One more reason to hate baseball

So, the SF Giants win a "World" Series. I don't know what the big deal is about the championship of a dying and irrelevant sport.

What I do know is that the partying that ensued in San Francisco may leave so many hung over today that the kids don't get out and vote for Prop 19.

Saves again, but with charts

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Saves and other statistics

Nicholas Beaudrot is exactly right:

...managers have adjusted their in-game strategy to maximize their closer's save opportunities rather than maximize their team's chances of winning. Yesterday Frank Francisco and Jonathan Broxton were brought in to protect three run leads in the ninth inning. This is good for my fantasy team, but not for their respective teams; you actually do the more to help your team's chance of winning by bringing in your best reliever when you're one run behind—to minimize the chance of your opponent getting a bigger lead—than you do by having the relief ace close out a game when three runs ahead. |Donkeylicious|

Time was, they called the closer "the fireman" and the closers job was to shut down a rally and bring the game home. You can really see the change in the way elite closers have been used if you look at outs per game in relief and runners inherited.

Below is a chart to which I've added those categories, plus GDP, which is a batting-against stat for grounded into double-play. To get a historical comparison, I compared Bruce Sutter and Dan Quisenberry, the elite closers of a previous generation, to the top save-earners from each league from 2004-08.

Closers past and present

Player	GR	SV	Out/GR	IR	GDP
Sutter -77	62	31	5.2	50	5
Sutter - 78	64	27	4.6	58	3
Sutter - 79	62	37	4.9	55	5
Quisenberry -80	75	33	5.1	89	18
Sutter 80	60	28	5.1	38	12
Quisenberry -82	72	35	5.7	36	17
Sutter - 82	70	36	4.4	54	12
Quisenberry -83	69	45	6	40	19
Sutter - 83	60	21	4.5	43	8
Quisenberry - 84	72	44	5.4	35	12
Sutter -84	71	45	5.2	48	18
Quisenberry - 85	84	37	4.6	71	15
Benitez - 04	64	47	3.3	23	3
Isringhausen -04	74	47	3.1	23	1
Rivera - 05	74	53	3.2	17	11
Cordero -05	74	47	3	21	3
Rodriguez - 05	66	45	3.1	14	1
Wickman - 06	64	45	2.9	4	11
Hoffman - 06	65	46	2.9	1	5
Rodriguez - 06	69	47	3.2	20	4
Valverde 07	65	47	3	7	5
Borowski - 07	69	45	2.9	8	1
Rodriguez - 08	76	62	2.7	18	5
Valverde - 08	74	44	2.9	16	0

Friday dumb game blogging, watch this video while the servers at the iTunes store are busy edition

Tigers win!

Opening Day...

...and it looks like there won't even be any snow when the Tigers host the Royals this afternoon. For what it's worth, I predict that the Tigers will win the American League Central. You can tell that this prediction is uncolored by fan bias, since the Royals are in the same division. I predict that the Royals will finish second, half a game behind.

Update: Royals win 5-4 in 11 and I'm starting to think that maybe those worries about the Tigers bullpen are well founded.

Electoral prognostication

Update: Gossage is in. Rice fell 16 votes short. Andre Dawson saw a significant increase in support but still fell well short of induction. Chuck Knoblach and David Justice received one vote each. Mark McGwire's vote total stayed pretty much the same. Both Lee Smith and Bert Blyleven gained votes. As of 1:30pm Eastern Time I called New Hampshire for Obama.

Well, tomorrow is the big day. That's right, the results of the Baseball Hall of Fame voting will be announced. It's almost a no-brainer, but I predict that Goose Gossage will secure election. Other thoughts:

• Mark McGwire will almost certainly lose votes. I think it's even possible that he'll fall below 5% and be dropped from the ballot. Not likely, mind you, but possible.
  
• You would think that there Andre Dawson and Jim Rice would have a shot at securing election by sweeping the anti-steroid protest vote. But you'd also think that if that were going to happen then some of the writers would have said something about it by now. In point of fact, the silence of the Andre Dawson Hall of Fame campaign is hard to miss. The Jim Rice supporters are slightly less silent, but that isn't saying much. My guess is that neither will secure election, but that Jim Rice will come close.
  
