Really? Really?: Chris Young’s Ejection

Maybe I’m overly sensitive to stupid sports journalism because of my love for Fire Joe Morgan, but this is ridiculous.  A sportswriter in Arizona, Nick Piecoro, genuinely thinks that Chris Young arguing balls and strikes shows that he is a competitor.

I was at the game in question. In fact, I was one of maybe 5000 people who stayed out in the rain to see this at bat. The first pitch to Young was on the low and inside corner. I thought it was going to be a ball. I felt as though no pitcher had gotten a call on that pitch all game. That said, I was really surprised to see Young get so angry at the call. It was a pitch that was close to the strike zone and, more importantly, it was strike one. The umpire has unilateral control over strikes two and three. There is no reason to aggravate him.

More importantly, the pitches that he got really upset about, strikes two and three, were the EXACT SAME PITCH. Did he think that he had convinced the umpire that his strike zone was wrong? How did he not expect that to be strike three?  I thought that the incident made Young look like an idiot.

Sadly, this is not the most ridiculous thing in the article. That honor belongs to referring to the Diamondbacks, at the time 56-55, as “in the thick of a pennant race”. Now that I think of it, it was also ridiculous to refer to “the thick of a pennant race” as early as August 8th.  In summary, Nick Piecoro is a moron.

Bob Ryan is Retiring…

And everything that I’ve read about it has been a eulogy. Why is there a rule that when somebody retires or dies they only talk about their positives? It’s almost offensive to the deceased and retirees. When I die, call me crazy, I want my family and friends to remember me as I actually was: a flawed individual.  I will now write about Bob Ryan, a flawed individual.

I will always remember Bob Ryan as the nasty participant in Around the Horn that I never wanted to be on. Please, let it be Jackie MacMullan or Michael Smith. Not angry Bob Ryan; not Woody Paige without the ability to laugh at himself. He struck me as a writer who supported his opinions with conjecture and casual observations, and then tried to convince people that he was right through force of voice, i.e. yelling.

There is no better example of why I think of Mr. Ryan this way than his reaction to the 2011 Bill James Projections. He disagreed with them, thinking that they undersold the Boston Red Sox as a whole. This is fine. Projections are always guesswork, and it’s healthy to question them and argue about whether they are accurate or not. The shape of Mr. Ryan’s argument, however, was not healthy.

Instead, he personally attacked Bill James, trying to discredit him by repeating Dan Shaughnessy’s joke that James “doesn’t even like to watch baseball.” First, anyone who cites Shaughnessy as a reliable source loses some credibility in my eyes. Beyond that, using a derisive joke isn’t just using an ad hominem argument, it’s the worst kind of ad hominem argument. If an ad hominem argument is made that addresses real character concerns, then it implies that care was taken in the argument. To make a flippant joke is to dismiss your opponent as insignificant; he doesn’t deserve any more attention than that.

I have not read or seen 99.9% of Bob Ryan’s work as a sports reporter. It’s entirely possible that he was a wonderful reporter. That, however, was not my impression of him, and I know that this side of Ryan existed. He probably deserves a lot of credit for a long and successful career, but he also deserves criticism for his penchant for mean-spirited ad hominem arguments.

A Plea for Reasonable Discourse

I got my haircut the other day. There is no earthly reason anybody but me should care about this, but I need to introduce this somehow.

I had a conversation with my barber. Since I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me, we defaulted to talking about the Pirates. I mentioned that I liked the acquisition of Travis Snider. His response was that he thought Snider would never be more than a fourth outfielder because he was “slow.”

I almost shut my mouth right then. Really. But I didn’t. I said that at least he was an upgrade over Alex Presley. He then replied that Presley was “better with guys on base.”

This struck me as an odd argument for two reasons. The first reason is that Presley almost always hit in the number one or number two spot. In that spot he would hit behind: 8) Clint Barmes, .242 on base percentage; 9) the pitcher, I’m not bothering to do the math; 1) Jose Tabata: .295 on base percentage. This lineup configuration would probably have Presley hitting with runners on base less than anybody in the Major Leagues.  If his value is in getting runners in, as my barber suggested, then it was being wasted and bringing in someone whose skills would be used would be an upgrade by default. Whether the Pirates should have sent him down in such circumstances or moved him to a different spot in the order would therefore have been a reasonable conversation.

