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The coach behind the plate

If you watched James Russell protect a Cub lead by throwing a scoreless seventh inning against the Reds on Saturday (4/21) during the recent homestand, you might remember a couple of highlights. One, Russell pitched out of a men-on-second-and-third, no-out jam that was not of his making. (Campana lost the leadoff fly ball in the sun and dropped it, and then he lunged in front of DeJesus, who was in pretty good position to catch the ball, when the next batter hit a soft liner to right.) Russell retired the next three hitters, Stubbs, Votto and Phillips, in order, but the memorable out came when Votto swung late at a 2-2 fastball. The fastball was moving briskly but not overpoweringly at Russell’s usual pace of 89 mph. The pitch was mostly straight down the middle, maybe an inch or two to the inside of middle, but Votto was late enough that it didn’t matter where it was. Enough to say that Votto wasn’t expecting a fastball when Russell had a ball to give, and with first base open. A prudent pitcher might bury a couple of breaking balls–as Russell had just done on 1-2–and then let a righty reliever come in and clean up the bases-loaded mess.

After the slider in the dirt on 1-2, catcher Steve Clevenger came to the mound and said a few words to Russell. Russell then blew the fastball by the slugger. I was watching the WGN feed when they focused on Russell as he gave a quick nod of affirmation toward his catcher. If you’re a subscriber, you can watch the at-bat on mlb.com and determine for yourself whether Russell was signalling to his battery-mate that they had just succeeded at something together.

Nothing could be more anecdotal than a story that ends with an affirmative head-shake. At the same time, it’s hard to quantify the effect of a catcher consistently making the right pitch request. Other than catcher-ERA–the ERA of pitchers when a particular catcher is behind the plate–there is no stat that helps us evaluate the game-calling skills of a catcher. I will grant that it is unsafe to rely, especially early in the season, on a stat for a defensive player that is so dependent on how well six or eight pitchers are feeling and throwing. I would just note that Cub manager Dale Sveum did bring up the game-calling stat recently when he said that Clevenger has “done great, and the ERA when he catches is incredible.”

Many argue that a pitcher calls his own game. If he doesn’t like the sign from the catcher, he just shakes it off. I wonder, though, if that formula really works in the immediate case. Russell doesn’t make a living throwing two-strike fastballs to league MVPs. I don’t think he volunteers to throw that pitch. At the same time, he doesn’t like to overrule his catcher when he has confidence in him and when the catcher has demonstrated a good situational feel. What I think happened here was that Clevenger said, Let’s go against the grain a little bit, and Russell said, Sure, why not? Brenly remarked that it took guts for Russell to throw that pitch, and I agree completely. I just believe that Russell needed, and got, encouragement from Clevenger.

If the catcher isn’t offering advice and support, the pitcher is all alone out there. If baseball were pro football, the pitching coach might assume the role of defensive coordinator and call pitches from the dugout. But baseball is autocratic. In between “Play ball!” and the scorekeeper’s last entry, the manager rules. The pitching coach might have a few words with the pitcher in the dugout. When the pitcher is on the field, however, he is not receiving signs from the dugout. Catchers do look to the dugout when runners are on base, so the manager can call pickoffs and pitchouts and the like. But my observation is that the catcher is the pitching coach during the game.

Posted 30 April 2012 † Phil § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Top pitching prospects

Over three seasons I have ranked Cub pitching prospects according to the Marmol Index, or strikeouts per nine innings minus hits per nine. This has been a good predictor of success for pitchers likely to join Marmol in the Cub bullpen, such as Maine, Gaub and Beliveau, three lefties on the current 40-man who have a chance to make the big-league staff this season. Gaub and Beliveau have been at or near the top of the Marmol Index since the middle of 2009.

The list has a couple of flaws. One is a bias in favor of relievers, who don’t have to pace themselves and can bear down harder on the handful of hitters they see. Relievers also can get away with a degree of wildness that would doom a starter. Wildness can be a weapon in the arsenal of a strikeout pitcher. If he falls behind a hitter, a wild reliever can just walk him and try to get ahead of the next guy. It works for Marmol (most of the time). A starter can’t put runners on every inning and expect to stay in the game very long.

The best Cub pitching prospects right now might be relievers, but not the nine or ten best. If you look at the current Marmol Index in the right margin of this page you will see the names of nine relievers before you get to the first starter, Cameron Greathouse. (Aaron Kurcz, number seven on the list, is actually a sometime starter who averages two-and-a-half innings per game.) It is true that after the 2010 season, three starters–Cashner, McNutt and Archer–came in 3rd, 4th and 5th in the Marmol-index rankings, but that was an unusual collection of starting talent which, in any case, should have finished 1-2-3 rather than 3-4-5 in any serious ranking. The table below is a new version of the Marmol index that tries to correct for the bias against starting pitchers.

The table adds three columns to the old index. The new fields are games, innings per game, and at the far-right of the table, an “adjusted” K/9-minus H/9 that gives a pitcher credit for his number of innings per appearance. The new formula, according to which pitchers in the list are ranked, is K/9 minus H/9 plus (innings-per-game minus 1). According to this formula, if a pitcher throws exactly one inning per game, there is no adjustment to K/9 minus H/9. More than one inning per game, his number is adjusted up. Fewer than one inning, it adjusts down. In the table, Weathers (1.04) and Gaub (1.11) come closest to exactly an inning per appearance. Whitenack, Rhee and Kirk pitched into the sixth inning, on average, in their games, while Coleman lasted into the seventh, overall, in his twelve starts for Iowa.

The result of the adjustment is that while Greathouse is still #10, starters Liria, Whitenack, Rosscup and Loosen are 4 through 7, while Cates, Jokisch, Coleman, Rhee and Kirk are in the next ten.

