St. Curtis, the Patron Saint of Clutch and Bloody Socks and St. Pedro, the Patron Saint of Excellence

So Joshua, listen buddy, let me tell you something exciting. Some day you are going to join the Canon of Red Sox Saints. I bet you didn’t even know this prestigious group existed, but they do. I pray to them pretty much every night, right before I fall asleep in my Damon Buford jersey, which is a child’s-sized medium, and, consequently, does not produce a nice mental image, but I digress. You’re going to be the Patron Saint of Badassery. Pretty cool, no? I thought you’d like that. There was that time that I said you were no Johan Santana, and I think it’s possible you may have overheard me, but that’s water under the bridge, and come on, that’s not even true any more. I wouldn’t trade you straight-up for Johan. I wouldn’t trade you straight-up for anyone right now because you’re there. You’re a Red Sox great. A future saint!

There’s just one little thing I’m asking for, Josh. I think you know what it is. I know my fellow fans would really appreciate it too. But no pressure; your fate is sealed. When your career is over, you’ll join St. Pedro and St. Curtis as the Sox from this era in the Canon (St. Jason, St. Timothy, St. Manuel and St. David will be there too–I don’t know about St. Kevin, St. Jonathan, and St. Dustin yet).

But, you know, a win tonight wouldn’t hurt.

Listen, Joshua is a post from: Free Pedro

Let’s hope Byrd’s back on the juice!

In all seriousness though, I’m supremely disappointed that Meryl Masterson will no longer be part of my life. She will be missed.

An “I Told You So” (In Advance) is a post from: Free Pedro

For each player, I started with the current season’s ERA+. There are two things of special importance to consider: (1) In the regression analysis I based my analysis on, the r-squared was only .28, which means that a good deal of the variance of ERA+ is not explained by age alone. Of course this is the case, but what it means for the analysis below is that I am only showing the effect that we can expect age to have on the future performance of the pitchers. We are leaving out everything else (defense, injury, coaching, learning a new pitch, etc.). (2) We can not be sure, especially in the case of Buchholz, what each pitcher’s true ERA+ is. As such, I have included error bars. Halladay has error bars at 6%, which includes his variance of the last two seasons. Buchholz are much larger (10%), which means he ranges in talent from about as good as Lester was last year, to about as good as John Lackey was last year. Now, he may be much worse, he’s probably not much better, but it gives us a jumping-off point.

The graph above below suggests that Clay Buchholz will eventually become a better pitcher than Roy Halladay due to Buchholz’s growth and Halladay’s aging, but this won’t happen until 2018, when Roy Halladay is 41! It also says that, even if Buchholz is much better than we expect and Halladay is much worse than we think, chances are they won’t be comparable as pitchers until 2011, when their error bars cross. I’d go so far as to analyze this graph as saying that it is unlikely that there will be a time in the next 5 years where we’ll consider Buchholz a better pitcher than Halladay.

So, the relative ages of our pitchers in question does not make me any less likely to trade for Halladay. At this point, we can be fairly certain that Halladay will be a better pitcher than Buchholz for a long time. Knowing that the Sox will get the best player in the deal, and that he will remain so for a good duration, does not necessarilly mean they should pull the trigger. Obviously, how highly the Sox value the other prospects in play, who are much harder to project than Buchholz because they are younger and lack Major League experience, will make or break this deal.

Halladay v. Buchholz is a post from: Free Pedro

The graph below shows the career arcs of the average MLB batter and pitcher. It’s based on regression analyses (here and here) that isolated the effect of age on production. The vertical axis in my graph is the percentage better than the player was at age 21, so a positive percentage is how much better a player is at a certain age than he was when he was 21 and a negative percentage is how much worse. The average batter peaks at 29, and the average pitcher peaks at 28. For discussion of the current rumors, I have graphed the supposed trade targets and the potential Red Sox prospects in play.

So mark this down right now: The Sox, won’t trade for Halladay. OK, let me amend that a bit–the Sox won’t trade for Roy Halladay if they have to give up what the Jays are asking for. As we can see in the next graph, under Theo Epstein, the Sox have been very careful not to give long-term contracts to aging pitchers. They let Pedro and Lowe walk and showed little interest in the Santana trade or acquiring Sabathia. The length of the arrow is the length of the contract, and the number is the average yearly salary of the player.

Clearly, the Sox value a pitcher who they can sign when he’s still in his mid-twenties. As such, they value players like Lester, Buchholz, Bowden, and Kelly extremely highly. They wouldn’t give up Lester to get Santana. The reason they are so protective of their pitching prospects is not that they think they are all going to be stars, but because they know that if they do develop into talents, they will have the opportunity to lock them up in their mid-twenties and have them under contract for the primes of their careers. As we can see, the Red Sox have had great success in extending the contracts of their players at below-market rates. Ortiz, Youk, Pedroia (coming off an MVP!), and Beckett were all signed at good prices for shorter deals. The Sox have a clear strategy. Their MO is to sign a player who is still under contract to a cheap, short extension. Obviously, the Sox have had problems with shortstops, and the Drew contract is unforgivable.

