Chipper Jones Thinks Your Pitch Is Outside

I feel like I am an open-minded individual. I can accept that the baseball world is in a constant state of flux: circumstances change, attitudes are reformed, technology evolves. It comes as little surprise, then, that a sportswriter would fire this bottle rocket into the window of tradition:

TIME TO FIX BASEBALL'S MOST BASIC ELEMENT

Next week: can we really trust that the Sun is at the center of the solar system?

Anyway, Chipper Jones recently got all hot and bothered over balls and strikes in a game against the Phillies, throwing his support behind the notorious QuesTec laser targeting system. Dayn Perry is there to take this idea all the way down the rabbit hole.

However, on a larger level Jones is spot on: the quality of home-plate umpiring these days is simply not acceptable. As such, it's time for sweeping changes. Specifically, it's time — past time, actually — to automate the calling of balls and strikes.

Hasn't somebody already automated Chipper? I find it ironic that one of the few things that gets Larry the Affable Automaton into a lather is a robotic GPS system.

Here's the thing: the game of baseball, on a fundamental level, is about the strike zone. All of it — the home runs, the strikeouts, the bunt singles, the walks, the groundball double plays — flows from each hitter's and each pitcher's ability to command the strike zone.

Agreed.

When that zone is called inconsistently, it corrupts the competitive integrity of the game.

Yep.

That's what's happening now, and that's what's been happening for a long time in baseball.

Funny you should mention that...

To put a finer point on it, watch any major-league game and ask yourself whether, say, 25 percent of the ball-strike calls look incorrect after replay or imaging. Over the course of an entire game, it adds up, and that level of inaccuracy makes a mockery of the game.

A lot of things make "a mockery of the game." Phantom tags make a mockery of the game. Greaseballs make a mockery of the game. This sure as hell makes a mockery of the game.

But in regards to cheating, fudging, and bending the rules, well, this kind of stuff has been going on for a long time, and nobody really seems to have a problem with it. Perry is simply doing his best Captain Renault and he is shocked--shocked--to find that people are gambling in the back rooms at Rick's Place.

No doubt, those resistant to such measures will meow about the loss of the nebulous "human element."

Now, I have no feline predilections, but when you are making up "citing" specific statistics like "25 percent of the ball-strike calls look incorrect after replay or imaging," then that human element isn't very "nebulous" by your own definition.

Besides, there's no reason that, in an aesthetic sense, the game need change at all. You'd still have your home-plate umpire suited up and in his usual position. He'd have the computer calls relayed to him by a wireless indicator, and then he'd relay those calls with his typical flair.

Thank the Lord that even though we'll be eliminating the bulk of the umpire's craft, we will preserve the "flair" of the grandstanding officials who so rightly believe that they, not the famous athletes, are the main attraction.

The foundation of sports is fairness

No, no, no, no, no.

The foundation of sport is camaraderie, teamwork, and equanimity. The foundation of professional sport is greed, exclusion, and specialization--especially in baseball, where part of the impetus for forming the first professional leagues was to concoct a profitable business model for team owners and to gradually remove all brown people from the first-tier clubs.

and without a ruthlessly consistent strike zone baseball simply isn't fair.

Things that are also not fair: rainy Saturdays, the U.S. tax code, the continued prominence of Nickelback on mainstream radio, life.

With all the talk about steroids and competitive imbalance and the like, something as mundane and taken-for-granted as the strike zone isn't likely to inspire much in the way of activism.

Maybe because steroids and that old bugbear "competitive imbalance" (whatever that means) are actual problems.

It's time for baseball to repair itself at the most basic level: take ball-strike calls out of the hands of umpires.

And while we're at it, let's take game-calling out of the hands of catchers, plate discipline out of the hands of hitters, and command of the strike zone out of the hands of pitchers. Hell, we could even do away with pitchers entirely, substituting the finest pitching machine technology (which, coincidentally, would still be superior to Jose Mesa). That might finally make Chipper happy.