The other flaw in the Marmol Index is that it overlooks walks, so that Gaub and Greathouse and Casey Weathers, for example, as well as Marmol himself, can rank high in the list in spite of having certain numbers, like WHIP and BB/9 and K/BB, that flash in red. I am inclined, though, to continue to treat this flaw in the ranking system as a kind of virtue. A good formula should be simple, and therefore can’t be universal. Here we are seeking out good arms, not good aim. Gaub will probably be a major leaguer this season at 27, and Weathers, who is also 27 and would have been fifth on the list by the old formula, will get a fresh start in the Cub organization. One mark of prospecthood is the size of your window. Lesser prospects than Gaub and Weathers would have disappeared by now. Greathouse, by our measurement, is a real prospect, in spite of a K/BB ratio below 1 and a midseason demotion from Peoria to Boise. He was only 20. A pitcher’s command tends to improve over time, unlike, say, his fastball.

Jeff Beliveau was 21 in 2008 when, as a junior at Florida Atlantic, he struck out 78 and walked 77 in 76.2 innings, and fell to the 18th round in the draft. But his arm made him a prospect and today his control is no longer an issue. His WHIP last season was 0.93. Command-wise, Marmol himself is still a work in progress, but the promise of an elite closer was always there.

Posted 21 February 2012 † Phil § prospect ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Top hitting prospects

Below is a table listing the eight top position prospects for the Cubs in 2012, along with a similar table from a year ago. The data in both tables is taken directly from the prospect tables in the right margin of this webpage, except that I have removed the rows for players who are too old still to be taken seriously as prospects, including names like Lou Montanez, Brad Snyder, Jason Dubois and even Marquez Smith, who will be 27 in 2012. Bryan LaHair was a casualty of this removal process, in spite of the fact that he may become a fully-fledged major leaguer quite soon. I don’t see a rationale for including LaHair while at the same time excluding his steadily aging cohort from a list that purports to be strictly numbers-based.

These rankings track fairly closely to OPS except that I legitimize thievery. I consider a base that is stolen to be as valid a unit of offensive production as a base that is attained any other way. Basically, I take the sum of total bases + walks + SBs, adjust it slightly, and divide by games played to arrive at a score, according to which the players are ranked. Without receiving credit for stolen bases in 2010, Campana would not have made my top eight a year ago, nor would Matt Szczur have made the list this year; but then, there is Campana in the major leagues, after all. Campana was not on any prospect list that I ever saw besides this one.

Of the fifteen distinct names on these two lists, seven have already played in the majors in a pre-September context. They are Castro, Guyer, Chirinos, Campana, Rizzo, Sappelt and Castillo. Jackson will likely join their ranks in 2012. Among the rest, Torreyes may be the surest bet.

I am not predicting stardom for anyone here in particular–except perhaps for Castro, who is already something of a star–but I also am not expecting that so-and-so will be a fourth outfielder or a backup infielder or a DH. Prospect lists should be about players who are expected to earn everyday jobs in the majors. If you think about it, no one really makes the majors as a backup or a DH. Major-league backups and utility players are those who once earned starting jobs but subsequently lost them. Jeff Baker had a solid year at A+ and AA in 2004, and found himself the starting third baseman for the Rockies the following April. When he hit .211 for the month, he went back down to triple A and had to work his way up again. After you get a certain amount of experience in the majors, you can settle into a backup role. Blake DeWitt was a first rounder who started in 101 games for the Dodgers in 2008 at the age of 22. He is a backup now, but if he had projected as a backup, he probably would not have made the majors at all. The idea that one used to hear that an AL team would be interested in Jake Fox to DH–that was never possible. If you can’t play a position and you are not an elite slugger, you cannot stick in the majors long enough to ever find a niche. There are no niches for rookies. As has been reported recently –

Tony Campana’s speed is intriguing to Sveum and he thinks Campana could win five games in a season with his speed late in games … Sveum remembers Campana beating the Brewers a couple of times last year.

David DeJesus is the leading candidate to leadoff for the Cubs but Dale Sveum said he’s considering using Tony Campana in certain matchups.

–even Campana had to be taken seriously as a starter.

The purpose of this list, then, is to identify players who will make it to the majors and stick. What happens beyond that is a question for fate to decide. It is above the pay grade of a prognosticator or even a scout.

There are a couple of eye-catching items on the current list, such as Anthony Rizzo’s score, Ronald Torreyes’s age, and the mere sight of Richard Jones sitting there in third place. Where did he come from? He came from complete obscurity, just as Chirinos did a couple of years ago. Jones earned his fairly lofty score by notching more than two total bases per game. During the two years covered here, only Rizzo, LaHair, Guyer and Chirinos have done that over a full season.

Had I not deleted LaHair from the table, he would have been second to Rizzo with a score of 1.83. In 129 games, LaHair had 303 total bases, 60 walks and 2 stolen bases for 365 points, adjusted to 236 (by subtracting the number of games).

Posted 30 January 2012 † Phil § prospect ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Rizzomania

People who point out that Jed Hoyer traded for Anthony Rizzo often fail to mention that it was Theo Epstein who dealt him. And sure, Jason McLeod drafted Rizzo, but that was only in the sixth round.

In any case, all of that happened before Rizzo got 153 PAs in the majors in 2011. Apparently the Padres were among those who felt that a serious flaw in Rizzo’s swing was exposed in those PAs, since they recently traded a top-of-the-rotation starter, Mat Latos, to the Reds for a package that featured Yonder Alonso, who replaces Rizzo as the Padres’ first baseman of the present and the future.

Rizzo played in the Cubs’ season-ender at SD on September 28. If you subscribe to mlb.tv, take a look at his four at-bats in that game and listen to the commentary by the San Diego broadcast crew, especially by Tony Gwynn, and decide whether you still covet this guy.

At least with Colvin, it was the approach, not the swing itself, that was the issue. I know Rizzo was twenty-two at the time of this game, but Castro has taught Cub fans that a really gifted player has a certain buoyancy, and is never over his head. Especially if you are a first baseman of no particular defensive distinction–that’s eighty percent of first basemen–your hitting skills had better come very naturally to you. Hee-Seop Choi had different mechanical problems but the same dilemma: a first baseman in the batter’s box must never be a work in progress.

I am much less interested in Rizzo than in two rough and ready hitters who could play first for the Cubs in 2012: Fielder, of course, but also LaHair, who just ended 2011 having hit 55 regular-season home runs in three leagues (including the majors in September).

