Nationals Arm Race

Andrelton Simmons put up what most consider the best defensive season of 2013. Photo via espn.go.com

The recent years have been a rise in all sorts of statistical analysis in the game of baseball (as we all know), and one of the more important areas of research has been the measurement and tracking of defensive metrics.  The data we have at our disposal is not yet infallible, but the data has opened our eyes to the real impact that some major leaguers have on the defensive side of the ball.

We’re all quite familiar with the WAR-based arguments that have completely consumed last year’s AL MVP award voting as an example of modern statistics helping to shape the selection of a traditional award winner.  However, up until 2013, the Gold Gloves remained an award that was given out without practically any consideration given to any advanced metric, and the awards have been embarassed in recent years with some amazingly inept selections.  The two most laughable selections of recent memory were Rafael Palemeiro in 1999 (given a Gold Glove for his play at 1B despite the fact that he only played 28 games in the field that  year) and Derek Jeter in 2010 (a year in which he posted a -5.1 UZR/150, was dead last among all 59 AL shortstops in Total Zone Total Fielding and had the selection was openly mocked by the normally staid Baseball-Reference.com website).   Even the more defensible gold gloves over the past few years have been considered “wrong” by the stat-crowd, to the point where a number of national writers openly mock the awards and go out of their way to “ignore” th em.

This concerns me as a fan, and as someone who is keenly interested in the Hall of Fame merits of players.  I absolutely believe that when it comes time to judge players on the whole of their careers, that individual awards such as the Gold Gloves, MVP and Cy Young awards matter.  I want these awards to be relevant and properly awarded.

Two things have happened lately that give me hope:

1. Bill James and a varied panel of baseball writers, statisticians in the field and former players now vote on The Fielding Bible awards each year.  The 2013 Fielding Bible awards are not league specific; they recognize the best in the majors at each position each year.
2. The Gold Glove award committee for the first time in 2013 has incorporated a statistical element to the traditional surveying of players and coaches to choose the award winners.

(All winners/leaders listed below are on one common Google XLS here.  Listed are the winners of the GGs, Fielding Bibles, and then the leaders in each league by position of these Defensive stats: UZR/150, DRS, FRAA, and Total Zone.  I haven’t gone into the various definitions and pros/cons of these stats; I have a planned off-season defensive statistical overview post where I’ll go into greater detail).

First off, if you believe that the Fielding Bible panel has picked the best possible awardees, then you’ll be happy to note that every Fielding Bible award winner also received a Gold Glove this year.  Here’s the Fielding Bible winners by position for 2013:

Now, here’s the Gold Glove winners, with the Fielding Bible award winners bolded:

As you’ll see below by looking at the various defensive metrics out there, most of the Gold Glove winners were merited.  In fact, there only seems to be one egregiously bad selection here (which we’ll get to below).  Nearly every other winner was at the top of one or more of the advanced metrics available by position for his league:

UZR/150 leaders per league (again, with Fielding Bible winners bolded):

Defensive Runs Saved leaders per league:

FRAA Leaders per league:

And lastly here’s the Total Zone Total Fielding leaders:

So, after looking at all these leaders, lets talk a bit about the Gold Gloves and ask ourselves whether they did a good job representing the best defenders this year.  Position by position:

Catcher: Salvator Perez is as good an AL pick as any; the only other AL catcher in the mix is Matt Weiters.  On the NL side, Jadier Molina has earned his reputation and backs it up on the metrics side.  His only challenger being the little known Wellington Castillo from Chicago.

1st Base: Hosmer and Goldschmidt seem as good of picks as any; only Mike Napoli and Anthony Rizzo seemed close in either league.  Napoli may have been a better pick than Hosmer on the weight of the evidence.

2nd Base: There’s several decent candidates who were not honored, but I don’t think anyone is arguing vehimently against either Pedroia or Phillips as the winners.  Darwin Barney may be the most egreiged candidate.

