plan of attack, and then make adjustments on the mound to ultimately confuse, frustrate and kill that guy's threat.(pp.110-111)

Wells worked through a couple at-bat examples on that theme and I found myself thinking this book could get interesting. Show me how that process played out against Cecil Fielder in the context of the 1996 playoffs and we'll have something. No luck. The rest of the book becomes a succession of "I was smoking, here's my line, we won, I partied" or "I sucked, here's my line, we got creamed, I got a cortisone shot."

In the end, Wells doesn't seem to think games are won my strategy.   They are won by attitude. He ends the book with this:

Want to come in fourth place? Build yourself a team by the numbers. Want a ring? Build yourself a team of hard-nosed, hard-hearted, hard-fighting (and possibly hard-living) monsters. ... Gather enough of these anti-social mutants in your clubhouse, and I promise you'll be playing ball in October. (p.407)

He then lists his "Got-Balls-Star" team. Who's on it? Roberto Alomar, Cal Ripken Jr, Dave Winfield, Andy Pettite, etc.; Lords knows you wouldn't pick those guys by the numbers. Ugh.

But this nonsense gave me an appetite to think more about pitching. So the next book I grabbed was Roger Kahn's The Head Game: Baseball Seen From the Pitcher's Mound. It promised to be exactly what I wanted. In the intro, Kahn talks with 50s Dodger pitcher Clem Labine who asks him if, after 40 years, he gets bored watching baseball:

Not at all. I study the pitcher. What's he going to throw? I study the hitter. What pitch is he looking for? I make myself become the pitcher and the hitter. Clem, they're playing chess at ninety miles an hour and that's not boring at all.(p.xix)

Kahn doesn't deliver chess at 90 mph. What follows are biographical sketches of great pitchers, from Candy Cummings through Young and Mathewson then Spahn and Koufax to contemporaries like Sutter and Glavine.  Occasionally, there is a piece of pitching strategy thrown in, like this:

If he had not seen a batter before, the veteran Spahn read important signs. "A man who drops the front shoulder when he cocks the bat is a high-ball hitter. If he drops the back one, he's a low ball hitter. After he takes one swing you know whether he has quick wrists. All this is important, but pretty elementary.(p.177)

There are maybe four passages with that much insight in the whole of the book, plus brief treatments of the grips of basic pitches. It turns out there is more anatomy of the pitching duel in Baseball For Brain Surgeons. When you get out-analyzed by Tim McCarver, brother, that's sad. But there is one moment of prophecy. The last sketch is about coaching, featuring Leo Mazzone:

"You know," he said, "if you write that I know everything about pitching, you can make the two of us look foolish."

"How so?"

"Because," this unassuming scholar said, "when Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz graduate, I may get stupid very, very fast."(p.301)

Paging Daniel Cabrera.

Once I settled into this as a book of avuncular tales of the good old days, I did enjoy it for that. As a book entitled "Portraits of the Great Pitchers" it would succeed. Masquerading as The Head Game it's a rip-off.

Wanted: a real analysis about pitching.

 Disappointment Notice:  This post contains neither reference to, nor photographs of, hot chicks.

Disclaimer:  I am nothing resembling a scout, so what follows is the most amateur of player reports you are likely to see.

Alfredo "Weak Sauce" Simon made another rehab start at Bowie this afternoon, vs. the Richmond Flying Squirrels.    He lasted 5 plus and turned over a 4-1 lead with 2 runners on to Pedro Viola.   Viola blew the lead but stuck around long enough (3 IP) to win, with Jose Diaz striking out 3 for the save.   Bowie wins 6-5.

But the outcome of the game isn’t of significance to Birdland.   The condition of Simon may be.    He certainly looks good physically, slimmed down by his weeks on Dominican prison rations.   He also looked pretty good pitching early on.  His fastball velocity is there -- in the 91-94 range, mostly 93-94.   He was throwing his splitter around 85 and it was moving nicely.   In the first two innings he had strikeouts three times on three consecutive splitters, though one of them was erased by the runner reaching on a passed ball.   The other good news is that he was throwing strike one, getting first pitch strikes on 13 of 23 batters faced, with another 4 putting first strikes in play.