Or we could recognize that the purpose of these computer targeting systems is to merely evaluate--not replace--the consistency of an umpire's strike zone. It is a tool, not the means to some pie-in-the-sky end where arguing with any umpire is a thing of the past and everyone passes up the most convenient of opportunities to gain a competitive edge.

Like I said, I'm an open-minded person.

Uncle Cholly: Manager of the Year?

Kevin Hench of FOXSports.com brings us this delectable little nugget from his recent piece ranking the National League's Manager of the Year candidates:

The Phils had a chance to shave the Padres' wild card lead to two games Saturday night before Tom Gordon and Brett Myers combined to allow three home runs in the 8th and 9th in a crushing 4-3 loss. Myers had to be restrained from going after a reporter in the clubhouse after the game.

That was a pretty embarrassing incident for everyone involved in the organization, especially when the audio made its way onto the web. Definitely not good for the Phillies. Let's hope people don't judge them by the actions of one crazy closer who has had trouble controlling his emotions throughout his career.

So things are pretty much back to normal in Philly.

Kevin Hench, you asshole.

In April, it was Manuel who had to be held back from going after a media agitator. The team responded immediately to Manuel's fire, jumping back into contention over the next two months.

He's certainly succeeded in getting his players to lash out at sportswriters when asked about the correct spelling of the word "retard" and provide a list of excuses (injuries, opponents, the ballpark) when they can't get the job done. Charlie's been very exemplary in this regard.

But it's been hard to imagine the Phils making it to the finish line with their matchstick-and-bubblegum pitching staff. If they somehow win the wild card, Manuel deserves a ton of credit (and a free agent starter who isn't a complete disaster).

Yes. The way the Phillies are remaining in playoff contention has nothing to do with Ryan Howard rediscovering his power stroke, or Pat Burrell's resurgence, or Aaron Rowand's career year, or Jimmy Rollins' quiet consistency, or the blossoming of Cole Hamels, or the pants-down luck of finding pitchers in the farm system who are far superior to those disastrous free-agent starters.

The credit all belongs to Charlie, the man who overworked Myers during his transition, overplayed Howard during his slumps, quixotically supported Rod Barajas, batted Rowand in six different places, and always left pitchers in for one out too long.

It cannot be that the flawed Phils are again succeeding despite Manuel, carried on the back of a monster MVP candidate for the second straight year. That would be far too logical.

Stephen A. Smith Sets the Record Straight

Yesterday I said the Phillies still had a shot in the NL East despite playing half of the season like baseball's version of the New Jersey Nets. Do you find solace in the Phils' star power, Stephen A.?

Howard's a stud, not a one-year wonder. Rollins is playing some exceptional baseball. And Utley is fully worthy of his $85 million deal and fully capable of feeding a city's baseball aspirations (with Howard and Rollins) for years to come.

Those guys are great baseball players. Certainly can't blame them for the team's lack of success.

Any team would want these players. Any team would be respectable with these players. Any team would put quality players around these players and, dare we say, win with these players - even if it meant having to pull off a deal for some quality pitching before the July 31 non-waiver trading deadline expires.

Ok, so without those three guys, the Phillies are basically the National League's answer to the Kansas City Royals. I can see the similarities.

Any team but the Phillies, it seems.

You know, I don't think the Phils aren't that much different from the Mets, either. Both have potent offenses (Philly's is slightly better). Both have one young top-of-the-rotation stud (Hamels/Maine). Both have roughly two reliable starters behind that stud and have been scrambling all year to find warm carcasses to put on the mound for those fourth and fifth days. Both have 2-3 reliable arms in the bullpen. The only difference at the moment, as I see it, is that the Mets have a closer, and the Phillies don't.

Damn you, Billy Wagner.

And I know Pedro is due to come back sometime in August, but he's pushing 36 and hasn't pitched since last September. He's at a point where even the greatest arms usually level off, even when pitching regularly in real games. Should he still be enough to scare the Phillies into dealing for one more starter for the stretch run? Perhaps. But I predict you'll see Freddy Garcia on Celebrity Fit Club before that happens.