Shortstop: the amazing Andrelton Simmons led every possible statistical category; there was no chance he was losing.   J. J. Hardy‘s selection wasn’t bad per se, but as you can see from the above tables four different AL shortstops led each of the four statistical measures.  None of them was Hardy though, making you wonder if his gold glove was slightly on reputation.

3rd Base: One day Manny Machado will move back to short (maybe) and challenge Simmons for the title of “Best Shortstop in the Game.”  But for now he has to settle for easily being the best defensive 3B in the game.  As with Simmons, Machado led every possible defensive measure at his position.  On the NL side, the choice of Nolan Arenado was a sound one, with only Juan Uribe really challenging him.  Thankfully the award didn’t go to someone like David Wright or our own Ryan Zimmerman based on reputation.

Left Field: Alex Gordon was a sound choice; the NL choice of Carlos Gonzalez may have been a disservice to one Starling Marte.  However, picking individual positions for the OF is somewhat tough, especially for the corners.  Fangraphs lists RF winner Gerardo Parra as a left-fielder for some reason.

Center Field: Carlos Gomez is a great pick (and is one of the reasons I posted my “Why no MVP support for Gomez” post in this space, which by the way, got almost no reaction from the readership…).   Adam Jones was nearly dead last in some of these range metrics and unfortunately has gotten this award via reputation (and his arm; still one of the best) as opposed to performance.   Jones is clearly the “Derek Jeter” of 2013, and the voters really erred badly on his selection.   Its hard for me to say who I would have preferred; Jacoby Ellsbury is the biggest name among the four guys who led the four different defensive numbers, but Ellsbury’s arm is weak (nearly last of any CF in the league) and a better candidate would have been Leonys Martin.

Right Field: Gerardo Parra and Shane Victorino are the leading candidates for their leagues and both selections are warranted.  I know that Hunter Pence led the NL in FRAA, but his arm is awful (one of the worst of any RF in the league), so that has to count against him.   In fact, Victorino was as good as or better than Parra in most of these metrics (with the exception of Arm; Parra has one of the better arms in the league).  I’m guessing its arm strength that tipped the Fielding Bible balance to Parra.

—

Conclusion: I think the Gold Gloves did a pretty good job in 2013 of identifying the best overall defenders at each position.  With one significant exception (Adam Jones).  I think its time the sportswriters who have been purposely ignoring the awards come back into the fold.

Now that the WS is over, the official off-season begins.  Since a number of key dates related to player movement are based on the end of the world series, now we can officially list the key upcoming dates.

This document is also available in the links section to the right-hand side of the blog (see the 2013-14 MLB Off Season Calendar link).  I’ve uploaded it to Google XLS.  A few of the dates listed here are estimates or based on the day they occurred last year.  The XLS has urls to back up some of these dates.

Ortiz is the 2013 WS MVP and drinks from very large bottles. Photo AP via usatoday.com

So, as we wind down the 2013 World Series, one in which Boston star David Ortiz performed at levels rarely seen and earned the WS MVP as a result, a familiar narrative is sprouting up.  Stop me if you’ve heard it;

“David Ortiz is a known PED user.”

And thus his accomplishments (and eventual Hall of Fame case) are forever tarnished.

Here’s the thing: what “proof” exactly is there that David Ortiz used PEDs?

(You know, David Ortiz, who just came in 3rd in the Boston mayoral race).

As far as I can tell, the source for the allegations against David Ortiz is this NY Times article, dated July 30 2009 by writer Michael Schmidt.   Go ahead and read that article and tell me where exactly there is definitive proof of any positive test?  Here’s a couple of salient quotes from the article which encompass the “proof” that compelled this writer to forever trash the reputations of these players:

• “…according to lawyers with knowledge of the results.”   
• “The lawyers spoke anonymously because the testing information was under seal by a court order. “
• “The lawyers did not identify which drugs were detected.”

Hmm.  This sounds awfully thin to me.  Anonymous lawyers who claimed to have “knowledge of the results” of the 2003 surveys, who did not go on record and didn’t identify the supposed substance.  AND, to make matters even worse, these lawyers were knowingly breaking federal laws by disclosing information that was a) supposed to be confidential and b) at the time under seal.

