Blissful Knowledge: August 8, 2004 - August 14, 2004 Archives

August 11, 2004
A LOOK BACK

I just wanted to touch on a couple of items from the classic 13-inning game between the Yankees and Red Sox last month.

1) Since the game was played, I've been trying to think of a better regular season game I've seen. I officially give up.

2) For a political columnist, Bob Herbert is a great sportswriter. His NYT op-ed on the game indicates that he's in the wrong department:

By then the players on both sides seemed to have entered a special zone that transcended the rivalry of the two teams. They were locked in an extended competition played out at such a high level of skill and intensity that it conferred a kind of grace on all who participated, no matter who would end up losing.

That was one of the most amazing things about the game - the way the players on both sides dropped all pretense in extra innings, and combined an all-out effort to win the game with undisguised awe at what they were a part of. Except, of course, for the Red Sox's soon-to-be-former shortstop. It wasn't just the sitting out of a key game, or the contrasts with the great plays and efforts of his ancient rivals Jeter and A-Rod. It was the contrast vivdly portrayed by the TV cameras - his Red Sox teammates standing at the top step of the dugout, mouths uniformly agape for innings on end, while Nomar sat by himself on the bench, motionless and emotionless. Sometimes, the TV camera does not lie.

3) My brother had tickets to the game. He gave them away less than an hour before game time. The recipient has promised to name his first-born child after my brother. (Let's hope it's a boy.)

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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

I get very uncomfortable whenever I'm around too many people who agree with me. The only way I know to dispel the discomfort is to play devil's advocate. Put me in a room full of Bush supporters, and I'll be making the case for Kerry in no time.

Apropos of nothing in particular, I finally had an epiphany about that tendency. It's not any praiseworthy instinct towards critical thinking or even a healthy contrarianism. (Contrarianism is generally overrated, as it leads too easily to mindlessness of its own.) Rather, it's a misguided superiority complex, manifesting itself as a disrespect for other's views and beliefs.

I'll try to do better. So from now on, if people want to try to make the case for Bush, I won't stop them.

Posted by Dr. Manhattan at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

August 10, 2004
ORGANIZATIONAL EFFICIENCY?

I noted the other day that the Toronto Blue Jays' disappointing season, despite J.P. Ricciardi's efforts that have been applauded by the sabermetrics community, threatens to turn that team into the center of the "Moneyball" wars.

David Pinto comments on yesterday's firing of manager Carlos Tosca and anticipates one justified line of criticism:

[W]hat I want to know is why Moneyball GM's do such a poor job of hiring managers?

...Why do they go for teachers like Tosca, or player's managers like Francona, or people with a presence like Art Howe? Why don't they go for someone like Earl Weaver or Whitey Herzog or Davey Johnson, who basically agree with their philosophy of running a baseball team without being obvious about it? Are these GMs afraid to share the limelight with a strong manager?

Pinto makes a very good point: the managers of the "Moneyball" teams generally range from the mediocre, to the uninspired, to Grady Little. The only such manager I can think of that inspires any respect around the game is Bruce Bochy of the Padres, and that's only if you (a) count the Padres as a "Moneyball" team and (b) assume that the respect granted to Bochy is justified; I'm somewhat skeptical as to both.

I think there are a few factors at work here:

1) There almost certainly is a control-freak aspect at work; insofar as the "Moneyball" GMs feel they need to create a revolution against the entrenched interests in the organization, they feel a manager with any experience at all carries an unacceptable risk of becoming an independent power source. Sandy Alderson was quoted in damning detail on this point in Moneyball with respect to Art Howe. Though the sentiments are never put in Beane's mouth in such explicit fashion, the attitude one gets from reading Moneyball is that Beane feels that the best he can expect from a manager is a Hippocratic goal of "do no harm."

