The Futility Infielder

Still catching up on my reading from having been gone this weekend...

• Dodger Thoughts blogger supreme Jon Weisman scored a real coup with this interview of Dodger GM Paul DePodesta. The young GM has spent the better part of his tenure walking around with a target on his back because mainstream media types, particularly some of the more witless Los Angeles Times hacks can't be bothered to move past their knee jerk anti-Moneyball reflexes.

While DePo has made some head-scratching decisions that haven't been popular with fans -- trading Paul Lo Duca, leting Adrian Beltre depart as a free agent after a monster season, signing Derek Lowe -- he's showing an ability to combine the analytical perspective he honed as an assistant GM in Oakland under Billy Beane with the strengths of the Dodgers' resources -- an excellent player development system and scouting department, an open-minded manager, and deeper coffers than he had as an A. He's taken a lot of flak for his approach, but last season the Dodgers reached the postseason for the first time since 1996 and won their first playoff game since the 1988 clincher, shedding some rather large monkeys from their back. For whatever it's worth, the Dodgers are the Baseball Prospectus staff pick to win the NL West.

Cherrypicking a few choice quotes from Weisman's DePo discussion...

On the stats vs. scouts divide:

"I don't think all of us have to be versed in objective and subjective analysis, but we at least have to appreciate that both exist and will be pieces of the puzzle. Our professional scouts have asked me, are there (particular) statistics you want me to look at? I said, 'No, we can do that in the office. Your job is to add texture to those numbers.'"

On losing Adrian Beltre and signing J.D. Drew:

"Our biggest fear was being left standing without a chair when the music stopped."

On evaluating the organization's top prospects:

"We're trying to predict the performance of human beings in special situations... We're never going to be right about that. We're going to try to build a decision-making process where we're right more often than we're wrong. We know we're not going to be right all the time.

On being linked with Moneyball:

"I was small enough in the book that it hasn't affected me at all... But people who, for whatever reason, were offended by the book or what it posits, definitely would like to see the people in the book fail – that became pretty clear through the course of last year. It hasn't necessarily changed my day-to-day."

Excellent work from Weisman, and kudos to DePodesta for granting the most astute man covering the Dodgers some quality time.

• Speaking of the Dodgers, one of the more controversial decisions made by DePodesta and company was letting starting pitcher Jose Lima, who won their lone playoff game in flamboyant fashion, depart for free agency. While the decision may have been difficult from a sentimental standpoint, the analytical red flags were all there: his 4.07 ERA was nothing special in the context of the pitcher-favoring Dodger Stadium, his success was founded on a low .268 batting average on balls in play, his homer rate was a ghastly 1.7 per nine innings, while his K rate of 4.9 per nine was well below league average.

Lima's Opening Day start in Royal blue appeared to validate that decision. He was bombed for five runs in three innings by the Detroit Tigers, yielding three homers, two by Dmitri Young, who scored a rare Opening Day hat-trick, and one by Brandon Inge. Lima Time was not a good time yesterday.

• From the Controversial Departure/Bombed on Opening Day files, here's the line of former Yankee Javier Vazquez in his debut for the Diamondbacks: 1.2 IP, 10 H, 7 R, 7 ER, 0 BB, 2 K, 37.80 ERA, L, 0-1. Wow, turn off the ugly. While I somehow ended up with Vazquez on my fantasy team, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if a few more outings like this elicit revelations that something is amiss in his shouler or elbow.

• MLB's revised steroid policy has claimed its first victim, but it's hardly the marquee name one would have expected. Former Tiger centerfielder Alex Sanchez, now with Tampa Bay, received a 10-day suspension for testing positive, a result Sanchez claims was produced by use of over-the-counter supplements. Aided by whatever juice he was on, the 5'10", 180-pound Sanchez walloped two homers last year and slugged .364. We're still waiting for congressional blowhards such as Henry Waxman, Christopher Shays and John McCain to pass a bill requiring him to be burned at the stake, with all four of his lifetime homers expunged from the record books.