Why would anyone believe this?

In the same story, Ortiz “confirmed the report” but if you read exactly what he said, he didn’t admit to testing positive.  He “confirmed that the union told him that the report was true.”  That’s not an admission of usage of a PED.  That’s just acknowledging that he was told his name was apparently on some list.  And as noted later on (and referenced in the link at the bottom of this blog), MLB and the Union have since stated that some players on “the list” never tested positive; they were just on the list as having being tested.  Or even worse (as is noted in the above link), “… in 2003, legally available nutritional supplements could trigger an initial ‘positive’ test under our program.”   Furthermore, the commissioner of MLB released a statement openly questioning the 2003 results as well in 2016.

Think about that.  Ortiz could have been drinking some supplement that was legal then, is legal now, but which triggered a positive test.  Ortiz has vehemently denied initially or ever using anything illegal whenever it has been brought up since.  Of course, those denials run shallow considering that every PED-suspected user denies in the same way.

Ortiz does not appear in The Mitchell Report; go ahead and search its 409 exhausting pages and there’s no mention of him.  Nor does Manny Ramirez (ed; corrected after the fact; i had written Manny Rodriguez), who was also outed in the 2009 NY Times article.  Ramirez’ reputation has since been sullied through his own stupidity and multiple subsequent positive tests … but I can’t help but wonder if Ortiz wasn’t being unfairly targeted by some faceless “lawyer with knowledge” who could very well have been a die-hard New York Yankees fan (this is the New York Times after all, and these proceedings were all conducted in New York City) with an axe to grind.

You may think this is a cynical approach.  You may have blind faith that the journalist in question took his “sources” to his editors, who should have vetted the information and made the decision to publish based on such anonymous quotes.  And to that I say, you’re a fool if you think that all journalists are prim and proper and squeaky clean in terms of their morals.   You don’t know these people, you don’t know who their sources are, and you don’t know the motivations behind the breaking of federal laws in order to … do what exactly?  Purposely tarnish the career of a player who didn’t do anything to anybody, and who apparently may not have even used the damn PEDs in the first place.

I find it troubling, that a man’s career, legacy and reputation are basically shot because of some unconfirmed report.   If this was in a court of law, the “evidence” against Ortiz would be considered so thin that any right-minded judge would dismiss the case outright before it even began.

Ortiz commented on this topic in an SI piece recently and I can’t help but agree with his take on the situation.  He felt helpless, he (claims) not to have ever  heard anything about a positive test until his name appears in the New York Times.  He claims that he’s asked repeatedly for additional proof, for the name of the drug he supposedly tested positive for … and has never been told!  Think about that.  The people who hold the evidence that has destroyed his legacy are refusing to give him details about his own test and his own career.

I’m not the only one with this view: Ken Rosenthal discusses many of the same facts in this May 2013 article.

Anyway.  I feel Ortiz may have been unfairly thrown under the bus in the post Steroid-era mania of discovery, and judging a man based on “proof” this weak continues to trouble me.  Feel free to comment if you have better information than I do about his supposed “positive test.”

(Editor note: Ha; I forgot to publish this prior to last night’s game.  I would have been right 🙂

Well, I was 4-for-4 leading up to game 5 predictions … and was wrong.  I thought St. Louis could break out against the weakened Clay Buchholz.  But they couldn’t do anything against a clearly laboring Buchholz, doing nothing against mid 80s fastballs throughout the night.  Wainwright made some mistakes that cost him (0-2 hanging curve in the 1st, then not pitching around David Ortiz being early, simple examples).

In the end, perhaps trying to predict either Game 6 or a possible Game 7 is fools-gold; I think we now see that Boston is the superior team and has worked around its own offensive deficiencies and a stitched-together rotation.  They get Mike Napoli back in the middle of their lineup now that they’re back in the AL park using DH rules, and at some point this will make the difference.

