Barry Zito Forever

Ten Things I Hate About the Tom Verducci Column
This column has already been discussed at length here. Yesterday, though, it was hailed as "amazing and scathing" by no less than CNNSI's "Fantasy Central" Producer (in his personal weblog, though, so this is either a cheap shot or a gratuitous name-drop or both). Meanwhile, I've been gathering my thoughts on this for a long time now; please pardon the length, correct any dubious reasoning, and so on.

In no particular order:
1. Gratuitous use of "Billy Beane." In fairness, this is much more of a problem with reactions to the column than with the column itself. I found no incendiary references by Verducci after all; rather, it's Quintong who invokes "Beane and his disciples," and countless Primer trolls who try to shift this to their favorite whipping boy (the man whom they perceive to be a stathead icon).

Certain names can just no longer be used in rational discussion, at least of anything other than the legacies of those people themselves, and certainly not of merits of ideas espoused by those people. Rush Limbaugh is poster-child for these "unnameable" people: So many people either blindly follow him or reflexively despise him that even on Primer, discussion degenerates too quickly. (Incidentally, in that last link, I believe the poster known as "Realist" stands out for rudeness, venom, and ad hominem attack. Many other people, including Szymborski, tried to discuss things calmly with him/her, to no avail.)

Other good examples in news/politics include Martha Stewart, Hillary Clinton, and every U.S. president in my living memory. In baseball, Beane has achieved that status (as has one other person whom I'll mention later), perhaps through no fault of his own. (He may have brought it on himself but I don't think that point is relevant to this discussion.)

It's certainly fair game to criticize what Beane has actually done as GM as part of your critique of the A's organization, but I don't find Verducci to have done this, except implicitly, in the this is the team he has built sense. Even there, he gets a lot of things baldly wrong.

2. Conflating "criticism of a team" with "criticism of an approach." Again, this is a fault of the people who praise Verducci rather than Verducci himself, but enough people are doing it that it needs to be called out.

In 2003, at least, two stathead-oriented teams faced each other. Oddly enough, one of them won and one of them lost. Even in 2000 and 2001 the A's had to face a team that relied far more on Things Statheads Like (read: walks/OBP/conversation of outs) than it was ever credited for. (In "our" circles circa 1998, I remember reading articles extolling not Billy Beane but Brian Cashman, since Cashman had figured things out that other teams seemed not to have figured out.) That leaves 2002 unaccounted-for, but A's-Twins was arguably the least fluky-frustrating series of the four. I'll wave my hands and blame some combination of Tim Hudson and the Metrodome, moreso Huddy.

In any case, there's this misconception that the A's, or Beane specifically, are singlehandedly bearing the standard for some dogma. Baseball America, of all places, has gone beyond this.

3. The "Big Game" Fallacy. John Madden used to complain about this when he coached the Raiders: People said his team couldn't win the big game, but they never actually annointed any particular game as "the big game" until after Oakland had lost. Madden (in a great quote that Google has failed to retrieve for me) asked his critics to tell him in advance which games the big ones were, so that he'd know to win them.

In the A's case, apparently people have decided that the "big game" is the one that would win them a Division Series. (But if Oakland actually did happen to win a Division Series, and then did badly in the ALCS, then--that year at least--the "big game(s)" would be the ALCS loss(es) rather than any Division Series loss(es).)

On the message boards a lot of wannabe mathematicians have pointed out that, if Oakland had a 50% chance of winning each "elimination" game, then there would be a 1-in-512 chance that they lost all nine. To them this seems too improbable. The problem with it is that, well yes, Oakland in particular would have a 1-in-512 chance of losing those particular games. That said, if you consider 34 years worth of expanded playoffs and anywhere from 26-30 teams in baseball, the odds much higher that some team somewhere would have nine opportunistic games and lose them all.

People notice the A's streak more because it fits an easy-to-describe pattern, just as they'd notice (and be suspicious) if the winning lottery numbers were ever 1-2-3-4-5-6 instead of something more random-looking like 17-8-29-2-11-14.

That's not to say there isn't a reason why the A's losses have fit that pattern: Any time a pattern like that comes out, it's reasonable to try to find an underlying cause. Unfortunately, neither Verducci nor anyone else has even attempted to explain how and why Oakland's teams manage to get their first two wins in a division series and then not the third.

My theory: As soon as people notice a pattern like this, it starts to become self-fulfilling. If you want to discuss specifically why a team can't win the last game of a series (as opposed to the games preceding it), this is intuitively at least as good an explanation as anything I've seen anyone else come up with.

4. "This team doesn't catch the ball well enough..." Tom Verducci, meet Bill James. Meet Fielding Win Shares By Position. Notice all the A's at or near the top? But don't just trust the numbers: Trust the people (read: us), who have actually seen this team play in months other than October. Night after night, Eric Chavez and Mark Ellis (more on him later) and even Miguel Tejada have made dazzling plays, sometimes literally game-saving plays. (Go back to the top of the 12th inning of Game 1. Oh wait: Verducci actually does this himself, and somehow concludes that it's Manny Ramirez's fault.)

