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

Who was the best pitcher of the steroid era?

And to kick off the debate, I’ve invited Danny Stahl, our friend and long-suffering Royals fan – and  amateur baseball analyst – to share his thoughts. He has written a very thorough and thoughtful essay, in which he comes to a very unfortunate conclusion for those who love Pedro…

Here it is, published in all its Pedro-hater (i.e. Maddux-loving) glory:

Who’s the best pitcher of our era?

So let me start by defining the question. ‘Best’ is a combination of every possible factor one would consider, and I’ll do my best to compile a list of pitchers who any somewhat knowledgeable baseball fan would consider. ‘Our ‘ is the Generation Y group who has grown up in this ‘era’ of baseball often described as the steroid era.

For me, the era starts on April 23rd, 1988. No, that’s not my birthday – that was 33 days earlier. No, April 23rd was Steve Carlton’s last game, and he was out of this world good (he won 27 games for a team that won only 59), so he’s the line I’m drawing.
Since then I can come up with only a handful of pitchers who are to be considered for this great honor. They are in no particular order:

Representing Starters:
Pedro Martinez
Roger Clemens
Randy Johnson
Greg Maddux
Tom Glavine
John Smoltz

Representing Closers:
Mariano Rivera
Trevor Hoffman

… ok so right off the bat, I was joking about both closers. Both were great in their own ways, but cannot be included in this list. I think the modern day 1-inning closer is bogus and proof of that is how bad the Royals are despite having the league leader in ERA starting every 5 days and one of the league’s best closers at the end. Closers play a smaller and smaller role these days.

OK, moving on. I’m going to eliminate John Smoltz due to his time spent as a closer, and Tom Glavine for being only the 2nd best on his own team behind Maddux. So that leaves Martinez, Clemens, Johnson, and Maddux. Once again, I’m making a speed judgment call, but because this is the ’steroid era’ we’re discussing, beating the big monsters at the plate is more impressive when you DON’T join in on the ‘roid party. Clemens eliminated. (Oh and he’s a jackass and I don’t like him, so according to Hall of Fame statute #5 Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to his team) Roger has none of the bolded whatsoever. (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3525/3238924680_891732c539_o.jpg).

Getting down to 2 was a bit harder, so I could actually do a one-on-one analysis. I chose to eliminate Johnson for a few reasons. First is that this blog loves Pedro, and next is the fact that Randy was great between the ages of 35-40, which is a little unbelievable to have happened without steroids. [Editor's Note: wo, wo, calm down, no one is accusing anyone of anything]. Also Randy too is a jackass, and was at his best when he got to move to the #2 slot behind Schilling on the Diamondbacks. So here we go, here’s the fight of the era, Pedro -vs- Madd Dog. We’ll start with some basics and go from there.

Pedro:
214-99 (.684), 2.91 ERA, 3117 K’s, 757 BB’s

Maddux:
355-227 (.610), 3.10 ERA, 3371 K’s, 999 BB’s

It’s even. Pedro wins in winning percentage, Maddux is 8th all time in wins. Pedro has a slightly lower ERA, Maddux has more K’s. So what in the world could separate these two? Here’s a few more detailed stats to go along with it.

K/BB-> Advantage Pedro
Pedro: 4.14
Maddux: 3.37

K/9-> Advantage Pedro
Pedro: 10.1
Maddux: 6.1

ERA+ -> Advantage Pedro
Pedro: 154
Maddux: 132

BB/9 -> Advantage Maddux
Pedro: 2.4
Maddux: 1.8

WHIP -> Advantage Pedro
Pedro: 1.051
Maddux: 1.143

Seems like I’m going to go with Pedro doesn’t it? Well I’m not and here’s why…

Greg Maddux is quite possibly not only the best pitcher in our era, but the best of all time. He’s 8th all time in wins, and has put together a longer more consistently productive career than anyone in baseball history. Despite the fact that people often say that Pedro had a “Kofax’esque” career, he has had 14 seasons of at least 20 starts. He played roughly from ages 21-35 in which he led the league in ERA 5 times, K’s 3, and Wins once, but also had seasons with win totals of 10, 11, 14, 13, 7, 14, 9, and 5. Remember, he played for the Red Sox and Mets, who averaged 4.93 runs/game in his lowest total year (2008). Pedro has only led the league in wins once (23) and despite lower totals, Maddux has done it three times (20, 16, 19).