The good news ends there.   Simon lost control of the split in the 3rd, and his control on his curve was horrible all day.   It was way up or in the dirt or way outside, with exactly one curveball strike in the outing.   He seemed to be practicing it in game, throwing it again and again without success.   This had two predictable results.   He went to 3 ball counts on 7 batters between the third and his hook with none out in the sixth.   Counting from my scorebook, he ran up to 89 pitches plus foul balls, so probably close to 100.

The obvious other consequence was that batters could sit on the fastball and began making really good contact.   Four of his hits allowed were solid line drives, as was one of his three air outs.   Even two of his groundball outs were scorched.  And this is AA hitters.   It didn’t turn into much in the way of runs, because he interrupted the damage with strikeouts of the weaker hitters, but if it were MLB hitters it would have been very ugly.   Simon even seemed to get his pride up about it, as if offended that these guys were touching his heater.    After Richmond’s Roger Kieschnick had doubled to the  right center gap off a high fastball in the 4th, Simon started him with the exact same pitch in the 6th.   Surprise, surprise, he got the exact same gapper double in return.   One curveball loaded walk later and his day was over.   These runners would score on an error and passed ball when Viola came in.

 

5+ IP, 3R, 1 ER, 5H, 2BB, 7K, 4 GO, 2 FO, 1 LO

 

The bottom line is that the sauce is still very weak.  Based on his success in the early innings, Simon may be able to pitch a decent inning out of the pen.    He has 2 pitches at best, without an offspeed option.   If he threw a change-up all day I didn’t recognize it as such.   Given this lack of reliable pitch selection to work with, the idea that he could be a rotation option is a VERY BAD IDEA.   I mean ‘it will be better not to watch that night’ bad.

Bowie has certainly seen better pitching:

 

So this year I couldn’t help myself and continued my off-season baseball reading into the regular season.   The book that carried me over was Burt Solomon's 1999 history Where They Ain’t: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles, the Team That Gave Birth to Modern Baseball.

I don’t know the histories of all the existing franchises well enough to be certain, but I think the Orioles are the only one that has had a team bearing its name that played in three leagues that are still operating.   If that’s not unique, I think the Orioles must be the only one that had a historic era of excellence in each of the three leagues.  Obviously, the American League era, bookended by our first and last World Series wins was the longest and most significant.   The International League era, with its seven straight pennants between 1919 and 1925, was the most consistent.

This book tells the history of the first era of excellence, in the National League from 1894-1897, which was the briefest and the most star-studded.   In these four years, the Orioles won 3 NL pennants and 2 Temple Cups, with a team that had 5 starters and a manager that would all go to the Hall of Fame.   For folks like me who didn’t know, the Temple Cup was the original major league playoff.   Founded after the 1893 season by the owner of that year’s runner-up Pirates team, the pennant winner and runner-up played a 7 game playoff series.  It allowed the O’s to invent playoff frustration.  

 

In 1894 & 95, the O’s won the NL by 3 games both times but lost the Cup.   So the media and fans debated endlessly about who was the real champion of baseball.   Modern clubs that dominate the regular season, have a bad short series in the DS and watch a Wild Card advance to the World Series, Willie Keeler, John McGraw and co. felt your pain a hundred years earlier.  Only in 1896 were the O’s indisputably champs, winning the NL by 9½ games and taking the Cup.   In 97 they missed the pennant by 2, but won the playoff.   At that point, since the Pirates hadn’t had a chance to play for it yet, the Temple Cup was withdrawn.

 

The team succeeded playing a new kind of baseball.  Solomon writes:

 

At the time, baseball had been a game of power and thick-bodied men.  Then came the Orioles, scrappy and swift. … They used the hit-and-run, the bunt, the squeeze play, the cutoff play, the Baltimore chop – whatever was unexpected and put their opponents on edge.  They never stopped thinking.  Scientific baseball, it was called, or inside baseball, or – more than occasionally—dirty baseball.