I don't agree with that attitude, assuming it exists. If you are in fact trying to overturn an organization's culture, proclaiming the changes from the top down is only one step towards that goal: you need agents of your program at many different levels making sure that the changes get carried out on every level. Billy Beane understands that; the A's are a model of implementing unified organizational strategy throughout the minor leagues. Why not have an agent of Beane-ball as manager, instead of settling for a cipher like Art Howe? I tried making this point - albeit not very well - some time ago in suggesting that Bobby Valentine might be a good match to manage a Billy Beane team. Justly criticized by David Pinto, my point was that a manager as smart, confident and open-minded as Valentine (or someone like him, with better people skills) would be capable of buying into the analytic program and pushing it forward in a way that an empty uniform like Art Howe could never do.

Incidentally, the team that seems to have best integrated their manager into the organizational philosophy is the Cleveland Indians, with Eric Wedge. I can understand that it would work best with a young, rebuilding team like the Indians, but if any Red Sox fans can explain how Francona helps advance the front office's agenda, I'd like to hear about it.

2) Generally, there are no managers in the game today with the self-confident desire to put their own stamp on the game (or, if you prefer, "egotistical enough to consider themselves strategic geniuses"). There are no Gene Mauchs, Earl Weavers or Whitey Herzogs managing today. Perhaps that fact feeds the feeling of Beane and his ilk that the most they can hope for out of a manager is an innocuous apparatchnik.

The last manager I can think of who really changed the game was Tony LaRussa, who bequeathed us the hyper-specialized, overloaded bullpen. Why aren't there any more like him? I can think of a few reasons (all of which are pure speculation):
a) There were never that many managerial geniuses in the old days either; the "old boys'" network was even more prevalent then.
b) The continuous increase of the media and national exposure for every game and team has increased the costs of dissenting from the conventional wisdom (i.e., a unique managerial strategy might be the lead story on Sportscenter every night).
c) The sabermetric revolution might have had some indirect effect, in that baseball people are now aware of outside sources of knowledge that go by the term "expertise." While they may not actually know what such expertise consists of, they understand that they can't go by their whims and call it expertise any longer.

UPDATE: Thinking about it more this morning, I realzed that the above omits one of the biggest reasons for the lack of larger-than-life managers today: evolution. The late Stephen Jay Gould's articles on evolutionary processes and the extinction of the .400 hitter are much loved by baseball analysts everywhere: to oversimplify into one sentence, his point is that the competitive pressures of the sport have, over time, reduced the differences between the best and worst players, making it that much more difficult to perform extraordinarily disproportionate feats like hitting .400. (I'm sure someone will tell me if I'm wrong. And as a digression, I think there's a good argument to be made that the last decade has seen some reversal of the Gould-identified phenomenon - there seems to be an increase in the extremes between the best and worst players and performances. But that's for another time, preferably reinforced by some real math.)

Red Sox fans might have trouble accepting this after last year's Game 7 debacle, but I think there's a good argument that today's worst managers are better than the worst managers of the past. There will always be those who can't handle the pressure or get along with people, but today's managers are unlikely to let their prize pitching prospect go for 175 pitches to build his toughness, or even do so with their grizzled rotation ace in order to save the bullpen. Nor will they bat the guy with the .290 OBP leadoff just because he has good speed, or sacrifice 130 times a year. And they probably won't see their primary job as teaching the youngsters how to "pound that Bud" either (though if it's Selig, it might not be a bad idea). Even the smart managers of today did some stupid things back then: not until his team defeated the Yankees in the 2003 World Series did certain sabermetrically-oriented Kansas City Royals fans forgive Jack McKeon for blowing out Steve Busby's arm (by having him throw about 9,000 pitches in a game when Busby was supposedly telling McKeon that his arm didn't feel right).

A final unscientific illustration of the point: Up to a couple of decades ago, a prevailing attitude among many managers went along the lines of "real men don't look at stats." (The last such manager, I think, was Dallas Green. A mutated version of this mindset survives among some recent managers who seem to confuse bunting with machismo, such as Don Baylor and Bob Brenly.) Today, the more common problem is managers who look at stats but don't know what to do with them - as in "I played Player A instead of Player B because Player A has good numbers against this pitcher; he's 2 for 3." (Yankee fans with memories for the ridiculously trivial may remember that Joe Torre used precisely this argument in playing Darryl Strawberry over Cecil Fielder in Game 1 of the 1996 ALDS. He's wized up since then.) I think that's progress.

