The Futility Infielder

Whew! It's been a whirlwind week here at Futility Central, a week that's seen me:

• attend my first ballgame of the year, last Wednesday's Yankees-Red Sox matchup, a/k/a Mariano's Meltdown

• drive up to Boston to be a guest speaker at Tufts University's class on baseball stats

• celebrate this site's four-year anniversary

• get in my first game of catch for the year

• leave the Mets' home opener in the sixth inning with flu-like symptoms and wind up in the Beth Israel emergency room system for the better part of the next day

• publish my second Prospectus Hit List feature at BP, now with an enhanced design and Pythagenport-based rankings

That's a pretty full seven days. Fortunately, I made copious notes along the way, so just to recap a few thoughts here before they become completely irrelevant...

• First, the anniversary. It's tough to believe that much time has passed since I penned this tribute to Willie Stargell and registered a domain name that had been rolling around in my head for a few weeks. Tougher still to fathom that the work I've done here would put me on TV or in a college course syllabus. I want to thank everybody -- family, friends, fellow bloggers, writers and readers -- who has helped me with advice, encouraged me to keep going, or showed up to read what I have to say day after day. Building and running this site has changed my life in ways I never imagined it would, and for that I'm eternally grateful.

• The weather couldn't have been more perfect for my first ballgame of the season, a Yanks-Red Sox matchup to boot. As the Yanks clawed back from a 2-0 deficit to take a 3-2 lead in the bottom of the eighth before summoning Mariano Rivera, the completion of a perfect afternoon was within reach.

By now the outcome -- five runs by the Sox, resulting in Rivera's second blown save in as many days and, technically speaking, fourth in as many appearances against Boston -- has been picked apart, so I won't belabor it too much. But it was hell to sit through, as Rivera threw 38 pitches (20 of them balls) before departing. He'd have gotten out of his bases-loaded, one-out jam had it not been for Alex Rodriguez's error on an easy grounder that could have either generated a forceout at home plate or a game-ending double-play. But the ball was bobbled, all hands were safe, and from there the wheels fell off, resulting in a round of sky-is-falling pronouncements from all corners.

As bad as the performance was, perspective is sorely needed. Rivera didn't throw during the offseason, and had been bothered by bursitis in his elbow during spring training. He's obviously not in his usual midseason form, but that hardly means the end is nigh. Baseball Prospectus' Joe Sheehan had a very reasonable take:

Let's not kid ourselves. This is being blown out of proportion in part because Rivera was facing the Red Sox. Had he blown back-to-back saves against the Devil Rays in June -- or to the A's and Rangers in August, as he did back in 2003 -- there wouldn't be headlines like "Time to panic in the Bronx?" or lines like "Has he lost it?" working their way into coverage. Because Rivera's failures this week came against the Red Sox, six months after he was credited with two blown saves against them in the ALCS, there's a rush to pass some kind of judgment based on a vanishingly small sample of events.

First of all, the "four straight blown saves" is overstating the case. It was two games last year and two games this year, and drawing a line connecting to the two is horribly misleading. Moreover, Rivera hadn't even pitched poorly until yesterday.

Sheehan runs down the four games, noting particularly that his second blown save of the ALCS was hardly a fair designation:

[D]inging Rivera with a "blown save" in this [Game Five] situation doesn't remotely reflect his performance. He came in with the tying run on third, another guy on first, no one out. The Yankees were playing the infield back. Rivera faced seven batters and retired six, the other reaching on an infield hit. The "blown save" designation comes from the fact that the first out he got was on a fly ball that was deep enough to score the tying run. He pitched wonderfully, and lumping this in as a failure ignores the difficulty of the situation into which he entered.

...Save yesterday's outing, Rivera hadn't pitched poorly, and in fact, had pitched very well in at least one of the games, blown save or no. The common thread isn't failure by Rivera; it's that the Yankees asked him to protect four one-run leads. Certainly in the ALCS, the Yankees' failure to capitalize on late-game situations was as much a factor in their losses as anything Rivera did.

For what it's worth, the run expectancy in that two-on, no out situation is 1.854 runs, meaning that Rivera actually did an above-average job in keeping the Sox from taking the lead.

