The Gold Gloves™ angried up my blood!

Ok, I swore to myself that in predicting the winners of the Gold Gloves™ (rather than who should win) that I wouldn’t let myself get angered by the results because I was acknowledging the silly ways that the coaches and managers vote on the award.  Besides, I did this last year.  Nevertheless, here I am!

There weren’t even any egregious decisions in the NL voting this year.  Yeah, Chase Utley should probably have won, but I can’t really say he’s overwhelmingly better than Brandon Phillips this year.  I just think he has probably deserved to win for a while and I’d be sad if he didn’t ever win.  Second basemen tend not to age well.  Scott Rolen’s also very good, but I can’t help but think that an improved offensive year combined with being on a playoff team allowed him to win the award.  Really, I’m not complaining about the actual winners, just the process.

Coaches and managers vote on the Gold Gloves™.  They can’t vote for their own players, and the OF spots are lumped into three awards not differentiated by position.  Other than that, anything goes.  I’d be surprised if most of those coaches or managers look at any numbers before voting, but if they do I would bet it’s mostly limited to (mostly useless) fielding percentage.  Usually guys that are good defensively have good defensive reputations among the coaches and managers, which is why the awards are usually closer to right than wrong.  However, as I mentioned with Scott Rolen, I think playing for a winning team and having a good offensive year are almost as important as a. having won before; and b. actually being good at defense.  When giving my predictions to my friend Chris, I said that if the Cubs had had a better year, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Marlon Byrd win a Gold Glove™ for his good offensive year, good defensive reputation (he just looks like he’s playing hard out there!), and his big play in the All-Star game throwing out David Ortiz at 2nd base.

I’m not really blaming the voters for the bad choices, either.  They’ve just finished a long year, they probably don’t really take it too seriously, and they don’t really get to watch all the players on whom they’re voting except for when their teams are matched up against each other.  I’m sure I’m not pointing out anything new.  I really only have two rather mild suggestions to improve the voting.  They’re not ideal, but I think they could realistically be implemented.

1. Give the vote to the same pool of voters for other major MLB awards.  I understand there are politics involved and that the Gold Glove™ is obviously not a BBWAA award, like the MVP, RoY, and Cy Young are, but when the mainstream media discusses a player’s accolades, Gold Gloves™ are often included in the same breath.  If that comes up in discussion of a player’s place in history, we should be striving for a better way to award those trophies.

2. More transparency.  I’m a proponent of this in pretty much all facets of life, but with regard to baseball awards, it makes sense.  With the rise of twitter, blogs, and basically the whole internet, people have more access to nearly all writers.  Some writers are making their ballots public for whatever award they vote on.  Keith Law took a lot of heat over including Javier Vazquez on his NL Cy Young ballot last year, but he was able to respond to his critics and explain himself.  Many still didn’t agree, but at least he was able to present his reasons and defend them.  I think transparency should be a requirement of all award ballots, actually.  I’d like to see all the ballots, with a rank order of at least three candidates.

This brings me to a larger point.  At this point, I’m a baseball fan for life.  They’ve got me.  I read about baseball, I watch baseball, I listen to podcasts talking about baseball.  I know that the award results are a flawed process, and that flawed processes can produce flawed results.  I have an idea about how I’d figure out who the best fielders are, and it has nothing to do with “fielding percentage.”  But, just like with improving the accuracy of umpiring calls, we need to improve accountability.  When there’s accountability, it makes more genuine the credibility these awards already have.  The casual fan still uses Gold Gloves™ to see who was “the best” in a given year.  It’d be great for the sport if doing so was actually a useful tool.

Gold Glove predictions. I hate awards season.

I made some NL Gold Glove predictions in a conversation with a friend this morning. The announcement of the winners should be coming down in about ten minutes. Here are my predictions:

Pitcher – Adam Wainwright
Catcher – Yadier Molina
1st Baseman – Albert Pujols
2nd Baseman – Chase Utley
3rd Baseman – Ryan Zimmerman
SS – Troy Tulowitzki
OF – Michael Bourn
OF – Andres Torres
OF – Shane Victorino

These don’t mean who I think is the most deserving, but who I think will win. I’m shakiest on the 1B and OF picks, although who really cares? Derek Jeter won again; the Gold Gloves don’t actually signify that someone is the best fielder. I think Torres is probably too unknown to actually win, but he was a feel-good story and was good offensively. I hate the Gold Gloves.