Posted 30 December 2011 † Phil § prospect ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Looking for a pitch to take

“If 0-2 and 1-2 are bad luck for every hitter (except Prince Fielder), the secret to hitting would be to prevent those counts from turning into an at-bat.”

If Tyler Colvin’s first full year in the majors, 2010, had been a college course–call it Hitting 101–he would have aced the qualifying exam (spring training), gotten a B on the midterm and a C- on the final, for an overall grade of C+. In 2011, he took the next course in the sequence but failed the midterm and slept through the final. He may get an opportunity to resume his academic career, but if he ever graduates it will probably be in a different uniform.

Colvin always had a low walk rate as a prospect, and people who stress the importance of that number have been expecting him to fail. Colvin did not disappoint them. I, on the other hand, am disappointed. I knew his approach to hitting was not up to major-league snuff, but I thought he might learn to hit in the course of his first couple of seasons, whereas the stroke, the power, the speed, the glove–those are things that cannot be acquired over time. Whatever your expectations of Colvin since the day he was drafted in 2006, it’s a terrible waste of talent so far, made keener by the slugging prowess–20 home runs and a .500 SLG–that he teased us with as a rookie in 2010.

The walk-rate folks might say that the ability to tell a ball from a strike is an important tool also, and either you have it or you don’t. Colvin obviously didn’t, and doesn’t. They would say his failure was fore-ordained. I am less of a believer in pitch recognition as a tool. I think there is a secret to hitting, and that Colvin, lacking either the native intelligence or the proper coaching, has not been able to follow the clues that lead to that secret. Once you have the secret, it’s actually not that hard to hit. Since some readers may find it strange to hear a blogger say that hitting major-league pitching is not that difficult, let me place in evidence this testimony of Lou Piniella’s:

Look, you’ve got to hit with men on base, that’s all there is to it. It’s really not that hard. I played 17 years. It’s not like I haven’t played up here. It’s not that hard. It really isn’t. I know everybody’s trying but it’s not that hard.

In any case, I didn’t say I could do it, just that someone with the physical wherewithal, like Colvin, along with the practical experience of swinging at a million pitches could do it by putting sound hitting principles into practice.

Here, then, at no extra charge, is my philosophy of hitting, and my attempt to provide the theory behind a “grinding” at-bat, as new Cub president Theo Epstein referred recently to the hitting approach that he likes. A good at-bat is not simply a matter of taking pitches. If you never swung at a pitch, your P/PA (pitches per plate appearance) would be above 3.0, probably the worst in the majors but within shouting distance of Ichiro’s 3.51. If you swung only at 2-strike pitches and succeeded in fouling off a small percentage of them–say one out of five–you might do better in P/PA than Yuniesko Betancourt (.316) or Vladimir Guerrero (3.22) or even Aramis Ramirez (3.32). You would not in this case be a hitter at all, just someone with a disinclination to swing who happens to have a bat in his hand but doesn’t necessarily know what to do with it. A hitter must know when to swing. More specifically, a hitter knows that a good time to swing is when the pitcher has determined to throw a strike.

When is a pitcher trying to throw a strike? (By strike I mean a pitch in the strike zone.) I’ll answer that question with a question. When do pitchers get yelled at? Because managers and coaches get upset when their pitcher throws too many ball fours, he is highly likely to at least attempt to throw a strike whenever the count stands at three balls. A pitcher also gets yelled at if he fails to throw strikes consistently on 0-0, since it’s awkward to miss the strike zone when a hitter is obviously taking, as he often is on the first pitch. While the hitter may not like to swing on 0-0, since it’s a terrible at-bat, the opposite of grinding, if he makes an out, still he expects it to be a strike, often a breaking-ball strike and not infrequently a hanging curve. A hitter should also expect a strike, or at least an attempted strike, on 1-0, since the pitcher doesn’t want to fall farther behind. Two and oh is an obvious hitter’s count, as is 2-1, since a pitcher will want to avoid 3-1. The counts that we would expect to favor the hitter, then, are 0-0, 1-0, 2-0, 2-1, 3-0, 3-1 and 3-2.

A pitcher can also get yelled at for not missing the strike zone. A veteran pitcher who is good at reading his adversary’s mind can sneak an 0-2 pitch by the hitter on occasion, but it is generally a no-no to serve up something hittable on a count that calls for an offspeed pitch in the dirt. “Why didn’t you bury it?” A pitcher hears those words as soon as he reaches the dugout if the manager hasn’t already gotten the point across during a trip to the mound. If the hitter lays off the 0-2, the next pitch is also unlikely to be a strike. A pitcher’s control is not perfect and he may throw a strike on 0-2 or 1-2, or he may, as we said, try to sneak a fastball past a hitter who is being very cautious about swinging. The hitter has to be ready for anything on those pitcher’s counts, but he should be expecting a pitch that is a bit off the mark and that expectation should make him less likely to swing. This gets us to the crux of our hitting philosophy. Given a tendency among all pitchers to miss the strike zone when the count is 0-2 and 1-2, a count of 2-2 or even 3-2 should be within reach of a smart hitter in just about any at-bat. We are beginning to glimpse how a grinding at-bat is accomplished.

The table below ranks the twelve possible hitting counts according to whether they favor the hitter, or at least whether they favor good hitters. The batting average in the second column is the cumulative 2011 BA, per hitting count, of fifteen pretty decent hitters in the NL Central: Pujols, Berkman and Freese from the Cardinals, Braun, Fielder and Weeks from the Brewers, Votto, Bruce, Phillips and Stubbs from the Reds, Walker and McCutchen from the Pirates and Ramirez, Castro and Pena from the Cubs.