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AIDS HELP IS NOT ON THE WAY

Here's a terribly dispiriting piece (registration required) by James Pinkerton about the prospects for further progress - specifically, the lack of such - in the fight against AIDS. The factors he cites are ones I hadn't thought of before, but they unfortunately seem accurate:

Activists say the drug companies have underfunded R&D. But the truth is that the drug makers have spent tens of billions of dollars on fighting AIDS. Now, however, they are quietly pulling back. Why? Because they no longer see profits ahead. The drug companies are being pressured into basically giving away their existing anti-AIDS meds in Third World countries, home to 95% of the 38 million people infected with the virus.

Even so, they are routinely vilified; the chief of Pfizer, Hank McKinnell, was booed off the stage in Bangkok. If a pharmaceutical company were to come up with an AIDS-smiting "silver bullet," Magic Johnson would gladly pay the sticker price, while everyone else would demand it free. If you're Pfizer, it's hard to make money that way.

...But now there's a new twist: The creation of a permanent, self-perpetuating AIDS bureaucracy that has a vested interest in maintaining the disease but little interest in curing it. For every case of AIDS today, somebody — usually a middleman of the type well represented in Bangkok — gets money.

The world now spends about $4.7 billion a year on AIDS. About two-thirds of that comes from the U.S. And both governments and nongovernmental organizations have figured out that if they make enough noise, they can get even more for AIDS treatment. President Bush has pledged to spend an additional $15 billion over five years, and John Kerry has pledged to double that.

And of course, any number of big-name foundations — Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Elton John — are writing checks too. Thus has "Big AIDS" — the network of caregivers, consciousness-raisers and, of course, condom distributors — become a big business. Five million people contracted HIV last year — and as for the next 5 million, they're worth billions too, according to a grim dollars-for-dying formula.

In this new environment, when funding streams correlate with victim streams, the vision of a cure as a goal yields instead to perpetuation as a goal.

Read the whole thing, and weep. (Thanks to Mickey Kaus for the pointer.)

Posted by Dr. Manhattan at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

August 09, 2004
THE (CASH)MAN WITH THE PLAN

Check out this outstanding profile of Brian Cashman in this week's New York magazine.

The piece has already attracted some notoriety for a quote from Mrs. Cashman about how her husband might consider going to the Red Sox for his next job. But there are some more informative nuggets in the piece as well. A unique testimonial:

... “Brian comes off as very humble, but he is one street-savvy motherfucker,” says an admiring baseball agent. “Those people who underestimate him in any way—he will cut their throats.”

A preview into how the Yankees are attempting to smarten up their organization:

Cashman has allies in his effort to smarten up the organization. The head of baseball operations, Mark Newman, recently came across a Financial Times story about the cutting-edge University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt. “We e-mailed about some issues of mutual interest. As Steven explains it to me, game theory is about the interaction of competitors, whether in the marketplace or politically or on the athletic field,” Newman says. “We want to take advantage of a 200 IQ that happens to enjoy sports. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we need to ask questions. And Cash’s brain works that way, too.” The notion is a long way from being implemented, but the Yankees want to see if Levitt’s thinking can help steel its young, developing players against the pressures of performing in New York.

And a behind-the-scenes look at his workday:

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other issues. Cashman huddles with doctors diagnosing Giambi’s mysterious illness. He also fields complaints from players’ wives upset with their seat location. Another afternoon, Kevin Brown is insisting that a groundskeeper travel from the Bronx to Staten Island to manicure the pitching mound for Brown’s rehab stint. (“Man, Brown is a perfectionist,” says the groundskeeper. “No, he’s a prick, is what he is,” snaps a Yankees coach.)