Perhaps there is a plausible explanation for losing 12 of 17 one-run games. For still being mediocre at 44-44 despite leading the NL in runs scored (456), possessing one of the most potent offenses in the game with a three-headed nucleus to guide this franchise.

I just can't find one.

He's got me there. Besides multiple injuries to front-line pitching, a highly competitive division, AL-dominated interleague play, the unbalanced schedule (only five games against Washington so far), and just being the goddamned Philadelphia Phillies, there's absolutely nothing to explain their misfortune.

"Don't sleep," an enthusiastic Rollins kept saying. "We're still hanging around, and Flash [Tom Gordon] and Brett [Myers] are coming. We're still here."

True. But so is Adam Eaton and whatever no-names called up from the minors.

So go ahead and enjoy the second half of the season. Be my guest.

That's it everybody. Go home. There's no reason to watch the rest of the games. Stephen A. Smith, the epitome of infallibility, has spoken. There is no hope.

Quite frankly, that's BS.

Phillies Are Still Believers, But Why? [The Guy Who's Always Yelling]

10,000 A Second Time Around?

One of the things I love about blogging is thrill of "being there"--writing about stuff either as it happens or shortly after.

Last night (or early this morning, depending on how you look at it) was definitely a "being there" experience, though all I meant to do was get a few thoughts down about the Phillies' historic 10,000th franchise loss and do a post later examining how this milestone makes me feel.

Well, I had to put that on hold after glancing at the paper this morning. Apparently, the Phillies "official" count was still at 9,999 after last night's surrender to the Rockies. I went into a full-fledged panic. I flew to my computer and frantically started checking the several sites tracking the total number of losses.

Celebrate 10,000 was all nines. PhillySucks was 9,998 as of July 8th--corresponding with the "official" total. Wikipedia still had a tally of 9,999 losses, which was strange, considering the page displayed the same number after the extra-inning loss on Friday night.

I had checked my math on Saturday morning to make sure that the next loss would indeed be the 10,000th, using Wikipedia as my source. Now, fearing a calculation error, I did it again this afternoon--it added up to 10,000. Wishing to corroborate that information with a different source, I added up the figures posted by Baseball-Reference--which added up to 9,999.

Completely frustrated and on the verge of pulling a Larry Bowa-style freak out, I compared the records, season-by-season, between the two sources. It wasn't long before I found my deviation.

In 1890, the Phillies finished the season with a record of 78-54. This appears to be an officially sanctioned record as it appears almost everywhere: Wikipedia, Baseball Almanac, ESPN, even the Official Site of the Philadelphia Phillies.

There is one place I have found where the record is different--Baseball-Reference. The site lists the 1890 record as 78-53, citing a game on May 23, 1890 against the Chicago Colts (forerunner to the Cubs) that was ruled a no-contest but somehow went in the books as a Phillies loss. A little more research revealed that Phillies PR did indeed address this discrepancy a couple weeks ago, noting that the franchise does not consider the May 23rd game a loss despite what the numbers say on its own official website.

I processed all of this in two distinct phases:

1) I felt horrible for (a) getting the number wrong and (b) somehow letting the PR story slip by me. I try to keep up with the newspapers and press releases, but most of my writing comes from observations gleaned from the information on baseball websites and the games themselves. This isn't meant to be a fast-breaking news blog, after all. Still, an official statement on the subject of the 10,000 losses should have been a target of my commentary. At this point, I seriously considered scrapping my most recent post and acting like it never happened.

2) I kept thinking about it over lunch and finally found some self-sympathy. I've been running these numbers on my own since the beginning of the season. And when every site I used to compile those numbers at the time (this was sans Baseball-Reference) says that the Phillies lost 54 games in 1890, I'm going to take that at face value. I'm just a Joe Schmoe blog--I don't have easy access to 19th century copies of the Spalding Guide. I wish I did, but I just don't. It's easy for me to miss certain minutiae.