During that same age span, Greg Maddux never won FEWER than 15 games. In fact he did it from ages 22-38, threw in a season of 13 wins, and then got another 15-win season at 40. His streak of 15+ win seasons is 17 years. For 17 straight years, he was great, posting a 3.10 ERA and never failing to get his team the wins they needed from their starter. I understand that he only won 20 games once, but never posting a season under 10 wins for 20 years surely makes up for it. I have to give the nod to the Mad Dog for all of this, and go ahead and throw in his 4 Cy Youngs and 18 Gold Gloves for fun.

Bring on the controversy, but my pick is the Mad Dog. And hey, chicks dig the longball.

-Danny Stahl

To those who love Pedro, or somehow Johnson, or – dare I say – even to those who love Clemens, you’d better bring your A-game. Danny Stahl has thrown down the gauntlet.

Open Thread: Who is the Best Pitcher of the Steroid Era? is a post from: Free Pedro

I guess that’s the kind of criticism you take when you start putting your thoughts onto the internet for everyone to read. If you had asked me a week ago what the chances were that the Mets would put together five straight wins at any point for the rest of the season, I wouldn’t have given them any better than one chance in ten.

Well, that’s why they play the games.

Jason could probably run a graph telling us the odds of any given team winning a certain number of games for the rest of the year.  But for the next day’s games, what would it matter? It’s only a prediction. Underdogs win every day.

Just as I was comforting myself with these thoughts, my brother called me a bad fan and told me he wouldn’t be sitting next to me at Citi Field come playoff time.

Where’s Jim when you need him? Jim? Jim!? Ah, good, here he is:

It never get’s old, does it?

I enlisted Jim’s help to drive home this simple but profound point: It’s a long season, and even a five game winning streak couldn’t change the fact that the Mets are in fourth place in the NL East. There are also eight – count ‘em, eight – teams ahead of them in the Wild Card.

So I don’t want to hear any talk about the playoffs. I’m just nervous this little winning streak will provide Omar Minaya the cover he needs to make a monumentally stupid move that will mortgage what’s left of our future. He can’t wait to gamble with borrowed money. I can feel it. He just needed the right excuse. Well the Mets have served it up. Now that Omar is finished crying over his most recent embarrassment, he’s probably out looking for the deal that will take the heat off and keep the Mets just close enough to the pennant race to put fans in the seats.

The problem is that the Mets have virtually no shot at the playoffs. The Monte Carlo simulation gives them a 3.64% chance entering today’s games. Now, I know what I just wrote. That’s why they play the games, right? Didn’t the Rockies win 13 of their last 14 to make the playoffs back in ’07? Well, yes, they did. But that’s not the kind of scenario you have in mind at the trade deadline. You don’t make a deal thinking you are going to turn a sub-.500 bottom-dweller into a .650 machine down the stretch.

Does that make me a bad fan? No. I want the Mets to win as much as anyone. I just accept the fact that if they are going to go .650 down the stretch and make the playoffs, they are going to have to do it with the players they’ve got.

Playoffs? Playoffs!? Omar, Please, Don’t Make a Deal is a post from: Free Pedro

Jonathan, how much does a top three of Cole Hamels, Cliff Lee, and J.A. Happ scare you?

If it does scare you, maybe it shouldn’t. I looked at the top three in the rotation for the NL playoff contenders (and the Mets) this year, and found that, even after adding Lee, the Phillies are behind the other contenders in front-of-the-rotation talent. For the data below, I found out what it would look like if you created a pitcher out of the top three in each of the rotations (weighted average) for each of the contenders and had him throw 240 innings. One obvious caveat is that Lee’s stats were compiled in the more difficult league for pitchers. He should perform better in AAAA.

Hamels, Lee, Happ 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

Just think about this for a minute. The Mets VP of Player Development, Tony Bernazard, was fired this week because he launched into vicious tirades in the Citi Field stands during Mets games and then challenged the whole AA Binghamton Mets team to a shirtless brawl. And that wasn’t even the story of the week.

Not to be outdone by his disgraced VP, Omar Minaya elected to bolster his own incompetence credentials – and to add ethical turpitude to his resume as well – by hurling serious accusations at one of his chief media critics, Adam Rubin of the Daily News, in broad daylight in front of the entire New York press.  As Matt Cerrone at Metsblog put it, Minaya went in to a press conference to put out the Tony Bernazard fire, and wound up lighting a whole new blaze. The truth is that Minaya’s new inferno makes Bernazard’s old arson look like a smoldering campfire.

