Gone are Reed and Poveda

Report: Rangers acquire Cantu for two minor-leaguers

Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports, who has an amazing record of accuracy when it comes to stories involving the Rangers, says Jorge Cantu is coming to Arlington from Florida for right-handers Evan Reed and Omar Poveda. No word yet from the club.

-- Jeff Wilson

Read more: http://startelegramsports.typepad.com/foul_territory/2010/07/report-rangers-acquire-reed-for-two-minorleaguers.html#ixzz0v6d5EoBf

Is it better for a pitcher to start in the bullpen or should we throw him to the wolves and let him figure things out in the rotation?

 

I examined the 20 pitchers that have received at least 1 first place vote for Cy Young since 1990.  I wanted to know whether or not highly successful pitchers broke into the majors as starters or were eased in via the bullpen.

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Every time I see someone complain that the Rangers are moving Derek Holland back to the bullpen or back to the rotation with exasperated "WHY WON'T THEY JUST PICK  ROLE FOR HIM AND LEAVE HIM THERE!!!!!!!!!" frothing from their imaginary mouths, I think to myself, "self, why does it matter?  Throwing a baseball is throwing a baseball."

So I decided to dive into some numbers and see what they said about pitchers in Holland's position.

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With about a month left until I head back to work (and a month and a week until the kids come back), I'm looking at finally getting around to writing a script to automatically send out an alert when the no hitter watch is on.  Here's how my back of the envelope plan looks:  Script reads in a webpage that has all the game linescores for that day.  Script scans the linescores looking to see if a game has any hits.  Once a certain inning is reached (possibly user definable?) an alert gets sent out via rss/twitter/email.  The email contains teams, inning, score, and pitcher with the no-no going. 

I wrote a little program to scan minor league teams for statistics off thebaseballcube so I'm not completely out of my element on this one.  The only technical hurdle will be learning how to post to twitter/rss.  That's doable.

Poll

Would You Use a No Hitter Alert Service?

40%

Yes

22 votes

60%

No

33 votes

55 votes | Poll has closed

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJD8k2hgRmU

Playing Hardball with Ron Stalinovich, career minor leaguer. 

When you go to the ballpark, are you seriously gonna pay 4.50 for a hotdog?

Links to the other videos (and an AWESOME '86 Mets music video)

Commercials for Easton bats.  The other videos feature Carlos Zambrano, Andre Ethier, Brad Hawpe, and Matt Kemp.  Watching Zambrano in the "taking one for the team" video is delightful.

 

Released by the Nationals.

He lost the last two years to injuries after a really nice 2005.  Now 30, he's lost a chunk of velocity and isn't likely to ever regain his past form.                                        

cribbed from rotoworld:
"Nationals released RHP John Patterson.
Stunning. Obviously the Nationals shared the same concerns about Patterson's lack of velocity that we did, but he still looked like their probable Opening Day starter and they'll only save about $600,000 by cutting him. They're left with a rotation of Shawn Hill, Jason Bergmann, Tim Redding, Odalis Perez and either Matt Chico or John Lannan. They'll probably need both young lefties initially with Hill likely to open up on the DL."

The Rangers currently lead the majors in HR with 64.  That puts them on pace to hit 230, tied for 24th most in the history of baseball.

Amongst the 24 teams to have hit more than 230 HRs in a season, 17 finished with records above .500.  The overall winning percentage of these teams was .532 (86-76).  To reach 86 wins, the current Rangers would need to win 58% of their remaining games (68-49).

Switching gears...

Since the change to the divisional playoff format in 1969, 142 teams have finished May with a .400 winning percentage or worse (they finished the year with an average winning percentage of .415).  

Of those teams, four of them came back to reach the playoffs (3%).  Most recently, the Houston Astros won the Wildcard in 2005 despite starting the year off 19-32.  The others to come back from a horrible first three months were 1989 Toronto Blue Jays, the 1981 Kansas City Royals, and the 1974 Pittsburgh Pirates

Three women played in the Negro Leagues.

Replacing Hank Aaron, Toni Stone played 2B in 50 games and hit .243 in 1953 for the Indianapolis Clowns.

Mamie Johnson pitched herself to a 33-8 record in three years between 1953-55 also for the Clowns.

