Good morning.
Here are several links from the past week that will make your Monday at the office a bit more bearable:
- Like his fellow Royal teammates, Yordano Ventura wasn’t happy with how Game 7 of the World Series turned out. Nonetheless, the young fireballer went out to a Kansas City suburb the following evening to have some fun at a softball field. Deadspin’s Kevin Draper has the details.
- Jonah Keri of Grantland offers up lessons from the season that just concluded. Among them:
2. The October Roster Is More Important Than the Regular-Season Record
[Mike] Trout’s 98-win Angels took major blows to their pitching staff this season, with young ace Garrett Richards suffering a season-ending injury in August and breakout arm Matt Shoemaker pitching at less than 100 percent in the playoffs. The 96-win Orioles lost two pivotal players to injury in Matt Wieters and Manny Machado, and then lost Chris Davis to suspension, making them far less formidable in October than they would have been at full strength. Meanwhile, the Royals entered the postseason with all of their key players healthy, then fared far better than their record or reputation suggested they would.
The expanded playoff format implemented in 2012 again served its purpose this year, getting two additional teams into the field and positioning those wild-card clubs as heavy underdogs. Maybe it’s time to consider the possibility that the wild-card teams aren’t as puny as we prognosticators make them out to be, though. Baseball carries the smallest home-field advantage of any major North American professional team sport, meaning a wild-card team that sneaks in with 88 regular-season wins can go from afterthought to genuine danger if it’s healthy, fully stocked, and built for October.
- Via Mark Newman of MLB.com: Alex Gordon and Yadier Molina were named Platinum Glove Award winners signifying their status as the top fielders in their respective leagues.
- Writing in Fox Sports’ Just a Bit Outside, Rob Arthur of Baseball Prospectus cautions free-agent bidders against investing heavily in ”suddenly overachieving” players, such as Victor Martinez:
Martinez’s breakout was suitably astonishing, and most were willing to dismiss it as lucky for the first few months of the season (for the record, I believed in him early on). But Victor Martinez is also 35 years of age, and a pure hitter with no defensive position. His impending free agency will no doubt beget a hefty contract, but it is unlikely he will continue to perform like this season’s edition. We have four consecutive prior years of data to suggest he’s something like a good, maybe even a great hitter, and then one aberrant, miraculous year in which he tore the cover off the ball. This year shades his forecasts towards greatness, but it likely doesn’t set the pace for all Victor Martinez seasons to come. . . .
The proper remedy would be to price Victor Martinez not on his 2014 success, but on the player he’s likely to be going forward. That’s a task easier stated than done, however. Even though breakout players don’t systematically outperform their forecasts in the next year, they do deviate from them to a greater degree, both positively and negatively, than you would expect by chance. These players are simply more difficult to predict.
The task is made more dangerous still by the free agency bidding process. If we assume that each team has independent and slightly different projection systems, then they will all come to marginally distinct views on someone like Victor Martinez. At that point, it only takes a single team with an over-optimistic projection to drive a player’s price beyond reason. That team may win the auction for the player’s services, but, because their projection lies outside the consensus, they are also the most likely to have made an error in valuation (this paradoxical effect is called the winner’s curse).
- Fangraphs’ Dave Cameron suspects that the Rockies may finally be ready to enter a rebuilding phase, which would likely result in the departures of Carlo Gonzalez and Troy Tulowitzki.
- After 16 seasons in the bigs, Alfonso Soriano called it quits. David Schoenfield of ESPN’s SweetSpot notes how the former Yankee, Ranger, National, and Cub was both overrated and underrated.
- Just a Bit Outside is losing one of its star authors, Gabe Kapler. The Dodgers have tapped the former big-leaguer as its new farm director. Before packing up his things, Kapler penned a farewell note. He concluded:
Clubhouse chemistry may not be quantifiable, but it is certainly palpable at its most potent. Our team at FOX Sports is a savory blend of innovative and traditional, tolerant and pressing, studious and fun. I was proud to call the members of this crew my teammates. I learned valuable lessons from each of them.
As I move on to work with the Los Angeles Dodgers organization, I say farewell to a special group of people. In baseball, clubhouse chemistry matters. Apparently, it does in media too.
That’s it. Have a walk-off week!