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BASEBALL REVIEW - AL EDITION

Here are some thoughts about the 2004 baseball season as we pass the 2/3 mark. This post is about the AL only; I will hopefully do a shorter piece on the NL later this week (or I may just do a series of shorter posts on specific teams).

AL EAST

Yankees

To be discussed in a separate post, as befitting their oh-so-regal status.

Red Sox

“How the East Was Lost” – the Sox have lost the division to the Yankees at three points:

1) When they, as Baseball Prospectus pointed out, treaded water after their April sweep in Yankee Stadium and allowed the Yankees to wipe out the accumulated deficit against the toughest part of their schedule. Once the Yankees went into June with a lead, it was that much tougher for the Sox to catch up.

2) After the sweep which culminated in the classic 13-inning game on July 1, the Yankees were wiped out. Promptly swept by the Mets (an event that, in almost any other year, would have caused apocalyptic overreactions from the Boss, and I don’t mean Bruce), the team treaded water for much of July, going 10-8. A Red Sox hot streak, long expected by most fans, would have made the race interesting again. Instead, the Sox also went 10-8 and thus frittered away another month.

3) Donating the shortstop formerly known as No-mah to the Cubs for 40 cents on the dollar, if that much. This trade has been picked over in cyberspace, and there’s no need to rehash it here. While I understand the necessity to get him out of town for non-performance reasons, the fact remains as stated by Jedi Master Beane in Moneyball: “The day you say you have to do something, you're screwed. Because you are going to make a bad deal.” (Quote may be somewhat inexact, as I don’t have the book with me.) I’m sure the Sox management knew this, but did the deal anyway. Theo Epstein may need more training before he can become a Sith Lord and challenge the Yankees (to invert Larry Lucchino’s infamous quote).

One other thing: Many people have noted that the Sox’s “Pythagorean” record (i.e., the record that they would expect to have based on their totals of runs scored and runs allowed) is just about identical to the Yankees, and drawn the conclusions that: (a) there is little if any difference between the quality of those teams, and (b) the Yankees’ superior record is mostly attributable to luck (though research has indicated that a superior bullpen such as “Quan-Gor-Mo” gives teams a small structural advantage on Pythagoras).
I buy both points, to a degree. But history is an interesting thing. Let’s look at the following comparisons:

Year Yankees’ “Pythagorean” Record Red Sox’s “Pythagorean” Record
2004
(through August 5) 59-48 61-45
2003 96-66 94-68
2002 99-62 100-62

(Note: 2002 and 2003 figures are from Baseball-reference com; 2004 figures are from Rob Neyer’s ESPN.com page. There is a minor difference in how they calculate the expected records: Baseball-reference uses the somewhat more accurate exponent of 1.83, while Rob’s page uses the traditional 2, for those who care.)

Pretty close, with the Red Sox having a small advantage in 2002 and 2004 (so far). Now let’s look at the real-world records:

Year Yankees’ Record Red Sox’s Record
2004
(through August 5) 68-39 59-48
2003 101-61 95-67
2002 103-58 93-69

The difference between the two teams may have largely been luck, but that luck seems to have been around for a while.

And no sooner do I write this than I see the following on Rob Neyer’s ESPN chat:

Tom (Upstate NY): The Yanks are leading the league because they're vastly outperforming their Pythagorean projection, but they've done this consistently since 1996. Eight of nine years they've beat Pythagorus since the dawn of the Torre-Rivera era, by a total of 37 wins. What's the cause of this amazing feat?: Torre's managerial skills?, Rivera and the rest of the bullpen?, or just plain luck? My money's on Rivera, et al, but what's you're call?

Rob Neyer: (11:57 AM ET ) Good question, Tom. The Twins have been doing the same thing, though not for as many years. The standard answer is that it's mostly luck, that the bullpen effect has been studied and found wanting. But I'd love to see a new study of the subject, because the Yankees do make you wonder.

