The best/worth thing about a Derek Jeter award is that it will increase division and bitterness on the best team in each league.
Sure, sometime there is just a clear best player. But usually there are arguments. When it's just between the best players in a league, well...rivalry between teams and fandoms are a *good* thing.
But when you have to pick a best player on a single team and it's a MLB official award? Man, you're begging for family-level bitterness and resentment. Drama. Drah-muh!!!
Yes, strikeouts are up, walks are up, home runs are up, leading to less balls in play. This was an inevitable by product of the shift ban, as I have predicted since they began talking about it.
OK, I'll bite. Why is it inevitable that banning the shift will cause an increase in Ks, BBs, and HRs? And how can we be sure it has anything to do with the shift?
I have done long comments on this site about it many times, but was trying to avoid it. Here goes, trying to keep it shorter than usual.
The shift was baseball's natural defense to the pull power, swing hard at everything, even with two strikes philosophy, exacerbated by the launch angle revolution. Defensive analytics fighting offensive analytics. It was working, albeit slowly.
Teams were slowly putting more action players in their lineup after the lineup had basically been taken over by three true outcome types. K's were down for two consecutive years after going up for 15 consecutive. Walks were down some, as were home runs. Balls in play were creeping back up again the last two years after a precipitous drop since about 2007 or so.
Banning the shift will obviously send all those numbers back the other direction, with no way for defenses to stop it. It will be a fairly continuous rise. We will have K/9 back over 9 soon and approaching 10 in a few years. Balls in play will be down, and will be less than 23 per game before a few years have gone by. The hit to all fields action player with little power will be something from the history books.
Baseball did some things to make the game shorter, and I am all for that. They did some things to try and artificially prop up stealing (though the caught stealing percentage was already at it's lowest rate ever), which I have mixed feelings about.
But then they pretty much guaranteed by the ban of the shift that even though the games are quicker, there will be less action plays in the game. Over time, as three true outcome guys take over the game, steals will go back down some, (from this year's level anyway) as teams steal less when there is more power over time.
Shorter games, but even less stuff happening, and there will be progressively less in an inexorable fashion.
I did a long response about front and back leg hitters, but it was too complicated and I deleted, so the shorter answer is this: at least in theory, the defensive shift should have encouraged batters to not play "home run derby" every at bat, because it took away some hits from those kind of batters. Now that incentive to spray the ball around for more hits while giving up some power is gone.
I wonder if you know that a historic baseball stadium in Tokyo where Babe Ruth played could be demolished soon? Ruth played at the Meiji Jingu Stadium in 1934 on a barnstorming tour with other American stars that included Lou Gehrig, Lefty Gomez and Jimmie Foxx. Ruth homered several times before 60,000 fans in games at the stadium, which is still home to the Japanese league champion Yakult Swallows. Only three other major ballparks remain where Ruth played: Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and the Koshien Stadium in Kobe, Japan. Wrigley and Fenway have been renovated, but plans to save Meiji Jingu have been dismissed by developers and politicians and may soon be destroyed. I wonder if you could help save it?
Japan park where Babe Ruth played subject of climate battle | AP News
The list of the best players on the best teams was great fun to look at. It does show that WAR, and in particular, fairly precise defensive ratings, have really revised evaulation, because if more than half of your picks would have won a vote at the time, I'd be surprised. Some were not the biggest star on the team and some were, but didn't have the best hitting stats. I guess the simple way to check this would be to see how many of the Joe picks did best in league MVP balloting that year (we certainly know the nine MVPs did! But beyond them....)
There is a good article on Kelenic at the Athletic today. Instead of going back to Wisconsin in the off-season he stayed in Southern CA and AZ working with non-Mariner coaches working on rebuilding his swing. And he also went to a sports psychologist who helped him focus on the positive . He was so hard on himself and even the best players fail 60-70% of the time that he was beating himself up. So his improvement seems to be due to a lot of work on his part. And if he keeps this up the Mariners should be a team to be reckoned with.
