A DLD for a second day in a row!? Unheard of! But it's really happening, because we clearly need something to take our minds off of baseball around here.

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After a dramatic week, and somehow pulling off a split in the four game series against the Angels, I'm sure everyone on the A's is hoping for a smooth, uneventful beatdown of the approximately last place Orioles (they are in a virtual tie with Toronto). You might point out that the A's are in last place as well, and with a worse record than Baltimore, but the Pythagorean records tell a much different story -- the Orioles have been significantly outscored this season while the A's have actually slightly outscored their opponents. Could that gap between the Oakland's expected record and their true record be due to Geren's mismanagement? (and maybe a little bit from that 14-0 blowout last week)

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These A's have been looking sort-of familiar lately, with their inability to score runs and pitching staff that refuses to ever give them up. The theory that Oakland pitching is enough to keep the team in contention will be severely tested in this series, when they go up against the slugging Chicago White Sox. Yeah, it is still very early in the season, but the White Sox have been putting up some really big offensive numbers – 62 runs scored! 11 home runs! team OBP is .367!! Will Braden, Cahill, and Anderson be able to shut down Dunn, Quentin, and Konerko?

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The A's are limping along after another series loss (but a pretty sweet performance from Cahill, who has suddenly decided to become a strikeout pitcher) but they now get to face another 2-4 team in Minnesota. In fact, things have been going even less well for the Twins, who have scored three fewer runs than Oakland while allowing nine more (some of that could be because they had to play a three game series at New York). The Rangers can't stay perfect forever, so let's hope that this is the weekend where the A's leave their slow start behind and start gaining ground in the AL West.

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Sorry, it's only the second series of the season and already the GOG is going up late. I have an excuse, which involves travel and my shocked refusal to pay extra for hotel internet in this day and age. So this is going to be a short one.

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Baseball baseball baseball. Baseball Oakland baseball baseball Athletics. Baseball baseball baseball baseball baseball!

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Hey! It's time for the baseball season and that means that the GOG is back! Actually, I really didn't give it any thought until a couple days ago. We are running out of time until opening day, so let's get started!

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Hey, it's my first GOG since 2009. I'm counting on the A's to make it a good one!

Oakland is in the midst of what passes for a hot streak this season. The Red Sox, on the other hand, have lost seven of their last ten and have a number of players on the DL that can only be described as “Larry Davis-ish”. There will still be an unacceptable number of Sox fans in the Coliseum, but hopefully they will all be sent home unhappy. Me? I'll be walking the fine line between friendly heckling and getting kicked of the apartment by my girlfriend.

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Over at fangraphs, they recently proposed a fun statistic for keeping track of relief pitcher performances: shutdowns and meltdowns (actually, the idea was first proposed by tangotiger on The Book blog, but I'm going with the fangraphs version of the stat). We saw the full range of reliever performances last night, so I figured it would be a good opportunity to try it out.

The basic idea is to come up with something that serves the same purpose as saves and holds, but isn't so stupid. I don't think it is controversial, even among statistical traditionalists, to point out that a closer who comes in for the ninth inning with a three run lead and manages to convert the save isn't all that impressive. Or that the tensest moment in a game might come in the seventh inning, with a one run lead, the bases loaded, and one out. In that situation, a strikeout or double play ground ball can swing the entire game.

The shutdowns/meltdowns stat uses Win Probability Added (WPA) to quantify each relief pitcher's effect on the game. Win Probability is exactly what it sounds like -- just use the historical record of baseball games to calculate the probability of a team to win the game, given the base/out state. For example, at the start of the 4th inning yesterday, with zero outs and the Rangers up 1-0, the A's Win Probability was 38.3%. Then, Cliff Pennington grounded out to the pitcher and that probability fell to 35.4%, as precious opportunities slipped away. It's important to note that not all plate appearances are treated equally by Win Probability. The out that Pennington made to start the 4th reduced Oakland's chances by 2.9% but Ryan Sweeney's strickout to end the inning was only cost 1.4%. This leads us to Leverage Index (LI). The LI for a plate appearance is a measure of how important that PA is, relative to an average situation. Pennington's out hurt more because the Leverage Index is higher at the start of an inning than later on in the inning (because it is easier to start a rally if there are few outs). Of course, the real fun with Leverage Index comes in the late innings of close games, where the game result hinges on individual at-bats.

More discussion of WPA can be found here or here. In the AN stats primer, danmerqury describes it as:

A statistic that sums up a player's contributions to winning a single game. For example, before a batter's plate appearance, the chances of his team winning the game are calculated, and subtracted from the chances of winning after the batter's plate appearance. This change can be added up for one game or a whole season.

(Actually, I feel like I'm sort of invading danmerqury's territory with this whole fANpost).

Ok, after all that introduction, let's get to the fun part. A shutdown is defined as any relief appearance where the pitcher contributes positive Win Probability of at least 6%. A meltdown is defined as whenever the relief pitcher contributes Win Probability less than -6%. Six percent doesn't sound like a whole lot, but it was chosen so that the total number of shutdowns in the league over the past few years would more or less match the total number of saves plus holds.