The data seems to bear out our analysis above based on pitchers getting yelled at, if we assume that a high BA indicates that the hitter is swinging at strikes while a low average suggests the opposite, that he is chasing two-strike pitches out of the zone. At least we can say that the data is consistent with our prediction, based on pitchers’ trying to throw strikes or trying to miss, of what the good counts are for hitters. I am a bit surprised to see 1-1 at the top of the list of favorable hitter’s counts, but the data sample is not huge, and the top four cumulative batting averages in this table are nearly the same. A safe generalization is that any count with less than two strikes is hitter-friendly. Among two-strike counts, 3-2 is more favorable than 2-2, while 0-2 and 1-2 are to be avoided. Only one hitter, Prince Fielder, among our NL Central group of fifteen is comfortable enough hitting from behind to hit safely on 0-2 and 1-2 at a rate higher than .250 (actually .279 in Fielder’s case). The average hitter among this group has less than a one-in-five chance–a .171 chance, to be precise–of getting a hit if the count stands at 0-2 or 1-2 when the pitcher throws the final pitch of the at-bat.

If the table seems to imply that a good hitter, when faced with an 0-2 count, becomes a .159 hitter, that is not quite accurate. If he takes a strike or otherwise makes an out, another hitless 0-2 at-bat is recorded in his player page at baseball-reference.com. (All of the numbers in this article are derived from the Standard Batting: Splits: 2011: Count/Balls-Strikes data for each hitter at this indispensable site.) But if he takes a ball, the count moves to 1-2, and his 0-2 BA is not touched, since this was not an at-bat that reached its result at 0-2. For the sake of getting a decent pitch to hit, the hitter is advised not to swing at the 1-2 pitch, either. At 2-2, he can breathe a little easier: his expected BA (based on the group-of-15 column in the table) is now above .200, and will jump to .236 if he can wait out one more ball and run the count to full.

Colvin’s numbers for 2010 and 2011 in the table show the same general arc as the numbers derived from the “group of 15.” When he faces a count of less than two strikes, and the pitch results in an at-bat, Colvin hits well (in 2010 at least). When an 0-1 or 0-2 pitch results in an at-bat for Colvin, he fares poorly.

I am not saying that a hitter should turn his pitch-recognition tool on full blast when the count is 0-2 or 1-2, in order to avoid getting saddled with a futile at-bat. I doubt that a hitter really has such a tool, but if he does, he will use it on every count. What I am saying is that when the count is against him, a smart hitter will actively look for a particular pitch to take, just as in a hitter’s count he looks for a certain pitch to drive. On 0-2 or 1-2, a smart hitter looks for an offspeed pitch at the belt or lower, and will lay off that offering, because it is a pitcher’s pitch that is intended to dive down below the knees before it crosses the plate.

I never get the sense that Colvin is looking for a pitch to take. With two strikes, he is always protecting the plate, or swinging at anything close, or some such nonsense. It is pointless, because the next pitch will be the same thing in the same place. The count hasn’t changed. I suspect that if you asked Colvin what’s the worst that could happen in an at-bat, he would say a called-third strike. That’s wrong. A called-third strike is a normal, acceptable hazard of trying to get a better hitting count.

If 0-2 and 1-2 are bad luck for every hitter (except Prince Fielder), the secret to hitting would be to prevent those counts from turning into an at-bat. In the Count/Balls-Strikes table in Baseball Reference, every at-bat is tallied for one or another pitch-count. The table below consolidates this at-bat data, and shows Tyler Colvin with a disproportionate number of at-bats that are logged when the count is 0-2 or 1-2. For the group of 15 as a whole in 2011, 0-2 and 1-2 counts represent 22.5 percent of all at-bats. For Colvin , those counts represent 28.8 percent (2010) and 32.5 percent (2011) of all at-bats.

The pitch-count stats for each hitter are compendious in Baseball Reference, but they don’t quite give us the measure of a hitter’s patience that would be provided by a precise count of swings and takes. I can infer how many times a hitter took a pitch for a ball when the count was 0-2, but not for a strike; nor can I infer how many times he swung, since a foul ball would not impact the table data when there were already two strikes. In the table below, I present pitches taken for a ball when the count is 0-2 as a percentage–but a percentage of what, exactly? It’s not a percentage of all pitches with the count 0-2, because that’s just not in the data. As I said, I don’t have information about balls hit foul. I have to give the “pitches taken for a ball on 0-2″ count as a percentage of all plate appearances in which the count was ever 0-2. (That’s the “after 0-2″ row in the data table in Baseball Reference.) Pitches taken for a ball is arrived at by subtracting 0-2 at-bats from “after 0-2″ plate appearances. Here is the upshot: in 2010, Colvin saw 0-2 in 85 plate appearances. In 39 of those he made an out or got a hit (or was safe on an error or fielder’s choice, etc.) while the count was still 0-2. That leaves 46 times that he took a ball on 0-2. That is 54.1% of the 85 PAs, which does not seem terrible, but the average among the Group of 15 is 57.5%. Then on 1-2, Colvin’s take-a-ball percentage is only 44.4, while the group average is 52.2. Here is the table:

Looking at these aspects of plate approach in which Colvin is deficient by a few percentage points–but consistently so–we should remember the effect of an extra hit here and there on a batter’s season. One additional hit in every ten at-bats transforms you from a .150 hitter–that’s Tyler Colvin in 2011, the worst in the league–to a .250 hitter, like Colvin in 2010, a plausible candidate for rookie of the year. Add another hit every ten at-bats and you’re Albert Pujols in a good year. Colvin could solve his hitting woes by looking for pitches to take on 0-2 and 1-2 and trying to grind out an at-bat that is finally settled, for good or ill, on a full count. He might be more inclined to do so if he grasped that pitchers have different tendencies on different counts. I like to believe that the necessary insights seep into all hitters’ brains, even the duller ones, eventually; but Colvin may have missed his chance with the Cubs and will likely have to go elsewhere to learn the rudiments of hitting. If that happens, then from the Cubs’ point of view his tools did not overcome his bad approach, and the people who stressed his low walk rate were right all along.

Posted 10 November 2011 † Phil § coaching § prospect ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Sox fans stick together

In a two-team baseball town like Chicago, there are always going to be sports columnists who are fifth columnists with respect to one or the other team. Last week, Phil Rogers sided with Boston on the question of how much compensation the Cubs owe the Red Sox.