Baseball Prospectus' Nate Silver weighed in with an excellent look at some of the numbers behind the power surge of the last two decades, testing what he called the Steroid Gap Theory:

Suppose that the predominant media opinion on the subject of steroids is correct: a substantial number of players are using steroids, and steroid use results in substantial and bifurcating improvements to player performance. We will call this the Steroid Gap Theory. What would we expect the corresponding impact on the game's competitive ecology to look like?

It might be the case that offensive levels would rise, if more hitters than pitchers were using steroids, or if the benefits of steroid use were more profound for hitters than they were for pitchers. But this would not be the distinguishing mark of steroid use; offensive levels cycle upward and downward all the time, and they have since the very origin of the game. Rather, the distinguishing mark would be that variance in player performance would increase. If some players, be they hitters or pitchers, were gaining a new and substantial competitive advantage, while others were remaining in place, then we'd expect a greater amount of differentiation between the best-performing players and the worst-performing players....

Silver compared the standard deviations in home run rates between two eras, 1961-1992 (exlcuding the '81 strike season) and 1996-2004 (excluding the transitional '93 season as well as the strike-marred '94 and '95 campaigns). His findings ought to surprise the mainstream wags who posit that steroids are solely the province of the musclebound big bashers:

As it happens, not only has the increase in the standard deviation failed to keep a proportionate pace with the increase in home run rates, but it has actually decelerated. That is, while offensive output has increased substantially, the playing field has become comparatively more level. Last season, for example, about 19.3 home runs were hit per 650 plate appearances in the National League, with a standard deviation of 11.9. Compare that to 1970, when just 15.6 home runs were hit per 650 PA -- about a 20 percent decrease from contemporary levels -- but the standard deviation was actually a bit higher, at 12.3.

This is far from a perfect experiment. But at the very least, it is highly problematic for the Steroid Gap Theory. If just a substantial minority were benefiting from steroid use, and the benefit were predictably and markedly positive, then we'd expect the differentiation between the haves and the have-nots to have increased. That differentiation has in fact increased on an absolute level, but it has decreased relative to what we would expect given the overall environmental improvements that all hitters are benefiting from, be those in the form of expansion, a lively ball, a smaller park, the birth of Jimmy Haynes, or what have you.

Silver's findings mesh neatly with the work I did in contributing a chapter to Will Carroll's forthcoming book, The Juice: The Real Story of Baseball's Drug Problems, which hits the shelves in a couple of weeks. In my work, which analyzed the unprecedented home run rates of the 1993-2004 era, I concluded that while steroids might be playing a part in the increased number of longballs, other factors such as expansion, new ballparks and especially changes in the ball itself are more likely culprits given the broad shape of the trends. One point I'd like to emphasize is that while seating capacities in the 18 new ballparks introduced since 1990 are less than in the previous generation of parks, outfield fence distances themselves are generally further than they were before:

NL       LF    LCF     CF    RCF     RF
1990   331.3  375.8  402.6  375.8  331.0
2004   333.0  375.5  404.5  379.6  332.5
change  +1.8   -0.3   +1.9   +3.8   +1.5

AL       LF    LCF     CF    RCF     RF
1990   327.1  378.1  406.1  374.9  323.1
2004   328.7  377.9  403.3  374.6  324.4
change  +1.6   -0.1   -2.9   -0.3   +1.3

At some point in the not-too-distant future, I'll hopefully be able to excerpt my chapter into a piece summarizing my findings in more detail.

• My steroids chapter will be one of the topics of discussion when I head up to Tufts University later this week as a guest speaker for a class called The Analysis of Baseball: Statistics and Sabermetrics which features my DIPS summary page on its syllabus. That's just one weird and unexpected place my work has taken me; by the end of this week, I may well have another to report.

• Arn Tellem certainly isn't George Steinbrenner's favorite agent thanks to the gag order Tellem placed on his client, Jason Giambi, with regards to addressing steroids-related questions. In a classic case of misdirected anger, the Boss lashed out at Tellem back in February, likely still smarting from the revelation that the Yanks assented to Tellem's request to omit the word "steroids" from the language of Giambi's seven-year, $120 million contract.

