Over at SI.com, Cliff takes a look at more off-season signings and how they might play out:
Mike Cameron, CF, Red Sox
The 2009 Red Sox’s dirty little secret was that, save for the perpetually underrated J.D. Drew (10.5 runs above average in right field per UZR), their outfield defense was a disaster. That Jason Bay was 13 runs below average in left field may not have been a huge surprise, but Jacoby Ellsbury, having finally taken over center field full time with Coco Crisp in Kansas City, was even worse. Ultimate Zone Rating listed Ellsbury as 18.6 runs below average in center, a shockingly poor performance for a young player known for his speed. Together Bay and Ellsbury cost the Red Sox three wins in the field, which is one reason why Bay was allowed to sign elsewhere and Mike Cameron was brought in to play center and push Ellsbury to left.
Cameron’s center field defense has been worth almost exactly a win for the Brewers in each of the last two seasons, while Ellsbury played 346 1/3 innings (less than a quarter of the time he spent in center last year) in left field in 2008 and was nearly a win above average in that brief time. Don’t expect that sort of brilliance from Ellsbury this year, but even if he is merely worth one win over a typical 1,200 innings, the Red Sox could experience a whopping five-win upgrade on defense alone. Some of that will be given back in the downgrade from Bay’s bat, which was worth five wins in 2009 according to VORP, to Cameron’s, which is typically worth roughly half of that, but that massive upgrade on defense keeps the Sox’s new outfield arrangement well above replacement, and well above their 2009 performance.
by Bruce Markusen |
February 27, 2010 9:08 am |
2 Comments
Just how bad were the Yankees in 1990? The pitching was atrocious, the offense was even worse, and the managers of the team were Bucky Dent and Carl “Stump” Merrill. When Lee Guetterman is your best player, that’s a pretty good sign that things have hit rock-bottom.
Yes, Lee Guetterman (pronounced Goo-ter-min) was just about the best thing the Yankees had going for them in 1990. An awkwardly tall left-hander with a bushy mustache, Guetterman did not fit the profile of a Yankee hero. He did not start a single contest and saved only a pair of games. But he did lead the staff with 11 wins, while posting a fine ERA of 3.39. Pitching in the inglorious role of middle relief, Guetterman gave the Yankees their most reliable innings of the season. “Throw him the Guetter Ball,” I would yell at the TV! Heck, he was even more effective than Dave Righetti, the Yankee closer who had forged a more famous reputation and a far better career than Guetterman.
Prior to 1990, Guetterman had been a journeyman, a failed prospect in the Seattle Mariners’ organization. He was best known for his height; at six feet, eight inches, the gangly Guetterman looked more like a small forward than a relief pitcher. When he made his debut for the Mariners in 1984, he actually became the third tallest pitcher in major league history.
Guetterman was big, but he didn’t throw hard. He instead relied on a sinking fastball and a deceptive delivery, featuring a pronounced leg lift. There must be something about tall left-handers and their inability to throw hard. Unlike Randy Johnson, who has been an exception to the rule, the tall southpaws I remember have been soft tossers, like Guetterman and former New York Met Eric Hillman, who was six-ten and couldn’t break glass either.
The lack of speed didn’t dissuade the Yankees. After the 1987 season, the Yankees made a five-player deal with the Mariners. Cutting their losses on the disastrous Steve Trout experiment, the Yankees sent a package featuring the flaky left-hander and backup outfielder Henry Cotto to Seattle for a return of three young pitchers: Wade Taylor, Clay Parker, and Guetterman. The Yankees saw Guetterman as a candidate for long relief, or possibly the back end of their paper-thin rotation.
By 1990, the Yankees had no great expectations for Guetterman. He simply pitched well when called upon, inspiring more confidence from both Dent and Merrill, who summoned him repeatedly in the middle to late innings. They called on him 64 times for a total of 93 innings. That’s the kind of workload that few relievers undertake today, but the game was different 20 years ago. Back then, middle relievers often pitched two or three innings at a time, something that the rubber-armed Guetterman was fully capable of doing.