There would be howls all around if Jackson went to Boston, but consider what ESPN’s Keith Law thinks of a guy who is widely regarded as the Cubs’ No. 1 prospect. He sees Jackson as a reasonable part of this exchange.

“If you think Theo is going to turn this organization around, (wouldn’t you) give up six years of a non-star prospect?” Law said in an ESPN.com chat, answering a question with a question.

I’m with Law on this one. Epstein and the front office that he will assemble for Ricketts — along with Ricketts’ understanding that you have to spend heavily on teenage players to grow your own stars — should be a game-changing shift for a franchise that has been patching things together annually since Dallas Green left.

No one should think the Cubs are going to get Epstein without some labor pains. Jackson could be the biggest of those pains.

Rogers is an old Sox fan. I mean he’s an old White Sox fan, but red or white, it comes to the same thing, in that he doesn’t have the Cubs’ best interest at heart. And here is David Haugh yesterday in a piece that originated in the Trib but was picked up quickly by the Boston Herald:

Promising minor league center fielder Brett Jackson – not to be confused with Bo – could be a Cubs fixture for the next 10 years. Or become this decade’s Corey Patterson. Go ahead and call Jackson a “five-tool player,” but please don’t call him a deal-breaker.

Sure, young right-hander Andrew Cashner might be three years from making the All-Star team. Or the modern-day Mark Prior could be 40 innings away from shoulder surgery too. If the Red Sox and their medical team demanded Cashner in exchange for Epstein, they might consider asking for an MRI machine too.

Likewise the Cubs would be nutty to put the future of 21-year-old Double-A pitcher Trey McNutt or any other hotshot prospect such as Josh Vitters ahead of their own with Epstein.

Haugh is a former Sox beat writer who has never traveled with the Cubs. Not that I don’t trust him, but just for balance maybe we could have the Trib and the Boston Herald solicit the opinion of a Yankee beat writer on what sort of compensation Boston deserves?

I can’t blame Nick Cafardo for carrying water for the home team when he covers the Epstein negotiations in the Boston Globe. Here is Cafardo this morning:

The Sox have come hard at the Cubs for even an established player such as righthander Matt Garza. Given the
anger of fans toward Sox ownership over the 7-20 September collapse, the team needs to come away with
something of significance for Epstein.

The Cubs are on the hook for Boston’s September collapse? A Cub loyalist–and I wish there were more of those in the Chicago press corps–might point out, as a topic worthy of a closer look in Boston, the power struggle between Epstein and Larry Lucchino. Something like the following exchange must have occurred in the months that preceded any contact between Epstein and the Cubs.

Epstein: Make me the top baseball man in the organization. I have earned that position.

John Henry: No, we’re staying with Larry.

Epstein: Let me go, then.

They couldn’t promote Epstein, so they lost him. Nothing to do with the Cubs.

The question of what Theo Epstein is worth to the Cubs in terms of prospects is the wrong question. The Red Sox could have kept Epstein, all they had to do was make room for him. They chose not to. Rather than trying to explain that potentially unpopular decision to fans, they resorted to the old baseball stratagem of disguising a bad management outcome as a trade. “Theo wanted out, so we traded him.” When the Cubs rid themselves of Fukudome in early August, reports were that the Indians would only have to pay $750 thousand of Fukudome’s remaining contract, implying that the Cubs would still be responsible for $3.925 million, or 84%. I haven’t seen that $3.925 million number printed anywhere, nor the 84%, probably because the Cubs asked for a player in return and in so doing caused everyone looking at the “trade” to take his eye off the ball. The Cubs received a talented 21-year-old, Abner Abreu, who at that point had to be considered a failed prospect. Failed or not, Abreu distracted Cub fans and media from the awkward fact that the Cubs were paying Fukudome to play somewhere else.

The Cubs today are only required to follow the script and to distract Red Sox fans and media momentarily from the underlying truth that it’s Lucchino’s team now.

Note, by the way, that two months of Fukudome is worth more in baseball money than a year-and-a-half of Epstein. Brett Jackson is worth considerably more to the Cubs than Fukudome.

An obviously false report surfaced yesterday that could have a kernel of truth to it. SI’s Jon Heyman wrote:

In a possible surprise twist, the Chicago Cubs and Theo Epstein are said to have interest in Padres general manager Jed Hoyer to join a baseball operations department they hope is headed soon by Epstein, who is waiting in limbo while the Cubs and Red Sox resolve the compensation issue to complete the trade that would put Epstein in charge of Chicago’s beloved North Side team.
It’s uncertain how the Padres would react to the Cubs interest in Hoyer but if he is able to go to Chicago, Josh Byrnes, who has been working as VP of baseball operations in San Diego, would be elevated to GM.
A move by Hoyer, 37, would be seen as fairly shocking since he’s already a GM, but perhaps the Cubs could give him the same title, while making Epstein a president. Nothing is known to be finalized yet, and it could still be Byrnes going to Chicago, but the possibility that it could be Hoyer instead was raised by several people familiar with the talks.

Epstein is in Boston working for the Sox and cannot be reaching out to Hoyer about a Cub job, particularly a job that makes no sense because it is worse than lateral for Hoyer, in that he would go from being the top baseball man in San Diego to being number two in Chicago. If someone on the Cubs is talking to Hoyer or asking for permission to talk to him, it is not Epstein. If it is not Epstein, it is instead of Epstein. In other words, the Cubs are preparing to move on. At a minimum, they are testing the water in San Diego to see how another team with a GM under contract might handle the question of compensation.

Half of me hopes the Cubs do move on. The other half of me hopes the Red Sox come to their senses. None of me hopes that the Cubs listen to the counsel of the fifth columnists at the Tribune.

Edit: The Hoyer rumor is getting hot. Bruce Levine reports this afternoon that league sources confirm that Hoyer may be headed to the Cubs. Levine also talks about a close personal relationship between Tom Ricketts and Padres co-owner Jeff Moorad. No one seems to be contesting the idea that Hoyer will work under Epstein.