For whatever sentiments that Steinbrenner and Tellem deserve each other are worth, Tellem weighed in with a thoughtful back-page article in this Sunday's New York Times regarding the recent Congressional and mainstream media grandstanding over steroids:

To politicians and the sports commentariat, baseball - pure, beatific, transcendent - is a kind of national sacrament, a near-holy aspect of our moral fiber. It is a ritual affirmation of an eternal America, a yearly renewal of life and humanity. As James Earl Jones's character mused in "Field of Dreams," "It reminds us all of what was good and could be again."

The game's self-appointed moral avatars act as if "Field of Dreams" were a documentary. In fact, a recent cover of Sports Illustrated featured the "Field of Dreams" field inset with an excerpt from the most self-righteous essay in baseball history: "What am I going to do with this scrapbook full of memories and the stories I used to tell? Another summer full of moments will soon begin, the biggest home run record of all ripe to fall. What will we do, each of us, now that we know?"

By manufacturing emotion and outrage, the sporting press resembles sports talk radio, a medium in which designated hotheads make outrageous comments solely to draw attention to themselves. The designated hitters of the print media portray themselves as honest referees, but see gray in only one shade. Never mind that back when McGwire was suspected of taking steroids, the major leagues had not yet banned the drug. Never mind that he was a team player who stayed out of trouble and remained fan-friendly. Never mind that he started a foundation and gave $3 million to help abused children. Some of the same writers who in 1998 were praising Mark McGwire for saving baseball now call him a disgrace. Today's athlete can be a hero or a villain, but nothing in between.

...I don't deny that sports figures can have an outsize effect on an impressionable child. Nor do I diminish the sorrow of families whose children have died after aping the actions of their favorite athletes. But if fingers must be pointed, shouldn't they also be directed at those parents who live through their children's athletic careers, force-feeding them pie-in-the-sky expectations? Or coaches who pressure young people to get faster and stronger and win at all costs? Aren't they the real role models?

In that aforementioned SI cover article, writer Gary Smith wistfully recalls 1998, "The Summer of Longballs and Love" as he terms it; your barf bag is located in the seat pocket directly in front of you. It's writers such as Smith who built the pedestals on which sluggers such as McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds were placed, and watching them knock those pedestals down in such a self-serving manner is particularly gag-worthy. Smith, who has written perceptively on the role of sports in American culture, certainly knows better, so here's a big Bronx cheer to him.

But the much more troubling point that Tellem raises is that while players such as McGwire make convenient villains in this tale, it's the parents and coaches of the susceptible kids who should be the real targets of public ire. More than anyone, they, not the players, have a direct impact on those kids day-to-day lives. They, not the McGwires and Bondses of the world, should bear the brunt of responsibility for the use of steroids at the high school and college levels rather than assuming the roles of unwitting victimhood. Those relatively anonymous men and women don't make the sexy headlines, don't end up as the targets of congressional investigations or grandstanding front-page articles in mainstream magazines, but if the steroid problem is going to be solved, they'll have to step up to the plate along with the big names.

• In my recent BP article, I made reference to the Yankees' increased ticket prices for 2005 but wasn't able to provide an exact percentage by which they rose. Since that article was published, Team Marketing Report has released its annual figures, which show that the average Yankee ticket price has risen to $27.34 -- a 10 percent bump over the previous year's figure of $24.86. Given that their average price only rose 60 cents from 2001-2004, the Yanks can hardly be singled out for passing the increased cost of their on-field product to their customers.

By the way, the most expensive tickets in the major leagues still belong to the Red Sox, whose average price went up 9.3 percent to $44.56. The gap between the Sox and the Yanks has increased over the past five seasons; in 2001, Sox tix cost $34.86, 44 percent higher than the Yanks. Now, they're a whopping 63 percent higher than their AL East rivals. Of course, given that the Sox have one more World Championship to celebrate than the Yanks in that span, I doubt anybody in New England will complain.