Thursday, May 27, 2010

How Are The Blue Jays Any Good?

Well they were for a while, but after last night's near-comeback against the Angels they sit today at 27-22, fourth in the American League East.  That's a tough spot to be in with a record that good.  Any arguments that suggest playing in the AL East absolutely sucks need only gander at some of the numbers below:

-The Blue Jays have 27 wins.  That's tied for third most in the American League and tied for FOURTH IN THE MAJORS.

-The Major League home run leader is Jose Bautista with 15.  He's tied for fourth in RBI's, putting him on pace for a 49 HR, 128 RBI year.  No big deal.

-They have three players (Bautista, Vernon Wells, Alex Gonzales) on pace for a 30 HR, 100 RBI season.  John Buck is on pace for 30 HR, 99 RBI's.

-The team leads the Majors in doubles, HR (by 14 over Boston), RBI's, Runs Scored, SLG %, Total Bases and, obviously, Extra Base Hits.  That's the MAJOR LEAGUES.

-They've done all this with the following stellar performances: Aaron Hill (.154/.268/.324), Lyle Overbay (.200/.281/.337) and Adam Lind(.228/.293/.391).  Hill is coming off a hamstring injury but nothing is stopping Overbay and Lind from hitting like Major Leaguers any time now.  Hill and Lind were the team's second and third best players last year so they have a longer leash, but Overbay is a free agent and a prime asset for a rebuilding team to move for, well, anything.  Right now he has no value and that's disappointing.  They'd surely love to move him and give Brett Wallace some at-bats.  Anyway, the point is that for how good they've been offensively, they could be better.  That's unlikely of course, Hill and Lind will probably heat up as Bautista and Gonzales cool off, but it goes to show how over their heads they've been to this point.

-Some good signs from the pitching staff.  They've given up the second fewest HR's in the American League, fourth fewest earned runs, lead the AL in strikeouts, second in strikeouts/flyouts ratio (always a good sign), third in slugging % against, and have caught the second most runners attempting to steal (a shared pitcher/catcher stat).

-The defense has also been good, they have the third best fielding percentage in the AL, fourth in double-plays turned, third fewest errors (they have 25, behind the Yankees with 20 and the Twins with, holy crap!  9!), second in assists credited and first in put-outs (any caught ball, tagged out, or thrown-out.  No strikeouts, basically). 
So that's the good, and lots of it as you can see.  There's some bad though...

-The batting averages are terrible.  Nobody is over .300 (Wells is .299), six regulars (played over 30 games) are below .260.  That would fine, except for...

-The on-base percentages are awful too.  For perspective, a good-to-great hitter will have three slash line number (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) of .300/.400/.500.  Bautista leads the team with a .361 OBP and four are under .300 (important guys too, Gonzales, Lind, Hill, Overbay).  The indicators are bad for guys like Gonzales, who's hitting .263 but has an OBP of .296, Wells, who's hitting .299 but has an OBP of .355, and recent pick-up Fred Lewis, who's hitting .283 but has an OBP of .316.  To me a good sigh is a hitter with an OBP of about 70 to 100 points higher than his batting average.  That's arbitrary of course, but that indicates a player who will still get on base if his hitting slumps or he runs into bad contact luck.  These three aren't walking enough and when the hitting drops off the team will suffer.

-Overall, the team is 22nd in the majors in walks, 10th in the AL.

-They strikeout A LOT.  Second most in the majors.

-Their OPS (On-base % plus slugging %) is fourth in the AL.  That's pretty good, except when you consider how many other categories they lead the league in.  Specifically, the fact that they lead the entire MLB in slugging % but are fourth in their own league in OPS (8th overall) speaks to how disproportionate their offense is.  In other words, they're hitting a LOT of homeruns proportional to their walks, singles, etc.  That's good though, right?  Kind of like a skinny girl with big boobs?  "In proportion" isn't always best!  Well yeah, except that when you aren't walking enough to keep up with your homeruns and doubles, you're prone to offensive slumps when the ball isn't dropping between fielders or landing in their gloves at the warning track. Or you lose even when you hit six homeruns in one game.

-There's some poor pitching indicators too, mostly in the bullpen.  Overall, the pitching staff is 8th in American league ERA and only have one complete game (tied for second last).  That's starting to tax the relief corps who've finished 48 of 49 games, have needed to record to fourth most average outs per game, have thrown the fourth most average pitches per game (all AL stats) and have already blown 6 saves.  The bullpens' ERA is a little higher than the team's, 4.49 vs. 4.36, but that's only 0.02 points higher than the league average.  They've done a good job of overworking individual relief pitchers; they're below league average in back-to-back relief appearances as well as relievers pitching over one inning.  So Cito's managing his bullpen well enough but the starters have to start pitching deeper or the bullpen ERA will creep higher and higher every month.  And there's no Stephen Strasburg to pick first overall.
 
