Lincoln Mitchell

Blog

This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell

Posted in: Baseball

Billy Beane and the New Moneyball →

Beane's recent trade is relatively easily explained by the likelihood that Beane is trying to build an A's team that will play deep into the playoffs and possibly win the World Series, something they have not done since 1989. It is also possible that Beane sought to exploit a new market inefficiency-the overvaluation of prospects. The growth of prospect analysis, the knowledge fans have of prospects, and the improvements in scouting and drafting have all contributed to an environment where teams are reluctant to part with their prospects, and covet the top prospects on other teams.

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How the Giants Collapsed →

The Giants were not going to play .667 baseball for the whole season, as they had through their first 63 games, but they certainly looked like a team that was too good to play .250 ball for a month. The easiest way to explain a collapse of this kind is to attribute it, in one for or another, to a change of luck and injuries. Luck and injuries certainly have played a role, but that is only part of the story.

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Can the Giants Move Timmy? →

Lincecum, however, is only under contract for another year and a half, but has been pretty bad over from 2012 to today. During this time he has an ERA of 4.77 and walked almost four batters per nine innings. He has also occasionally shown signs of his old self. He has averaged a strikeout an inning, was dominant coming out of the bullpen in the 2012 post-season and even threw a no-hitter last year. It is possible that some pitching coach somewhere thinks he can fix Lincecum and would like his team to get him. The Giants are unlikely to get much back for Lincecum, but a team might take his salary off their hands, and free up his spot in the rotation so that it can be upgraded.

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Don Zimmer and Baseball Lifers →

Baseball lost a bit of its history last week when Don Zimmer died. Zimmer was the starting 2nd baseman the day the Dodgers won their only championship in Brooklyn. Twenty-three years later he spent Rosh Hashanah managing the Boston Red Sox to their most famous defeat ever as Bucky Dent's three run home run dashed the Red Sox pennant chances. He was the starting third baseman in the first game the New York Mets ever played; and 27 years after that spent Yom Kippur managing the Chicago Cubs as they got eliminated from the NLCS on a clutch single by Will Clark. Zimmer, however, wasn't Jewish, so probably was not aware of the connection between important defeats and Jewish holidays in his life.

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Dee Gordon, Billy Hamilton and Angel Pagan →

The Oxymoron, as Pagan is known by some Giants fans, or maybe just by me and my sons, is a big reason why the Giants have done so well in 2014. The Giants have a top heavy lineup with productive, but erratic sluggers filling the 2-6 slots. Pagan's ability to get on base, steal a few bases, and take the extra base when needed has helped the team surprise many with its strong offense, good for third in the league in runs per game, this season. Pagan's success, and his impact on the Giants this year, is a reminder that behind all the language about being a spark plug, making things happen, or adding a different dimension to the game, batting leadoff is, to a great extent, a one dimensional role. That one dimension is getting on base. Players who cannot fill that one role cannot be great leadoff hitters.

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Time for Tedious All Star Game Debates Again →

At best these debates are fun, challenging and seemingly important. Hall of Fame and Award related discussions feel important because they have direct bearing on how the game and its history are remembered. One of the annual baseball debates that meets none of these criteria surrounds the All Star Game. These debates begin around this time of year and usually take the form of whether some genuinely underrated very good player, a famous and clearly great player having an off-year or a not well known player having a good first half should start the All Star Game, or make the team. This year Josh Donaldson, Derek Jeter and Seth Smith are good examples of each category.

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Yankee Hypocrisy on Their Own History →

No team in sports talks more about their history than the New York Yankees; and that is why the decision to honor Tino Martinez and Paul O'Neill with plaques in Yankee Stadium is so puzzling. Honoring Martinez and O'Neill is an affront to Yankee history for two reasons. First, the absence of Bernie Williams' name in that group is a noticeable slight. Wiliams will get a plaque next year, but making him wait a year while two inferior players who spent less time on the Yankees get their plaques this year is, at best, puzzling.