If the foregoing is true, it becomes even clearer that Boston is overplaying its hand. Tom Ricketts may be better at this game than we dared to hope. While the Red Sox talk tough through their media allies, they can do nothing to prevent a key member of Epstein’s team from hitting the ground in Chicago.

Posted 19 October 2011 † Phil § Ricketts § prospect § trade ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Taking names

If fans were expecting a shakeup after Tom Ricketts took over as chairman of the Cubs late in 2009, they had to wait until the third week of August 2011 to learn that general manager Jim Hendry had been terminated a month earlier. (Hendry was held over for a month to attend to unfinished business, the signings of recent high draft picks.) In the month following the announcement of Hendry’s firing, Ricketts demonstrated that he had indeed been taking names while waiting for the Cubs to show improvement in their second season under new ownership. He gave Oneri Fleita, vice president of player development, a four-year extension on his contract. Tim Wilken, scouting director, was granted a highly anticipated meeting with the chairman in which he was promised that his job would continue for the remaining year on his contract but would not be extended, or at least not now. Wilken, in other words, was given a public vote of confidence of the sort that is sometimes seen as delaying the inevitable. Executive assistant to the GM Gary Hughes, meanwhile, announced his resignation.

Why was Fleita’s extension so urgent that it had to be removed from the purview of the next GM? Detroit was actively courting Fleita while Ricketts was working on his list of GM candidates to interview. Obviously Ricketts didn’t want to risk losing Fleita, but that begs the question why Fleita had become highly sought after. The short answer to that question is probably two words, “Starlin” and “Castro.” Budding superstars don’t just happen to a franchise. In his role of Director of Player Development and International Scouting, Fleita, along with coordinator of Latin American scouting Jose Serra, gets credit for bringing Castro in. Fleita also gets credit for South Korean recruit Hak-Ju Lee’s success, despite Lee’s having gone to the Rays in the Garza trade last winter. Lee was a key component in the package that secured the deal. This year, Lee was a second-team selection to Baseball America’s minor-league all-star team and he remains on a fast track to the majors. The Cubs’ international signings have become more prominent lately and are competing well with the better known products of the annual June drafts. Twenty-year-old Jae-Hoon Ha, for example, and not Josh Vitters was the top performer in the Tennessee Smokies’ championship bid earlier this month, hitting .313 to Vitters’ .103 during the playoffs and, in the finals, hitting home runs that gave the Smokies early leads in two games that they subsequently lost.

Wilken has received his share of criticism lately, and more than his share, in my opinion, from observers who don’t get the math right on how long it takes to draft and nurture talent and feed it to the majors. Here is an example of an unreasonable timetable applied to Wilken. As of this past June, Wilken had conducted only one fewer draft for the Cubs than had his predecessor, John Stockstill. Stockstill ran seven drafts from 1999 through 2005, while Wilken has managed six drafts since 2006. There is a sort of symmetry here, and I saw a recent blog post to the effect that, pitching aside, Stockstill sent Theriot, Soto, McGehee and Brendan Harris to the majors while Wilken’s drafts have yielded Colvin, Barney and Campana. If there is a clear winner here, it is probably not Wilken.

In order to make the comparison fair, however, you have to ask about the major-league status of Stockstill’s picks following the 2004 season, since that season is the equivalent of the 2011 season for Wilken, five Octobers following his first Cub draft. It turns out that Stockstill’s only non-pitcher who played a game in the majors before the end of 2004 was Brendan Harris, a September call-up that year who saw action in 23 games. A tally of MLB games played in by Wilken draftees through yesterday, September 25, with three games remaining in the 2011 season would include Colvin’s 218, Barney’s 169, Campana’s 91, Josh Harrison’s 62, LeMahieu’s 33, Josh Donaldson’s 14 and Guyer’s 13, for a total of 600. Thus the score in this one fair comparison of Wilken to his predecessor is 600 to 23 in Wilken’s favor.

We knew, of course, that Wilken was an upgrade over Stockstill, and also that he could produce bodies to fill major-league active rosters. Where, though, many people are asking, are the elite players that the Cubs will need to compete at a high level? Where are the all-stars? Here again, we have to compare products of the same vintage. Looking around the NL Central, how many elite everyday players can you find that were drafted in 2006, Wilken’s first Cub draft, or later? On the Reds, I only see Stubbs, who is having a tough third season (except in terms of SBs) and leads the NL in strikeouts. Stubbs was drafted in ‘06. Votto was drafted in ‘02 and Bruce in ‘05. (Phillips was an acquisition from the Expos, drafted in ‘99.) The elite draft years for the Brewers were 2002 (Fielder), 2003 (Weeks) and 2005 (Braun). Neal Walker on the Pirates was drafted in ‘04, McCutchen in ‘05. Unless you like Colby Rasmus (2005), St. Louis hasn’t drafted an elite everyday player since Molina in 2000. They drafted Pujols in 1999.

The NL Central elite seem to be distributed two or three to a contending team. The Cubs already have Castro. While there is no other elite young player on the roster at this time, I, for one, expect big things from Brett Jackson beginning next year. I don’t make any such prediction for Vitters, although he is still very young and coming off a very decent year. My problem with Vitters is I don’t think he can handle third base, and he will have to hit like a Bruce or a Braun to stick in the majors as a left fielder. Colvin may be an elite player someday but not for the Cubs: his hitting IQ is simply too low for him to stick in the majors with his current team. (I also don’t think the Cubs did Colvin any favors by parading him and his .150 batting average–one-and-a-half hits per ten at bats–around the league instead of waiting until next year when his major-league BA would reset; but that’s another essay.) There are other elite prospects in the pipeline, however, and sometimes a solid player like a Flaherty or a LeMahieu surprises you and becomes elite. It just requires patience on the part of fans as well as team owners. Wilken’s 2011 draft is thought to have landed a good number of elite prospects.

Should Wilken have been extended, then? Not necessarily, not if you believe, as Tom Ricketts appears to, that people who do a workmanlike job overall but make crucial mistakes should be held to public account. Time will tell whether or not Wilken wasted three perfectly good first-round picks, including a #3 pick, on Colvin, Vitters and Simpson, but that situation doesn’t look good today. The treatment of Wilken seems fair even to this Wilken booster. He was given another year to demonstrate a little more definitively, to the new GM and to the owner, that time is on his side.