Basically, you've got a team that kills baseballs when it makes contact, misses a lot, has a lot of players putting up hilariously unexpected offensive numbers, fields pretty well, and pitches okay but is overworking its relief pitching.  The fact that they don't walk enough and are using the bullpen so much indicates that they won't maintain their success level, especially with 12 straight games against divisional opponents, six of which are against Tampa Bay who have the game's best record.  We know this already though, don't we?  This team was supposed to finish last or lower, right?  Probably, but when you look at where they'd be in other divisions, whether in the AL or NL, it's frustrating because it's the same story every year.  
When you talk about re-alignment, it very much depends on the salary structure of the sport.  In the NHL, re-aligning the divisions because one is weaker than the rest is pretty silly; a hard salary cap ensures some degree of balance and fairness so that if you aren't winning, well, too bad because everyone's rules are the same.  Major League Baseball, with it's capless spending, regional TV channels and flimsy luxury tax, should have to deal with the periodic re-alignment question because teams are playing by such dramatically different rules.  You can point to low-revenue success teams like Tampa Bay or the occasional Florida Marlins run, but those both flukes and exceptions to the rule.  Florida had much bigger payrolls in their World Series wins before stripping them down to nothing and Tampa had years of not just high draft picks, but high draft picks that worked out.  They're the Pittsburgh Penguins of MLB, but with no protective salary structure to keep the Yankees from signing away Carl Crawford next year, and whomever they want after that.  It's a well-stated argument that the MLB salary structure is unfair, I'm not going to get into it again, but it spills into the re-alignment debate.  If you won't institute some player salary restrictions, can't you at least let the Yankees and Red Sox beat up someone else for a while?  You got to toss the mid and low-revenue market teams a bone, don't you? Hello?

Friday, May 21, 2010

"No, I think we should stay!" "Why?" "Because I'm in the dumpster already!"

3D TV is the focal point of consumer electronics this year.  My experience in the industry suggests that most customers, as is the case with any new technology, are taking the wait-and-see approach.  In fact, most people roll their eyes and shake their proverbial fists at how the world is changing so fast, there's always something new, Things in My Day were just fine thank you very much, how do I know when to double-click, and Get Off My Lawn!!!

Anyways, what's telling about the reactionary nature of most people is, at least when it comes to technology, there's an admittance of their own culpability for not seeing how new products, ideas and paradigms will fit into their lives.  People generally don't like change unless it's an improvement over something they already know they don't like; if they don't know they don't like it, they won't like the thing they'll eventually like that's better than what they don't like but think they do.  Totally.


This is not true in professional sports, where some fans and the majority of media take conservatism to a level where, if you translated it into the real world, would be like watching a mob storming Apple and protesting the cost of the new iPhone because they've been writing letters with parchment and quill for three hundred years and that's GOOD ENOUGH.  The Stanley Cup playoffs, apart from almost everyday in Major League Baseball, is probably the worst cesspool of the kind of reactionary, Thug Life, xenophobic mindset that you hear shrilling from the mouths and pens of the hockey media. 


 This shouldn't be new to anyone, is it?  How long have we had to listen to CBC's choice of buffoons in the booth or in the intermission shows, from the lovable and silly (Don Cherry, yes you love him even if he is crazy) to the horrible and unfortunately (Mike Milbury) to the better but only by comparison (Glen Healy) to the inexplicable (PJ Stock).  It's not that I dislike their commentating, I'm slowly getting over the shock of seeing a mediocre third line agitator taking air time away from Ron MacLean, it's just that they all thump the same old-school mindset in lockstep with each other.  The old-school hockey dogma, always around but LOUDER during the playoffs, encompasses the following ideas bellowed out as Facts: The superiority of Canadian role players to European skilled players, the importance of Grit, setting the Tone For The Next Game (because NHL players are terrified by facewashing and are not able to emotionally recover), the importance of intangibles (which, by definition, is something that cannot be demonstrably proven to be beneficial), the often overrated Underrated Player (if Maxime Lapierre is the key to your team...) which is often paired with the Well-Known Player who "surprises" in the playoffs, except that everyone knows who they are (look, Joe Pavelski was an Olympian, stop discrediting him as a nobody because YOU'VE never heard of him and don't understand that he's facing weaker defensemen than Thornton-Marleau-Heatley), the importance of Toughness, silly sayings like "It's not a series until the home team loses" (by that logic, Montreal, down 2-0 going back home after being outscored 9-0, had NOTHING to worry about), the importance of both Heart AND Soul, how it's a great story when a bad player scores a bad goal off a bad line change on a bad deflection in overtime and, of course, character.  It's exhaustingly repetitive.  At least when Don Cherry's talking about covering the point men and screening the goalie he shows some actual video evidence.  Imagine that.