How did Minaya manage to outdo Bernazard’s WWE moment? Omar baldly asserted in front of the entire New York press that Rubin has been lobbying for a job in the Mets player development department. Coming on the heels of Rubin’s story about Bernazard (and his recent criticism of Minaya), Omar’s accusation implies that Rubin’s journalism stems from a desire to fulfill his own ambitions of running the team.

It doesn’t matter whether Minaya’s statement is true or not. Those who focus on that detail are missing the big picture. If it is true, then Minaya has sacrificed what rapport he had left with the New York media in order to lash out at one reporter for doing his job. If it’s not true, then, well, draw your own conclusion.

Readers of this blog already know my thoughts on Omar and the team he has constructed. If incompetence in player personnel management can’t get Omar fired, and if three straight years of unprecedented disappointment can’t get Omar fired, then perhaps this final act of self-destruction will finally do him in.

I think it’s especially worth noting that when I look back one day on the Omar Minaya era, I won’t at first recall that third strike on Beltran in the 2006 NLCS, or seven up with 17 to play in 2007, or even the devastating encore in 2008. I will instead remember the Midnight Massacre, the Tony B. Challenge, and the Minaya Meltdown. Those are the moments when I have felt embarrassed to be a Mets fan.

I don’t walk around with my head hung low when my team loses. Every team has its share of disappointments. That’s baseball. But when I watch my general manager sell himself and the team out in order to settle a personal score with a member of the media, it adds just enough insult to render the injuries irredeemable.

Minaya’s Meltdown is a post from: Free Pedro

A Failed Experiment is a post from: Free Pedro

What I always like to remember is that I don’t know those names for a reason. The prospects are still prospects. They haven’t proved to anyone that they can make it in the Major Leagues.  And if there is one thing we have learned over the years about MLB scouting, it’s that it is an inexact science at best.

From that simple revelation, I don’t need any minor league knowledge to know what the big trade this year ought to be. For the Phillies and Blue Jays the path is clear. They must strike a deal for Roy Halladay. They’d be crazy not to.

This is a deal that makes sense for both sides. Halladay is 32 with a whole lot of mileage. I don’t think the Blue Jays can count on building a winner around him next year, especially not with the Red Sox and Yankees peaking. They probably can’t afford him long term either, but the truth is they shouldn’t want him anyway. In the post-steroid era, teams should think long and hard before signing 33-year-olds with a penchant for throwing complete games to long-term contracts. Not everyone can (or should) be Roger Clemens.

The Phillies, on the other hand, are in very serious contention again this year. They lead the NL East by 6.5 games over Florida (yes, 10.5 over my beloved fourth-place Mets), and they have scored more runs than any team in the NL—a trend we can rest assured will continue.  But Jamie Moyer is showing his age – finally – and Cole Hamels might be feeling the effects of throwing a thousand innings last year. If the Phillies hope to make a run to the World Series again, I’m not convinced they can count on both Hamels and Moyer to show up. That makes Roy Halladay the prefect answer to their only question.

Why Roy Halladay? For three simple reasons.

First, he’s Roy Halladay – you know, the Cy Young award winner who has thrown 24 complete games in the last 4 seasons, all while maintaining an ERA around 3.00. He is 11-3 with a 2.62 ERA this year in the AL East. Imagine the damage he could do in the Senior Circuit. Let’s just say the NL East isn’t exactly playing Major-League-quality baseball this year.

Second, Roy Halladay is the perfect pitcher for Citizens Bank Park. He is a groundball-strikeout guy who can go deep into a game and save your bullpen. Down the stretch, it doesn’t get any better than that. When you play baseball on a softball field, you just can’t ask for a better fit than Roy Halladay.

Third, you get him for two seasons – at least. I think the Phillies should consider signing him to an extension, simply because he is such a great fit for their ballpark. I wouldn’t go longer than 5 years, but that will be for the Phillies to work out.

Now we read from Jayson Stark that the Phillies are balking because they don’t want to include both J.A. Happ and Kyle Drabek in the deal. Granted, J.A. Happ has been excellent for the Phillies so far in 2009. The Phillies can feel justified in their reluctance to trade away top pitching prospect Drabek (about whom I know nothing), and their 6’6” 26-year-old left-hander Happ, who has a 2.97 ERA along with 71 strikeouts in 100 innings pitched this year.

The problem is that these days the Phillies are in the business of winning the World Series, and it’s not the kind of opportunity that comes along every year. No team in the NL East is prepared to make a run. The Phillies are virtually assured of a playoff spot. They’ve just got to get the one piece that can bring it all together in October.

That piece is Roy Halladay.

Doc to Philly? It’s Meant to Be. is a post from: Free Pedro