Joe Morgan and Jon Miller nearly gave me a heart attack

I didn’t get a chance to watch any of last night’s baseball game.  I heard Cliff Lee was pretty good.  I mean, I actually heard it: I was listening on the radio.  Bringing the experience to me aurally were ESPN’s normal Sunday night baseball TV announcing duo of Joe Morgan and Jon Miller.  While a fantastic ballplayer in his time, Mr. Morgan as an analyst doesn’t provide a lot of…analysis.  Mr. Miller neither offends nor excites me when listening to his work, which is probably a good thing for a national baseball announcer.  Anyway, it’s uncertain they’ll be back on ESPN next year.

I’m not in to bashing mainstream baseball analysis.  I know that it’s not for me, and that lots of people watching the game might be comforted by having a Hall of Fame player providing that analysis.  Besides, who could top this?

To last night’s game: in the 8th inning, Joe Morgan was going on about how good Lee looked while steamrolling the Yankees lineup, even in the 7th and 8th innings as his pitch count climbed over 100.  Mr. Morgan said that while Lee wouldn’t pass “the pitch count test,” he was passing “the eye test.”  Since I couldn’t see how Lee looked, I confirmed via text with fivetoolwill that “he looked great.”  Still, I had reservations about Lee coming out for the 9th inning.  He’d already thrown 122 pitches, which topped his previous season-high of 120 set in Game 5 of the ALDS against the Rays.  I won’t claim to know enough about the effect that throwing 120+ pitches in consecutive starts would have on the rest of Lee’s postseason performance, but Ron Washington has to balance that risk of hurting the Rangers’ chances at their ultimate goal (winning the World Series) with the immediate goal of closing out last night’s game.  Either way, the two options seemed to be to leave Lee in for the 9th, or take him out for Neftali Feliz, the Rangers best relief pitcher.

That is those WERE the two options, until the Rangers added six runs in the top of the 9th, essentially putting the game out of reach.  As the Rangers kept adding on, the only obvious choice (to me) was to bring in one of the Rangers other relievers to save Feliz.  An 8-run lead is very hard to squander in one inning.  Jon and Joe seemed to be agreeing with me.  There were a few exchanges like this during the top of that 9th:

Jon: Well, that question of whether or not Cliff Lee will come back out for the 9th inning is now moot now that the Rangers have added on.

Joe: Yup, it’s no longer in doubt whether or not Cliff Lee will start the 9th.

I quickly realized that Jon and Joe WEREN’T ACTUALLY SAYING ANYTHING.  Yes, they were acknowledging that the Rangers scoring was affecting the probability of Lee coming out for the 9th…but weren’t indicating how.  Based on Ron Washington’s poor bullpen management in game 1 and the lunacy that sometimes comes out of Joe Morgan’s mouth, I had a moment of panic that Lee might actually pitch the 9th in some bizarre, out-dated, “finish what you started” show.

Of course, Ron Washington still brought out Feliz and used him unnecessarily; and, of course, Morgan and Miller defended the move, saying things like “you’re going to have to use your bullpen” and that he was already warm, so you might as well use him.  The point of all of this is that, while Joe Morgan can make some wrong-headed comments as an analyst, he’s just one of many people in baseball doing things that just don’t make sense to me.

Wait…did we miss something?

After a thorough review of FiveToolFans blog activity – we’ve come to a conclusion.  We totally slept through the 2010 season…er, completely forgot to hit “Save” on all our posts…or just got incredibly lazy. I mean busy.

So we’ve decided to make ourselves a playoff resolution – FiveToolFans will rise again.  After all, there’s going to be a whole lot to talk about. 

Stay tuned!

Shoppach to the Rays, or: Why I Love Baseball

Yesterday, the Tampa Bay Rays traded for a catching improvement in the form of Indians catcher Kelly Shoppach, in exchange for a player to be named later. The Rays incumbent catcher, Dioner Navarro, went from being a marginal All-Star in 2008 to absolutely wretched in 2009 (100 OPS+ to 52). Late in the season the Rays traded for Greg Zaun, who hit well, but Zaun is 38 and now a free agent (although the Rays have offered him arbitration). Navarro is probably not as bad as he was last year (he’s only 25), but almost certainly not as good a hitter as he was in 2008.  It’s yet to be determined which of those two will remain with the club.

Shoppach is an entirely different animal. His batting average is ugly (.214 last year) and that’s partly because he strikes out a lot (36.2% of the time last year), but, when he does make contact, he hits for a lot of power (.208 career ISO).  Also, he walks a decent amount, especially when compared to Navarro’s 4.6% BB rate last year.  Shoppach is one of those unusual “three true outcomes” kinds of guys who’s never going to impress with slapping the ball to the opposite field, but, when he’s not striking out or walking, he’ll probably hit the ball hard.

