Lincoln Mitchell

Blog

This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell

Tagged with: Philadelphia Phillies

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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A Golden Age for Baseball in the Golden State →

Some of the most exciting young players in the game are also playing in California now. Mike Trout's rookie year was extraordinary, the most impressive debut by a young player in a very long time. Buster Posey, the catcher for the Giants won an MVP award in a season where most Giants fans would have settled for simply a solid return to catching. Posey and Trout could well be the two faces of baseball for the next decade. The only young players on the east coast who are similarly exciting, Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg, are playing not in Boston or New York but in Washington.

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The Unusual Career of Bobby Abreu

Abreu is the kind of player who will be easily forgotten by most fans. His post-season footprint was not large for a player in the wild card era who amassed well over 9,000 regular season plate appearances. He underperformed in black ink and awards voting; and had a personality that rarely drew a great deal of attention. However, he was also a player with both an unusual skill set and career path who managed to put up numbers that would not look out of place in Cooperstown.

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The Yankees and Roy Oswalt

The New York Yankees have been the biggest non-story of the off-season. Not surprisingly, given the role the Yankees play in baseball’s shared consciousness, this non-story has itself become one of the major themes of this off-season. Shortly after the World Series, the Yankees renegotiated a big contract with their ace pitcher CC Sabathia. Since resigning Sabathia, the team has done almost nothing. They have signed Hideki Okajima to a minor league contract, parted ways with longtime catching star Jorge Posada, but made no significant changes to their major league roster.

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Will the Phillies Regret the Jimmy Rollins Contract?

It is striking that while after Jeter resigned last year, the baseball blogosphere was teeming with criticism of the Yankees, the Phillies have not been targeted in this way for the Rollins signing. This is not surprising given the role the Yankees play in the collective baseball consciousness, but the Phillies are also a big market team which has now been forced into another big market mistake.

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The New Free Agency

One would expect that many teams would be courting Pujols and Fielder, both of whom are likely to remain among the best players around for at least a few more years. The relative lack of interest in both of them indicates quite a bit about the state of baseball economics and salary structures today. As has been the case for many years now, although all teams are free to pursue Pujols and Fielder, there are several small market teams for whom, due to their lack of revenue and payroll limitations, signing a premier free agent is not a realistic hope. It has been a long time since the Pittsburgh Pirates, Kansas City Royals or Minnesota Twins, for example, have made a major splash in the free agent market.

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More Wild Cards, Fewer Pennant Races

If the expanded wild card system, which will be in place by 2013, had been in place this year, this second story, which may have been the defining baseball story of 2011 would not have occurred. The Red Sox and Braves, as the fifth strongest team in each league, would have won the last wild card spot. The exciting month of September in which four teams played meaningful games every day would have been replaced by five teams jockeying for post-season position. Rather than more than fifty games about which fans of four teams cared, there would be two very brief series at the end of the regular season.

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The Phillies, Red Sox, Yankees and the Big Market Blues

This year’s World Series will be the second in a row in which neither the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox nor Philadelphia Phillies will be playing. The 2011 payroll for each of these teams was over $160 million; and in the case of the Yankees, well in excess of that number. No other team spent even $140 million on payroll in 2011. The Texas Rangers and St. Louis Cardinals had the 11th and 13th highest payroll, with each spending between $90-$110 million assembling their pennant winning teams.

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Foreseeing the Unforeseen Consequences of Baseball Realignment

Any proposal to restructure MLB is going to have its problems, just as the current system does, but it is foolish to move forward too quickly without thinking through these problems in advance. If baseball is comfortable creating a system that is, in some respects, more fair each season, but which further institutionalizes the advantages enjoyed by wealthy teams, that is not an unreasonable decision. On the other hand, rushing ahead with this new system and then feeling shocked and surprised when the Yankees and Red Sox are both in the playoffs for each of the first few years and that teams finishing 13th, 14th or 15th are hemorrhaging fans, would evince an appalling lack of foresight on the part of Major League Baseball.

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West Coast Pitching Dominance

While the origins of this difference between the West Coast and the Northeast may be partially economic, partially random and partially due to ballpark effects, the result is that a distinct West Coast style of baseball has evolved. The home run heavy, weak starting pitching and strong veteran bullpen approach best represented by the New York Yankees is not tried by any West Coast team; and the Red Sox are the only East Coast team with any young starting pitches, Clay Buchholz and Jon Lester, who are good enough and young enough to stand out in the west. Given the recent success of the Giants, who one quarter of the way into this season, are still playing very well, this model, which seems to be applicable in Florida as well, may catch on among mid-sized market teams outside of the West Coast, thus becoming yet another trend that originates in California and makes its way east.

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For Some Teams and Players the Season is Getting Late Early Already

After about twenty games or so, however, something interesting happens. The numbers begin to take on more meaning as trends become discernible making it easier to determine which players may have lost a step or have become legitimately better and what off-season roster moves will work out. Obviously, it is a long season in which games and championships are usually decided in the margins, but these general trends become visible at around this point. The line between the sample size being too small and real trends becoming apparent is not altogether obvious. As Yogi Berra might say, the season gets late early sometimes.