Game 6: Michael Wacha versus John Lackey; Simply put, I think Wacha’s amazing run of unhittable-ness may end tonight.  You have to think Boston’s going to go back to the film, look for a weakness, and try to exploit it.  Lackey probably puts in his typical quality start; 6 innings, 2 or 3 runs.  It just seems that fate is going to go Boston’s way after they clawed 2 of 3 in St. Louis.

I’m going with Boston closing out the series tonight in a memorable night for Boston fans, finally clinching a World Series on home soil.  Oritz is your obvious World Series MVP and bolsters his eventuall Hall of Fame case.

Why isn’t Carlos Gomez getting the same attention for MVP that Mike Trout is getting? Photo Denis Poroy/Getty Images via zimbio.com

Simple question.

Brewers break-out star Carlos Gomez led the NL in bWAR.  Gomez played for a non-playoff team and augments his 24-homer/.506 slugging bat with speed on the basepaths (40 SBs this year) and plus defense in center (he was just named to Bill James Fielding Bible Team as the best defensive Center Fielder in the game).  Yet Gomez will likely lose out on the MVP voting to Andrew McCutchen, a player who trails him in the bWAR standings but who played for a playoff team.

Sounds an awful lot like the Mike Trout/Miguel Cabrera comparison, doesn’t it?

Why is nobody talking about Carlos Gomez for the NL MVP?  In fact, in the litany of post-season award review columns not only do I not see his name prominently mentioned, I’m not seeing it even mentioned in the list of top 5-6 candidates.  You hear about McCutchen, Clayton Kershaw and Paul Goldschmidt as the likely top 3 NL candidates, then you hear about guys from the other playoff teams (Yadier Molina or Matt Carpenter from St. Louis, Joey Votto from Cincinnati, or Freddie Freeman from Atlanta).  Where’s Gomez on this list?

If you are a critic of the Miguel Cabrera pick and maintain that Mike Trout deserves the MVP in the AL and use “WAR” as a basis for your argument … then are you similarly arguing that Gomez should win in the NL right now?

I think the entire Trout-Cabrera argument is tired; i’m tired of hearing it and I’m sure people are tired of talking about it.  The critics of those who support Cabrera for MVP like to talk about the “narrative” of the MVP, how the award criteria definition on the ballots seems to imply that the winner “should” come from a playoff team.  But I’m of the opinion that those who blindly live by the WAR stat and support Trout but do NOT similarly demand support of Gomez are falling victim to their own “narrative” as well.

Ask yourself; if you think Trout is the AL MVP (this year or last year) … then what’s your argument that Gomez is NOT the NL MVP this year?

I like doing this post every year (here’s 2012’s version, here’s 2011’s version), looking for trends in baseball’s most successful teams.  How do the best teams generally construct their rosters?

Borrowing from last year’s post, there are four main ways teams can acquire players:

1. Draft/Development: The player is with the original team that drafted him.  In the case of international free agents, if they’re signed as 16-year olds they are considered in this category as well (i.e. Jose Fernandez is a developed player despite being acquired as an international “free agnet” while Yasiel Puig).  It could be better defined as “Club developed players.”
2. Trade MLBers: The player was acquired by the team by virtue of trading an established MLB player.  Most of the time these days, this means the player was acquired as a prospect (since most trades seem to be of the prospect-for-established player kind).
3. Trade Prospects: The player was acquired by the team by virtue of trading prospects.  This is essentially the reverse of #2.
4. Free Agency: The player was acquired in free agency.  This category also includes several other types of acquisitions: waiver claims, Rule-5 draftees and cash purchases.  These three categories are lumped together since all three indicate that a team has acquired a player with zero outlay in terms of development or prospects.

Sometimes these trades get a bit muddled; if you send a combination of major and minor league talent to the other team, which category does it fall under?  But for the most part trades are simply categorized.