I agree that Albies is earning below his market value. But he also earns more every six months than I will see in my entire lifetime, and by a pretty good margin. I shed him no tears.
There are three ways to evaluate a trade: did it make sense at the time? Did it work out as planned (at least in the short term)? And what were the long-term ramifications? A General Manager really only has control over the first; injuries, performance fluctuations, and the vicissitudes of fate control the rest.
I love Joe blogs, his books and all his writing, even though he is a Yankee hater. Now you know, Joe, how successful your blog is and how much this retired baseball fan who grew up in the Bronx appreciates the quality, creativity and humor you produce almost every time.
I'm sorry to be gratuitously vulgar, but I did serve in the Navy (home of the gratuitously vulgar), and so I know that "those little doughnut-shaped, sticker, hole reinforcements" have a name. They're called paper assholes.
During the first Padres game I ever attended as a young kid in May 1969 (well, actually the second; it was the nightcap of a double-header), Ollie Brown caught a ball on the run just short of the warning track, turned and fired a strike to the plate to nail the runner tagging up from third base. (If it happened today, we'd be watching it on ESPN for the rest of our lives.) My father turned to me and said, "You'll never see a better throw than that." Fifty-four years and several hundred games later, his assertion remains true.
The one year you chose Mariano Rivera, the best closer in baseball history, is a year when he wasn't the closer. Every other Yankee title year went to Jeter.
It's one of those great topics - how much extra credit does a pitcher get for the last out aka the Save? Rivera was used in key situations that year and so he only got 6 saves, but he had a 2 ERA with over 100 innings pitched and got 8 wins in relief. It was his highest WPA, RE24 and WAR season (the latter being fantastic for a reliever (~5).
The question can be asked of KC fans - who was more important in 2014-15, Holland or Wade? Same goes for Cleveland is 2016, Cody Allen or Andrew Miller? I don't even hesitate by saying the latter in both cases. Why don't managers keep it that way? I think its because of the prestige and the resulting compensation. If a manager doesn't move his best reliever to the "closer" role then the team doesn't plan to keep him (when he becomes a FA he'll sign with a team that will him a closer and give him big money). I also think there are enough managers that believe in the closer role that will sustain that promotion ladder for relievers.
I like to call it the happy zone for managers, when you have an established closer that you can use for the 9th inning save situations, but you actually have a better pitcher who you use for the key situations earlier that are actually higher leverage. Torre had it with Rivera and Wetteland in 1996. As you note, Yost had it with Wade and Holland in 2014 (and 2015 until Holland's arm fell off), Francona had it at the end of the year and playoffs with Miller and Allen. Another great example is the 2002 Angels in the postseason where Percival was the established closer but the 20 year old K-Rod pitched two full games worth of innings in the post season and was nearly untouchable. As you note, this can only happen for one year or so before the better guy wants to be "promoted" to closer.
Used to be there were 10-12 guys almost every year used that way, the best reliever in the highest leverage, for as long as he was effective. Seems especially like starting in the 60s, with the expansion of the schedule to 162 games, they started popping up, and that usage pattern was pretty consistent til the 2000's, when pitch counts and pitcher abuse points and other things started coming into vogue.
Since Rivera's 1996 season, there have only been 12 times that a pitcher racked up 100+ innings exclusively in relief, and NONE since 2006. Oddly, half of those were by guys named Scot(t): One each by Doug Jones, Danny Graves, Steve Sparks, Keith Foulke, Derek Lowe, Guillermo Mota, Scot Shields and Scott Proctor and four(!) by Scott Sullivan.
I think the fear is that pitchers' arms will fall off if you do that to them. People point to the likes of Proctor, who had only one more good season in him and then struggled with injuries for the next half decade before washing out of MLB.
Pitchers hafta throw harder than ever, on each and every pitch, just to get by these days, making it tougher to bring them in and expect them to get through 2 or 3 innings. Plus, by limiting them to an inning at a stretch, you can use them on back-to-back (but not back-to-back-to-back!) days, but they're still throwing fewer innings than if you brought them in to pitch 3 innings and then gave them two nights off to recover.