All these so-called "old-school" ideas are frustrating because they're repeated ad nauseum and because they're examples of the kind of lazy journalism you see all the time.  We've been hearing about how having role players, hot goalies, Good Ol' Canadian boys and experience gained from prior losses are keys to playoff glory.  The causal links between these "truisms" and actual successes are questionable.  If a team full of role-players wins, it's because of effort but if they lose it's because they just lacked the talent.  Hot goalies are great, they really are, but even this year Jaroslav Halak, who certainly has been utterly brilliant, and his team would've been eliminated if Bruce Boudreau could get his Vince Carters to drive the damn puck to the net instead of firing wrist-shots from the blue line.  Not to mention how soft many of the goals against the Capitals were.  Michael Leighton, after two straight shutouts, is the current Hot Goalie even though he has Chris Pronger playing against the top TWO lines, not to mention 6"5' Braydon Coburn, Matt Carle and Kimmo Timmonen playing against everyone else.  Pretty sure lots of goalies could put up a few shutouts with that defense.  The point is that there's plenty of teams that win Stanley Cups in spite of their goaltending (Chris Osgood never had to be any more than Chris Osgoodenough), and plenty of hot goalies whose teams are gone after one or two glorious rounds.  Lastly, I think we can finally put the myth of the Great Canadian playoff stars to bed; Malkin and Zetterberg have won the last two Conn Smythe trophies, Nicklas Lindstrom won it in 2002.  


I'm not taking the argument that good goaltending, role players and grit and intensity aren't important components of a Stanley Cup run.  My problem is that we hear about this stuff all the time and the media uses these phrases to paint a broad stroke and avoid digging any deeper.  Identifying Grit and Intensity and Will To Win is like walking outside like you do everyday and being shocked when you see the sky.  Everybody is working their ass off in the playoffs, there aren't any bad teams with lazy players left and when there is, like whenever Alex Kovalev's team is in the playoffs, they're the exception to the and stand out.  The increase in effort, speed and intensity from regular season to playoffs is astonishing and it's important to notice it and celebrate it, but don't "prove" this to us using examples of shot-blocking and beating out icing calls.  We see that in the pre-season.  Narrow the focus a bit, highlight the guy who returns after having all his teeth knocked out, the player with the bad knee, the stitches on the bench.  Putting all the examples of toughness and grit together cheapens the impressive ones and makes them seem ordinary.  They're all tough, incredibly resilient and every night they risk permanent injury.  We know this and that's why we love hockey, we don't need to hear it ALL the TIME.  You're CBC/TSN/Sportsnet, your audience knows why it's watching.  Teach us something we haven't heard about yet. 


Corsi numbers were discussed a little while ago on Coach's Corner (I think, Cherry "mentioned" them) and were, of course, dismissed as bad new-age hoodoo.  Corsi numbers count the number of shots for and against that a player was on the ice for; a shot for is a plus one, a shot against is a minus one.  It's like plus/minus but with shots, not goals.  There's a host of new stats out there (QualComp, Team Regression, David Staples' Error Stat) that bloggers and hockey writers are playing around with, suggesting that we might be at a dawn of a new statistical age similar to the Bill James baseball statistical revolution that had its roots in the 1970's.  I kind of doubt it, hockey's a tougher sport to measure because it doesn't stop and start in the same quantifiable way, but the effort and research being done is outstanding.  These are hockey fans who are dedicating their free time to digging deeper into the sport to try to understand what exactly is going on out there, how are some teams winning consistently more often than others even with a salary cap, how can you evaluate two players with similar basic stats, which position is the most important, and so on forever.  


This isn't the place for an insufferable argument about blogs vs. mainstream journalism, that's been done to death.  Instead, I'm simply asking why CBC, TSN and Sportsnet continue to feed us cliches about momentum and effort while fans in their own time are testing their statistical hypothesis and risking their new ideas in the flamewars of the Internet to see what works.  There's problems with any stat in the hands of an idiot, particularly in hockey where the very collection design can be called into question (you can image how easy it is to poke holes in the Quality of Competition Faced measurement), but bless those souls who use their great minds and limitless patience on trying to figure out which millionaire should be signed by which team's billionaire owner instead of curing cancer or writing books explaining the stock market.  Without them, we'd be reduced to Doug MacLean's assurance that Montreal has All The Momentum Now because of tonight's big win.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Stupid Telus Puppy!


So I only got halfway into my grand experiment of picking playoff series results based on one game, only to have "someone" kick out one of those tubes that keeps our internet motor running.  More to come...

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Round 2.1

Pittsburgh vs. Montreal

Boy, do a lot of people ever know everything about hockey eh?  You'd think Montreal was the first seed and Washington scraped into the playoffs!  Who were we to think that the highest scoring team in the league, with the most points, with the highest goal differential and the best powerplay would beat a team with a forward corps full of Oompa Loompas, a defense as mobile as a Hal Gill on skates (wait...), and a goaltending situation perhaps best described as having all the unity and cohesion as that guy from Identity.  None of you called it!  Stop pretending!!!  Anyway, Pittsburgh looked really good in the first game, the powerplay had four goals and Halak was chased after five goals on 20 shots.  In keeping with the integrity of this experiment you'd have to take Pittsburgh by quite a bit, especially with Montreal losing Markov for probably the series.  The Pens, against this opponent anyway, have more than enough to compensate for the loss of Jordan Staal, who is currently listed as out indefinately.  Pens in 5.