The Futility Infielder

In the eight years I've been a Yankees partial season ticket holder, going to roughly 10-15 games a year, I can count the number of meaningful (as in pennant-race meaningful) September games I've been to on one hand. I generally front-load my ticket requests to go during the warmer weather. By this time on the calendar, the Yanks have usually taken care of the business of entrenching themselves in first place. One game which stands out in memory is the September 7, 2003 matchup with David Wells going against the Red Sox, a game which decided the season series between the two teams. But that -- and the recent Curt Schilling debacle -- was an early September game, important but not down-to-the-wire in its implications.

Wednesday night was one of those rare occasions. The Yanks sent Randy Johnson to the hill to face the Orioles with his team just half a game behind Boston in the AL East standings, a margin that's been trimmed from four games inside the last two weeks. They had gone 9-2 over that span, even winning an ugly 11-10 game against the Blue Jays in which Johnson was ejected in the second inning.

The previous night's contest against the Orioles had been a similar sludgefest, a 3-hour, 41-minute 12-9 win for the Yanks in a game which they had led 9-3 after two innings and 10-3 by the time I checked in during the fifth. A short outing by starter Aaron Small and a slow leak in the bullpen -- compounded by Joe Torre's insistence on using Lefthanded No Out Guy (LNOGY) Alan Embree -- had required the rousting of the overworked Tom Gordon and Mariano Rivera, the last thing the Yanks need at this time of year, particularly in a game that had shaped up as a blowout.

Luckily, Johnson brought his A game, the one he had in shutting down the Red Sox 1-0 September 11, the one worthy of a creatively emblazoned wallet. He held the Orioles -- a team as dead in the water as any I have seen in over a quarter-century of following baseball -- hitless through the first four innings, with only a fourth-inning walk to Miguel Tejada marring perfection.

By then, Johnson had been staked to a 2-0 lead courtesy of Matt Lawton. With Gary Sheffield limited to DH duty by a bad quad and Bernie Williams getting some rest in favor of the suddenly hot Bubba Crosby, Torre had no choice but to start Lawton, who had gone just 4-for-47 since being acquired from the Cubs in a waiver deal. With Hideki Matsui having singled off of Rodrigo Lopez two batters earlier, Lawton hit Lopez' first pitch into the rightfield bleachers, thereby doubling his homer and RBI totals as a Yank.

With the lead secured, Johnson's quest for a no-hitter became the focus. He got the first out of the fifth, striking out 31-year-old rookie Alejandro Freire. Following that, a bad throw by Derek Jeter after diving for Eric Byrnes' ground ball pulled Jason Giambi off the bag, and the crowd -- full for a Wednesay night, with 50,382 officially on hand -- cheered the official scorer's ruling of an error (the First Commandment of Official Scoring reads, "Make the first hit a clean one, especially for the home team.").

The point became moot two pitches later, when Chris Gomez lined a clean single between Giambi and Robinson Cano. It was the only time the Orioles had two baserunners on at the same time, but Johnson barely escaped by getting Luis Matos to ground into a 6-3 double play, the throw for which Giambi had to dive for. Already struggling with back spasms recently, Giambi has toughed it out so that Sheffield could remain in the lineup. But after that dive, he had to leave the game in favor of Tino Martinez.

The Orioles did get a run in the sixth, when Bernie Castro, the Orioles backup second baseman for the rest of the year after Brian Robers' season-ending elbow injury (which I thankfully missed seeing the night before) reached on an infield single to third base; Alex Rodriguez made a diving stop that prevented a double but his throw was late. Melvin Mora followed by scorching a Johnson pitch to deep centerfield for an RBI double, and things look they might come apart at the seams with Miguel Tejada looming next. But Johnson got ahead of Tejada 0-2 before inducing a fly ball to center, with Mora tagging. Javy Lopez ended the threat when A-Rod made a great diving stop of a one-hopper; this time, he was able to beat the runner with the throw.

The Yanks got runners to third base with two out in the sixth and eighth innings, but that was the closest they came to scoring again. A day after racking up a dozen runs, half of them off the bat of Gary Sheffield and his one good leg, the offense seemed to be telling the Big Unit to make do. So it was still 2-1 when Johnson came out for the eighth, having already thrown 104 pitches. Matos bunted one foul, then took him to a full count before flying out, then David Newhan inexplicably tried to bunt his way on as well before grounding out. You know your pitcher is dealing when the opposition is reduced to weak attempts to bunt its way on in the late innings. Finally Johnson blew Castro away, throwing a fastball that the rookie couldn't catch up with. Ninety-six on the gun. No chance. Oompossible, as my late grandfather used to say. Welcome to the big leagues, Meat.

Rivera came on for the ninth and immediately hit Mora with a pitch. Oy gevalt, I thought to myself. Tejada grounded into a fielder's choice, but Lopez singled. Why would anything be easy at this point? Jay Gibbons came out to hit for Freire and quickly fell behind 0-2. As usual, the Yankee crowd rose to its feet with two strikes, and my friend Julie, my companion for the evening, remarked that the crowd never learns that on 0-2 a pitcher usually wastes one instead of striking the guy out. Not this time. Rivera got him swinging on the third pitch. The crowd had scarcely stiopped cheering when pinch-hitter B.J. Surhoff lined Rivera's next pitch right to Tino at first to end the game.

I had spent a good portion of the night eying the out of town scoreboard between pitches, noting the Indians were up 2-0 on the White Sox and the Red Sox leading the Devil Rays 4-2. We didn't hear the remaining crowd reaction as the score changed, but by the time I reached the subway platform (Julie took a different train), the news that Boston had lost, giving the Yanks first place by a half-game, was circulating. I quickly called my friend Nick to confirm, then let out a howl as I got onto the subway car. "First place, beeyach!" I shouted to a 4 train full of beaming strangers. It was a fun ride home.