The second reason that I thought this argument was odd, however, makes the argument for moving Presley into an RBI slot in the lineup void. I don’t need to say much to explain it. Here goes:

Alex Presley with no one on: .258, 7 doubles, 4 triples, 8 home runs, 208 plate appearances

Alex Presley with men on: .169, 2 doubles, 0 triples, 0 home runs, 79 plate appearances

Alex Presley with runners in scoring position: .170, 1 double, 0 triples, 0 home runs, 53 plate appearances.

A Philosphy Major Weighs In

On Bucs Dugout, Charlie Wilmoth has posted a criticism of something that sportswriter Dejan Kovacevic wrote. It has to do with closer usage, but that is tangential to my purpose here.

Kovacevic takes the “Moneyball crowd” to task for often using the following rhetorical tactics: “meh?” (the unexamined dismissal of an opposing argument), “ad hominem” (attacking the person making the argument, not the argument itself), and “straw man” (arguing against an ostensibly similar, but weaker, argument than what one is actually arguing against). He then says that he thinks that the “Moneyball crowd” uses “groupthink” that prevents them from being “objective” and “intellectual,” follows it up with an insinuation that sabermetricians don’t keep an open mind, and finishes by saying that “maybe there’s a REASON (sic) closers pitch the ninth.”

Kovacevic uses the very same bad rhetorical tactics that he accuses the “Moneyball crowd” of in one paragraph tweet short post. He starts with a group ad hominem argument when he accuses them of using such techniques and not being able to keep an open mind and finishes with “maybe there’s a REASON (sic) closers pitch the ninth,” a “meh?” if there ever was one.

The hypocrisy here makes me angry. I don’t even necessarily disagree with Kovacevic. I have said before that I think that the sabermetric community has, for good reasons, become unnecessarily entrenched in some of its positions and that it is time for it to evolve. However, arguments like this are the very reason that the sabermetric community circles the wagons and vociferously argues these positions.  If Kovacevic wants sabermetricians to be more open-minded, then he should engage them in frank and honest discussions, not attack their character and intellectual integrity. Otherwise, he is contributing to the problem that he is ostensibly trying to change.

A Quick Note about the Lineup (8/9/12)

After Starling Marte, Travis Snider, and Andrew McCutchen, hitting 1-2-3, reached base 9 times on Tuesday and 4 yesterday, Clint Hurdle has decided that this is not a recipe for success. He has replaced Snider with Josh Harrison, he of the .293 OBP and 84 wRC+. Ugh.

On the flip side, Garrett Jones is not playing against the lefty after one of the worst baserunning performances in recent memory. More importantly, Jordy Mercer and Michael McKenry start today.

A Few Smaller Things

Before I move onto more thorough posts regarding the trade deadline and third order winning percentage, I am going to mention a few smaller things that bother me about the Pirates right now.

Smaller Thing Number One: Clint Barmes’ Playing Time

I love Clint Barmes’ defense. I really do. I think that he provides premium defense at a tough and important position. I also think that his defense is under-appreciated because it relies heavily on good positioning. However, even if Barmes has been the fourth-best defensive shortstop in the major leagues this year (which he is per FanGraphs) his hitting has been so bad that he has still provided no value. He has produced exactly 0.0 WAR despite having the fourth most plate appearances of any Pittsburgh Pirate.

I understand that Jordy Mercer may be worse. But we can’t know that unless the kid plays. Personally, I think that benching a replacement player is an acceptable loss to take on in finding out what Mercer is. Instead, he has gotten all of 25 plate appearances (in which time he has been credited with 0.3 WAR, or infinitely more than Clint Barmes). It drives me crazy.

Smaller Thing Number Two: Bullpen Management

In the bottom of the eighth inning tonight, both Joel Hanrahan and Chad Qualls were warming up in the Pirates’ bullpen. After the fourth run crossed the plate, eliminating the save opportunity, Hanrahan sat down and Qualls would come on to pitch the ninth inning. The Pirates’ win expectancy stood at 98.8% at the start of the ninth inning. This seems to support the use of a lower quality reliever, like Qualls, but in a three run game (source: this game) the Pirates’ win expectancy would have been 97.4%. This would also support using a lesser quality reliever. In short, the closer role leads to manager stupidity.