They’re playing baseball somewhere? Go figure that.
New York City got hit in the side of the face with a Junior Barnes slushball yesterday. I trooped around some on the Upper West Side and it was fugliosity, man. This morning the slush turned into snow. The eight flights of stairs that I walk down each day were so bad that I crouched down and made like a sled. I saw sofa abandoned sofa cushions on the way down–the neighbhorhood kids must have had fun last night. The rest of the sofa was at the bottom of the stairs–maybe they had too much fun.
Anyhow, it is a comedy show but New Yorkers are tough and many of us braved the elements and made it in to woik.
William Faulkner on the origins of The Sound and the Fury, one of his most acclaimed novels:
It began with a mental picture. I didn’t realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a book. And then I realized the symbolism of the soiled pants, and that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless and motherless girls climbing down the rainpipe to escape from the only home she had, where she had never been offered love or affection or understanding.
I had already begun to tell the story through the eyes of the idiot child, since I felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of knowing what happened, but not why. I saw that I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother. That was still not it. I told it for a third time through the eyes of the third brother. That was still not it. I tried to gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman. It was still not complete, not until fifteen years after the book was published, when I wrote as an appendix to another book the final effort to get the story told and off my mind, so that I myself could have some peace from it. It’s the book I feel tenderest towards. I couldn’t leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again.
I read this passage almost twenty years ago and am still fascinated by it. The idea that Faulkner created an enduring work of art and yet felt that he failed is amazing. Can a great work of art be a failure? Why not? Nothing is ever that simple. Apocalypse Now comes to mind as a brilliant movie that is also a mess. So does Raging Bull.
Martin Scorsese once said, “Raging Bull is a about a man who loses everything and then regains it spiritually.” Based on this statement, I think the movie fails as a story because I don’t think that DeNiro’s Jake LaMotta ever reaches that kind of grace, or I don’t think it was conveyed by the filmmakers in a convincing way. That said, if this is a failure, sign me up! Because Raging Bull features some of the most hypnotic, brilliant filmmaking–especially the editing and the sound editing–of any American movie. It is often very funny, though on some level, it is also turgid and humorless.
Raging Bull was DeNiro’s pet project. He had to talk Scorsese into making it and they, in turn, had to talk Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver) into revising the script. In the book, Martin Scorsese: A Journey, the director talked about what hooked him into the project:
The motive became to achieve an understanding of a self-destructive lifestyle–of a person who was destructive to the people around him and to himself–who finally eased up on himself and on those other people, and somehow made peace with life.
I used Raging Bull as a kind of rehabilitation, thinking all the time it was pretty much my last picture in L.A., or America.
It’s not really a boxing movie. It’s about Scorsese saving his own life and finding some kind of redemptive thread in LaMotta’s story. It’s about DeNiro getting so deep inside of a character–Scorsese said that he played LaMotta like a brick wall–it didn’t matter how much of a creep the character was, there was a sliver of humanity there and that was worth exploring. It is about the obsessions of both men.
As regards any specific book, I’m trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do, taking my output (the course of it) as a whole. I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world…I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I’m still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead. I don’t know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep trying in a new way. I’m inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don’t have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time. Though the one I know is probably as good as another, life is a phenomenon but not a novelty, the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time.
Scorsese was an emotional mess when he made Raging Bull. I think that comes across in the movie. It is a stunning work, brilliant and flawed.
“If ever we had to count on Robinson Cano,” hitting coach Kevin Long said Tuesday, “it’s this year. That’s not a pressure statement, because I think he’s ready.
“He’s already a big part of our offense, but now we want him to be one of the elite guys in our lineup, where a pitcher says, ‘Man, I do not want to see this guy up here right now.'”
…”We chart chase percentages for each of our hitters, and Robby chased 11% of pitches out of the strike zone, which was the highest on the team. Most guys are around 5 or 6%. And Robby’s chases go up with runners in scoring position.”
If Cano has a good season, if he improves with runners on base, the Yanks sure are going to be tough. Meanwhile, over at Bats, Ben Shpigel writes about Cano’s fielding.