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Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera →

Cabrera is a very good player, but he is also in danger of being defined by his most well known accomplishment. Cabrera's 2012 triple crown was the first by anybody in an astounding 45 years. The triple crown is perhaps the ultimate old school offensive accomplishment. It consists of leading the league in three categories, home runs, batting average and RBIs, the latter two of which are still taken seriously by some while seen as of secondary import to many more advanced quantitative analysts of the game. In 2012, Cabrera beat out Pujols' teammate Mike Trout for the MVP award despite Trout having a much better year by more contemporary measures. That MVP vote was as much a referendum on methodology for evaluating players as it was a vote about who was the best player, but it elevated Cabrera just as Pujols' decline was becoming most noticeable. That triple crown may also help distinguish Cabrera from Pujols who will probably never win one. In the eyes of many, he will be seen as the superior slugger of the era, but Pujols at his best was a better player, and hitter, than Cabrera ever was.

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Pondering the Panda →

Obviously, if Sandoval does not begin hitting soon, he will not get anything near what he is asking for on the free agent market, but if he turns around his season, he should be able to get around that much. Sandoval may not seem like a $20 million a year player. He has been erratic mixing very good years like 2009 and 2011 with off years like 2010. Sandoval is also probably more known for is colorful nicknames and often unsuccessful efforts to control his weight than for anything he has done on the field, but he is clearly one of the game's best young hitters. From 2009, his first year as a full time big leaguer through 2013, Sandoval 43rd in WAR among all non-pitchers. This may not sound too impressive, but, Sandoval is still only 27. Only five players are younger than Sandoval and have more WAR during those years.

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Stories the Mets Tell Themselves →

Despite their four pennants and two World Series victories, the Mets have embraced the lovable loser narrative. This is a difficult thing to define; and clearly Mets fans to prefer their team to win, but the existence of this narrative, even though its relationship to reality is more tenuous, gives the Mets a more forgiving environment than some teams. This dynamic is, of course, exacerbated, by the more successful, wealthier and, according to most Mets fans, arrogant, team that plays in the Bronx. The Yankees are a great foil for the Mets. The Mets can explain away failure by saying they can never compete with the more wealthy and ruthless Yankees, but can also cultivate a following as New York's kindler and gentler team.

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Now Playing First Base for the Yankees →

The first few weeks of the season saw one unexpected and one expected event occur for the Yankees. The unexpected event is that all three veteran outfielders, particularly Suzuki and Beltran were hitting. The expected event was that the increasingly brittle Teixeira missed a bit of time due to an injury. Additional injuries forced the Yankees to start Francisco Cervelli, a light hitting backup catcher at first base, twice. Cervelli himself got hurt and Beltran filled in ably for part of a game. Fortunately for the Yankees, Kelly Johnson, an off-season pickup expected to play mostly at third base has been hitting well and playing fine at first base.

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Commemorating Derek Jeter, Forgetting Bernie Willams →

Williams played for the Yankees for 16 seasons, most of them as their star center fielder. The Yankees have a tradition of great center fielders; and while Williams is obviously not in the same class as Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio, he is clearly the third best center fielder in franchise history. Williams also played more games in centerfield for the Yankees than DiMaggio, Mantle or anybody else. Williams batted cleanup and played a marquee position for a team that won three consecutive World Series, spent his entire career with the Yankees, was very popular with the fans, but the hoopla around the notion of the core four has caused Williams to be almost entirely forgotten less than eight years after he played his last game

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What if the Dodgers Don't Win the Pennant This Year →

The Dodgers are a good team that narrowly missed the World Series last year and has a good chance to get at least that far again, but there are no guarantees and much that could go wrong for the team between now and October. They have become a contender through strong international signings, a farm system that has developed one of the very best players in the game, but most significantly an ability to take on contracts like those of Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez that other teams do not want, and by signing free agents as needed. This is the model that the Yankees began to use after their 1996-2000 run, with mixed results. The Dodgers are employing that same strategy in a much more difficult context. They could get a few breaks and win it all as the Yankees did in 2009, but those eight years from 2001-2008, when the Yankees missed every year and kept spending more money on free agents could well be a more likely scenario for the Dodgers.