On September 20, Gary Hughes resigned as “special assistant to the GM.” Since Hughes had a personal relationship to Hendry, and since that particular GM was no longer available to assist, we should consider Hughes’ departure a by-product of Hendry’s firing. Whatever Hughes accomplished with the Expos and Marlins earlier in his career, it’s hard to find evidence of much energy expended on the Cubs’ behalf since he began filling his sinecure in 2002. The only two Cub acquisitions that I can find linked to Hughes are Kendall and Fukudome. I believe Hughes lives in the Bay area and attended a lot of Giant and A’s games and got a good look at Kendall in Oakland. Kendall (and Hughes himself) probably didn’t cost the Cubs much but Fukudome cost $48 million and represented a significant scouting lapse, since it was glaringly evident that he didn’t swing the bat well. It made sense, then, for Tom Ricketts to include Hughes in his late-season roster of public housekeeping items.

This brings us to Jim Hendry. In two or three years, a new GM will receive much of the credit for the success of players he acquired directly as well as those whom Fleita and Wilken acquired for him. Some fans will recall that Hendry hired Fleita and Wilken. The Cubs are largely a Hendry creation for the foreseeable future. This is not to say that we should be sorry to see him go. No GM could survive the mess Hendry made of the Cub outfield by lavishing money and years on Soriano, Fukudome and Bradley. While Hendry may not be missed, the new GM will be surprised (unless he is Andrew Friedman) by the pool of talent that he is inheriting.


Posted 26 September 2011 † Phil § Ricketts § prospect ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Two new starters for 2012

The Cub organization has been ready with three young outfielders, Colvin, Campana and Jackson, over the past two seasons, although Campana is still waiting for a position to open up and Jackson needs a roster spot and a position. The high minors were generous in providing the Cubs with two solid middle infielders, Castro in 2010 and Barney this year. The system was less helpful, however, when the team begged for starting pitching in the wake of injuries earlier this season. The Cubs auditioned Coleman, Cashner and Russell as starters but only Cashner had early success, and then he went down in April with a sore shoulder. No one at Iowa or Tennessee was ready to step up, and so the hunt began among unemployed journeymen like Doug Davis, Ramon Ortiz and Rodrigo Lopez. Cashner may be returning soon but now Zambrano is under suspension and in limbo for 2012. Will the Cubs have any more luck finding starters internally in 2012?

The answer is yes, if they simply move Marshall and Samardzija into the starting rotation and replenish the bullpen with a few of the relievers who are performing at a high level at Iowa and Tennessee. To replace Marshall and Grabow (whose contract is ending) in the pen, they have Gaub, Maine and Beliveau. That is not necessarily the order in which they would be promoted, which would likely be Maine (because he has ML experience), Beliveau (with very few walks issued this season) and Gaub if needed. To replace Samardzija the Cubs have Rhoderick, on a fast track that that has brought him to double-A in his first professional season, and Hatley, also at AA. The Cubs also have a righty reliever at Iowa named Robert Coello, whom they obtained from the Red Sox in return for Tony Thomas last winter. Coello started off slowly for the Cubs but has picked up steam lately, especially since he moved to the bullpen in early July. Coello is a big, mature (26) hard-throwing righty. He has experience as a starter and could also audition for that role next season.

Apart from Coello, the abovementioned pitchers are the top five in my Marmol Index (Pitching prospects 2011). Pitchers at the top of the Marmol index have many more strikeouts than hits allowed, which speaks to their arms and their stuff. I reproduce the top of that ranking in the table below. I then add Coello for three rows, one with his numbers for the entire season, one beginning June 1, and one limited to his bullpen work since July 7.

Marshall’s body of work in the last two seasons speaks for itself. Samardzija has turned into a pitcher in front of all of our eyes. Due to his fame and his contract and the aggressive way the Cubs promoted him, he has had to conduct his development in the spotlight. He is a more effective pitcher today than he ever was in the minors, and he is probably not done improving. Time to find out how good he can be.

Posted 20 August 2011 † Phil § prospect ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Looking forward to 2012

After consulting, apparently, the Mayan calendar, baseball’s cognoscenti determined that Sunday, July 31st, would be the end of the world for the Chicago Cubs, coinciding with the major-league trading deadline; or, less metaphorically, that the Cubs’ GM would dispose of every remotely tradeable player on the team just before being disposed of himself. Management would blow the team up, in other words.

Nothing like that happened, and it is amusing that the Cubs beat the Cardinals on that Sunday and have won every day since.

I have maintained, and still maintain, that the Cubs began to turn around in 2006 when they hired Tim Wilken as their scouting director, and that after five or six years of Wilken draftees and other international signings percolating through the system, the organization would reach a critical mass of youthful talent and would start to resemble a normal good team. We are seeing some of that this week, but I think it will become more noticeable in 2012.

By “normal good” I mean a team that is balanced in several ways. Balance is the key. Even the few scattered decent Cub teams in my lifetime–I won’t say good teams, because a good team would play in a World Series now and again–have been top-heavy in terms of their strength residing in aging sluggers like Banks, Hickman, Santo and Williams or Sosa and Alou. Here are some of the ways a team can be balanced: veterans and kids; offense and defense; pitching and hitting; speed and power; lefty and righty sluggers; lefty and righty starters and relievers.

Looking toward 2012, the first thing I see is youth and strength up the middle, with Soto at catcher, Castro and Barney in the middle infield, Brett Jackson in center. Given that the Cubs were unwilling to trade Ramirez or Pena, I would assume that Ramirez will be at third next season–the Cubs have merely to exercise an option to keep an elite power hitter for an extra year–and Pena may be at first, although that contract will likely have to be for more than a year, and the Cubs will have to think twice before agreeing to it.