Moreover, I looked at the specifics of why the May 1890 Phillies-Colts game was ruled a no-contest. There was an apparent substitution dispute; the umpire wouldn't let the Phils put in reserve outfielder Bill Grey for some reason. The records still say the Phillies eventually lost the game 10-8. I assume that they finished the game under protest and, miraculously, won redress from the National League. Maybe it was more common in those days.

Anyway, I looked up Bill Grey's statistics out of curiosity. I wanted to answer the question: had be been able to play in the game, would the Phillies have won? I don't have the benefit of a complex computer simulation, but the equation Little-Used Reserve Outfielder + .242 Lifetime Average seems simple enough to me. Who knew that the gamesmanship surrounding this incident would be replicated over a century later?

Obviously, the denied substitution didn't seem like a big deal to most people after the fact, hence the 54 losses listed almost everywhere. This information plus my mistrust of the Phillies' PR motives (wouldn't you like the chance to remove losses from your favorite team's record?) went a long way in putting my mind at ease. I won't go so far as to call it a cover-up, but I'd like to think I inadvertently penetrated the Phillies' weird statistical voodoo tactics, kind of like Napoleon's troops stumbling upon the Rosetta Stone out of pure dumb luck.

But if the Phillies want to celebrate their 10,000th loss for a second time, that's just fine with me. Who knows? Maybe they'll find a way to keep that one off the books, too.

Here's How Phils Got the Number [Philly.com]

Gotta Spend Money To Make Money

John Kruk, you've made a successful second career yelling at Peter Gammons on Baseball Tonight. So we ask you this: what's wrong with the Phillies' personnel philosophy?

Honestly, I think they baby their minor-league players too much. They keep them in the minors so long that when they fail, it’s in the big leagues. I don’t think they’re going to change until they get new ownership. They’re good people, but how do you convince people of their age that we need to spend $100 million on a guy? If I had the money these owners have, I’d have trouble with it myself.

Whoa, Krukker. That's a complex answer. Let's take this step by step.

(1) How does somebody stay in the minors too long without failing at some point? Of course you're going to get more Gavin Floyds than Cole Hamels...es. It's the law of averages.

Isn't the best way to see if a guy's going to succeed in the majors is to actually get him some major league experience? Unless there's some sort of Tron-like survival simulation that can trap a prospect inside an XBox until he can hit the breaking ball with consistency, you're going to have to call him up sometime and evaluate his adjustment and personal growth. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned that way.

And I think the patient approach worked just fine for Rolen, Rollins, Utley, Howard, Hamels, et al. An organization's reluctance to leverage the long-term success of its prospects against a short-term exploitation of the hype and publicity gained by rushing every single one of its blue chippers into the bigs (I'm looking at you, Kansas City) should be applauded, not criticized.

(2) You've got a point about the owners. Their nearly-invisible public image sends the wrong message to a fanbase desperate to win and historically intolerant of people who seem to lack even a modicum of "passion" for the organization. They seem to emerge once every couple years to make another ineffectual front office change--the kind of decisions that move the team no farther forward or backward.

And why should they? Bill Giles and David Montgomery purchased the Phillies in 1981 for $30 million. According to Forbes, that investment is now worth a cool $457 million. That's a lot of Dollar Dogs. However....

(3)....that doesn't mean they haven't been willing to spend for on-field personnel. It's a matter of spending money on the right players than any old free agent with a little experience and misleading stats. This winter's free-agent pitcher bonanza was a perfect example of owners running wild. A few of these questionable decisions are working out at the moment (Ted Lilly, Jason Marquis), but I'm willing to bet a lot of GMs would like a mulligan on their ill-advised signings (Barry Zito, Gil Meche, Vicente Padilla, Miguel Batista, Jeff Weaver...it's a long list).

And who says the Phillies aren't spending money? Their current payroll is almost $90 million and has more than doubled since 2001. In baseball's currently rosy financial state that's still only the 14th highest in the majors, which is why it might appear that Giles and Montgomery aren't spending enough.