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Barry Bonds Back with the Giants →

Bonds had a nine year peak where he hit .305/.438/.600 for an OPS+ of 181. He finished in the top ten in MVP voting eight of those years while winning eight gold gloves and stealing 300 bases. Those are extraordinary numbers, but they are even more impressive because those years 1990-98, were not only a time when Bonds was not taking steroids, but, at least for the last few years of that period, a time when many others were. During those years, Bonds accumulated 76.2 WAR, the most in a nine year period since Willie Mays in his prime. Lost in the noise about Bonds and PEDs is that a clean Barry Bonds dominated the early steroid era in a way not seen in a generation. During those years, Bonds was also a remarkable player to watch. He was a complete player who could run, hit for power, steal bases and exhibit an extraordinary batting eye.

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Can Baseball's Intangibles Be Measured →

In the last decades, big league teams have invested increasing resources in things like proprietary statistical analysis and data management, scouting and talent evaluation, yet chemistry and similar issues are still both largely viewed as important and evaluated using entirely subjective, rarely consistent and often tautological methods. Endeavoring to get more useful data so as to better measure and use ideas like chemistry and leadership seems far-fetched now, but a generation ago pitch-tracking, fielding data and other information we take for granted today would have been hard to imagine.

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Eliminating Collisions at the Plate Will Be Good for Baseball →

Removing the collision at home plate, takes a tactic away from base runners with the intention of making the game safer, but it does not change the overall dynamic or balance of the game. In this respect, these rule changes are different than the changes over the decades that have been implemented to keep batters safer from pitched balls. The required use of batting helmets, increased use of body armor and system of quicker warnings for pitchers who rely throw brushback pitches, has created an advantage for hitters that did not exist 60 years ago. Regardless of whether or not one supports throwing inside, it is hard to deny that for many years it was a legitimate part of the game, and of the game's strategy.

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Derek Jeter, Still Baseball's Most Underrated Overrated Player →

Jeter is one of the most intriguing of baseball players because for most of his career he has simultaneously been overrated, he is clearly not the greatest player or even the greatest Yankee in history, and underrated. He is not strong on defense, but has not been as bad as many think. Moreover, Jeter's extremely cautious style with the media has led most of the media to cover him as some sort of baseball saint, always ready with a good team oriented quote, respectful of the game and its history and almost never willing to criticize a teammate, or opponent. A minority of fans, however, see this is as a highly choreographed image by Jeter, which of course it is, and decry him for not being genuine.

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Is Baseball Doing Better Because the Owners are Making More Money? →

As writers and fans have grown to have a stronger understanding and interest in the business side of baseball, it has become more common to measure the success, or health, of the game by things like the revenue generated by the teams. This is not unlike measuring the state of the American economy by looking only at the Dow Jones Index. It may give a good heuristic of the economy, but it misses a lot of important aspects. Why, after all, should a devoted fan care how much more money the rich people playing and running the game make? I do not enjoy a day at Yankee Stadium, the venue where I usually see most of my live baseball, any more knowing that the Steinbrenner brothers are having a good year. In fact, I enjoy the experience less knowing that so many of the people behind the scenes, doing things like selling concessions or tickets are not compensated well.

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Fat Elvis and the Hall of Fame

Berkman's Hall of Fame fate is a measure of how the Hall of Fame voters punish both steroid users, for their steroid use, as well as clean players for not being quite as good as their steroid using opponents. The result of this will be a Hall of Fame with the excellent sluggers from previous generations, but only the very best, more accurately only some of the very best, from the last twenty years or so.

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The Yankees and Tanaka →

The biggest problem facing the Yankees is not their infield, but a farm system that has no top level prospects and that has been among the least productive in the game over the last five years or so. Addressing this problem is more important for their long term future than finding another free agent on which to spend a lot of money.

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