Sorry for the lack of posting, I haven't had the time/energy/anything worth writing about recently, but I'll do my best to pick up the pace. Anyways I was reading Tom Verducci's list of all-stars for his offcial ballot and while its not bad it inspired me to give my list of all-stars just the starters and the reasoning behind it.
American League
1B. Mark Texiera - I realize that he may look lacking in areas such as batting average, as he only is batting .276 but when you're OPSing over .980 it kind of makes up for it a bit. More importantly, despite his really awful start to the season the raw numbers don't show precisely how utterly dominant this guy has been since then, as someone who's seen him everyday he's carried the yankees with his bat and at least as importantly with his defense.
2B. Aaron Hill - I'll agree with Verducci here, I knew he was hitting well but 19 home runs with a line of .302/.340/.506 from second base, well that's pretty impressive. Especially when you consider that his career was seriously derailed by a concussion that he didn't get over for a very long time its been remarkable. Indeed, you watch them enough its plain to see that Hill has basically carried this team, and this is down from where he was a few weeks ago.
SS. Jason Bartlett - God help me I pick a freaking Tampa bay Ray over my man Derek Jeter and I almost did pick him over Bartlett given that he's missed a good chunk of the season the DL but the guy's numbers are still better, .368/.404/.566 with 17 stolen bases and 6 home runs compared to the Captain's .309/.384/.455 with 19 stolen bases and 9 home runs. To Jeter's credit its still good and an improvement from last year but its hard to argue with those numbers and his stellar numbers. All that said I still want Jeter to win and I'll vote for him because he's a yankee and damnit what would an all-star game be without Jeter?
3B. Evan Longoria - Man I feel like I'm copying Verducci here but you can't argue with Longoria the disussion begins and ends with Evan this year. Sure A-Rod is playing better but he's hardly been all-star caliber its not even worth discussing.
OF - Adam Jones, Nelson Cruz, Jason Bay - a lot of deserving guys for sure but these three stand out for me for various reasons, all having career or breakout years and seem to me to be great overall players
Pitchers - Zach Greinke, Roy Halladay, Felix Hernandez, Mariano Rivera, Joe Nathan, John Lester, Justin Verlander
I could list more but I won't just two reliever and five starters is adequate, all of these guys have been absolutely lights out all year.
As you can see I suprisingly thought the fans did a decent job with the all-star teams, with some exceptions like Pedroia over Hill who's clearly having a better season, but for the most part the fans will get to see the best of the best.
And maybe that training included ...
Well, you know where that one was going, but I'd prefer to leave it as unstated speculation. However, if Ibanez ends up hitting 45-50 homers this year, you can bet that I won't be the only one raising the question. And judging by my buddy's message board post this morning, and questions like this in public forums, people already are."
I realize that greater writers than myself at ESPN have already dissected this topic to a higher degree of compentcy than I will, but I felt obliged to weigh on on the discussion. If you have not heard after dragging his ass for years trying desperately to get to it, Randy Johnson finally won his 300th game against the Nationals last week, sparking the ever-popular "will he be the last 300 game winner" argument, but more interestingly, is he the best left handed pitcher ever? Such a statement seems hyperbole at first, after all I've seen Johnson many many times stink up the joint and while he was great, can we really say after looking at the entire illustrious history of baseball that this dude with a mullet is the best who's ever thrown with the other arm? However premature it may seem, the title of Greatest left handed pitcher of all time is in truth not all that unbelievable and deserves to be at least in the disucussion along with Lefty Grove and Warren Spahn.
As some of you may already know, Johnson's accomplishments thus far have been impressive to say the least. Johnson has more strikeouts than any other lefty, and 700 more than Carlton. He won five Cy Youngs and finished second three times. Despite competing against more pitchers (thanks to expansion), he led his league in ERA four times and finished second three times. He had a much better adjusted ERA than Spahn and faced superior competition to Grove. He threw two no-hitters, one a perfect game, and struck out 20 in one game. For certain, there hasn't been many guys to come around like Johnson especially when you consider his career path and the era in which he played. Beginning in earnest in Montreal and then later shipping out to Seattle, Johnson was at best a middling pitcher in his 20s lacking the control and mechanics to be a great pitcher, but suddenly the lights just went on and Johnson became a force to be reckoned with winning more games in his 30s than his 20s. What's more, Johnson pitched in an era like no other, where we saw now that a large group of the players where practicing better baseball by chemistry and became stronger than ever able to foul off more pitches and hit them further than ever as stadiums shrunk because well chicks dig the long ball. All of this considered and he still was able to put up the numbers that he did? I mean over 12 years he posted a197-80 record with a 166 (!!) ERA-plus? That's crazy and compared to the compartively less dominating ERA+ of 158 and 124 of Grove and Spahn respectively, the numbers seem to indicate that compared to his peers was even more impressive than the other two leftys were. For sure, all of this considered, to suggest that Randy is the best lefty ever is at least plausible.