Still, it's about quality, not quantity. There are no $100 million Phillies, but let's just say there are plenty of guys who are feeding their families pretty damn well. A quick look at some of those recent fat free agent acquisitions (and one recent trade acquisition) that are supposed to turn a team into a contender:

- Freddy Garcia, owed $10 million in 2007: this looks worse with each successive 5-inning outing for "the Chief," the highest-paid pitcher on the Phillies roster. In an 8-year career, he's posted a sub-3.80 ERA only once. Once a premier strikeout guy, his velocity has been declining and he seems more susceptible to injuries. Looks like an early bust for a guy that was brought in to be a potential staff ace--at least he'll be a free agent at the end of the year.

- Tom Gordon, owed $7 million in 2007: only in Philadelphia does a 38-year-old relief pitcher receive a three-year contract with a club option for a fourth. He turned in an All-Star season in his first year as a Phillie, but it's very likely that he only had one good year left in the tank. Injured and ineffective this season, plus the presence of Brett Myers in the bullpen renders him obsolete as a closer even though he's still pulling in a mega-closer's salary. A dubious contract for a guy who had only saved more than 30 games once in a season before 2006.

- Jamie Moyer, owed $6.5 million in 2007: you have to love the fact that the 44-year-old Moyer has pitched 21 more innings than the 30-year-old Garcia (though he has missed at least one start due to injury). The grizzled junkballing clubhouse "leader" thing screams Major League, but he rocked for the Phillies after being acquired from Seattle last August. Even so, most of his second-half numbers saw a significant overall decline last season. Not surprisingly, a lot of his 2008 contract is based on statistical incentives accrued this season and the next--not a bad insurance policy for what has been one of the team's more pleasant surprises.

- Wes Helms, owed $2.05-2.3 million in 2007; another acquisition who is not living up to expectations, Helms was supposed to be the starting third baseman and has promptly played himself out of a starting job. A .321 slugging percentage and zero home runs just won't cut it from a generally "offensive" position. On the plus side, he's been a real team player. It's just a shame he's usually "helping" his team from the bench. Barring a miracle, I can't see the club picking up his third-year option in 2009.

- Adam Eaton, owed approx. $7 million in 2007; though he's never had an ERA under 4.00 in any season, he's not a bad pitcher by any measure. Of course, it helps when his offense averages 5.5 runs/game when he starts. The problem here is that he's getting #2 money when he's a solid #3 at best...and, technically, right now he's either the #4 or 5. This winter's inflated free agent salaries are partially to blame but he may have already hit his career stride in San Diego.

- Rod Barajas, owed $2.5 million in 2007; a textbook example of pre-season panic, as the Phils believed they so desperately needed a veteran presence in front of rookie Carlos Ruiz (doing the exact opposite, in fact, of what Kruk accuses and trying to protect the kid from failing right away). There's no need to go into the details of why this was a mistake, so let's take the time to appreciate the irony of his contract's incentive clauses for an MVP award ($100,000) and a Gold Glove ($50,000). Hmm...pick up the $5 million in 2008 or buy him out for a mere $500,000? Well, Chris Coste requested to be sent to Reading (AA) instead of Ottawa (AAA) so he could get some starts at catcher. You can connect the dots there.

And let's not forget they still owe Jim Thome something in the neighborhood of $7 million for this season alone.

See, there's no reluctance to spend money in the Phillies boardroom. It's just not being spent right when almost $35 million--40 percent of the entire payroll--is devoted to players that are either significant risks or falling far short of expectations.

There are still plenty of good contracts: a lot of the homegrown players (which makes the backloaded ones easier to swallow), Jon Lieber, Aaron Rowand, etc. The problem is that the Phillies, contrary to the Krukker's observations, may be spending too much for too little and forcing the team into a situation when they have to field inferior players instead of lower-priced alternatives (i.e. Greg Dobbs, Abe Nunez) or those bright-eyed prospects that are supposedly coddled so much. It's simply a financial logjam. Keeping up with the Joneses (or New Yorks or Los Angeleses) is just not a viable option.

Cot's Baseball Contracts [an invaluable resource for excellent contract information I could not find anywhere else]
Interview With John Kruk [Philadelphia Magazine]