• Neither Chuck Knoblach nor David Justice will receive enough votes to remain on the ballot.
  
• Lee Smith will continue to lose votes.
  
• Bert Blyleven will reverse last year's trend and increase his vote totals.

In other electoral news, Obama will win in New Hampshire with Clinton and Edwards in a virtual tie for second. On the Republican side, Romney will do better than expected.

HOF horserace blogging

Another consequence of the Mitchell report is that any chance Mark McGwire had to increase his vote totals this year is as lost as the innocence of the East German women's swim team. Between that and the fact that Tim Raines is the best player coming on to the ballot, this is looking like a good year for the players who've been hanging around just below the 75% thresh hold for awhile.

I made a chart.

As you can see if you've got really good glasses or a high quality display, all the trends point to Goose Gossage going into the Hall. Jim Rice also looks pretty strong, but you have to wonder why he lost support last year.

For historical context, here's another chart.

And here's a piece of trivia: The last time that no player received enough support to be elected to the Hall of Fame was 1996.

I get silent when I'm drugged up

Andy Pettitte's idea that HGH isn't a performance enhancing drug if you only use it to heal faster is clearly bunk, but his statement yesterday is pretty interesting.

In 2002 I was injured. I had heard that human growth hormone could promote faster healing for my elbow. I felt an obligation to get back to my team as soon as possible. For this reason, and only this reason, for two days I tried human growth hormone. This is it -- two days out of my life; two days out of my entire career, when I was injured and on the disabled list. I wasn't looking for an edge. I was looking to heal.

Looking to heal faster, obviously, is looking for an edge. And every pitch Pettitte threw that he wouldn't have thrown without HGH leaves a mark in the record book where it otherwise would have remained blank. Still, I'm curious to see what kind of traction Pettitte gets with this. Lots of sports fans are going to see something to admire in Pettitte's desire to get back to his team.

Relatedly, it seems to me that the Mitchell report tends to confirm a view that I've held for awhile. Namely, that the use of performance enhancing drugs is so widespread that the playing field is effectively level.

Dept of corrections

From last December:

Speaking of exclusion from the Hall of Fame, Steve Garvey is down to two years of ballot eligibility. He was named on only a quarter of ballots last year, and has never been named on more than 43%, so it's looking like he won't make it into the Hall of Fame. It's a shame. |link|

It turns out, though, that last year was Garvey's last on the ballot. Oops.

And it is a shame. Especially when you look at the list of players coming on to the ballot over the next two years. Ricky Henderson is a first ballot lock in 2009, but nobody else looks likely to make the Hall, let alone on the first ballot. Tim Raines is probably the next strongest candidate, and he doesn't meet barely even meets my lax standards. With that kind of competition, there might have been room for Garvey.

By the by, while tooling around baseball-reference.com I noticed a stat I hadn't seen before -- HOF Monitor. Here's the description:

This is another Jamesian creation. It attempts to assess how likely (not how deserving) an active player is to make the Hall of Fame. It's rough scale is 100 means a good possibility and 130 is a virtual cinch. It isn't hard and fast, but it does a pretty good job.

Follow the link to see the rules for assigning points. Steve Garvey scored 130.5 points.

This post has been edited by its author.

Keep the kids off drugs!

While examining a 17-year-old pitcher for a knee injury last year in Nashville, Dr. Damon H. Petty was asked a chilling question by the teenager and his father: If reconstructive elbow surgery were performed on his healthy throwing arm, might he gain some speed on his fastball?

Dr. Petty said he dissuaded them, explaining that was a myth, a “dangerous notion to entertain,” and that ligament reconstruction on a healthy arm would not improve his pitching “one iota.”