    Whatever the name, the national game would never be the same.   Before Willie [Keeler] broke in, ballplayers customarily held the bat at the very end; he choked almost halfway up and chopped and thrust and poked at the ball.   By his success, he changed what was right.  In place of the slugging came speed and strategy and smarts.  p.5

 

Little as we think of these ‘small ball’ plays now, this is consistent with the best Baltimore tradition of strategic play.   When Frank Robinson was gone and Paul Blair and Rich Coggins were the tools in hand, even Earl Weaver played a speed game for a couple years.  He didn’t have to like it, but he was using the tools he had.   HoF manager Ned Hanlon had Keeler, McGraw, Hughey Jennings and other small, quick, aggressive guys and adapted the game to the team.   They were also taking advantage of a basic circumstance – fields were horrible and gloves were small.  Playing small ball gave them the optimum chance to be given runs via their time’s epidemic of bad hops.    I didn’t realize how much more fans and writers stressed defensive gaffes back then until I saw the old box scores in this book, which list put outs, assists and errors where today’s box shows runs, BI and AVG.

 

But these O’s ‘scientific baseball’ is also an example of how baseball thinking lags behind events.    These small ball strategies were originally developed in response to the short reaction time batters had to swing away against a pitcher who was 55 feet away in a four foot wide box.   Those rules were changed before the 1893 season, so the strategies were outmoded before they were ever perfected.   If the most talented players had persisted at slugging after the rubber was installed and moved back to 60 feet, baseball history could have been very different.  Instead, baseball enshrined the ideas of Hanlon’s O’s and those ideas remained the standard of the game for the next 30 years.   The white ball came, then the spit-free ball, then the live ball but players kept at it until Babe Ruth bucked the traditions and showed what slugging could do (the story told in William Curran’s interesting book Big Sticks).   Change in baseball continues to take decades even down to the present, as shown by the gap between the first Baseball Abstracts and the references to ideas like BABIP and sample sizes that are just now emerging in the mainstream lexicon.

 

The second theme of this book is the business history of baseball – how its magnates pushed their teams around and the battle to create the American League.    Here, the claim that the 90s O’s ‘gave birth to modern baseball’ falls flat.   It’s true that they were an American Association team that had to merge into the NL after the Player’s League competition nearly sank all three existing leagues.   They saw that same management/workers tension continue to pulse when their stars held out for bigger salaries.   They became part of ‘syndicate baseball,’ in which one owner held multiple teams and they saw their stars shipped off to create a dynasty in Brooklyn.  They were squeezed out of the NL when it contracted to 8 teams, used as a founding site for the competing AL, and robbed of players in the ‘league jumping’ that followed.   They were the last volley in the war between the leagues, when the AL moved them to New York to compete head-to-head with the NL in the biggest market.

 

But the turn of the century Orioles were unique in none of these things.  More sadly, in most of them they were the passive victims of the manipulations of bigger business interests.   Solomon summarizes the disgusting facts very succinctly: 

The old Orioles had given rise—life, really—to all three of the ballclubs in Greater New York.   They had made the Dodgers, they had nourished the Giants, and they were the Yankees.  (p.264)  

I guess ‘the team that exemplifies all the stages of the birth of modern baseball’ or ‘New York baseball’s bitch’ didn’t make such good subtitles. 

 

Interesting as Solomon’s history here is, the style of the book is distracting.   He tries to describe ball games in the language of the day, where pitchers are ‘twirlers’, fans are ‘cranks’ etc.  Occasionally, it creates the illusion that you’ve gone back to that time.   But then he writes intervening sections about the business practices with historical distance and the disorienting effect is that you’re constantly zooming in and out in time.   It also makes it hard to tell how much he may be plagiarizing his newspaper sources.    If Solomon wanted to give readers a sense of the 1890s, he would have done better to take the approach G.H. Fleming used in his great book The Unforgettable Season.   Fleming recreates the 1908 Giants/Merkle story by just editing down the newspaper accounts and citing them, so you get not only the tone of the times but learn the voices of the individual sports writers.

 

Even with this stylistic weakness, Where They Ain’t is an engaging history.   If the CC Book Club is born this off season as I’m planning, I expect to nominate it for one of our reads.

Doing the Disney vacation thing with my wife and son for the last 10 days, I had a chance to escape the theme parks a few days to catch some Grapefruit League games.   The Braves hold their ST at the ESPN Wide World of Sports facility on the Disney campus and we were there for the last three games of their Spring.  Champion Stadium is an attractive Spanish style place with comfortable seating and nice sight lines from everywhere I walked.