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Expanding the Playoffs Solves the Wrong Problem

The efforts to expand the current baseball playoffs so that a total of ten, rather than eight teams, earn a post-season berth is a good effort to solve a relatively minor problem, that will do nothing to address the more serious issue facing competitiveness in baseball. The alleged problem is that too many teams are never in the running for a playoff spot thus causing fans to lose interest early in the season, while the same small handful of teams dominate the playoffs.

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Are Long Term Contracts a Luxury Tax?

Long term contracts are unavoidable for big market teams, because in baseball teams still pay for past performance leading players and their agents to still be able to demand long term contracts. In practice this amounts to something of a luxury tax all but guaranteeing that big market teams will overpay for players during the last years of their big contracts. Adding big contracts every year is the cost of trying to compete every season. This tax pushes money to the players and not to the lower payroll teams, but it can be punitive nonetheless. For example, while most small market teams probably wish they could have afforded Rodriguez during his first years with the Yankees, very few will want him during the years 2013-2017 when the Yankees will be paying him more than $110 million while he is in his late thirties and early forties.

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Clemens, Johnson, Maddux and Martinez in Historical Perspective

When Philadelphia Phillies manager Charlie Manuel sent Chad Durbin to the mound to start the bottom of the fifth inning of game six of the 2009 World Series, replacing future Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez, it was the end of a baseball era. Martinez’s last game in the big leagues had not gone well as the New York Yankees, led by Hideki Matsui, rocked him for four runs in four innings. Martinez was the last of a quartet of pitching superstars also including Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux, who, at a time when offensive production was higher than ever, dominated the game as no other group of pitching peers ever have.

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Maybe the Phillies Won't Win the Pennant

The Phillies will probably still be a very good team in 2011 with a four man pitching rotation that could carry them very far into the post-season. However, there are still scenarios where things could go wrong for them. Key hitters could continue their declines; Werth could prove difficult to replace; or their pitchers might not all have great years like they did in 2010. More interestingly, the Phillies have become a team big market team with all the advantages, such as the ability to sign Cliff Lee, and disadvantages like being old and committed to big contracts that are almost impossible to move, like Ryan Howard’s. Big market teams sign the best players, but they also set very high expectations, favor veterans, and often overpay for talent. This will also be the Phillies’ story in 2011.

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Have the Yankees Gone Soft

If the Yankees are transitioning into a new era-nobody ever says rebuilding in Yankeeland-the Jeter and Rivera signings make little sense, but that seems to be what the Yankees are doing as they look for young players to handle much of the pitching rotation and perhaps some of the catching. In this context, the simplest explanation for resigning Rivera and Jeter, particularly Jeter, for the numbers the Yankees agreed upon is that the Yankees have let sentiment and their own spin override baseball decisions and that they have gone soft.

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Get Ready for the Most Political World Series in History

It is probably the most politically polarizing World Series in history as one team’s most famous fan and former owner is former President is George W. Bush while the other team plays in the country’s most left of center major city and has long been probably the most progressive franchise in the game. The “Let Timmy Smoke” signs and t-shirts, referring to Giants’ ace Tim Lincecum’s marijuana bust would fit in as about as well at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington as prominent Republican politicians would at AT&T Park, or anywhere else in San Francisco. Somehow this is fitting for the first World Series that, should it go to six or seven games, will be the first to be concluded after Election Day.

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How the Giants Can Win

The Phillies, even after a tough first game loss, are probably still the favorites in the NLCS, but the Giants should not be counted out. The Giants chances rest not on an anything can happen in a short series kind of optimism or solely upon their excellent starting pitching, but primarily on a match-up of skills that may make the Giants uniquely positioned to beat the Phillies.

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Maybe the Red Sox Should Be Sellers

The Red Sox have had a rough 2010 due to injuries, slumps and age. The team got off to a rough start, but played very well from mid-May through the All-Star break. Currently, with about 60 games remaining the Red Sox are seven games out of first place and five games behind the Rays for the wild card. It will not be easy, but they could catch the Rays and maybe even the Yankees. This would suggest that the Red Sox should be buyers at the deadline. However, another approach might be to recognize that while the Red Sox might be able to sneak into the playoffs as the wild card, this is not the type of team that, even if it snuck into the wild card, can play far into the playoffs and to be a seller.

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Reflections on a Halladay Weekend

Nonetheless, Halladay occupies a strange place in the pantheon of great pitchers as his career fell between two generations of great pitchers. He spent the first part of his career in the shadow of the Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux and Pedro Martinez cohort who dominated the game from the late 1980s until the middle of the last decade and were all better pitchers than Halladay. When these pitchers began to retire few years ago, a new group of pitchers including Tim Lincecum, Zack Greinke and Felix Hernandez emerged as the top pitchers in the game. Although there is certainly no guarantee that these pitchers will have better careers than Halladay’s, it likely that for much of the duration of his career, Halladay will be not quite as good as at least some of this next generation of stars.

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