I suppose some memes are impossible to shake, no matter how wrong they are. Verducci things to himself, "A's suck at defense," without bothering to actually check the assumption. He flips on the TV, sees the Game 3 error total, and thinks a triumphant "Ha!" to himself. And, more likely than not, continues to assume that the best defenders in baseball are guys like Derek Jeter (more on him later).

5. "...doesn't succeed at situational hitting..." Impossible to refute without pinning someone down on a definition of situational hitting. Is it that they don't hit "when it counts"? Everyone's talking about the 3-for-45 by Chavez and Tejada, but nobody talks about just how ugly Boston's middle-of-the-order stats had been, or their 2-for-whatever with runners in scoring position, because the series lasted just long enough for the Red Sox to right the ship.

Maybe Verducci just wants the A's to move runners over more? Or bunt?

6. "...and, as one Oakland source put it, 'We're the worst baserunning team in the league.'" This one is actually true, so why is it something I "hate" about the column? Easy: Verducci 'buries the lede.'

This is the second time in three years that Oakland has blown a series (at least a Game 3, with a 2-0 lead) specifically on bad baserunning. That is a trend, at least if you're looking for trends, and it might (or might not) be an indictment of the A's coaching staff. Do some legwork, guys: Compared to other teams, what does Oakland do (or not do) in spring training and pre-game drills? Is there a systemic problem or was it just spectularly ill-timed boneheadedness by Jeremy, Miggy, and Byrnes?

And no, you emphatically don't get away with blaming statheads for screwed-up baserunning. After all, given just how precious we all know 27 outs to be, why on Earth would you think we condone cavalierly throwing them away? (Neyer gets this.)

7. "There is also the matter of their leadership vacuum." Does anyone here know how Verducci voted in the 2002 AL MVP race? If he voted for Tejada, is he on record stating why?

8. "The fatal decision." If the Red Sox really were about to walk Dye intentionally (I don't know, I was in an airplane when it happened), then pinch-hitting Melhuse was indefensibly stupid. This sort of oversight ought to lead to a managerial firing rather than a "the whole organization sucks" column.

Come to think of it, the baserunning itself is arguably on the manager, to the extent that it's his job to have 25 games ready to play, with their head in the game. On the other hand, to be fair, blaming the manager for playoff failures is intuitively dissatisfying since we've now had two managers go through this.

All the same, specific players (and specific managers) did either make boneheaded mistakes or fail to come through or both. In the very end, the A's lost Game 5 because Terrence Long struck out with the bat on his shoulder rather than getting a walk or a hit. Players fail sometimes; they're human. Every pitcher-hitter confrontation produces a result adverse to one player or the other.

9 and 10 (because it's so galling that it counts double). "Maybe Derek Jeter isn't your prototypical Moneyball player..." There are so many things wrong with this paragraph that I'm not even sure where to begin.

First, as a Primer pointed out, Jeter is in many ways a prototypical Moneyball hitter, if you set aside the fact that he singlehandedly costs his team $17 million a year.

Second, the paragraph implicitly gives all or most of the credit for the Yankees' post-season success to Jeter, which if anything is orders of magnitude worse than giving Beane most of the credit/blame for whether the A's, or "stathead" teams generally, succeed or fail.

Let's just say Jeter has a pretty good supporting cast, shall we? Actually, both the A's and Yankees have had remarkable positional stability in recent years, making a position-by-position comparison easier. Lessee:
Jorge Posada or Ramon Hernandez? That choice seems pretty clear.

From 2000-2003, each team has had two years of Jason Giambi, not that New York did much with Giambi in the 2002 playoffs anyway. I'd give Hatteberg the nod over Tino, though neither one pushes his team to a championship, Tino's rings aside.

The fascinating comparison is Mark Ellis to Alfonso Soriano. Ellis should be the player you want, either if you have a defense fetish or if you think that statistics lies. Soriano has gaudy numbers in overrated categories and is an atrocious second baseman. And yet, he adds significantly more to a team than Ellis does. More importantly for this particular discussion, I think a vast majority of baseball fans would assume that he does.

Skip shortstop, rather than begging the question.

Eric Chavez or Robin Ventura? Chavy certainly has far more upside but, ironically for the A's and statheadness, check out their OBPs.

As for outfield, both teams have seen more flux: Wow, I didn't fully comprehend just how much of a revolving door of mediocrity the Yankees had in LF, pre-Matsui. And yet, since 2000, how many outfielders have the A's had as good as Paul O'Neill, let alone Bernie Williams? (Okay, slot Justice and Dye between O'Neill and Williams.)

Wednesday, October 08, 2003