View from my seat on the 1B upper deck:

 

View from my LF SRO spot:

 

Down the right field line, there is a view over the home bullpen that is not unlike what you can get from the CF standing room at OPACY.   Here's Braves starter Brandon Beachy warming up there:

 

But a really cool feature is that the visitors' bullpen is cut out of the lawn seating down the left field line.  So you can stand by the fence and be just about five feet off the plate and four feet elevated above the bullpen catcher.   Even at that distance, the pop of somebody bringing a 90s fastball is a little scary.  It gave me a better appreciation for standing in at the MLB level.    You can also look through the fence behind the pitcher and see them adjust grips inside their glove. 

 

I saw Braves v. Tigers the first time and the game was the epitome of ST doldrums.   Tigers prospect Adam Wilk was touched for 4 runs in the first 2 innings, including 3 in the first three batters, thanks to 2 singles and a Chipper Jones HR.  Brandon Beachy delivered the most vanilla 6 scoreless I've ever seen.   There was nothing about him that looked special, but he changed speeds between 78 and 88 and located.  That was all it took to keep Magglio, Cabrera and V-Mart down.

In the late innings it turned into black comedy, with the remaining scoring of the 5-3 Braves win coming on hit batters, wild pitches and errors.   At the center of the farce was the Artist Formerly Known as Flat Breezy.   In Atlanta, Sherrill is bending the brim of his cap and apparently the flat brim was the source of his power.    Giving up 2 runs on 2 hits, a walk and two wild pitches, our boy George looked sad, sad, sad.

There was some excitement in the place when I went back for Braves v. Phillies.   For good reason, Philly Fever is running really high and the park was packed to overflowing with red-jerseyed fans.    When the home organist tried to play the charge song, it was na-na-Na-NA-na-NA!  [Dead Silence].   When Ryan Howard tagged a no-doubter onto the left-centerfield berm, the place went crazy.   Halladay was starting for Philadelphia and was totally in control, holding the Braves to 1 run over 5 innings.  Final:  Philles 6, Braves 1.   My last game opportunity, v. Nationals, rained out.

One tip, if you go to this facility, drive yourself and park near the lot exits.  While Disney is usually good at moving crowds of people and has reliable buses to everything else, it took 1 to 1.5 hours to get out of this place by bus.   Note to park designers:  If you going to cram nearly 11K folks into a 9500 capacity stadium, have several youth league events going on the back fields and have the whole thing let out at once, you need more than 2 lanes of outgoing traffic.

The bigger problem here is how 'Disney-fied' the baseball experience is.   They have corny theme music for every walk, hit batter, K or anything else.   Cheesy sound effects go with every foul ball.   Opposing team outs are followed by Pac-Man game-over noises.    It's amusing for half an inning and goes on the whole nine.   Between innings, they have a video crew doing lame game show things in the stands.   A visual flavor:

Austin Jackson and his pal, Mickey:

 

"The often-imitated, never-replicated, Atlanta Braves Philharmonic Saxophone Quartet"

And of course:

Sorry if you had to rinse after that last one.

My bottom line on all this tarting up is that a casual fan probably has a good time here.    If you are going to Disney for other reasons and just need a baseball fix, like I did, it's an acceptable price to pay for that.   But if you are in FL for a hard-core baseball geek Spring Training tour,  this is probably a stop you want to leave off the list.  It will ruin the vibe.

 

Save the Endangered Fan Post!   ONLY YOU can keep it from extinction.

Andrew_g’s piece yesterday on the O’s ‘extra 2%’ returned me to something I’ve been thinking about for a while.   I love to bash Peter Angelos as much as anyone, but whenever I have someone I like to bash my better nature asks “Could you really do better?”  Even in an egregious case like PA’s, I’m never sure I could.   I’m less well informed than most people.  I have less native intelligence.  I’m less quick thinking and have less reliable instincts.   I don’t have a history of especially prudent purchasing.   I don’t have particularly good luck.   It’s true, I’m heart-breakingly lovely to gaze upon, but I think that quality in a baseball owner, plus the ridiculous wealth I’m imagining for the scenario, might not be enough.

I’d need a basic instruction sheet to make it work.  So what would be on it?   It seems like it would have 3 basic pieces.   Determine the budget.   Make the commitment.   Execute the budget fully.

Step 1: Determine the budget

Do this by establishing simple benchmarks for each component. 