The procedure is commonly known as Tommy John surgery, named after the former major league pitcher on whom it was first performed in 1974. The surgery has become so reliable, with a success rate of 80 to 85 percent, that it has prolonged the careers of hundreds of major leaguers. About one in seven pitchers in the major leagues this season has had the surgery.|NY Times|

No evidence of any kind is given for the claim that the performance enhancing reputation of Tommy John Surgery is a mere myth. Maybe it is, but there sure are a lot of anecdotal reports of major league pitchers who throw harder after the surgery than before.

Leaving that aside, do you think we can assume that if one in seven major league pitchers have had the surgery, it wasn't medically necessary in all cases? And that when the surgery wasn't medically necessary, it was sought because it was thought (perhaps wrongly) to increase velocity?

Each broken dream still lingers on

The bright side of Joel Zumaya's recent injury is that I belatedly learned about this:

According to the Detroit Free Press, Zumaya was hurt playing a PlayStation 2 video game called "Guitar Hero", in which the player simulates playing an electric guitar for popular rock bands. Zumaya, a 22-year-old rookie, suffered inflammation in his right (throwing) wrist and forearm from playing the game.

When Zumaya went to the Tigers training staff about his injury, they noticed his pain was more consistent with a guitar player than a baseball pitcher, according to the Free Press. Since Zumaya was known to play the game, the team asked him to stop, and he pitched pain-free in the World Series. |source|

Not much of a bright side, I know. But I can tell you from experience that the Guitar Hero injury risk is real. Here are some tips that will allow even the most avid Hero to play injury free:

• Warm up! Look, I know that the "Easy" songs are easy, and hardly worthy of a Hero, but the mode is there to help you out. Don't let pride be your downfall.
  
• Know when to quit. We've all been there. Freebird was a breeze and it's got you thinking that you're finally ready to rip Message in a Bottle on "Expert". Don't believe it. And don't think that after you've failed seventeen times that the eighteenth is the charm. It isn't. It's when heroes get hurt and become, once and for all, zeroes.
  
• For God's sake, steer clear of Psychobilly Freakout. Unless you happen to be eight years old playing that song puts you on the fast track for carpal tunnel. It's just not worth it.

A game played with a bat and ball by two opposing teams of nine players

Less than a week to go until the baseball hall of fame balloting results are announced, and the tension is palpable.

Seriously, it's totally palpable.

Anyway, I agree with Mike Sullivan that Cal Ripkin, Jr. and Tony Gwynn are shoe-ins, and that Mark McGwire doesn't have a snowball's chance. The interesting action comes when you look down the ballot at the top returning vote getters. Here are the top five players returning from last year's ballot:

Name	Votes	Pct
Jim Rice	337	64.8
Goose Gossage	336	64.6
Andre Dawson	317	61.0
Bert Blyleven	277	53.3
Lee Smith	234	45.0

[source]


The requirement for election is that a player must appear on 75% of ballots cast. There were 520 ballots cast last year, so that works out to 390 votes. As you can see, Rice and Gossage are both right on the cusp.

Here's part of what Sullivan had to say about Rice, the returning player with the highest vote total:

The attitudes toward Rice have softened over the years, as is evident by his vote total last year. He received 337 votes, good for 64.8 percent but just short of the required 75 percent. Working in Rice's favor is the historical fact that nobody has ever gotten such a high vote total without eventually getting in.

I happen to think that all five of those players deserve election, but unlike Sullivan (I think), I don't believe that any of them will make it this year. The simple reason is that the voters are extremely unlikely to induct more than two players in any given year -- the last time it happened was 1991 -- and this year there are more than two newly eligible players deserving election.

Those high vote totals for Rice and Gossage are probably explained by the fact that last year there weren't any strong candidates among those in their first year of eligibility. The world having turned, their totals will probably drop this year. There is, though, hope for the future. The only sure-fire hall of famer arriving on to the ballot in the next couple of years is Rickey Henderson in 2009, so there should be room to elect a few borderline guys next year or the year after.

Yes, this is one of those hall of fame posts

Some time ago I wrote a post proposing revised magic numbers for entrance into the Baseball Hall of Fame. One thing I didn't do in the original post was list the excluded players who would merit inclusion given my proposals, so I've posted that list after the jump.