Now, here is the summary of roster construction and “Construction Strategy Category” for all 10 teams that made this year’s playoffs.  I only count the “core players” on a team for this analysis.  The core players is defined as the 5-man starting rotation, the setup and closer, the 8 out-field players, and the DH for AL teams.  I didn’t extend this all the way to the 25-man roster, figuring that these core 15-16 players are the main reasons teams win and advance.  That and huge chunks of the bullpen and the bench are either fill-in FAs or draftees and it would skew the analysis of how teams really got to the playoffs.  Here’s the summary (the table is sorted by count of Draftees):

So, what are these four Team Construction Methods?  Lets go one by one:

Method #1: Build from within nearly 100% (Tampa, St. Louis and Cincinnati the best examples, Atlanta and Pittsburgh to some extent): Two great fact points drive this team construction for two of the best example teams in this category:

1. 18 of St. Louis’ 25 man post season roster was drafted by the team and is still with the team.   Another 5 total guys were acquired in trade (including Adam Wainwright who was acquired more than a decade ago).
2. When Roberto Hernandez got a start this past April, it broke a nearly 8-season long trend of Tampa having every one if its starts being taken by a starting pitcher developed in house.

These are easily the two best examples in the game of success from almost entirely in-house player development.  St. Louis has one core Free Agent (Carlos Beltran and only two on its entire playoff roster).  Cincinnati isn’t too far behind with its sole major FA acquisition on this year’s roster being Aroldis Chapman.   Atlanta and Pittsburgh do qualify for this (Atlanta has a huge number of home-grown players), but also have made enough trades/signings to create their current rosters that they don’t entirely fit here fully.

Method #2: Ride your developed Core and use your prospects to acquire big names: Detroit (to a certain extent).  Detroit has a good core of home-grown guys to which they’ve augmented by trading prospects and major FA acquisitions to arrive at their current incarnation; a very good, very expensive squad.

I continue to classify Washington in this category as well, 6 of our core 15 were drafted and another 3 were acquired by flipping our prospect depth.

Method #3: Wheel and Deal: Oakland, Cleveland entirely, then Atlanta & Pittsburgh to a certain extent.  Is roster-turnover the new market inefficiency?  Oakland’s 2013 team featured an entirely new infield from last year’s 2012 AL West winning team.  Only 3 of Oakland’s core 16 players were home-grown this year.  Billy Beane’s M.O. of wheeling and dealing is paying major dividends; his trades of established major leaguers to acquire prospects has resulted in two AL West divisional crowns in a row.  Meanwhile Cleveland has adopted some of the same strategy, with just one real home grown starter and a whole batting order assembled via trade and free agency.

Atlanta and Pittsburgh each have done their fare share of major trades/signings lately, with Atlanta ending up with Justin Upton and Pittsburgh ending up with 4/5ths of a rotation thanks to big moves.  So while both teams have their cores in player development, smart transactions have made big differences in their 2013 playoff pushes.

Method #4: Spend what it takes to win: Boston, Los Angeles Dodgers and Detroit to some extent.  Certainly no one can argue with Los Angeles’ planned path; they more than doubled their team payroll from 2012 to 2013 by taking hundreds of millions of dollars off the hands of … Boston, who still remains in this category despite a large bulk of their core 16 being home grown.  You just can’t have a $150M payroll and not be categorized as a “spend what it takes to win” team.  Detroit’s owner has opened up the pocketbook time and again to try to buy a winner, so they aren’t entirely in this category but they’re getting close.

So, what’s the *right* way to build your team?  I guess it depends; clearly all four of these methods can result in playoff appearances.  Perhaps its better to look at the downsides of each method:

Method #1 depends on a long track record of consistent player evaluation and drafting.  St. Louis, in my opinion the best franchise in the game, has a great track record.  Their 2009 draft alone produced 5 of their 25 man roster, and Michael Wacha was a 2012 draft pick who shot to the majors and may be the steal of that draft.  But getting there takes time and talent; to me clearly teams like the Cubs and Houston are re-booting in order to get to this point.  It tests the patience of your fan base and your RSNs (as Houston is learning).  Kansas City has tried this method for years and years and has had little luck.  Seattle went this route mostly and a slew of big-name prospects have failed to really pan out.  So you need great player development and some draft-day luck.  The new CBA is going to make this method harder and harder to do.