However, this trade intrigues me for a different, more personal reason, than how it will affect either the Indians or Rays; I care because it involves the player I know as “Slippy.”  The story…

These Guys Deserved Better, Even if They Weren’t the Best

There is a general concensus from many members of the statistically-inclined community that the 2009 season awards were given, with relative consistency, to the guys who deserved it (I’m not including gold gloves here, which as usual were…off).  Most notably the appointments of Joe Mauer as sexiest man in baseball AL MVP and Tim Lincecum as the NL Cy Young Award winner.  While I’ll never fully understand why Mauer wasn’t a unanimous decision – as there was simply no logical reason whatsoever to give a first place vote to anyone besides him – he still won by a ridiculous margin, and his monstrous value is now universally accepted.  There was plenty of backlash surrounding a certain ballot in the NL Cy Young race, but the winner there could logically be any of Tim Lincecum, Adam Wainwright, or Chris Carpenter.  Javier Vazquez‘s inclusion on Keith Law’s ballot made sense, whether any number of St. Louis writers want to admit it or not.   And besides, it’s healthy to have a bit of debate around these awards, so long as the winner made sense.

But still, as I looked through the results of the MVP voting, I felt that a number of players were still being drastically undervalued.  I’m not surprised, that’s what the BBWAA is known for!  So I thought I would pick out a few players who may have not been the best this year – but were a lot better than they’re being given credit for.

Kenny Williams to Bobby Jenks: “You’re fat.”

Again. 

Kenny, what’s the deal?  Calling out your closer for weight issues publicly for the second time – and for what exactly?  Yes, the man could stand to lose a few.  And yes, being the boss of your team means getting on your guys for this kind of thing.  But publicly?  I don’t see the point. 

Bobby Jenks has had trade rumors surrounding him incessently for the past few years, and as GM don’t you usually want to market the positive aspects of your players?  To me this just signals that the White Sox have no intention of trading Jenks, because Williams isn’t actually this dumb.

Mauer Named AL MVP

We can exhale – the right guy won AL MVP.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, Mauer deserved it no matter which way you look. He led the league in every offensive category, led his team to the playoffs,  picked up the slack when the Twin’s other slugger, Justin Morneau, went down – all while playing almost all of his games as a catcher.  Wow.   

But someone in the BBWAA stayed true to classic form by being batshit insane providing a headscratcher.  Yeah, someone gave Placido Palanco a vote.  It may have been a 9th place vote, but it was a vote nonetheless.

So although the offseason awards have actually been full of pleasant surprises (funny how the right guy getting the award becomes a pleasant surprise, but I digress) – someone in the BBWAA remembered that we count on them annually for a good laugh. 

Thanks for not disappointing!

2009 Cy Young Winners

On Tuesday, Royals ace Zack Greinke was announced as the American League Cy Young Award winner.  That’s good.  He was the best pitcher in that league by a good margin, despite tying for 7th in the league in wins (shock! I don’t think it’s worth re-hashing: wins do not a good pitcher make; others, including Zack Greinke, have said that better than I could).

Today, Tim Lincecum became a back-to-back Cy Young winner in the National League, beating out Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright in a very close vote.  I would have hated to have to vote this year, as each had excellent stats in one way or another and thus each had a solid case (that said, I would have voted for Lincecum because the stats he was best in are the stats I think most accurately judge goodness).

I think it’s impossible to judge things like toughness objectively: Chris Carpenter says Adam Wainwright should have won for a full year of brilliance under high expectations personally and for the team, Adam Wainwright says Chris Carpenter should have won for being the most “mentally talented” (whatever that means), and I say Tim Lincecum had to deal with being awesome on a not-quite-as-good team.  Each pitched well in the conditions they were given.  Different smart people (with real BBWAA votes!) looked at all kinds of numbers and came up with different answers.  Will Carroll thought Wainwright better by just a hair (and kept Carpenter off the ballot in favor of Dan Haren), Keith Law put Lincecum ahead of Javy Vasquez (he discounted Carp’s candidacy based on fewer IP), and everyone else had some combination of Lincecum, Carpenter, and Wainwright.  Perhaps, if Carpenter hadn’t missed so much time the voting would have been even closer.  But I’m not really thinking about the devaluation of Starter’s Wins, or who would have won in the absence of injuries or contextual team factors; nay, I’m thinking about next year when these debates/discussions/diatribes can start anew.

Brewers Not Listening To Offers for Fielder

Just saw this:

Brewers general manager Doug Melvin said he’s made clear to other GMs that he’s not listening to offers for first baseman Prince Fielder this offseason.  – www.foxsports.com

When I hear about GMs refusing to even discuss players, I can’t help but scratch my head.  From a PR perspective, sure – whatever.  Don’t let your fans think you’re actively trying to get rid of a popular, productive player.   But listening to offers doesn’t mean you’re shopping – it means you’re LISTENING.  And especially in the case of Prince Fielder, it makes a whole lot of sense to listen.