The other outfield spots will be occupied by two of the following: Colvin, Byrd, Campana, Soriano, Flaherty, Johnson. Colvin is a serious slugging prospect who belongs in right field, but may not be up to winning a spot right now. He gets a lot of good swings but few good at-bats. Colvin could be in right field next April, or he could be in Iowa.

Quade has never said that Colvin needs to be in the lineup every day. The sportswriters merely inferred that. I think what Quade meant was that right field needed to be available every day, which it wasn’t when Fukudome was around. When Colvin plays every day, he tends to pile up the oh-for-fours and oh-for-fives and go below the Mendoza line (.200) and continue down toward the abyss. One hit in every ten at-bats is the abyss. Quade needs to put a limit on Colvin’s at-bats, and to encourage him to have good at-bats in order to earn more. Colvin’s continued improvement over the next month and a half will be a big challenge for Quade.

Soriano has nineteen home runs now. He needs six or seven more. Then I think the Cubs will make a big push to trade him in the offseason. If they really paid Cleveland all but $775 K of the $4.7 million still owed Fukudome, then that same 84-percent rule could be applied to Soriano, in which case an AL team could get a slugging DH for three years for $8.6 million. Or the Cubs could pay even more, just to close the book on that devastating three-year spate of free-agent signings, and a team would basically be hiring Soriano for one year, after which they could just let him go. Meanwhile, Jim Hendry will have gotten a prospect or two for Soriano and allowed someone else to release him, thus saving a little face as in the Fukudome deal.

With Soriano gone, your only righty-hitting outfielders are Byrd and Johnson, and Johnson’s back could force him to retire at any time. (Brandon Guyer’s inclusion in the Garza trade was the one that really left a vacancy in the depth chart.) The Cubs’ reluctance to trade Byrd should be understood in this context. The GM will be busy in the offseason trying to find a couple of mid-rotation and back-end starters, but he may also be in the market for a righty hitting outfielder. The alternative will be to wait one more year and then choose among Szczur, Crawford and Ha.

I see Flaherty playing a little left and also backing up second and third. He replaces DeWitt in 2012. Flaherty’s lefty power and defensive versatility–he can even play shortstop–makes him a cinch major leaguer, highly likely to make the team in 2012.

Baker will still be around. Beliveau replaces Grabow. Clevenger or Castillo instead of Hill? Maybe.

The Wilken draftees on the team next year will be Barney, Jackson, Colvin, Campana, Flaherty, Cashner, Russell, Samardzija, Beliveau.

That’s the new-model Cubs in 2012, pretty much the team I have been waiting for. The big challenge then will be to find long-term solutions at third and first.

I am not claiming that “normal good” and “balanced” wins the World Series, although a little luck should get you close on occasion. Normal good does win a fair share of playoff games, whereas the “aging free-agent sluggers” formula has not won a single game in nine tries going back to 2003.

Remember, also, the edge that Castro gives you as he fulfills his promise. Any team built around a superstar shortstop like a Banks or a Ripken or a Jeter has a chance to be special. You have an advantage in most of the games you play, in that the other team has a shortstop that hits like a shortstop.

Posted 07 August 2011 † Phil § Hendry § Quade § prospect § soriano § trade ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thinking strategically

If you like the Fukudome trade–and what’s not to like about a deal that nets the Cubs another 21-year-old prospect with the size, speed, power, glove and strong right arm of a Junior Lake?–then you should hand most of the credit to Mike Quade. When none of your starting outfielders is punching his weight, it’s hard to score runs and win. If you’re the manager, you have to put on your GM hat and think strategically about improving your roster rather than tactically about writing the best lineup on a given day. Roster-building dictates that when you have onerous contracts, you play ‘em to trade ‘em. Quade has placed Fukudome in a situation where he looks his most attractive, as a leadoff hitter with a high OBP.

Unlike his predecessor, Quade stuck with that strategy while Fukudome took his annual midsummer break from hitting, and now Fukudome is someone else’s problem–or asset, depending on your point of view. Did the Cubs think he was a proper leadoff hitter? Obviously I didn’t, but I also notice that the Cubs are paying $3.925 million of Fukudome’s remaining $4.7, or 84%, so it was a player dump, not a salary dump.

I had a similar sense of watching baseball poker recently when Marshall and Marmol traded roles in the bullpen, before switching back again. I had never thought of Marshall as a closer, but when I watched him in the ninth innings against Florida and Houston–and even against Philadelphia, when he blew the save–he surprised me. I was particularly impressed by several 93-mph fastballs. (Marmol’s fastball these days is between 91 and 94, usually at the lower end of the range when he needs a strike.) Marshall has two other effective pitches, a high-80s slider and a mid-70s curve, and pinpoint control of his three pitches. That’s a closer’s arsenal. I particularly enjoyed his efficient 3-up, 3-down ninth against the Astros. If you want melodrama–agony and ecstasy–in your ninth innings, you don’t actually need Marmol when there are soaps on TV every afternoon. Personally, I find Marmol unwatchable, in real time at least. Later, when I know the outcome, I watch a replay of the ninth so I can see the winners’ reception line at the mound and hear the crowd chanting “Go, Cubs, Go!”

If you want to see masterful pitching, and an effective use of a fastball that will never reach 95, check out the way Marshall handles Howard and Ibanez in the eighth inning of that Phillies game. You can skip the Utley at-bat. Just try never to pitch to Utley in the eighth.

Marmol is back at closer, but does Quade really think he is better than Marshall, or is he just playing him now to trade him later? It’s unknowable at this point, but when Quade reminds us that Marmol is “getting paid as a closer,” it could be a clue that not just the outfield but also the bullpen is being stocked with lipstick these days.

Also unknowable is whether the Cubs are ready to give up on ever negotiating a face-saving trade involving Soriano. My heart says yes, but my head overrules it. Let’s see: Soriano’s current swoon is a poison pill, but at next year’s trading deadline the Cubs will owe him $45 million. Eighty-four percent of 45 is 37.8, so a team could grab Soriano for two-and-a-half years for a mere $7.2 million. Wait till next year!

Posted 29 July 2011 † Phil § Hendry § Quade § soriano § trade ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,