This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Posted in: Baseball
Like most winning formulas, the Giants approach is not fully replicable. Any strategy that begins with developing five top notch pitchers and an all-star quality catcher all within a few years of each other will be tough to follow, but most good teams are able to develop a core of top talent. That is more or less what defines a good team. The Giants strength lay in recognizing this was their moment and developing a good strategy to augment their core talent.
The Giants have won the World Series bringing the championship to San Francisco for the first time ever! When Buster Posey caught the third strike on Nelson Cruz, a journey which began with my mother dropping off me, my brother and our friend Charles, who back then was known as Tony, on the corner of Clay and Van Ness in San Francisco sometime in the mid 1970s, ended in a hotel room in Tbilisi, Georgia more than 30 years later. Those spring and summer mornings, my mother would give each of us seven dollars-three for a ticket in the upper reserved section of old Candlestick Park, the remainder was for bus fare and food. When the bus driver was in a good mood and only charged fifty cents for the ballpark express, there was plenty left over for hot dogs, soda, popcorn and ice cream, but if the driver charged two dollars or more, it made for a hungry day at the ‘Stick.
Bochy may not be the best Giants manager ever, but managers like player have career peaks and valleys; and Bochy is hitting his stride at the exactly right time. In general, Bochy seems less given to platitudes about chemistry, sticking with what has worked and the like than many managers. When Lincecum didn’t have it in the eighth inning of game six, Bochy took him out. Pablo Sandoval is a fan favorite who was a starter most of the season, but he has lost his starting job during the World Series. A clearly inferior, although well paid and experienced veteran like Aaron Rowand also is on the bench. Bochy, at least this post-season, seems driven by a strategy of getting the best players he can on the field for every inning of every game. It isn’t chemistry, but it just might work.
The most overlooked story of the game is that while neither Lee nor Lincecum had their best stuff, Lincecum pitched a tough 5.2 innings and kept his team in the game, while Lee did not. Lincecum appeared to be unraveling in the first inning, but got it together and settled down enough. It turns out that the long haired pot smoker was able to bear down and tough it out better than the deer hunter from Arkansas.
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.
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.
The Yankees limped into the post-season playing poorly during September and losing a division which they had led for much of the second half, but looked like a very different team during their first round sweep of the Minnesota Twins. A major part of their post-season success has been that Phil Hughes and Andy Pettitte, at least in the first round, exceeded most expectations and put many doubts to rest.The two pitchers turned in very strong outings during the Yankees sweep of the Twins. If they continue to pitch like this during the next two rounds, the Yankees will be very tough to beat.
Tim Lincecum is not only a great pitcher, but he is the kind of player that makes baseball such a great game. In a sport where even in this alleged year of the pitcher, big sluggers and big power pitchers still dominate the game, the 5’11” and skinny Giants star stands out even more. He is a throwback, not in the sense of poorly shaven white player who plays sometimes too aggressively, but to an era when players, and particularly pitchers, did not always look or act like jocks. With his long hair, west coast attitude, drug bust and mellow demeanor, Lincecum feels like a player from the 1970s or early 1980s, albeit one with some of the nastiest pitches on the planet.
Baseball, particularly National League baseball, on the west coast seems awfully far away from New York and Boston which continue to dominate the baseball media and thus receives little national attention. The Giants and Padres did not come to Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park this season, nor have they dominated recent off-seasone headlines with big trades and bidding wars over free agents, so it seems that few fans were aware of the race. Instead, the Giants and Padres spent the last twelve months bringing along top rookies such as Buster Posey and Mat Latos, giving a second life to veterans on whom most teams had given up like Aubrey Huff and Miguel Tejada and playing a very different king of baseball than the AL East.
The 2010 baseball season, like most baseball seasons, was full of surprises, disappointments and great moments. Although the playoffs have not yet begun, it is still a good time to reflect back on the season which is just ending. Looking at the great moments, surprising seasons, great plays and the like are all good ways to do this. However, 2010 like almost all seasons raise intriguing questions across a range of baseball related topics. Some of these questions will be answered in the next weeks, others next year, and still others in the next decade or so.
