Daily Archives: February 26, 2004

This Just In

Awww, man. The AP is reporting that Bernie Williams will have surgery today to have his appendix removed. This sudden turn of events means that Kenny Lofton will likely start the season as the Yankees’ starting center fielder. Shoot, I feel for Bernie. I was hoping that he would be able to get a full season in this year. Maybe he’ll only miss a few weeks of the regular season. Still, he’ll be behind everyone. Williams played well early last year, but has traditionally been a slow starter. This won’t help any. Drag.

While the Yankees officially parted ways with Aaron Boone this afternoon, Joe Torre could be leaning towards a contract extension. Tom Verducci has a piece on the Yankee manager over at SI.com. One of the things they discuss is the Yankee line-up. Like Joel Sherman also suggests in a sabermetric-friendly article in The Post, Bernie Williams could be a fine leadoff man.

Speaking of leadoff hitters, have you seen Johnny Damon, Boston’s answer to Captain Caveman? (Damon also looks a bit like the little kid with the deadly boomerang in “The Road Warrior.”) Most modern athletes are accused of being dull and guarded, but Damon is a flake with some real chutzpah. The anti-Yankee is sure to keep things lively in Boston this year (as if they needed any help in that department).

Finally, Jay Jaffe, and my label-mate Jon Weisman have posts up today about Michael Lewis’ Sports Illustrated article. Both are well-worth checking out.

Michael Lewis has a sharp, at times caustic, article in Sports Illustrated this week responding to the critics of his best-selling book, “Moneyball.” (The article isn’t available on the net, but it’s worth picking up the latest issue on the newsstand.) Lewis details his experience writing the book, and clarifies his relationship with the Oakland front office. He also examines how organized baseball is run more like a Club than a business, and how many mainstream newspapermen are card-carrying members of that Club. Lewis was bemused by the criticism directed at Billy Beane:

It was, in a perverse way, an author’s dream: The people most upset about my book were the ones unable to divine that I had written it.”

Here is Lewis’ reaction to Tracy Ringolsby’s brusque dismissal of the book. For Ringolsby:

The problem wasn’t just that Beane’s ego was out of control. It was that the author of Moneyball “has a limited knowledge of baseball and a total infatuation with Billy Beane.”

A limited knowledge of baseball–it sounds damning enough, but what does it mean? It doesn’t mean that there’s some distinct body of insider knowledge that he has mastered, or if it does, Ringolsby produces no evidence of it. It cannot mean the knowledge that might only come from playing the game, for he himself never got beyond Babe Ruth baseball. And it most certainly does not mean that he has some special understanding of what these people in Oakland are up to, because he has shown scant interest in interviewing them. Think of it! A guy who makes his living writing about baseball, working himself into a fine lather about Billy Beane’s radical experiment in Oakland and never, according to Beane himself, asking for an explanation. A limited knowledge of baseball: What it means, so far as I can tell, is that Ringolsby is just another guy who’s assigned himself the job of barring people from the game who, in his view, have no business inside. He’s not a writer. He’s a bouncer.

Lewis concludes:

But he has his own moment, this fellow. When he sits down to write his column he knows in his heart that he speaks for a lot of people who work just off the field of play. He may belong only to the women’s auxiliary of the Club, but his views of the game reflect those of the actual members. A lot of people who make the decisions about building baseball teams think the way he does. That’s why it’s possible for a team with no money to win so many games.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Top Billin

By Cliff Corcoran

When my gracious host, Alex Belth, first asked me to contribute a guest column to his spring training preview, he assigned me a profile of then Yankee second baseman Alfonso Soriano. I cranked out about 3,000 words and was in the home stretch when, on the day after Valentineís Day, Soriano was shipped to the Texas Rangers in exchange for Alex Rodriguez. Despite having spent the preceding week vigorously gathering evidence with which to defend the then 26-year-old Soriano against his critics, I was no less delighted at the news of the trade. The Yankees had just picked up the best all-around player in the majors and a man who is challenging for the title of the best shortstop in the history of the game. Well, that was my initial reaction.

As the trade sank in, official word came down that Rodriguez would be moving to third base, and I began to picture Miguel Cairo as the Yankees starting second baseman, I began to think about A-Rodís place in history a bit more deeply, as well as his ranking among the best active players in the game. The three primary questions I had were:

1) How exactly does Rodriguez measure up against the greatest shortstops in history, and how would this status change should his move to third be permanent?

2) If his move to third base is permanent, how would A-Rod measure up against the gameís greatest third basemen, should he continue to produce at his established levels with the typical decline of a player of his skill level?

3) Where exactly does Alex Rodriguez rank among the top hitters in the game today, and when speed and defense are taken into account, how much further would he move up the list of the games greatest players?

So letís try to answer these questions.

First letís take a look at how Rodriguez measures up against the gameís greatest shortstops. Itís widely acknowledged that if A-Rod has any competition for the title of the greatest shortstop ever, that competition comes in the form of one John Peter “Honus” Wagner. As Wagner played the entirety of his career in the dead-ball era (he retired in 1917 at age 43) the comparison between the two men is almost impossible to make based on counting stats alone. Even traditional rate stats fail us, as a large part of Rodriguezís value is derived from his slugging, which by definition is difficult to compare to that of a player from the dead-ball era. As a result weíre forced to turn to some slightly more advanced metrics. Namely OPS+ (adjusted on-base percentage plus slugging, which adjusts for park factors and is expressed in comparison to a league average of 100) from Baseball-Reference.com, and four stats from Lee Sininsí Sabermetric Baseball Encyclopedia: RCAA (runs created against average, the difference between the runs created totals for the given player and a league average player based on outs), RCAP (runs created against position, same deal but measured only against players at the same defensive position), OWP (offensive winning percentage, the projected winning percentage of a team composed of a league average defense and pitching staff and an offense comprised of clones of the given player) and RC/G (runs created per game, simply the number of runs scored per game by an offense consisting solely of clones of the given player