The 114th version of the World Series is upon us. Game One is at Fenway on Tuesday. The 2018 AL champion Red Sox beat two 100-win teams, including last year's champs, to get to the Fall Classic. Early odds have Boston at -125. The LA Dodgers return as NL champions winning on the road in Milwaukee in the seventh game of the LCS. Naturally we here at RMC were rooting for the Brewers, but such is life. I have a lot of friends who are Dodgers fans so I know they'll be happy. The Red Sox are my mom's team and I know my east coast family members are happy.
Giants fans will have to wait until next year, of course. Perhaps we'll get some exciting changes this off-season. In the meantime, enjoy the ballgames.
--M.C.
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Here's a quote from David Bell, interviewed by The Athletic's Melissa Lockard* last November when he was hired as VP of Player Development:
ML: Advanced metrics and new technology, like Trackman and Statcast, have brought a whole new layer of information for teams to access in order to evaluate their players. How much did you use that kind of information with St. Louis or elsewhere, and do you plan to utilize it with the Giants?
Bell: I know it will be used a lot. I have taken a real interest over the last four or five years in learning and researching and asking questions. I have a lot to learn still, but I certainly see it as an amazing tool that can open our minds to new ways of teaching, new ways of seeing the game.
Up until five years ago, I really didn’t know much about it. Fortunately, over the past five years, I was in a position where I was looked to to be the point person to ask questions and get information and supply that information to front office and staff and players. It was a tremendous learning experience.
I think in my last role as a bench coach, it just sort of scratched the surface. In this role in player development there is an even bigger opportunity. We continue to learn new things each and every day. That’s something that’s really important to me, having a mindset and having people around me that have a mindset that we are going to get all of the information that we can. Some of it we may not use, but we are going to be open to finding the best approach in every situation.
To have factual information. To have statistics. To have all of the different types of information that is out there. To have that and to utilize that is incredible, and another part of today’s game that we are fortunate to be a part of.
David Bell is now the Reds manager. Is this the sign of a house-cleaning before the new administration arrives?
Anyway, it is interesting to hear about the Giants use of analytics as the organization has a reputation for being behind-the-curve in that department.
(*The Athletic is behind a paywall so I did not include the link.)
I am amused by how the use of the word "analytics" is being thrown around like it's a new thing. Wasn't the first baseball guy that said, "You know, we should put that speedy guy who walks a lot near the top of the batting order" using analytics? The word is being used like it's entirely new. Likewise the "Giants behind the curve" meme. None of it has any quantification to know if any of it is true. And having watched Brian Sabean for years, you need to not pay too much attention to what he says, it's usually misdirection. Notice, too, how this talk of analytics conveniently provides cover for not having any productive position players in the minors. Not that I'm pooh-poohing analytics, I'm just highly suspicious of the laziness of the narrative that's being fed to the public.
We really have no idea. We can only hope our access to these big private entities--journalists--are getting us what they can and it's more than just spin and recycled memes. But we really have no way of knowing what goes on. I try to be careful about what I conclude and try to rely on direct quotes by players and others.
One way to think about modern analytics is this: all our lives we've been told that you should "play the percentages." Nowhere were these percentages published for consumption by fans! The new guys, the saber-types, they want to have ACTUAL percentages, actually counted and measured and calculated. That's the big difference.
Branch Rickey started this sort of thing, but it was proprietary. In the 60s guys like Pete Palmer actually created charts from real-game data on "the percentages." Bill James of course popularized the idea of re-imagining or looking behind traditional stats and came up with some new ones of his own. His definition of sabermetrics is "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." The key idea is "objective knowledge" and not simply "past practices" or "traditions." There's a lot more now, what with Statcast and the biomechanics stuff, than just statistical analysis.
The idea that the new boys on the block with their grad degrees in econ and stats are kicking out the old-school cigar-chomping scouts made for a good narrative in Moneyball but it is a tired story, I agree. There is no doubt, however, that we are at a time in baseball (all sports, actually) where all kinds of new information is available to teams and players. If you read FanGraphs you get a lot of stories from players about how this piece of analysis or whatnot was fed to them and they used it to improve their game. As a fan, I'd like to know if my team is a leader or a laggard. Trends come and go, naturally, but a trend AWAY from new knowledge is not one I want to see!
I highly recommend "Curve Ball: baseball, statistics, and the role of chance in the game" by Jim Albert and Jay Bennett. It's almost 20 years old but I've found it the most accessible and interesting of all the books I've read so far. Tom Tango's "The Book" is drier and more mathematical but you get a little more insight into how these guys think and work. I've learned a lot and have barely tapped into the mountains of stuff out there. I can't imagine the amount of material professional baseball people have to process these days!
All the kings horses and all the kings men, cannot make a non-power hitter, hit against the shift, if he cannot, or if he is too stubborn. If a player hits only a few home runs a year, and they shift on him, he needs to hit against the shift, or learn to. Obviously the shift does not help if the ball goes over the wall. But how much analytics does it take to hit to left, when the entire infield is playing on the right side. Shifts have worked too well, and the adaption to such a defense has been far too slow. Not sure about some of the defensive metrics, I look at them at times, and wonder if they have been keeping tabs on the same player that I have been watching. These are just some easy comments on some worth of analysis. When things get complex and you have two sets of data on a player that disagree. That is a lot of fun.