MLB salary:  Given zk’s post (here) about the correlation between the top spending and the top performers, set a number in the top ten spenders in the league.   Balancing 8 slots in the post-season against trying to keep the cost somewhat reasonable and build in incentive for efficiency, take the last year’s #8 figure, mark it up it by the CPI and this is the budget.

Draft funds:  Identify the budget from a successful draft year (say, the Matt Weiters year), mark it up for inflation too and this is the budget.

Scouting & development: Prior year’s budget plus 2%.   This is so that if andrew_g accepts my offer to work in the front office, I can say “See?  There, at least, is an extra 2%.”    Front office offers will be tendered to regular CC-ers who are willing to say goodbye to their day jobs, btw.

Step 2: Make the commitment.

Compare the resulting budget to the revenue stream and see if it allows for some profit or a loss small enough that I’m willing to pay that much to play with my toy ballclub.   If not, I sell the team.   If so, I commit to spending this amount in full every year for 12 years and never looking back.

Step 3: Execute the budget fully.

Establish the principle that every dollar of this budget will be spent in a cascading fashion.  The GM should spend available MLB salary dollars on FA acquisitions that make sense up to and never exceeding the limit.  The emphasis should be on making sense, not on the limit being unmet.   Any MLB salary dollars that are unspent will be made available to the next draft.   Money will NEVER go the other way (no robbing the draft to buy a FA).   This will resolve the verifiable fungibility question as a matter of policy, though we’ll still say ‘fungible’ a lot around the FO because it’s a fun word to say.

In turn, any draft funds not spent on the current year draft would roll down to scouting & development to be spent in full.   A high profile draftee doesn’t sign, make a major new investment.   Adam Loewen goes back for another year of JC, so you open an academy in Venezuela.   A lower dollar draftee decides to take up real estate instead, you put another scout on the ground in Japan or Korea.   But every dollar not invested in the visible structure of players is pumped into strengthening the foundation.

With these policies in place, I hire a GM for (barring genuine incompetence) 4 year terms like the president.   I then retire to my sky box and leave all other personnel & baseball decisions to her.  The only limit on her personnel control is that initial CC hires into the FO will require my approval to be fired.   I’ll still can your asses if the team has been losing, but I’ll make sure it’s done with love.

What do you think?   Could such a plan work, if someone rich were willing to implement it?   Would it be better than the ownership styles we see today around the league?

In the deep off-season, I usually need to read a couple books about baseball to get me through.   This year, the first one was It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts, Earl Weaver’s autobiography.    For anyone as late to the party as me, it’s a great read, structured to recount Earl’s conflicts with umpires, then with players then with opponents on the field.    The umpires section really turns on his glowing hatred for Lee MacPhail, who Earl claims always sided with umpires in his protests, regardless of the facts.  I wonder how Earl feels about our Andy. 

But I’ll assume most CC folks know this book, so I just want to highlight a couple quotes that really stand out for me.   The first comes during Earl’s recounting of his MiL playing days:

My personal statistics weren’t important to me.   It sounds like a lot of crap, but any time I went 3-for-4 and we lost, I was angry.   If I went hitless and we won, I was happy.  … I figured that if I did everything I could to help the team win and it did, I was doing a job that would eventually carry me to the big leagues.   Of course, if I was starting as a player now I would definintely concentrate on building good stats.   As I tell my players – you get nine guys on a ball club building good stats and you’re going to win. (pp.86-87

We’ll never be able to point to a single moment that is the dawn of stat-conscious understanding of baseball, but that epiphany by Earl when he got to be MLB manager is a candidate for it.

No one would confuse Earl with a small-ball manager.   But this book is great for underlining the fact that rejecting small-ball strategy can’t be confused with neglecting the “little things:”

We became very proficient at defensing the sacrifice bunt with a man on first and with men on first and second, and we worked hard on our pick-off plays; with a runner on second, with runners on first and second in a sacrifice-bunt situation, and with a runner on first in a sacrifice-bunt situation.   The pick-off plays require precise timing. (p.159)