After selling Stone's contract to the Kansas City Monarchs in 1954, Connie Morgan played two years at 2B.

cribbed from texasrangers.com:

The Rangers have placed pitcher Kevin Millwood on the disabled list with a strained left hamstring muscle.

The move is retroactive to April 29. Reliever Wes Littleton was called up from Triple-A Oklahoma. Mike Wood, who started against the New York Yankees on Thursday, is replacing Millwood in the rotation

Cribbed from rotoworld:

Manager Ron Washington said Monday that he likes Ian Kinsler hitting seventh against right-handers.

Kinsler should never have been hitting ninth against them in the first place, so moving him up a couple spots is at least a start. "Everybody kept asking me when I was going to move him up. Well, I jumped him two spots," Washington said. "To go any farther, though, he's going to have to move past some veteran hitters. When he does that, it will be safe to say 'He's arrived.'"

He's not quite as high as some of us think, but Washington's certainly not saying that he won't move up higher.  I'm satisfied for now.

1/22 - Dwayne Jarrett(WR) - USC - Whereas Ted Ginn reminds me of Steve Smith, Dwayne Jarrett reminds me of Keyshawn Johnson.  I think he has the talent to be a top notch possession receiver that goes over the middle to make tough catches for about a decade.

2/53 - Quentin Moses(LB) - Georgia - He's free falling because of concerns about his work ethic.  He originally looked like he could have been a top 10 pick.  I like Bobby Carpenter as much as the next guy, but I think he can play any of the LB positions.  

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http://tinyurl.com/2glukr

Lofton, CF
Cat, DH
Young, SS
Teixeira, 1B
Blalock, 3B
Kinsler, 2B
Wilkerson, LF
Cruz, RF
Laird, C

GMJ, CF
Cabrera, SS
Vlad, DH
Anderson, LF
Kotchman, 1B
Kendrick, 2B
Izturis, 3B
Molina, C
Willits, RF
                                                                                                                                               

I had major issues with OOTP2006 to the point that this was the first time I haven't pre-ordered the game in about 4-5 years.  Today they released the new version to people who pre-ordered.  Anybody here buy a copy of it?  Early thoughts?  Anyone else waiting for the reviews before jumping in?  

http://www.ootpbaseball.net/ for those with no idea what I'm talking about.

Wow.  VCU showed some real chutzpah at the end of that game.  After getting beat for layups two straight possessions, I guess I can see how Duke might play a little bit off of him, but he had no pressure when he stopped at the FT line and took that shot.

Always nice to get Bob Knight out of the tournament as early as possible.  Hopefully nobody want to ask him to do any studio work.  Even though Indiana fired him, I still can disassociate them enough to not hate the Hoosiers.

How about Marquette's inability to score?  they made 15 field goals all game, 10 of them were from 3pt range.  That's just terrible.

As the first major sporting event I've watched in HD, I'm now totally sold on its greatness.

What the hell?  Dallas is getting their head handed to them by friggin Golden State.  Down 15 with under 4 minutes to go in the 2nd quarter.  Don Nelson has their number this year.

I was looking at how much a couple tickets for the Phoenix game would be.  Upwards of 1000 bucks for floor seats.  Jeez.

From the Spring Training Game notes:

http://presspass.mlb.com/pp_viewer.asp?d=32033

Individual game tickets for Rangers home games in 2007 went on sale Friday.  The club sold 124,838 tickets on the first day and Open Day against Boston on April 6 is sold out.  In 2006 on the first day of sales the club sold 120,525 tickets and two years ago sold 112,297 tickets.

Good to see an ever so slight increase in sales from last year.  Kind of surprising to see that ticket sales were so low in 2005 when the team was coming off the 89 win season.

I didn't get opening night tickets (I don't think I could have gone anyway), but did get really nice seats for the first game of the D-rays series (section 39, row 1).  For anyone not in the know, the Rangers Inside Pitch newsletter sent out a coupon code where people could buy tickets early.  They usually send out codes a couple other times per year for half price tickets.

Cribbed from my leader

Even if Nowak had succeeded in impressing Jodie Foster, or whatever the guy's name is, the diaper detail is a chubby-killer for most men.

Certainly my John Lennon joke couldn't have been in bad taste if its copied by a serious professional news journalist, radio host, and soon to be television superstar.