Method #2 is slightly less harrowing than going entirely by method #1, but does depend on finding trading partners and finding matches for your spots.  This is where I classify the Nats right now; we have a good core of home-grown guys earned on the backs of several years of last place finishes/high first round draft picks.  And now we’ve parlayed some prospect depth into two key members (Gio Gonzalez and Denard Span).  The downside of this method basically is that your farm system gets depleted very quickly.  Washington’s farm system went from the best in the game to being ranked in the low #20s after matriculations, losses of first round picks and the two big trades.  Suddenly your team has no big-time rising prospects, your major league team has no reinforcements coming, and you soon devolve more into category #4, spending hand over fist to extend your stars and to fill in holes.  Kind of like where Philadelphia is right now.

Method #3 can go bad, fast.  If your trades don’t work out … you look bad, quickly.  You’re also buying yourself some known down years (think what Miami is doing; they clearly punted on 2013 while trading away a ton of salary and major league assets).  That can be tough on the fan base; Oakland and Miami’s fan bases already have their own problems, but Cleveland struggled to sell seats this  year even on their way to 90 wins.

Method #4 can go bad, fast as well … and expensively so.  Only three of the game’s 11 most expensive teams made the playoffs this year.  The Yankees got 85 wins for their $228M in payroll and look like they may be in trouble for a time to come.  Philadelphia?  73 wins.  The Angels and Giants were losing teams.   Free Agents are generally being paid for what they DID, not what they’re going to do.  And Free Agents are almost always in their late 20s/early 30s, entering their natural decline years, and invariably are going to be overpaid for their performance.  If you want to build your team through FA, consider that new estimates value a “win” at roughly $7M on the open market … meaning that to build just a 90 win team through free agency would cost more than $300M in free agent dollars.  Or about what Robinson Cano wants this off-season.  There will continue to be high-payroll teams of course (that RSN money has to get spent somewhere), but I feel as if the industry is going to get smarter about these long term deals.  One look at the Angels last few off-seasons should give you every bit of proof you need to know; hundreds of millions committed to aging sluggers, several very productive prospects traded away chasing glory, and the Angels (even with the best player in the game at $500k/year) look lost.

I think the answer to “which way is best” really resides in the skills of the organization at large.  You can succeed using all four methods … its just how *long* can you continue to succeed?

One little spreadsheet I like to put together at the end of each baseball season is the subject of this post: a look at the payrolls of the 30 teams compared side-by-side with their seasonal performance and then looking at the playoff teams.

Here’s the table; the teams are sorted by the Opening Day Payroll as calculated by Cots.   I used Cots’ numbers because they were far more accurate than other typical sites that report these types of things  (Googling leads to tables at Newsday, CBS and USAToday among others).  Cots are the most accurate because they take into account payments to former players, which is significant in some teams.  The other lists do not take this into account, just summing the payroll of the players still on the roster.  The team this makes the most difference for in 2013 is the New York Mets, who released Jason Bay but are still on the hook for his $17M payroll this year; that took them from the #23 payroll to #15 just by itself.

The “delta” column gives a barometer for teams who over performed or under-performed based on their salary.

Some interesting observations in bullet-form:

• The Jason Bay note from above: nearly 20% of the Mets’ payroll this year is dead money.
• 3 biggest over-performers this year shouldn’t be a surprise: Oakland, Tampa and Pittsburgh.
• The biggest under-performer also isn’t much of a surprise: Philadelphia.
• Only 3 of the most expensive 10 teams made the playoffs.
• Half the top 10 payroll teams finished with a LOSING record.  That’s amazing.
• The Dodgers spent nearly as much as 3/5ths of its divisional rivals (San Diego+Colorado+Arizona’s payroll).
• I didn’t realize just how much payroll the White Sox were carrying this year, for a last-place finish.
• Miami more than halved their payroll from last year to this.  Los Angeles more than doubled theirs.
• Washington, despite the disappointing season, finished almost exactly where they should have based on their payroll; they had the 12th best record of any MLB team and had the 11th highest payroll.
• The only two teams to “under-perform” their payroll and make the playoffs were Detroit and the Dodgers.
• Boston was the only team to “over-perform” their payroll rank of the 11 highest payroll teams.  That’s a lesson for you.