Tampa Bay Devil Rays

How cool is it to not have the AL East teams in the same exact order for the seventh year in a row? Finally, Tampa Bay shows signs of joining the big leagues. Not only are they flirting with .500 and amassing a core of exciting, high-ceiling young talent (it’d be nice if, thanks to being rushed to the big leagues, Crawford and Baldelli wouldn’t be eligible for free agency just as they’re hitting their primes – but hey, you can’t expect the organization to be perfect after seven years of nothing but mistakes), but last week, they even made a good trade. After only seven years of trying! (I don’t have to tell Met fans which trade I’m referring to…)

Baltimore Orioles

Some short takes:

Miguel Tejada and Javy Lopez: Justifying their contracts, for now.

Palmeiro: Start the Cooperstown clock soon – it’s almost time. Could last a little longer if his at-bats are restricted to RHPs.

Melvin Mora: If not for Barry Bonds (and some injuries), the most incomprehensible player in all of baseball. Seriously - from an extra guy, at best a super-utility guy, to a 1.000 OPS over two seasons? And you can’t even criticize the Mets for trading him in 2000 – not even the Orioles thought he’d be anywhere close to this good.

Sidney Ponson: Fat. Bad. Lesson not to (with one exception, now pitching for the Giants) give a big-money contract to a pitcher based on potential when he hasn’t translated that into performance at any sustained point over the first six years of his career: priceless. (See, e.g.: Dreifort, Darren; Escobar, Kelvim (though he’s actually doing OK this year).)

Pitching in general (to opposing hitters): Yum.

Toronto Blue Jays

This is ground zero in the Moneyball wars, and it should be. Great things were expected out of the Blue Jays this season, as J.P. Ricciardi has had over two years to raze the team to its foundations and rebuild as he (sabermetrically) saw fit. Coming into the season, it looked like he’d done so: he made several well-regarded moves to strengthen the pitching staff of a team that had won 86 games in 2003, and had a farm system supposedly turning out star prospects by the dozen. It hasn’t worked out that way, in every respect.

The Ricciardi regime has already taken abuse on a number of counts from the media allies of the scouts he’s fired. If the Blue Jays do not rebound quickly next year, Ricciardi could be in trouble and the anti-analytic media suspects will be quick to draw broad conclusions.

AL CENTRAL

Minnesota Twins

Thanks to their multi-year hex over the White Sox (as well as the injuries to Frank Thomas and Magglio Ordonez), they’ll be going to the playoffs again. And while they finally cleared space for Justin Morneau (thanks to the Red Sox-Nomar divorce), they (wisely) passed on Benson. Accordingly, they’re poised to be a speed bump for the Yankees in the playoffs, again. (All caveats about small sample sizes, “$%%^$& not working in the playoffs,” etc. apply.)
The thing to watch over the next couple of years is whether they are able to continue focusing and stay ahead of the hard-charging Indians, or whether a combination of bad contracts (Hunter, Radke, Stewart, etc.) and indecisiveness regarding talent allocation (Morneau, the two-year delay in getting Santana into the rotation, etc.) closes their window of opportunity.

Chicago White Sox

As a Yankee fan…THANK YOU, KENNY WILLIAMS!

Seriously, things don’t look good: Williams culminated a multi-year trend of dissipating prospects by overpaying for Freddy Garcia, and exchanged a somewhat reliable Loaiza for … well, “reliable” is not the first adjective that comes to mind in describing a pitcher who needs a battalion of psychologists every time he falls behind 2-0 on a batter or sees a Red Sox uniform. And he took on a lot of money in the process. And the farm system is depleted. And Thomas and Ordonez are each hurt and probably soon to be gone. And the stadium is still the worst of the new generation of parks. And Chicago fans still barely notice…

Cleveland Indians

They’re following the sabermetrically-approved path of bashing other teams’ brains in first and figuring out the other side of the ball later: (See: 1999-2000 Athletics, 2003 Red Sox and Blue Jays). Because they’re in Cleveland and their GM is neither a former employee of Billy Beane nor a current employer of Bill James, the organization hasn’t attracted the attention it deserves as an analytically-run place. But it’s possible that no organization, except possibly the A’s, has integrated research and analysis as thoroughly as the Indians have. Check out this great Cleveland Plain-Dealer series from last year for a description.