• • •

In this week's Hit List, I commented on the AL MVP race by noting that Alex Rodriguez held a 16-run edge over David Ortiz in Value Over Replacement Player before anyone considered defense, what with Ortiz being a DH and Rodriguez an excellent third baseman who should be playing shortstop. Prompted by one reader, I then noted that A-Rod had a two-win lead in Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP1), which does consider defense as well as offense; it was a 9.4 to 7.4 edge when I checked. All of that was enough ammo for me to feel secure in piping up my opinion, when asked by my favorite doorman to intercede in a baseball argument, that Rodriguez deserved the MVP more than Ortiz.

But a piece by James Click at Baseball Prospectus has given me reason to reconsider that stance. Click has used Win Expectancy to take another look at the comparison between the two. Win Expectancy takes into account the inning, the score margin, the number of outs, and the runners on base, comparing the state of the action before and after the batter comes to the plate to determine the percentage change in a team's chances of winning that game caused by the batter's outcome. BP uses it for its Reliever Expected Wins Added metric, a staple of many a Hit List entry. Here's Click:

The framework is not applied to batters in any of our regular reports, but it can be revealing when applied to hitters. Much like the reliever reports, each plate appearance can be analyzed by the difference in the team’s probability of winning the game before and after. Looking at the ninth inning of Tuesday’s Giants/Nationals game makes for a good walk-through. Randy Winn led off the inning with the Giants down 2-1. Given the Giants’ and Nats’ levels of offense, the Giants at that point had a 15.3% chance to win the game. After Winn grounded out to third, that dropped to 8.4%. A few batters later, Moises Alou’s three-run home run catapulted the Giants from 14.3% to 92.9%.

...A simple groundout by Winn cost the Giants a 6.8% chance to win the game in the top of the ninth while the same maneuver by Preston Wilson cost the Nats 3.6% in the bottom of the inning. Those values are significantly higher than the same outs earlier in the game. But this is what WE tells us that simple run metrics do not: they add context to performance, crediting clutch hits more than stat-padding home runs in blowouts.

And now, the requisite clutch hitting versus context independence blurb: Clutch hits exist, clutch hitters do not. There is no statistical evidence to support the idea that some hitters consistently perform better in situations defined as “clutch” as compared to normal situations. Good hitters are good clutch hitters; bad hitters are bad clutch hitters. Using WEx isn’t conceding the idea that some hitters are better in clutch situations than they are in normal situations going forward, but rather we’re looking to identify which hitters have contributed the most to their team’s chances of winning games given the situations in which they came to the plate. Not unlike teams that are outperforming their third-order winning percentage or a person who’s up at a blackjack table, those gains are banked and there is no correction going forward, but the best predictor of future performance is their third-order winning percentage, basic odds at blackjack, or overall hitting performance in all situations.

The upshot of all of this is that the major league leader in total WINS -- the total change in Win Expcectacy over the course of a season -- is David Ortiz, with 7.12. A-Rod is second in the AL, but it's a distant second, with 4.59. The NL leader is Carlos Delgado with 5.80, and five other National Leaguers (including, of all people, Tony Clark, who's having a magical resurgence in the thin air of Phoenix) have WINS higher than Rodriguez. Travis Hafner -- who has now homered in five straight games -- trails A-Rod by just 0.02 WINS, though he's likely surpassed him since that was written.

By the way, Derek Jeter, a man with a reputation for being "clutch," comes in at a bare 0.30 WINS. The Daily News pointed out on Monday, the day after Jeter looked at strike three to end the Yanks six-game winning streak, that eight times so far this year, Jeter has made the final out of a game with the tying run on base.

I feel like I've seen every one of those. And if the visceral difference I feel in seeing the Rodriguez/Jeter 2005 clutch comparison borne out numerically is worth anything, then I've got to reconsider the Rodriguez/Ortiz one as well. I'm not ready to call the race for MVP with 10 days left in the season any more than I am the AL East race. I just know I'll be paying very close attention.

• • •

John McMullen is best known as the man who brought hockey to New Jersey, where the Devils won two Stanley Cups under his ownership. He also owned the Astros for 13 years. But McMullen, who passed away last Friday at the age of 87, will forever be remembered for something he said back in 1974, when he had purchased a small share of the Yankees: "There is nothing quite so limited as being a limited partner of George Steinbrenner's."

The Times' Murray Chass has a warm remembrance of McMullen as a man of integrity and an anomaly among owners. Worth a read.

• • •

If you grew up watching baseball in the Eighties and collecting baseball cards as you did, then the Joe Sportsfan Worthless Baseball Card Collection ought to give you plenty of laughs. Hell, even if you didn't, you might bust a gut.

Each one of about 50 baseball cards from that era is paired with a quick and often hilarious blurb of "untrue fun facts." According to the site, Bob Horner "Once played an entire game in Japan in a Godzilla costume. Horner hit two homeruns in the game." Jay Baller "exploded onto the National League scene in 1989, using the Cubs V-neck jerseys to help run away with the league lead in chest hairs." My favorite: "In 1981, Gorman Thomas was suspended five games after he ripped off the arm of a heckling fan and used it to lay down a succesful sacrifice bunt during the game." I just love the image of Thomas, the grizzled, mean-looking slugger, doing bodily harm in the service of small ball.

Priceless stuff, well worth the visit even if names like Floyd Rayford (a favorite of mine in Salt Lake City) and Mike Laga don't mean a damn thing to you.