I do think the shifting will start to be attacked by hitters going the other way and whatnot. Things ebb and flow in the game, it's just that the "time between trends" is shorter. What's hip today is out of fashion tomorrow.
Mets have apparently narrowed down their GM finalists. Wonder if any have/will interview with the Giants?
"Conversations with the Mets continue to be organic". I think I will try to post much more meaningless babble like this in the near future.
Yeah, I know it's an easy straight line, at least put some work into it.
Yeah we are stuck with that stuff until the team actually hires actual people! I've tried not to be too caught up in the tidbits that get released.
Meanwhile Kelby Tomlinson gets his release. I think he's a minor-league free agent now. He has a homer of Clayton Kershaw, something to brag about when he's an old man.
Hank Greenwald passed away at 83. From 1979-1986 and 1989-1996 he was the Voice of the Giants. RIP, Hank.
Eduardo Nunez, World Series hitting star.
Bummer about Hank - he was under-appreciated, & actually pretty good.
I was jazzed that Eduardo Nunez got the decisive hit in a Red Sox victory last night. Although I understand the realities that led to us trading him, I liked him pre-Giants & as a Giant. He's a competent, versatile, & likable guy.
The Sox are getting big hits from nobodies and role players. Nunez slashed .265/.289/.388 in 502 PAs this season, well below his career norms, but he's a veteran guy and was able to contribute in a big moment. That's what makes baseball so much better than all the other major sports--you have to bat all nine guys and that means the scrubs and "lesser" players get to hit, too, so they have just as much a chance to be a hero. In basketball you'll always give it to KD, Steph, or LeBron at crunch time. The Patriots get to use Brady in every offensive sequence. But in baseball your stars have to wait their turns and so you never know who will be up to bat at the big moment (like Travis Ishikawa!).
7h 20m last night. Here's a bit from the ESPN story on the game:
Previously, the longest postseason game by time was San Francisco's 18-inning win over Washington that took 6 hours, 23 minutes, during the 2014 NL Division Series.
Brodie Van Wagenen is reportedly the next GM. He was formerly the head agent at CAA (Creative Artist Agency). They represent a lot of big names. Close to home it was CAA that negotiated Matt Cain's big 2012 contract, for example. This strikes me as a very odd choice to run a ballclub, but the Mets and the Wilpons are in their own universe, I expect. Not long ago Van Wagenen was negotiating a big contract for Yoenis Cespedes, now he will sit on the opposite side of the bargaining table. I'm curious to see how that works out, but my initial reaction is, well, that it is weird.
I hope the Giants get a smart, accomplished baseball person or persons to run the club. Chaim Bloom (Tampa Bay senior VP of baseball ops) was reportedly the runner-up and rumors have linked him to the Giants. But those are just rumors! The Giants are being very tight-lipped about the whole thing and that's probably good. What I want for my birthday (13th of November) is a new, shiny Brain Trust for the team, but I'm beginning to think they won't be done with the process by then. The Winter Meetings start December 9th, it seems like that would be a good time to have a new crew in place.
It was fun to watch LA blow game 4. I especially liked that Puig's heroism was erased. Fuck him.
An article, relatively brief, of interest to all sports fans of our age group. My brother and I were talking about this earlier, he lives in Santa Monica and has watched the surge of soccer's popularity relative to MLB and the NFL, all over the LA Basin and down to San Diego. The younger people (i.e. 40 and lower) are more tuned into the English Premier League or the MLS or the NBA. Not to mention the cord-cutting, older folks tend to have cable/satellite hookups and sports packages. The youngsters go for mobile devices and streaming and whatnot and that data probably isn't as neatly packaged and is thus harder to analyze. Maybe youngsters are watching baseball but by downloading compressed games or having instant highlights pop up on their phones. Not that I blame them, Joe Buck and John Smoltz are pretty bad, sort of a perpetual self-parody machine, blithely unaware of their obsolescence.
Dodgers do look like toast now. They had a real shot to even the Series. Roberts is getting roasted. I guess when a team wins the Division six years in a row with no ring to show for it the fans get a little testy. That's quite an enviable run of success. Just shows how tough the post-season tournament is. All the teams (and managers) are really good. Boston is having an amazing run, seems like everything they've done has worked out.
I have a nutty idea regarding Yasmani Grandal. He's a good player who has had a wretched stretch. He'll be a free agent. Switch-hitting catcher. Sign him to be Posey's platoon partner (sorry, Hondo). That way Buster can still catch but not have to get so worn down, and the hitting drop-off won't be so great (.797 OPS vs RHP). Mostly his defense is pretty good despite the post-season woes. Hundley has a lifetime .300 OBP, man. That ain't gonna work. Grandal is used to catching 100+ games and getting 500 PA so he can handle a bigger workload than Hundley. And they'll have Aramis Garcia in the wings as well. Posey's return to the field is fraught with questions after his surgery.
Meanwhile, in the only series worth watching, after last night's victory, the Carp are up 1 - 0 - 1.
I love that they have ties--er, I mean "draws"--in NPB.
And: "Go, Carp!"
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