Smaller Thing Number Three: Smart vs. Exciting

Andrew McCutchen. Need I say more? It’s more fun to watch play baseball hard than to watch him play it smart. He should have been out at second tonight. He absolutely should have stayed at first. But it would be impossible to argue that his actions made tonight’s game much more exciting (it helps that it led to a win as well).

Something Small that Bugs Me

I have become increasingly annoyed with the constant citation of “one National/American League scout” as a definitive source in baseball journalism. Major journalists, given how many times they reference such a source, clearly are able to contact many such scouts. As someone who follows baseball, it is clear to me that baseball scouts often wildly disagree on the things that “one National/American League scout” usually is talking about in these pieces. All that a journalist has to do is find one of these scouts that says something that supports his point. He then puts it into his article as “proof” that he is right.

If, in a history class at college, I cite only one historian who agrees with my thesis I fail. This is, I hope, true of every other academic discipline. Why do we let these journalists get away with this? This is actually even worse, because I can’t call up historians and ask them about my topic until one of them agrees with me, which well-connected sports journalists can do. It horrifies me. Really. It results in things like this causing hysteria.

Pirates’ Trades: Working Together

As I’ve mentioned here before, no trade happens in a vacuum. Individual, one or more of the trades that Neal Huntington made the last few weeks would seem to be a blunder. Taken togther, i.e. in context, they look brilliant.

Here’s the list of players added in these trades: Wandy Rodriguez, Travis Snider, Gaby Sanchez, Kyle Kaminska, Chad Qualls.

Here’s the list of players lost in these trades: Robbie Grossman, Colton Cain, Rudy Owens, Brad Lincoln, Competitive Balance Pick, Gorkys Hernandez, Casey McGehee.

Grossman, Cain, and the Competitive Balance Pick were not going to be in Pittsburgh for at least a year. I will come back to them later.

So in terms of current major league value Huntington swapped Owens, a borderline major league pitcher, Lincoln, a good relief pitcher, Hernandez, a bad fourth outfielder, and McGehee, a mediocre small part of a platoon corner infielder, for Rodriguez, a middle of the rotation starter, Snider, whose value is highly debatable, Sanchez, who is much better as a platoon guy than McGehee, and Qualls, a bad reliever.

McGehee was useless when replaced by Sanchez and Qualls is significantly worse than Lincoln. That may seem to make these four players’ acquisitions cancel each other out. Lincoln, however, fills the same role as Jason Grilli and Joel Hanrahan in the Pirates’ pen. Lincoln was a luxury that a team like the Pirates needs to sacrifice in order to improve holes in the rest of the team. As a result, I think that the swap of these players, that is Qualls for Lincoln and Sanchez for McGehee, is a net gain for the Pirates.

That means that the rest of the 2012 gain/loss calculus is represented by the loss of Owens and Hernandez and the gain of Rodriguez and Snider. This is simple. Rodriguez is a proven 2/3 starter in the big leagues while Owens is a borderline major-league pitcher. Hernandez wasn’t good enough to be a fourth outfielder on a team without three real outfielders while Snider has (while underperforming) been worth 1.9 WAR in 922 plate appearances. That’s not team altering, but it represents an upgrade in the outfield for this team and is, in my opinion, Snider’s floor.  The swap of these players in and out of the Pirates roster is a clear boost to the Pirates in 2012. Since the swap of the first group of players (Qualls, Lincoln, Sanchez, McGehee) was somewhere close to even, the Pirates have clearly made themselves better for the rest of 2012.

Whether Huntington’s trades improved or hurt the team’s long-term outlook is less clear. This is partially because projecting prospects is far from a perfect science. I have heard wildly different opinions on both Robbie Grossman and Colton Cain. If Grossman and/or Cain live up to the more positive descriptions of them that I have heard, then these deals may hurt the Pirates going forward. If they fall short of that, and prospects rarely turn out as well as their most glowing scouting reports claim that they will, then this becomes an interesting question.

It’s impossible to speak to this question without delving deep into questions about individual players like Grossman, Cain, Snider, and Sanchez. Until I have done that, I’m really not qualified to judge the long-term outlook of these trades for the Pirates. However, the fact that it is doubtful that the Pirates hurt their long-term outlook while significantly upgrading their current roster means that Neal Huntington did a great job at the trade deadline. I applaud him.