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The International System of Units (SI) needs a new prefix to denote 10^27 (right now it only goes up to yotta, for 10^24). A physics student at Davis has proposed a term that I am totally in favor of.

Austin Sendek, a physics student at UC Davis, wants the number of 10 to the 27th power -- a trillion trillions -- to officially become "hella" big.

So how much of something do you need to become hella? Well, suppose that Jack Cust continues to rack up STRICKOUTS at his 2010 pace of 185 per year. But now, instead of 185 STRICKOUTS per year, let's make it 185 per second. At that phenomenal rate, it would still take Cust 12.5 million times the current age of the universe to accumulate a hellawhiff. On the other hand, Jack will probably reach a kilowhiff sometime early in the 2012 season.

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It is time to wrap up the whole 2009 season, and the GOG along with it. This fANpost way freaking long. Scroll down to find answers and scores for GOG #00, an overview of the whole 2009 GOG, the final season standings, and awards.

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Because not having a DLD is barbaric...

Actually, the title references Penelope Spheeris' 1981 documentary about the Los Angeles punk scene. This was on my mind because of the death of Brendan Mullen earlier this week. Mullen founded The Masque, a club and rehearsal space in Hollywood that was the center of the first wave of LA punk bands. This is a link dump, so I will pass along a selection of the finest bands to come from the Masque scene.

• The Germs -- Lexicon Devil (live footage)
• The Alley Cats -- Nothing Means Nothing Anymore (live footage)
• The Bags -- Babylonian Gorgon (sorry, it's just audio, but the fact that this is like the best song ever should partially make up for it)
• The Middle Class -- Home Is Where (again, no video)
• The Weirdos -- We Got the Neutron Bomb (live footage)

But it's good to have some baseball links as well...

• The Hardball Times takes a look at some top prospects who played in the Southern and Texas leagues this last year. I'll let you guess who they are describing with this quote: "his power was every bit as devastating as advertised".
• Also from Hardball Times, a thorough look at the Venezuelan Patrol Craft. A friend of mine, who is a Rockies fan, is pretty unhappy with Oakland right now, on account of Huston Street's meltdown, but he really can't say anything bad about another part of the Holliday deal.

Dump away!

The season is coming to an end and, after yet another sweep at the hands of the Mariners, it just can't come soon enough.

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The time has come to buckle down! As of right now, the A's have 81 games in the loss column, meaning they need to win out to reach .500 for the season. Unfortunately, the green and gold is up against the Mariners, who have dominated Oakland to the tune of a .313 winning percentage. But those were the "Matt Holliday is a .200 hitter" A's of April, the "we just realized that maybe we should send Dana Eveland to AAA" A's of May, and the "getting rid of some dead weight" A's of August. Now the Mariners are up against the "Rajai Davis is Superman, and Eric Patterson is probably Batman or something" A's of late September, so do they even have a chance?

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It's the 50th GOG of the season! Thinking back to late April, where did we all think that we would be at this point? If I take a look here, I see that roughly 90% of us thought that these last series against the Angels would be a meaningful part of the division race.

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Sorry, but life has been throwing me curveballs lately, so this is going to be a short GOG. Hopefully this series will turn out like the last two, right?

Links

• Probable pitchers
• Rangers stats
• Grades are up for GOGs #47 and #48

GOG #49 :: Ranger Revenge? (21 points possible)

Four game series vs Texas Rangers -- September 21-24

UPDATE -- answers added below in bold

1. Series outcome [3 points] 2-2 split
2. Though Brad Ziegler doesn't have the same magic as he did last season, when he set the record for consecutive scoreless innings to start a major league career, he has actually been a better pitcher. The groundballs are still there, and the ridiculously low HR rate to go with it, plus he is striking out more hitters while walking fewer. The fact that his ERA is up to 3.15 in 2009 can be explained by his BABIP, which went from .246 in 2008 to .355 in 2009. And that is really a comment on Oakland's infield defense (and a dash of luck), not anything wrong with Ziggy. Predict his IP/K/BB for these four games [2 points each] 2.1 IP, 2 K, 3 BB
3. Ian Kinsler is proving himself to be a star player, with his second consecutive season at 4 WAR. Comparing this year to the last one, there are some significant differences, however. His BABIP is way way down, falling from .339 in 2008 to .246 this year. Ordinarily we might chalk that all up to bad luck (and I'm sure there is some luck component in there), but part of it seems to be a real change. While Kinsler's HR per fly ball ratio is up a bit this year, the main reason that he is about to break the 30 HR mark is because he is hitting a lot more fly balls than he did in the past. His fly ball rate is up from his previous norm of 43-45% to almost 55%, and the batted ball category that has declined is line drives. A big reduction in the number of line drives he is hitting surely accounts for part of the drop in BABIP, and his batting line has suffered as a result. It will be interesting to see if this is a one year fluctuation, or if it really represents the new Ian Kinsler. Anyway, the question is to predict his hits, home runs, and line drives for the series [2 points each] 1 H, 0 HR, 1 line drive (for a game ending double play)
4. How many plate appearance for Travis Buck in the series? Does he record a hit? [3 points for the first question, +-1 for the second question] 6 plate appearances and he did get a hit
5. Which Gonzalez posts a better game score, Edgar or Gio? [+1 if right, -1 if wrong] Gio's start was moved back a day, so he didn't pitch and this question doesn't count. But even Gio could have probably done better than Edgar Gonzalez's game score of 21.
6. As a team, the Rangers have almost identical numbers hitting against righties (.770 OPS) and lefties (.771 OPS). In this series, do they score more runs against the A's righties or lefties (counting starters and relievers)? [+1 if right, -1 if wrong] Waaaay more runs scored off of right handed pitchers, which isn't surprising because the righties threw waaaay more innings.