Joe Torre’s streak of nine straight seasons in which his team made the post-season but did not win the World Series, will come to an end this year because the Dodgers will not make the playoffs. While Torre enjoyed tremendous postseason success from 1996 through the 2001 ALCS, a period where his team went 14-1 in postseason series. He has been far less successful in the playoffs since that time, winning only five of his next fourteen postseason series. Moreover, during the first fifteen years of his managerial career, Torre only made the post-season once.
Posada and Jeter’s offensive production took a great deal of pressure off of the rest of the Yankee offense during theoe years. The late 1990s are already more than a decade ago, so it is often forgotten that those Yankee teams did not always get great production from what are usually thought of as important offensive positions such as first base, DH and the corner outfield positions. The 1998 team was an extraordinary team with no real weaknesses, but their worst hitter was left fielder Chad Curtis who posted an OPS+ of 90. However, in 1999, the players most often used at DH, LF, RF, 1b and 3b, all posted OPS+ of 110 or lower. These are extraordinarily poor numbers for a World Championship team, especially for one which won 98 regular season games and finished third in the league in runs scored. The 2000 team was similar as none of the players who played those five positions most frequently had an OPS+ of even 100. The offense in 2000, which scored 871 runs, good enough for sixth in the league, came from the catcher, shortstop, centerfielder and a handful of part time players. The 2009 team, however, hit from top to bottom and was the most balanced Yankee offense to win a championship since 1998.
One of the major exploitable market inefficiencies in baseball is that teams pay so heavily for past accomplishments. No team does this more than the Yankees who have evolved into something of a straw man in this debate. The long contract which they gave to Alex Rodriguez means that the team will be playing Rodriguez more than $20 million a year in 2015-2017. Nobody can seriously think Rodriguez will still be an elite player by that time. Even if his current season is viewed as an off-year, it is not realistic to expect him to still be a top star during the last three years of his contract when he will make a total of $61 million.
Today is Frank Robinson’s 75th birthday. Frank Robinson, of course, is not exactly forgotten today. He is widely known as a baseball institution having been a great player, mediocre manager and high profile league official for more than half a century. Interestingly, partially due to all his other baseball related accomplishments, his playing career is often overlooked. Today, Robinson at times seems like little more than a name on a home run list which gets passed by players like Jim Thome or Alex Rodriguez. Most fans contemporary fans know that Robinson was a great player, but few are aware just how great he was.
Cano and Pedroia are both 26 years old and among the best second baseman in the game. The rivalry between the two players could energize the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry for years to come. It is likely that fans of both teams believe they have the best player. This is supported by the narrative, but the numbers suggest that Cano has become the better player. It will be interesting to see if the awards voters reflect this.
Thomson’s death feels like the passing of an era that actually ended decades ago. The home run occurred when baseball was played in black and white, New York had three teams, and a radio broadcast of a ballgame to a soldier in Asia was considered an impressive technological feat. The home run belongs to a time, city, and even country of the long ago past, but somehow it can still make a young father feel compelled to share the event, which occurred years before he was born, with his young son and an make an aging veteran still feel his monthly paycheck slipping away just as Thomson’s fly ball slipped over the left field fence and into history.
Making it more difficult to rely on often empty platitudes about clutch performance, chemistry or character as a way to explain outcomes in baseball has been one of the major impacts of the quantitative movement of recent years, but to some extent that has been the easy part. The harder work begins with revisiting some of these ideas, which are so influential in so many other areas of life, and seeking to gain a clearer, measurable and data based understanding of their import.
Rice and Dawson are not the worst selections in Hall of Fame history, but they are definitely among the weaker outfielders in the Hall of Fame. One way to see this is to compare Rice and Dawson not to other Hall of Famers, or borderline candidates like Evans, but to a player who clearly did not have a Hall of Fame career. There was another slugging outfielder who was also active from 1976-1989, but whose entire career lasted from 1975-1992 thus overlapping significantly with Rice and Dawson.
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.
In 37 years, Steinbrenner delivered seven world championships, countless tantrums, headlines and managerial firings, several horrendous trades, as well as several brilliant ones, one never-ending desire to win and hundreds of millions of dollars in support of that goal, but never a dull moment. That is the record on which the man should be judged. Baseball will miss him.