[Of the 1973 team] The Orioles were no longer a power-hitting ballclub. …. We became a running club and a bunting-for-base-hits (we totaled 42) club.    You manage according to the abilities at your disposal and don’t ask anyone to do anything he isn’t capable of.  We had speed and we used it.  …  We ended up setting an Oriole record in leading the league with 146 stolen bases…  All of this led writers to ask ‘Isn’t it nice having all that speed?” To which I would reply ‘I’d rather have more three-run homers.’  (p.213)

This is a kind of intense pragmatism that’s getting lost in how we analyze baseball today.   We often want every player  to do everything.   I don’t think Earl would sweat that we lose some defense moving Luke Scott to left field to add a DH:

I firmly believe that I could assemble a group of scouts – people I’ve worked with—who in two years could put together an expansion team that would play well over .500 ball in its first season as a major-league club … Instead of selecting guys who may be good in three or four years, I’d take individuals who could play right away.   Guys who may be as slow as Kenny Singleton, but who can hit the ball out of the park.   Guys who can play defense and still know how to get on base by bunting for a hit or whatever.   Guys who can do one thing VERY well even if they are limited in other areas.  (p. 283)

I doubt  the WAR stat existed in 1972, (or even in 1982 when this was written) but Earl already believed in the concept:

I had to admit that if we’d kept Frank Robinson [in 72] – even if he had sustained the injuries with us that plagued him with the Dodgers – we would have won our fourth successive pennant.  Frank’s nineteen home runs would have won those six extra games we needed.  (p.202)

OK, so Frank’s calculated WAR for 1972 was only 2.0, but Earl had him for the years when it  exceeded 6 three times and topped at 8.3, so it’s an honest mistake. 

All these quotes capture Earl’s analysis but not his character.   So it’s best to stop with this incident from Berry Stainback’s introduction:

A writer asked Weaver why he hadn’t used the sacrifice bunt in the last game…  “ I put it on once and it was unsuccessful,” he said.  “The Yankees tried it three bleeping times and it was unsuccessful.   We kept getting the out and leaving he runner on first.   So please stick the sacrifice bunt up somebody’s ass and leave it there.”  (p.30)

There are so many day-trip opportunities to minor league ballparks from Baltimore, but I had only been to one. That was a stop out in Hagerstown for a Suns game on the way to a W. Virginia vacation. So with baseball unavailable for the break, but work leave to burn, I decided to correct that and took in the Baysox-Trenton Thunder game at Bowie.

Prince George's Stadium is a significant upgrade compared to Hagerstown's rickety antique Municipal Stadium. It is not noteworthy for style like Ripken Stadium or some of the Spring Training parks I've been to in Florida, but it is contemporary, clean and very comfortable. Great views, with a concourse behind that is open to the field. Nice place to spend 9.

The game initially looked to be a blowout. Nery had been scratched as the Baysox starter (don't know why, maybe his 10+ ERA?) in favor of Pedro Viola. Viola's fastball had good velocity, but it started out straight and he wasn't locating anything else. The result was 3 runs in the first 5 batters faced. But then he got settled, struck out the last 2 in the first.  He would end up striking out 5 and walking two, only giving up those 3 runs in 4 innings. Baysox scratched out one answering run in the first.   They got two more in the bottom of the fourth on a Caleb Joseph HR to take Viola out of the decision.

Then four quiet, scoreless innings. Prompted by James F's recent story, it gave me some time to look at SS Greg Miclat. He is a smart baserunner, so maybe he doesn't belong in this organization. He scratched out that first run single handedly.   He singled then made a heads up read on the LF's throwing error to get to second. He tagged his way to third then got a great break on a grounder to short to produce the run. He would single again in the eighth, separated by 2 lost-looking strikeouts.

James F wrote "he still needs to work on his defense, particularly his throwing." God, yes. His arm looked awful. In the sixth, he had to go two steps to his right, field across his body and throw from almost on the grass. He twisted his whole body into the throw and it bounced so short it pulled the 1B off the bag. Next batter, same chance but the twisting throw lofts way over the 2Bs head and into right field, turning an inning ending double play into 2nd and 3rd with one out. Great defense by catcher Steve Lerud later in the inning kept Trenton from scoring.

The solid 3-3 battle turned really ugly in the bottom of the eighth. The source of the mess? Our old friend, the bunt. Miclat is on first with no outs. Playing for the one run (all they would need to win? Ha!), 2B Ryan Adams BUNTS INTO A DOUBLE PLAY. It hurt to watch.