Shields had 4 more good seasons before that happened to him, 6 total. Foulke had 5 more great seasons, 8 total. Danny Graves pitched 7 more. Mota pitched another 8 seasons. Lowe pitched til he was 40, 14 more years! Terry Adams, who did it the same year as Mariano, pitched 8 more years. Doug Jones had only one more year, but he was already 42 when he did it. If a pitcher's workload is managed well, there's theoretically no reason you couldn't still use a bullpen this way, but nobody can seemingly agree on how best to use them.
I don't think they're necessarily trying to avoid pitchers getting hurt, since most competitive teams have the depth to sustain a loss of a reliever or two, but they are trying to get the most they can out of them, and nobody seems to think having them pitch, say, the 7th and 8th every other night is the best way to do that.
There is a World Series mvp award right? For most teams isn’t that or the cs award the best player on the team award?
Does every team start get a hank Aaron finalist?
The best/worth thing about a Derek Jeter award is that it will increase division and bitterness on the best team in each league.
Sure, sometime there is just a clear best player. But usually there are arguments. When it's just between the best players in a league, well...rivalry between teams and fandoms are a *good* thing.
But when you have to pick a best player on a single team and it's a MLB official award? Man, you're begging for family-level bitterness and resentment. Drama. Drah-muh!!!
Let's do it!
Yes, strikeouts are up, walks are up, home runs are up, leading to less balls in play. This was an inevitable by product of the shift ban, as I have predicted since they began talking about it.
OK, I'll bite. Why is it inevitable that banning the shift will cause an increase in Ks, BBs, and HRs? And how can we be sure it has anything to do with the shift?
I have done long comments on this site about it many times, but was trying to avoid it. Here goes, trying to keep it shorter than usual.
The shift was baseball's natural defense to the pull power, swing hard at everything, even with two strikes philosophy, exacerbated by the launch angle revolution. Defensive analytics fighting offensive analytics. It was working, albeit slowly.
Teams were slowly putting more action players in their lineup after the lineup had basically been taken over by three true outcome types. K's were down for two consecutive years after going up for 15 consecutive. Walks were down some, as were home runs. Balls in play were creeping back up again the last two years after a precipitous drop since about 2007 or so.
Banning the shift will obviously send all those numbers back the other direction, with no way for defenses to stop it. It will be a fairly continuous rise. We will have K/9 back over 9 soon and approaching 10 in a few years. Balls in play will be down, and will be less than 23 per game before a few years have gone by. The hit to all fields action player with little power will be something from the history books.
Baseball did some things to make the game shorter, and I am all for that. They did some things to try and artificially prop up stealing (though the caught stealing percentage was already at it's lowest rate ever), which I have mixed feelings about.
But then they pretty much guaranteed by the ban of the shift that even though the games are quicker, there will be less action plays in the game. Over time, as three true outcome guys take over the game, steals will go back down some, (from this year's level anyway) as teams steal less when there is more power over time.
Shorter games, but even less stuff happening, and there will be progressively less in an inexorable fashion.
Makes sense, but I think if the trends continue in the direction you predict that more rule changes will be on the way.
Perhaps, but they are not going to bring back the shift. There were too many old men yelling at that cloud.
I did a long response about front and back leg hitters, but it was too complicated and I deleted, so the shorter answer is this: at least in theory, the defensive shift should have encouraged batters to not play "home run derby" every at bat, because it took away some hits from those kind of batters. Now that incentive to spray the ball around for more hits while giving up some power is gone.
Theoretically that makes sense, but I didn't see too many hitters "spraying the ball around" before the shift was banned.