Now, let’s hope they get the rest of their pitching staff together before C.C. Sabathia blows his arm out.

Detroit Tigers

“The Detroit Tigers are not part of major league baseball until further notice.” – Mike Francesa, on the radio in the spring of 2003.

Notice has been given, as the Tigers have already surpassed their 2003 win total. They’ve done it mostly thanks to the bats of Carlos Guillen and Pudge Rodriguez, the latter further expanding his list of accomplishments for the Cooperstown plaque. As of last Sunday, the Tigers actually led the AL in Lee Sinins’ “Runs Created Above Average.”

One of the most fascinating articles yet published by the Baseball Prospectus was their preview of the Tigers before the 2003 season, in which they discussed the perverse PR problems faced by teams with good offense (especially power) but mediocre pitching. Good organizations know how to spout cliches about how “pitching and defense is the key” to everything, and then go back to the office and put things into proper perspective. Bad organizations actually believe it. The Tigers’ belief in such cliches led them to build “Comerica National Park” - an extreme pitchers’ park designed to strangle the very kind of player that had been most successful for the Tigers for the previous century – and build the wrong kind of team for the park. Thanks to Pudge and Guillen, the Tigers have returned to their roots to an extent. Has the Detroit media picked up on the reasons for the Tigers’ success, or have they been fooled by the park effects and attributed the Tigers’ resurgence to “pitching and defense?” Any Tigers fans out there who can comment?

Kansas City Royals

Team motto for 2004 comes from God’s punishment of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:19: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” I’ve lost track of the number of pitchers who’ve broken down, and Brian Anderson has been worse than that. But at least Allard Baird is getting better at the “trading-the-star” thing – he brought back some viable talent this time.

AL WEST

Oakland Athletics

Notwithstanding their recent series loss to the Yankees, the team has commenced its annual second-half run. This is getting ridiculous already; while “$#$%^ing A” deals for players such as Jermaine Dye might have been big contributors in years past, I don’t think last year’s acquisition of Jose Guillen and this June’s acquisition of Octavio Dotel (with a 5.32 ERA for the A’s as of Friday) are the primary causes of the A’s annual second-half sprint. More research is needed.

Aside from the struggles of Barry Zito (Joe Sheehan’s prediction looks very good now, even if Ted Lilly hasn’t set the world on fire either), the biggest story for the A’s in the national media will be: how will they self-destruct in the playoffs this time? Presumably, they’ll win a series eventually if they keep getting in. But many commenters have noted how much extra pressure the Yankees face in October, knowing that anything short of a World Series championship will be deemed a miserable failure. The A’s will be facing similar pressure from the media this year; if they win a series, will the media transform them into clutch heroes? I doubt it.

Texas Rangers

There is no team I am rooting against more this year (except for the Red Sox, of course). I should be grateful for their generous donation of A-Rod to the Yankees along with $67 million or so. And all Yankee fans will always root for Buck Showalter, and I hope Soriano does well. But the Rangers’ success this year (which even they clearly didn’t anticipate) feeds the common confusion of correlation and causation – i.e., their success will be attributed to the A-Rod trade, facts be damned (Soriano’s production is down from the last two years, despite moving to a better hitters’ ballpark, and how has the A-Rod trade contributed to the shocking and sudden competence of the pitching staff?). That must be stopped, for the good of all that’s logical.

Anaheim Angels

I still have trouble looking at this team rationally (the traumas of the 2002 ALDS run deep), and would have even more trouble if they had acquired Randy Johnson. With their (albeit injury-plagued) bullpen and Vlad the Unstoppable, they would be great trouble if they ever got to the playoffs. And that’s really all I have to say about them.

Seattle Mariners

As the great U.S.S. Mariner blog has described in hating detail, the Mariners’ front office has been a conscientious objector in the great “Moneyball” war between sabermetricians and traditionalists. But they did take Kenny Williams to the cleaners for Freddy Garcia, so there’s still hope.

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