The playoffs consisted of:

• 3 high-payroll teams (LA, Boston, Detroit)
• 3 mid-league payroll teams (StL, Cincinnati, Atlanta)
• 4 lowest third of the league payroll teams (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Oakland, Tampa)

This post dovetails nicely into my next coming post, which looks at the roster construction of the 10 playoff teams and talks about team building mechanisms.

Is this really a racially insensitive statement, or a media overreaction? Photo via usatoday.com

I know that the whole “Redskins” name debate has dialed up in recent months.  Sometimes tacked on to that debate is the status of the Cleveland “Indians” moniker in general, and the racially insensitive logo (at least in some people’s eyes) in particular.

But is this picture really that bad?  Is this sort of reaction warranted here?

Are these guys really dressed up in “red-face” or are they dressed up more like a “clown-face” that happens to be red?  I mean, the team colors are “red,” as evidenced by the red lettering on their jersey.  I dunno.   I didn’t think twice about this picture until I saw the story repeated several times in my RSS feed today.  And my initial reaction is this: I didn’t think anything of it and certainly didn’t take it as insulting.  But then again I’m a) not an American Indian an b) generally cynical when it comes to the general over-reaction in today’s climate against anything that is funny, sarcastic or anything even remotely resembling a politically incorrect statement.

I mean, it isn’t as if they colored their faces like this:

Not good. Photo via google images.

The two links that I posted happen to be from two websites that may be just trolling for readers.  One is the click-ad opportunistic BusinessInsider website; they often post incredibly argumentative headlines and lists of pictures that force you to click through 20 items to pad their hit counters.  The other is the USA Today, which has somewhat of a “stuffy” reputation in the sports reporting world for being overly “PC” in its columns and stances (see anything that Nancy Brennan has ever written or consider their relentless/continued coverage of everything Lance Armstrong when the other major sporting news outlets have long since let go of the coverage).  So perhaps I’m just getting caught up in these two website’s trolling activities and over-reacting myself.

What do you think?

Can Kris Medlen stop the Kershaw train tonight? Photo unknown via totalprosports.com

I’m 3-for-3 so far predicting the play-in games.  Called the Texas-Tampa game, then the NL wild-card, then the AL wild-card.    I didn’t mean to start the post-season by offering predictions, but some email messages with friends turned into analytic efforts which turned into blog posts.  Now i’ll continue the trend and try to guess the winners each day as best as I can.

Next up in baseball’s post-season: the first games of each NL divisional series.  Here’s some quick hit thoughts.  The si.com probable-pitcher page is a nice little resource, giving the probable starters and a quick little stat history.

Without doing a ton of research (not much time today):

Pirates at Cardinals.  Pirates #2  A.J. Burnett goes against St. Louis ace Adam Wainwright.   Wainwright is tough at home, tough all year, has been good down the stretch, and probably isn’t getting beat in his own stadium.  He’s a quality right-handed pitcher going against a Pirates lineup that doesn’t score a ton of runs and isn’t that great against right handed hitters.  I also think the Pirates may have a bit of a letdown early in this series, having blown their Ace and a lot of emotional capital in the wild-card game.  Burnett has faced the Cards six times this season, most recently a month ago in St. Louis and got hammered.  I think the Cards wear down Burnett on the road again and cruise to an easy game 1 victory.