Enough about Rivera... the best moment at the Stadium came in the bottom of the fifth. With their team leading 2-0, a sizable contingent of Red Sox fans was especially vocal in the upper deck behind home plate. Some Sox-jersey-wearing chowdahead was waving a large red sign at a section of Yank fans as he paraded up and down the aisle. Finally one Yankee partisan snatched the sign away, crumpling it up to the crowd's delight. A scuffle ensued and security was summoned.

Right as that was happening, Yankee first baseman Tino Martinez solved the riddle of Tim Wakefield's knuckleball and drilled a floater over the rightfield wall to tie the game. Standing to celebrate Martinez's first home run since returning to the Bronx, the home crowd was riled up, jeering the pair or Sox fans escorted away by security and bestowing a hearty ovation on the departing Yankee mooks just after showering Tino with love.

Alas, that Martinez blast was the third and final Yankee hit off of Wakefield for the afternoon. Only the wildness by Sox reliever Mike Timlin -- who hit Derek Jeter with a pitch that laid the Yankee captain out and walked two other batters as well -- aided the Yanks taking the lead before it all crumbled apart in the ninth. Still, the outcome was disappointing only in the context that it prevented a season-opening sweep by the Yanks over the Sox, and it served notice that these two teams may well be continuing their back-and-forth scrapfest through the rest of their 16 -- or perhaps 23 -- remaining matchups.

• On Thursday, I put the pedal to the metal and drove four hours into the heart of Red Sox country to drop in on Tufts University's course on baseball stats (The Analysis of Baseball: Statistics and Sabermetrics), where after discovering a few weeks ago that my DIPS page was on the syllabus, I'd been invited as a guest speaker. According to that syllabus,

This course will teach Tufts students the fundamentals of Sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball through objective evidence. It will cover the important concepts in statistics needed to perform sabermetric research and analysis. Students will design and implement their own sabermetric research study. We will discuss baseball not through conventional wisdom and consensus, but by searching for the truth of baseball performance using baseball statistics. Hitting performance, pitching performance, defensive performance will all be analyzed and better understood by looking at and analyzing current and historical data from baseball.

Renowned books such as the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract and Moneyball dot the syllabus, as do several Baseball Prospectus articles including Nate Silver's introduction to PECOTA in BP2003.

Prior to the class I spent an hour and a half talking baseball and Napoleon Dynamite with professor Andy Andres over Mexican food (Andres had the dang quesadilla). According to Andres, the Tufts class is the first of its kind, and this is the second semester he's taught it. While he holds a Ph. D in Nutritional Biochemistry and Physiology and his main gig is teaching an introductory biology course at Boston University, Andres has his baseball-stat cred as an analyst for Ron Shandler's BaseballHQ fantasy website. With his background, he's particularly well-versed in the physiological effects of steroids, and so we spent a good deal of time discussing Will Carroll's forthcoming book, The Juice.

We made our way over to the classroom via the softball field, where we were joined by assistants Morgan Melchiorre and David Tybor, the former a cigar-smoking Mets fan and the latter a wiry White Sox supporter. The trio of instructors are teammates on Jumbo's Peanut Surprise in the university's softball league, with Melchiorre the team's big basher (.826 AVG, 1.826 SLG, if the stats page is to be believed). As the class assembled, it was discovered that one of its participants had chosen to remain at practice rather than come to the lecture. Busted!

The class consisted of 16 students, four of them women. After a round of introductions and some baseball banter, we began with each student discussing the topic of his or her class project. The range of topics wouldn't seem out of place on a typical week's worth of Baseball Prospectus:

• An analysis of free agent market efficiency, comparing the 2000-2002 and 2003-2004 classes in search of variables which best determined player salary

• A look at whether power or finesse pitchers have more effect on batting average on balls in play (BABIP)

• Questec-related park effects on strikeout, walk and home run rates

• A search for the existence of "clutch pitching" in closers

• Weather effects on Boston pitchers' performances

• A study of Fenway's park effects on lefty and righty hitters and pitchers

• A search for the stolen-base break-even point using data from the last ten years

• An examination of the hitting stats of middle infielders over the past several years, in seach of clues as to the impact of steroids