Top of the ninth, the tie game is in the hands of Bob McCrory.  Remember him?   I attended his disastrous MLB debut back in 2008, so I'm very confident. He walks the first batter. Then with the second batter trying to bunt, McCrory walks him too. They are giving up an out and he can't even take it. He threatens to walk another bunt attempt, but on 3-2 the bunt goes down the third base side. McCrory falls off the other way, 3B Brandon Waring breaks back to cover third and nobody is anywhere near the ball. Based loaded, no outs after TWO CONSECUTIVE BUNT ATTEMPTS. Bowie can neither execute nor field the thing. Of course, the wheels fly in all directions next. RBI single, 3 RBI triple. Then Waring misses the third out by failing to tag a runner he had dead to rights. 3 more preventable runs follow. 10-3 Thunder.

Waring came up in the bottom of the ninth and helped to clear his name with a 2 run homer. What a shot! Off the top of the scoreboard in left-center. But that was it for the comeback attempt. The final was 10-5.   It could have been more fun toward the end, but it sure beat a day at the office. I also rediscovered the joy of keeping score. If, like me, you used to do this religiously as a kid but stopped, try it again. It really keeps you in the game.

Some more pics.   Warm ups.  "The Oriole Way"

Bradon Waring loads up:

Catcher Caleb Joseph playing left field.

 

 

Pedro Viola delivers, with Miclat and Joseph behind him:

 

 

 

 

 

Before I start complaining, let me admit my own bit of the problem.    I'm slipping on attendance.   04 & 05 I started the season with Spring Training visits.  06 I didn't get out until the Nats/O's exhibition two days before Opening Day, and I felt late.    Then last year, I didn't get to the park until 3rd week of April.   This year, I didn't make it until yesterday -- IN MAY.    Birdland won't be it's true self until all the folks who feel hardcore inside are outside -- taking the air in the stands at OPACY. 

That said, I was admiring the new scoreboards yesterday.   You can, like, read what they say -- even in daylight at a bad angle (looking up from Eutaw Street Reserves).    A big step forward, I think and then ...  Kiss Cam.   I can't believe I'm actually watching this nonsense at my home park.    Let 'em do that crap in DC, I've believed in years past, but not HERE.     At first I'm encouraged by the lack of response.   We want sports trivia between innings, or least cartoon hot dogs running the bases -- something remotely baseball.   Right?  Then, some fools actually smooch.  The cheer is louder than when Adam Jones' shot cleared the left field wall.   Ugh.  That cheer is real crowd noise too.

I know pumped in crowd noise has been around since the 90s, but the park management needs to do something about it now.    Blended into real crowd noise, you don't notice so much.   In the quiet, empty place right now, the sudden bursts of shrill screaming are just plain disconcerting.     So obvious.   So WEAK.   It's enough to inspire your offense to only get three hits.    Create excitement on the field, don't try to manufacture it in the PA.   Do laugh tracks make bland sitcoms funny?  C'mon.

In good news, the Orioles Hall of Fade is again a Hall of Fame -- brand new plaques behind the scoreboard.     You can actually read Al Bumbry's inscription again.    That's the deal.  That's Birdland.    Honor the tradition and do the hard, smart organizational work to recreate it between the lines.     Whoever in the Warehouse approves tarting up Birdland with the other stuff can kiss somethin' you can't show on the Jumbotron.

 

 

Hey, all.   I've been lurking for a year or more and thought I should come out into the open.   I've figured out my furtive Erik Bedard thing isn't working.

I have a sticker on my van says "Proud Orioles Fan."    For years (old van) I've wondered why I have it, since there's been so little to be proud of.   Lately I realized I keep it on there because I'm proud to be a fan, regardless of the team on the field (current fluke set well aside).   If you're still an Orioles fan after the last decade it says something about loyalty, long memory, and perseverant hope tempered by a taste for good black humor (not to say voyeurism around trainwrecks, it's black humor, really it is, it is).    Over the course of my lurk, I've admired these qualities in the regular posters.  I'm glad to get to know ya.

I'm certain to spout old baseball, pre-SABRmetric myths from time to time and tend to forget to take off my rosy shades when evaluating talent.  Apologies in advance. 

I also really love parentheses (I don't know why).