Dodgers at Braves.  The Dodgers have their rotation lined up and put out ace Clayton Kershaw in Atlanta for game 1.  Meanwhile the Braves send to the hill Kris Medlen, who has been fantastic down the stretch to get the nod as the replacement Ace of the Braves staff for Tim Hudson.  Medlen’s strong close to the season is muddied by looking at his competition; the last time he faced a playoff-calibre team was a month ago, when he was good but not great against the Cardinals.   Meanwhile Kershaw’s unreal 1.83 ERA on the season represented an ERA+ value of 194, tied for the 46th best ever such season and ranking him ahead of a couple of  Sandy Koufax‘s dominant mid-1960s seasons.  Kershaw led the league with 232 strikeouts; the Braves as a team only trailed the hapless Astros and Twins in team strikeouts.  Atlanta only hit .239 on the season against all lefties, let alone the best left-handed starter in the league.   I just do not see Atlanta getting a ton of baserunners tonight.  Plus I don’t entirely trust Medlen against a good team and I think he’ll have a quality start but get the loss, something like 3-1 to the Dodgers.

Can the effusive Swisher lead his rag-tag team to victory? Photo via wikipedia.

At first glance, knowing that the Rays have been travling around the country for the last two weeks like an indie band chasing side gigs, you would think the Indians would be favored in this matchup.

But look closer and you’ll see an Indians team that has a lot of heart but may not really be as good as their record indicates.  They readily beat up on the two weak teams in their division (going 17-2 versus the White Sox and 13-6 versus Minnesota).  They went 6-1 against the hapless Astros.  That’s a combined 36-9 against these three awful teams.   Against the rest of the league, just 54-51.  They lost the season series to Tampa, winning just 2 of 6 games.  They lost 15 of 19 against Detroit on the season.  They lost 6 of 7 to both Boston and New York.  So I think this is a weaker team than its 90-72 record; in fact I feel like in a different division they’d probably be just a .500 team.

You can only play who they put in front of you though.  They still had 90 wins and a fantastic 10 game winning streak to end the season  … but those 10 games were all against the 3 worst teams in the league.  What will happen when they play a battle tested, playoff-veteran AL East team like Tampa?

Tampa earned its way into a game 163 with tough road series victories at the end of the season, and earned its win over Texas in its first do-or-die game.  Unfortunately they burned their ace in the process and now will go with #3 starter Alex Cobb.  Not that Cobb doesn’t give them a great chance at winning: he’s 11-3 on the season, has pitched to a 138 ERA+.  His away splits are *better* than his home splits.  He’s been very solid since returning from the D/L and I would expect a solid outing tonight.  Perhaps 7 innings, 2 earned runs with 6 strikeouts.

Cleveland had to play it “straight” all they way til the end to guarantee a playoff spot and thus finds itself depending on 23-yr old Danny Salazar, he of exactly 10 major league starts, in this coin-flip game.  Salazar’s numbers in short sample sizes are good; 2-3, 3.12 era, 1.13 whip, 65/15 k/bb in 52 innings and a 121 ERA+.  The blogs rave about his heat and his change-up.  He gets a ton of Ks.  But he’s young, he throws too many pitches, and he’s likely only going to be able to give his team 5-6 innings in a best case tonight.   The Rays see a lot of pitches and are a patient team (2nd in the league in BBs); they and manager Joe Madden knows they can wait out Salazar, get into the Indians bullpen and take their chances.  The Indians pen is a mess, closer Chris Perez is lost, and they’re in the bottom third of the league in most macro categories (bullpen ERA, FIP, fWAR).   Their bullpen is righty heavy, so they can’t play matchups very well.   And the Rays are one of the better RH hitting teams in the league (top 10 in wOBA, top 5 in wRC+).

The Indians are at home (where they’re good), and they’re incredibly hot right now (21-8 in September).  They hit righties at about the league average and have a ton of left-handed/switch hitters at their disposal.   But I somehow see the Rays asserting their dominance, getting into the Cleveland bullpen and eking out a win.  I’m thinking perhaps a 4-3 victory for Tampa.  I’m not as confident here as I was in my first two predictions for the 2013 post-season … but have faith that Tampa will take the next step over the surprising Indians.