Following that, we engaged in nearly an hour of freewheeling discussion covering steroids, DIPS, JAWS, Ultimate Zone Rating, and a multitude of other sabermetric concepts, with some of the aforementioned projects working their way back to the discussion. Yankee-Red Sox comparisons came up often, peppered with commentary on the Mets and White Sox as well. We discussed the impact of park effects -- particuarly Fenway Park -- on pitchers as varied as Derek Lowe and David Wells. The students were enthusiastic both in discussing their own work and in inquiring about the state of sabermetrics in general. All in all, it felt very similar to the Prospectus Bookstore events I participated in recently -- an inquisitive audience asking intelligent questions.

After my time was up, we were joined by a second guest speaker: Zack Scott, a baseball operations assistant for the Boston Red Sox. Scott, in his late 20s, gave the students a glimpse into life in a particularly progressive -- and very successful -- front office. He emphasized that the Sox strive to get as full a picture from both qualitative and quantitative analyses as possible, that they favor players who control the strike zone both as hitters and pitchers, and that GM Theo Epstein isn't shy about seeking out the multitude of voices within that office. Scott described how, as a humble intern last summer, he was asked by Epstein to debate the "pro" merits of trading Nomar Garciaparra to the Cubs in a 2-for-2 deal that, while it didn't materialize, led to the big four-way deal soon afterwards. In one of his more candid comments, he admitted that any Pedro Martinez fastball thrown in Fenway was bumped up to a minimum 87 MPH reading on the stadium's scoreboard.

One of the students in the class, Jessica Genninger, doubled her participation by reporting on the class for the Tufts Daily. She gave a thorough airing of Scott's comments, so I'll skip over most of them in favor of her report for the sake of brevity.

A recurring theme of Scott's segment was roster construction, and towards the end of his spot he and I compared the makeup of the Sox bench, which stresses skills complementary to the starters (better speed, better defense, more contact oriented, better dollar value) to that of the Yankees (um, proven veteranitude, worldseriesability, sitnexttoJoeness, and shutupandplayballitude?). From where I sit, and I'm not alone in this regard, the Sox biggest edge on the Yankees comes in the composition and usage of those bottom spots of the rosters. That said, I had a fun time picking apart his team's acquisition of Jay Payton, whose strike zone judgment and general scarecrow-headed play would seem to fall outside the team's modus operandi.

Though the class' energy seemed to flag a bit during his presentation, Scott was witty and informative while maintaining a general air of humility, an impression that he sustained when the class broke and the instructors took us for dinner and drinks. I had to depart early to make my way to a friend's place in Providence, but I had a blast BSing with him as well as the course's instructors. Thanks to all of them for making my trip up to "enemy territory" worth my while.

• As to the general picture of my health, the surgically-repaired shoulder and still-needing-medical-attention glove both held up fine during my game of catch. The rest of my body had a rather unfortunate 24 hours during which nearly all of my bodily fluids came up for discussion. After my night of feverish sleep, Andra decided to take me to the ER under the fear of appendicits or kidney stones, and while both of those were eventually ruled out -- probably just a virus -- I now have a better understanding of the miracle of intravenous rehydration and medication delivery. I feel a hell of a lot better this morning than I did 24 hours ago, and once again I'm reminded what a lucky guy I am to have such a caring gal in my life. With our wedding just over one month away, it's full steam ahead.

Oh and man, what better way to convalesce on the couch than with the soothing sounds of Vin Scully calling yesterday afternoon's come-from-behind Dodgers victory in their home opener against the hated Giants? My stated goal from my hospital bed was to be home in time for the 4 PM EST game, and let me tell you, my $150 Extra Innings TV package was worth it just for the joy it brought me yesterday. Down 5-0 in the first thanks to Jeff Weaver's lack of anything resembling stuff, and then down 8-3 in the third, the Dodgers clawed their way back thanks to shoddy defense -- four errors, three on Giants outfielders including one Pedro Feliz misplay that recalled Barry Bonds' crucial error in Game Six of the 2002 World Series, ha-ha, and one on the game's final play -- and rang up four runs on closer Armando Benitez. Good for what ails, I tell ya.