To me, this means that the Sox are much more likely to give up their young talent for Adrian Gonzales than they are for Roy Halladay, who is quickly approaching the mid-thirties range where pitchers have historically fallen off a cliff. (Of course, these numbers are probably overly generous to older players because they were compiled in the PED Era. Don’t expect to see many productive 38-year-old pitchers in the next decade.)

Let’s consider the Mets.

Omar, like Theo, has done a fantastic job of signing his young talent to extensions. (That Wright contract may be one of the best ever.) It seems he has a soft spot for over-the-hill pitchers.  The Martinez and Wagner contracts were Cashman-esque. (Brian Cashman has a history of overpaying for past production. Oftentimes, this production was not even in the recent past.) While Santana was the best pitcher in the game when he was signed, very soon he will qualify as very overpaid. But Omar is getting better. The K-Rod deal is the type of short contract that works for a young pitcher. And though the Perez deal was a bit of a head scratcher because, let’s face it, his production wasn’t that great, even if it  was presumed to go up based on this analysis, at least it was short and for a young pitcher.

For laughs, let’s look at the Yankees next.

Brian Cashman may be worse at his job than anybody whose performance is so publicly observed. The A-Rod contract is so bad and so long that I had to extend the X-axis. No further discussion is necessary.

On Trading Prospects and Signing Long-Term Contracts is a post from: Free Pedro

A Failed Experiment is a post from: Free Pedro

People like to point out that the Sox went 20-3 starting on August 10 that year, a stretch that put the Red Sox in the playoffs in a year in which they’d in the World Series for the first time in, well, a while. They seem to think that this game was the catalyst. Setting aside the fact that there were 16 days between this win and the very good stretch of baseball that the sox played in mid-to-late August, the truth is that we overstate how impressive that type of stretch is. I’ll spare you all the math–feel free to email me if you want to see it and have an interest in learning a little about binomial distributions–but the chance of a team with a .605 winning percentage having a 20-3 run at somepoint in a season is a little over 36%. Consider further that, with the trades they had made and whatnot, the team was better than a .605 team at that point, and it becomes even more likely that they’d have an .869 stretch over 23 games. Still, I think this was one of the few games in a baseball season that can have a real long-term impact.

Mariano Rivera has been calling the Red Sox his daddy for some time now. While Rivera is successful in his save attempts over 90% of the time versus the rest of the leage, he’s successful about 79% of the time versus the Red Sox. More than 20% of his blown saves have come against the Sox, far more than against any other team. This data is not an abberation, the stats suggest (at over a 99% confidence interval) that the Sox are in Mariano’s head. The Sox turn him from the closer with the second highest career save percentage of all time into Byung Hyun Kim (no joke). Do I think that a dramatic walk-off in a penant race can put the Sox in his head? Yes, I do. Dave Roberts helped, too.

This win was not the catalyst that put the Sox into the playoffs. It didn’t make them any more likely to win the Series in ‘04. So celebrate July 24, 2004 because it was a fantastic game on its own merit. That, and because Mariano now trembles at Fenway.

Happy Hit A-Rod in the Face Day is a post from: Free Pedro

OBP + (1B + 2 x 2B + 3 x 3B + 4 x HR + SB – CS) / AB

Okay, simply, I just adjusted OPS (OBP + SLG) by adding the bases a runner steals and canceling out his hit when he gets caught stealing.* I ran the numbers for all 329 hitters with more than 200 AB in 2008. It’s not very interesting to look at the top ten hitters before and after the adjustment. They stayed the same, except for Youk falling from 9^th to 11^th, which is because the hitters with the biggest OPS and AOPS numbers will be the homerun hitters, and won’t benefit much from including steals (also, there’s a long tail factor at play, which means that ranks won’t change much). But my guess is that the Mets and Sox fans reading this will be interested to know that four of the biggest beneficiaries of this tweak to OPS are Jacoby Ellsbury, Jose Reyes, Luis Castillo, and (surprise) Coco Crisp.

Jacoby’s jump is huge. Before the adjustment, he’s comparable with crappy players like Jose Bautista, Troy Tulowitzki, most of the KC lineup, and old friends Mark Loretta, Kevin Millar, and Lastings Milledge. After: Mike Lowell, Russell Martin, Cliff Floyd, and Ichiro. His jump is from the 38^th to the 61^st percentile of players. Reyes’s jump may be even more impressive, though it is much smaller percentile-wise. After adjustment, his comparables are quite nice:

Sorry to include so many players, but I wanted to get Ryan Howard in there for the Mets fans. Anyway, the biggest risers** are included below.

*I realize that a single followed by a steal is not as valuable as a double, which often scores the non-David-Ortiz runner on first, but I’d say that this effect is balanced by the fact that a single followed by a caught stealing is not as bad as a strikeout, because that single and caught stealing probably scored the runner on second and almost certainly the one on third.

**The biggest fallers don’t tell us that much because they’re the players who never try to run and are getting passed by those who do.  As such, I’ve not included them.

In Praise of Speed is a post from: Free Pedro