From here, there are two interesting directions for this diary: 1) Crazy Astronaut Woman Talk -or- 2) Talk about Gordo's upcoming television show and predictions on how quickly it gets canceled.

Non-interesting directions for the thread include: "Dark Humor isn't Funny".

Per Sean Bass

The Rangers agreed to one year contracts with Aki, Bauer, and Brad Wilkerson.

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Norm just called into the Hardline saying that Sammy Sosa is in town talking to the Rangers.

Ugh.  No thanks.
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So, on the missed FG, Martin Grammatics, all 5'2" 104 lbs of him, tried to block Jordan Babineaux only to be brushed aside with little effort.  Think Chris Chris, 6'5" 220, could have held that block for a half second longer and allowed Romo to get the first down?

Between a big money kicker not being able to do anything to the point of being released, the blocked FG in Washington, signing a guy off the street that hadn't kicked in 2 years, to the bobbled snap, the Cowboys kicking game was really wheels off this year.

The argument goes something like this:  "The Rangers play in a top 5 media market so their payroll should be on par with other teams that play in top 5 media markets."  I'll be upfront.  I think this argument is bullshit.  Its really not even true, Baltimore-DC is bigger, but its split up for whatever reason, but I digress too soon.  The purpose of this post is to explain why I hate this argument.

First, the market is too spread out.  The DFW Metroplex is, by area, the 4th largest metropolitan area in the country at 8991 sq miles behind Chicago, Houston, and Phoenix.  Places like New York, LA, Boston, Detroit, and Philadelphia are sometimes half as large in size.  This means that it takes far effort for fans on the outskirts to get to games.  While the number of people who may have the potential to be fans of the team is relatively high, the actual number of people who live close enough that they're willing to put in the effort to regularly go to games is significantly smaller, and will continue to shrink as Far North Dallas continues to grow.  Placing the team in Dallas or Fort Worth would have only exacerbated this problem.  

Next, ticket prices.  Simple put, the Rangers do more with less than any team in the league.  The average Rangers ticket cost $15.81 last year, or 28th in the league behind only Colorado and Kansas City.  Meanwhile, Boston, the Cubs, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Houston, and the White Sox all had ticket prices more than $10.00 higher.  The Rangers were $6.40 cheaper than the league average or 40% below league average.  

The simple solution would seem to be "raise ticket prices" to increase revenue.  Another part of the "top 5 media market" is "they drew more than 2 million people last year they're screwing the fans!"  Its true, the Rangers drew 2.4 million fans in 2006 good for 17th most in the league.  At the current ticket price level, the Rangers are just slightly below league average in drawing fans.  Jacking ticket prices 40% would probably cause the loss of a good number of those fans.  As it is, they were 26th in Ticket Revenue (37.8MM) ahead of only perennial powerhouses Pittsburgh, Colorado, Tampa Bay, Florida, and Kansas City.

Payroll has to come from somewhere.  If we look at the percentage of player payroll coming from ticket revenue (revenue/payroll), 55% of the Rangers payroll is paid for by ticket sales.  Sounds pretty good, right?  They ought to be more competitive!  Did I mention that St. Louis, the Cubs, and Boston all bring in more in ticket revenue than they spend on player payroll?  Or that the Rangers percentage is 3rd lowest in the league behind Atlanta (who has the most exposure in the country via TBS) and Kansas City (who doesn't care and gets a giant check from the other owners every year)?  If the Rangers spent at the same percentage with those clubs, they'd have a 30 million dollar payroll.

In short, to spend like St. Louis, the White Sox, Mets, or Dodgers, Texas would need to increase ticket prices by about 10 dollars a seat while at the same time managing to attract an extra 10,000 people to each game.  Good luck.  To increase payroll enough without increasing ticket prices would require that they draw an extra 32,000 people per night (have to add some standing room only seats) and shatter the all-time attendance mark in major league baseball with 5,000,000 paid attendance.

The next time somebody rants on TV, Radio, the Newspaper, or this very forum about how low the payroll is, ask yourself if you'd keep going to the same number of games if tickets were twice as expensive.  I probably wouldn't, and I know a hell of a lot of people who'd throw their hands up in disgust and never set foot in the stadium.

About half-way down

Bob claims the Rangers have no interest in improving the team, says basically all they've done is sign Gagne and Lofton, and that those 1-year deals don't count.  