Looking back, I think a couple of the numbers I proposed might be a little bit on the low side, and that there are others -- 4750 total bases for example -- that few players reach without also passing one of the more established benchmarks. One number, 4000 strikeouts, jumps out as being on the high side. Only four players have hit that plateau: Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, and Steve Carlton. If the number were lowered to 3000, only three players not currently in the hall would be added to the list: Bert Blyleven, Greg Maddux, and Curt Shilling.

Of the purely statistical benchmarks proposed, the one I'm most perplexed by are triples. There are lots of pre-modern players with more than 150 triples, along with a handful of players whose careers went into the 1930s, but the only unambiguously modern players to hit that mark are Stan Musial, Roberto Clemente, and Lou Gehrig. The change, I'm given to understand, has something to do with advances in glove and fence technology. Among players active in my lifetime, Willie Wilson is the career triples leader with 147. Among active players, the aging Steve Finley is way out in front with 124. I guess my thinking when writing the original post was that anybody who could hit 150 in the modern era must be a hall of famer.

The numbers that commenters gave me the hardest time about in response to the original post were gold gloves and all-star appearances. You can follow the link to the original post to read my dismissive response to those criticisms. Looking now at the list of excluded players that those benchmarks would include, though, inclines me to agree that they are too permissive.

(Key: * - active player, + - has exhausted HOF eligibility, @#!% - Pete Rose)

• 10 Gold Gloves
  
  • Jim Kaat, 16 LHP+
    
  • Greg Maddux, 16 RHP*
    
  • Ivan Rodriguez,12 C*
    
  • Keith Hernandez, 11 1B+
    
  • Roberto Alomar, 10 2B
    
  • Omar Vizquel, 11 SS*
    
  • Ken Griffey Jr., 10 OF*
  
  
• 12 All-Star games
  
  • Cal Ripkin Jr., 19
    
  • Pete Rose, 17@#!%
    
  • Tony Gwynne, 15
    
  • Barry Bonds, 13
    
  • Ivan Rodriguez, 12*
    
  • Roberto Alomar, 12
    
  • Ken Griffey Jr., 12*
    
  • Barry Larkin, 12
    
  • Mark McGwire, 12
    
  • Mike Piazza, 12*
  
  
• 1600 Runs
  
  • Ricky Henderson, 2295
    
  • Pete Rose, 2165@#!%
    
  • Barry Bonds, 2152*
    
  • Craig Biggio, 1776*
    
  • Rafael Palmeiro, 1663
    
  • Cal Ripkin Jr., 1647
    
  • Jimmy Ryan, 1642+
    
  • George Van Haltren, 1639+
  
  
• 4750 Total Bases
  
  • Barry Bonds, 5784*
    
  • Pete Rose, 5752@#!%
    
  • Rafael Palmeiro, 5388
    
  • Cal Ripkin Jr., 5168
    
  • Andre Dawson, 4787
  
  
• 550 Doubles
  
  • Pete Rose, 746@#!%
    
  • Craig Biggio, 637*
    
  • Cal Ripkin Jr., 603
    
  • Barry Bonds, 587*
    
  • Rafael Palmeiro, 585
  
  
• 150 modern Triples
  
  • none
  
  
• 1600 RBI
  
  • Barry Bonds, 1930*
    
  • Rafael Palmeiro, 1835
    
  • Cal Ripkin Jr., 1695
    
  • Harold Baines, 1628
    
  • Ken Griffey Jr., 1608*
  
  
• 700 Stolen Bases
  
  • Ricky Henderson, 1406
    
  • Tim Raines, 808
    
  • Vince Coleman, 752+
    
  • Arlie Latham, 739+
  
  
• 450 Saves
  
  • Trevor Hoffman, 482*
    
  • Lee Smith, 478
  
  
• 50 Shutouts
  
  • Bert Blyleven, 60
  
  
• 4000 Strikeouts
  
  • Roger Clemens, 4604*
    
  • Randy Johnson, 4544*