I wonder if you know that a historic baseball stadium in Tokyo where Babe Ruth played could be demolished soon? Ruth played at the Meiji Jingu Stadium in 1934 on a barnstorming tour with other American stars that included Lou Gehrig, Lefty Gomez and Jimmie Foxx. Ruth homered several times before 60,000 fans in games at the stadium, which is still home to the Japanese league champion Yakult Swallows. Only three other major ballparks remain where Ruth played: Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and the Koshien Stadium in Kobe, Japan. Wrigley and Fenway have been renovated, but plans to save Meiji Jingu have been dismissed by developers and politicians and may soon be destroyed. I wonder if you could help save it?
Japan park where Babe Ruth played subject of climate battle | AP News
https://apnews.com/article/babe-ruth-tokyo-stadium-meiji-jingu-japan-46ae81d9b035959bd37e29ab1472e05a
Please help us save the Jingu Gaien baseball stadium and park.
Petition · Protect Jingu Gaien! Rethink the development plan! · Change.org
https://www.change.org/p/protect-jingu-gaien-s-trees-rethink-the-development-plan
The list of the best players on the best teams was great fun to look at. It does show that WAR, and in particular, fairly precise defensive ratings, have really revised evaulation, because if more than half of your picks would have won a vote at the time, I'd be surprised. Some were not the biggest star on the team and some were, but didn't have the best hitting stats. I guess the simple way to check this would be to see how many of the Joe picks did best in league MVP balloting that year (we certainly know the nine MVPs did! But beyond them....)
There is a good article on Kelenic at the Athletic today. Instead of going back to Wisconsin in the off-season he stayed in Southern CA and AZ working with non-Mariner coaches working on rebuilding his swing. And he also went to a sports psychologist who helped him focus on the positive . He was so hard on himself and even the best players fail 60-70% of the time that he was beating himself up. So his improvement seems to be due to a lot of work on his part. And if he keeps this up the Mariners should be a team to be reckoned with.
Please stop with the “in the last 50 years” lists. 50 years ago I was 21. Now I’m not. So please stop.
I started going to the gym (74 now) - it still hurts, but I actually don't feel my age like I did a couple years ago. YMMV.
I was 21 too. But I say keep it up.
ugggh- i wouldn't name a hemorrhoid or a venereal disease after Derek Jeter...
PS: before 'Downtown' was snatched by the SD Friars, he broke in w/my beloved Giants, i got to witness his prodigious home run blasts several times!
I would love to name a hemorrhoid after Derek Jeter :-)
i thought it already was a hemorrhoid name!
'best player on WS championship team' - is that for the FULL season or for the World Series itself?
2013 WS - David Ortiz >> Dustin Pedroia DURING the series.
I assumed it was for the year.
I agree that Albies is earning below his market value. But he also earns more every six months than I will see in my entire lifetime, and by a pretty good margin. I shed him no tears.
There are three ways to evaluate a trade: did it make sense at the time? Did it work out as planned (at least in the short term)? And what were the long-term ramifications? A General Manager really only has control over the first; injuries, performance fluctuations, and the vicissitudes of fate control the rest.
I love Joe blogs, his books and all his writing, even though he is a Yankee hater. Now you know, Joe, how successful your blog is and how much this retired baseball fan who grew up in the Bronx appreciates the quality, creativity and humor you produce almost every time.
most people who are sane and/or sentient hate the Yankees, as do i-
but i save most of my baseball hatred for the Dodgers...
Joe, Don't feel too bad about the pronunciation, if you google how to pronounce
Jerred Kelenic, they pronounce his last name with three syllables !
In addition to the 8 MVPs, you've also got 6 CYAs on that list:
Hunter 1974
Guidry 1978
Valenzuela 1981 (And Rookie of the Year!)
Hershiser 1988
Maddux 1995
Johnson 2001
I dunno what that means, but it's interesting.
I'm sorry to be gratuitously vulgar, but I did serve in the Navy (home of the gratuitously vulgar), and so I know that "those little doughnut-shaped, sticker, hole reinforcements" have a name. They're called paper assholes.
During the first Padres game I ever attended as a young kid in May 1969 (well, actually the second; it was the nightcap of a double-header), Ollie Brown caught a ball on the run just short of the warning track, turned and fired a strike to the plate to nail the runner tagging up from third base. (If it happened today, we'd be watching it on ESPN for the rest of our lives.) My father turned to me and said, "You'll never see a better throw than that." Fifty-four years and several hundred games later, his assertion remains true.