Game 1 starts at 7:05 pm. Don't swing and miss!

Results

Just catching up on some grading...

Overall scoring statistics

• mean = 4.41667 points
• standard deviation = 3.17543 points
• mode = 5 points

via cfcp.uchicago.edu

Your Scores

The big winner is Rated-R Superstar! The big loser? That would be me.

I must have seen the future because the title of the last GOG was "Ruin The Rangers", and the Athletics definitely just did that to any hopes that Texas has of making the playoffs. Of course, in my actual GOG entry I had Texas winning the series 2-1, so maybe claims of psychic ability should be taken with a grain of salt.

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Heading into today's game, the Athletics record against the Texas Rangers sits an even 6-6. This three game set, plus a four game series next week in Oakland, will make the difference between having to acknowledge that the Rangers were just a flat out better team than Oakland this year, or being able to cling to a winning head-to-head record. On top of that, Texas is still hanging on to the wild card race, four games behind Boston. Let the spoiling begin!

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While this series might not look like much at first glance -- the Twins trail Detroit by 5.5 games with 22 left to play -- there is one very significant milestone here. After Sunday's series finale, the A's will never have to play another game in the Metrodome!

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I hope you all had a nice extended weekend. Now it's back to work on the GOG...

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Well, every year there is that one team. The team that seems to bring out the worst in the Athletics. We all know that the lovable muppets haven't been very good at playing baseball this year, but there have definitely been bright spots too. It just seems like none of those bright spots show up against the Seattlites. Am I exaggerating, focusing too much on a couple bad games or bad innings? Yep, definitely. But, even though we are missing Felix this time around, I not looking forward to these next four games.

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September is here (well, it will be here tomorrow at least), so the A's schedule is packed full of the AL West. I'm really not looking forward to any more games against Seattle, but we can take solace in the series starting today against the woeful Kansas City Royals. As usual, Posnanski puts it best:

But this Royals team reminds me of that 1993 Mets team in this way — they are not without talent. But they will do what’s necessary to lose games. The 2005 Royals went out there every day knowing that the team across the dugout was better than they were. These Royals, on the other hand, are bad when Zack Greinke’s pitching. They are also bad when they score five runs in a game (4-10 record in those games if you can believe that). They don’t SCORE five runs in a game very often … but they still find ways to lose when they do.
...
They are also — and I admit this is an unofficial stat but I’m pretty confident about it — the league leader in times a player forgot the number of outs. The other day, catcher Miguel Olivo ran off the field with two outs which was staggering not because it was unusual (it has to be the third time this year Olivo has forgotten the number of outs) but because only two batters had come to the plate. It wasn’t like it was a long inning or something.
...
They are also — and I admit this is an unofficial stat but I’m pretty confident about it — the league leader in times a player forgot the number of outs. The other day, catcher Miguel Olivo ran off the field with two outs which was staggering not because it was unusual (it has to be the third time this year Olivo has forgotten the number of outs) but because only two batters had come to the plate. It wasn’t like it was a long inning or something.

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I really don't like the AL West this season. That last series was just the latest in a string of bad Oakland performances against their division rivals. As of right now, the A's are a .364 team when playing against Seattle, Texas, or LAAA. So it is with a heavy sense of dread that I consider the upcoming four game set in Anaheim.

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The Athletics are heading up to Seattle to take on their closest competition in the AL West, the third place Mariners. The Mariners don't look so hot right now, 12 games back from the first place Angels and below .500 for the last month or more. But, before you start to feel any sympathy for the fishermen, think back to the start of the season, when we were young and naive, and thought that Holliday, Giambi, and Cust would make a fearsome heart of the batting order. Back then, in early April, the Mariners came into Oakland and swept the place clean, putting a sour taste in my mouth that has persisted all season.

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This weekend, the A's finish off their season series against Detroit. Their record so far against Detroit is a 2-4, so it would take a series sweep to get into the positive column. The Tigers will be trying very hard to avoid that outcome, as they are perched only 2.5 games above the White Sox. And... that's all the analysis I have right now.

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Well, I thought that I would have plenty of time to whip up an awesome GOG, considering that I'm stuck in the Santiago airport for pretty much the whole day. But the internet ended up much spottier than the last time I was here, and I forgot to include a plug converter in my carry-on, so about half a GOG is all you'll get.

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