Excuse me?

Did he miss McCarthy?  Catalanotto?  Signing Millwood to a big contract last year?  Signing Padilla to a big contract this year?  If they're not trying to win why wouldn't they just let Padilla walk and go with a rotation of Wasdin-Diamond-Volquez-Danks-Dickey?

He and Dan have an agenda against the Rangers.  I can't recall the last time they said a positive word about them.  It would be one thing if one of them had that anti-Rangers agenda and the other one at least played the devil's advocate that maybe Tom Hicks isn't looking for a way to break in and steal your tv, have sex with your daughter, and kick your dog.  Instead even when they try to talk about the game from the day before, the segment always ends with them complaining about how "this team is in a top five market and they should be spending more money".

What they need is to have Jamey Newberg on as a special guest once a week during the off-season and 2-3 times a week during the season to provide some counterbalance to their vitriol.

I got mine.  Two up in the corner.  But that's okay, its not gonna be me that sees the game.  It'll be some schlep that pays 2 1/2 times what I paid.

Best I can tell, they were sold out in under 9 minutes this morning.

Now, if I haven't thoroughly jinxed it, they need to beat the crap out of Philly to wrap up the division while New Orleans wins out so the Saints get the bye.

I read this off Tom Tango's blog the other day and never got around to posting it.  I think he makes some really interesting points.

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/market_value/

Free agency is not "market value".  The market is made up of free agency, and arbitration-eligible players and slave wages.  Just because the free agent price is 4 million$ per marginal win (i.e., an average player who is a free agent would make 8 million$, plus an extra 4 million$ for every win above average) does not mean you have to pay for that.  Here's everything I wrote on a recent USSM thread discussing Richie Sexson:

In his article, Kevin Sherrington compared Matsuzaka's overuse to Kerry Wood.  I'm not sure its a totally fair comparison as Wood had already deteriorated before Matsuzaka's age.  So instead I decided to look at similar pitchers in the modern era who had high workloads early in their careers.

Since 1980, there have been 8 pitchers who threw at least 1200 innings by the end of the season they turned 26.  4 of them had more than Matsuzaka's 1402 IP.

Bret Saberhagen - 1464 IP
Dwight Gooden - 1523.7
Fernando Valenzuela - 1554.7
Greg Maddux - 1442
John Smoltz - 1223.3
Mark Buehrle - 1224
Mike Witt - 1228
Steve Avery - 1222

(That's 9 Cy Youngs and 34 All-Star apperanaces.  Very Impressive.)

As Sherrington wrote, durability is a concern.  Lets look at the injury history for each:

Saberhagen - nagging injuries throughout career.  Never pitched more than 200 innings after 25th birthday
Gooden - Shoulder problems along with drugs derailed his career.
Valenzuela - Dead arm starting in 1988 that he never really recovered from.  Weight issues may have prematurely ended career.
Maddux - No major injury concerns, started at least 30 games 17 of 20 seasons, never started less than 25.  Finesse pitcher rather than fireballer may protect his arm from injury.
Smoltz - elbow issues culminating in Tommy John Surgery forced him out of rotation following 1999 season.  Even before then he missed significant time on the DL with arm troubles
Buehrle - No major injuries through first 6 full seasons.
Mike Witt - Dead arm in 1987, never won more than 10 games after age 28 season.
Steve Avery - injured muscle under shoulder in age 23 season and never pitched more than 175 innings again.

At first glance, the list of pitchers is highly impressive, but its also a Who's Who list of star young pitchers who fell off the map due to injuries.

Going into this study, I was thinking that surely there were plenty of pitchers who threw a lot of pitches that ended up just fine.  After looking at these numbers, I have grave concerns about putting up big money for Matsuzaka.

cribbed from Rotoworld:

Dodgers declined RHP Eric Gagne's $12 million option for 2007.

He gets a $1 million buyout and becomes a free agent. The Dodgers are expected to make Gagne an offer to keep him, but a club such as Boston, Texas or Cleveland could make a larger bid for his services. Even though he's trying to come back from both elbow and back surgery, putting his future in doubt, he's still at least as good of a bet as any reliever available in free agency.

Really?

Jeffry Loria hates Joe Girardi.

Especially if the Rangers blow things up, I'd be quite interested in making a move for him if he becomes available.

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