An Annual Event

Dave Paisley

Right around this time of year, as pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training parks in Arizona and Florida, baseball fans crank up the interest level a notch or two. The endless winter of free agent signings, winter meeting trades, arbitration hearings and lousy football games is behind us, and we can start savoring the coming season. Except for maybe Royals fans.

As we look forward to the season, there's always a plethora of reading material to help us figure out what's what, from the mountain of STATS handbooks, to roto-geek reviews to the inane ramblings of Evan Grant.  Inheriting the mantle of the legendary Bill James, some of the best analysis of the past few years has come from the independent annuals created by stathead denizens of the baseball internet newsgroups, rec.sport.baseball in particular.

The first annual to hit the streets so far is Baseball Prospectus, 1999 Edition, available right now from Amazon.com, and right behind it is the 1999 Big Bad Baseball Annual, not quite out yet, but available for ordering from Amazon.com. (I have to admit to a vested interest in the latter, having written the Mariner essay, but overall, my part is pretty small and there's much, much more than my small contribution.)

I've had mixed feelings about Baseball Prospectus in the past. I bought it the past two years anyway, because its value outweighs its annoyances and I just couldn't help myself from ordering it this year, either. It arrived a couple of days ago, and I must say I've been more impressed with it this year than previously.

Lead editor since its inception, Gary Huckabay is gone this year, but most of the team remains intact. In fact, the cover credits five of the nine primary authors (instead of just Huckabay last year) plus "a Team of Experts on Baseball Talent." Probably doesn't include Dan Duquette and Peter Gammons, though.

The guts of the book are the individual team sections, and they rely on a mixture of prose, stat-geek analysis and sometimes witty, sometimes lame player comments. It's always fun to read the analysis of the home team, though. The Mariner essay, for example, is mostly a rant against the evil that is manager Lou Piniella. You won't get much argument from intelligent Mariner fans on that one.

My biggest problem with BP is that it doesn't give you actual real stats. Instead, you get "translated" stats. They are known as the Davenport Translations, or DTs, and if you read them long enough without the aid of beer, you tend to get the DTs yourself. Now, I've got nothing against quality analysis, but when I look at Ken Griffey Jr's line, I expect to see the actual number of home runs he hit last year, not some adjusted "should've hit, all other things being equal" number. Actually, for 1998, the number is the actual number, but only by coincidence. Another problem I've had in past years has been the lack of information on how the translations are done, but Clay Davenport gives a pretty reasonable accounting this year.
 
However, enough of the hitting. Some of the best work in this year's book relates to pitching. One of the snappiest pieces of analysis I've seen in a long time comes from Rany Jazayerli on pitcher abuse. Up front he gives the reader five tightly packed pages on his newly developed method for evaluating the overuse and abuse of pitchers, and then each team gets a half page summary in their section.

King of the hill of pitcher abuse by a landslide is alleged genius manager Jim Leyland. Pity poor MAP (Most Abused Pitcher) Livan Hernandez. Somebody call the SPCA! One and a half years of abuse by Leyland has his arm barely attached to his shoulder, but at least he may get some respite this year with Leyland off to Colorado. However, just imagine how those poor Rockies pitchers will fare under the steely glare of taskmaster Jim. Leading the American League is Blue Jay skipper Tim Johnson who was actually a more equal opportunity abuser than Leyland. His numbers are more consistent than Leyland's, and he sweeps every category. Rany's analysis is a fascinating piece of work, and worth the price of the book alone.

The other excellent piece of work is Mike Wolverton's Support Neutral Win-Loss Percentage (SNWLP for short) analysis. It's long been recognized that a pitcher's record is heavily influenced by not only his own ability, but also by his teammates' ability to score runs. Well, duh. But what hasn't been well known until recently is that a team's scoring can vary greatly for each starting pitcher. The variation tends to be pretty random, and unless someone does the dirty work of digging through the numbers, the true effects of run support are difficult to get at. Well, Mike does a fine job of compiling all the relevant information. Not only that, the info is all neatly summarized on the same page as Rany's pitcher abuse numbers, so there's a handy one-page reference for all the interesting pitching material.

One grating element is the cover note hype of their 1998 predictions. It mentions how they predicted "slippage" from the likes of Livan Hernandez, when in fact the 1998 BP predicted a very good 3.15 ERA (admittedly a slight increase from half a season in 1997.) The 1998 review does say "I expect he's going to struggle early in the year, as the National League tries to humble the new hotshot." And it also mentions the side benefit of keeping his workload down (as if Jim Leyland was listening.) However, it ends: "...his arm may recover in the long term. If it does, he may still be one of the league's best right-handers in two or three years." Now I'd hardly call that a resounding forecast of doom for poor Livan. But if you write something positive and something negative you can be right every time.

A fine book, all told, and worthy of consideration for your discretionary spending dollar.

about the author

Dave Paisley's prediction for Ken Griffey Jr. reads, "If he can stay healthy, expect Junior to put up stellar numbers. Otherwise, look for decline." By all means, agree wholeheartedly at drdjp@strikethree.com.