Damn, now I want to see it!
The one year you chose Mariano Rivera, the best closer in baseball history, is a year when he wasn't the closer. Every other Yankee title year went to Jeter.
Not saying it's wrong, just interesting.
It's one of those great topics - how much extra credit does a pitcher get for the last out aka the Save? Rivera was used in key situations that year and so he only got 6 saves, but he had a 2 ERA with over 100 innings pitched and got 8 wins in relief. It was his highest WPA, RE24 and WAR season (the latter being fantastic for a reliever (~5).
The question can be asked of KC fans - who was more important in 2014-15, Holland or Wade? Same goes for Cleveland is 2016, Cody Allen or Andrew Miller? I don't even hesitate by saying the latter in both cases. Why don't managers keep it that way? I think its because of the prestige and the resulting compensation. If a manager doesn't move his best reliever to the "closer" role then the team doesn't plan to keep him (when he becomes a FA he'll sign with a team that will him a closer and give him big money). I also think there are enough managers that believe in the closer role that will sustain that promotion ladder for relievers.
I like to call it the happy zone for managers, when you have an established closer that you can use for the 9th inning save situations, but you actually have a better pitcher who you use for the key situations earlier that are actually higher leverage. Torre had it with Rivera and Wetteland in 1996. As you note, Yost had it with Wade and Holland in 2014 (and 2015 until Holland's arm fell off), Francona had it at the end of the year and playoffs with Miller and Allen. Another great example is the 2002 Angels in the postseason where Percival was the established closer but the 20 year old K-Rod pitched two full games worth of innings in the post season and was nearly untouchable. As you note, this can only happen for one year or so before the better guy wants to be "promoted" to closer.
Nobody uses relievers like that anymore.
Used to be there were 10-12 guys almost every year used that way, the best reliever in the highest leverage, for as long as he was effective. Seems especially like starting in the 60s, with the expansion of the schedule to 162 games, they started popping up, and that usage pattern was pretty consistent til the 2000's, when pitch counts and pitcher abuse points and other things started coming into vogue.
Since Rivera's 1996 season, there have only been 12 times that a pitcher racked up 100+ innings exclusively in relief, and NONE since 2006. Oddly, half of those were by guys named Scot(t): One each by Doug Jones, Danny Graves, Steve Sparks, Keith Foulke, Derek Lowe, Guillermo Mota, Scot Shields and Scott Proctor and four(!) by Scott Sullivan.
I think the fear is that pitchers' arms will fall off if you do that to them. People point to the likes of Proctor, who had only one more good season in him and then struggled with injuries for the next half decade before washing out of MLB.
Pitchers hafta throw harder than ever, on each and every pitch, just to get by these days, making it tougher to bring them in and expect them to get through 2 or 3 innings. Plus, by limiting them to an inning at a stretch, you can use them on back-to-back (but not back-to-back-to-back!) days, but they're still throwing fewer innings than if you brought them in to pitch 3 innings and then gave them two nights off to recover.
Shields had 4 more good seasons before that happened to him, 6 total. Foulke had 5 more great seasons, 8 total. Danny Graves pitched 7 more. Mota pitched another 8 seasons. Lowe pitched til he was 40, 14 more years! Terry Adams, who did it the same year as Mariano, pitched 8 more years. Doug Jones had only one more year, but he was already 42 when he did it. If a pitcher's workload is managed well, there's theoretically no reason you couldn't still use a bullpen this way, but nobody can seemingly agree on how best to use them.
I don't think they're necessarily trying to avoid pitchers getting hurt, since most competitive teams have the depth to sustain a loss of a reliever or two, but they are trying to get the most they can out of them, and nobody seems to think having them pitch, say, the 7th and 8th every other night is the best way to do that.
Pitchers get hurt. Nothing will change that.