However compelling Johnson may be, there is at least a discussion for another lefty who has exactly 300 wins, the great Lefty Grove. Although I'm sure most people reading this blog probably didn't see Lefty, but his numbers are hard to argue. With a record of 300-141 and an ERA of 3.06 Lefty has the best winning percentage of any 300 game winner .680 compared to Johnson's .647. Of course this was a different era where hitters weren't as powerful, but as Philadelphia A's Grove still faced tough competition like the Ruth's and Gerig's of the world and yet still managed to dominate the competition. The incomprable Rob Neyer puts it best;
And for what it's worth, he also led the American League in ERA in nine seasons. Do you know how hard it must be to lead your league in ERA nine times? Roger Clemens is No. 2 on the all-time list, having done it seven times. Pedro Martinez, Greg Maddux, and (yes) Randy Johnson each have done it four times. Tom Seaver did it three times, and Nolan Ryan and Jim Palmer each did it twice. Think about that: Grove led his league in ERA as many times as Seaver, Ryan and Palmer put together. That, my friends, is dominance.
Indeed, one could argue that the true measure of how dominant a pitcher is is how his numbers fare compare to the rest of the league and in this facet Lefty stands alone. Sure his strikeouts are no where near the stratosphere of Johnson's but the bottom line is a pitcher needs to prevent runs and lefty did it the best. Of course Grove's candidacy is not without its faults, after all he played in an era before integration and never had to pitch against anyone of color, a fact that should not be discounted. Further, as I mentioned he played in a bygone era before television or the internets or anything like it to be able to actually see how dominant Grove was. We have plenty of tape to show how great Johnson is, but all we have with Grove is the numbers and some still photos. While those are convincing its hard to adequately compare the two.
Finally we have the winningest pitcher in the live ball era, Warren Spahn. Pitching from 1942 to 1965, Spahn compiled an unbelievable 363-245 record all while on so-so teams wallowing away in obsurity in Milaukee and later Atlanta and yet he still managed to dominate. Nine top finishes in ERA, 13 20-win season, and unlike Grove he pitched against the best baseball players in the world. Of course, Spahn lacks the domination factor of a Grove or Johnson striking out only 4.43 per nine innings, but what Spahn did better than anyone is dominate over a long run and for a whole lot of innings. Indeed as Johnson famously said to Spahn "Oh, I threw 270 innings and had 12 complete games." Spahn just said, "That's a nice year, Randy, but I did that every year." While Johnson was great in his time for a considerable time it's just hard to compare to Spahn's longetivity. In short, he was just so great for so long its hard to say he wasn't the greatest of all time.
This is hardly a open and shut case and there are virtues for each candidate and more, but I think for me the nod goes to Spahn, but not by much. All three pitchers were amazing in their own right and easily the best of their eras so it really hard to quanatively evaluate all three adequately. That said you can really pick any one of these guys and not be too bad, all three are some of the best the game has ever seen.
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Some Key Terms to Know When Reading
wOBA - a new one I'll be using, short for weighted on-base average is essentially an improvement on OPS. Scaled to average OBP (with .330 the league average) wOBA more properly weighs on-base percentage higher than slugging percentage and more accurately weighs extra base hits (a double isn't worth double of that of a single which is what SLG does) to give a better picture of a batter's worth.
.000/.000/.000 is the industry shorthand for the split stats for batting average, on base percentage, and slugging percentage, in that order, these are some of the more commonly used stats to indicate how productive a hitter is.
OPS - shorthand for On-Base Percentage Plus Slugging is becoming more in vogue in the mainstream media to get a better idea of the raw production of a hitter, instead of saying how often they get a hit OPS shows how productive those hits are.
BABIP - Batting Average on Balls in play, its pretty much what it says, how often that a batter puts in ball in play that it becomes a hit, its a stat that shows if a hitter is just having a lot of bad luck or a hot streak is just fluky. For instance a BABIP of .200 is considered unlucky its not that he's not hitting, he just isn't hitting where the fielders are not there.
OPS+ - as the name implies, OPS+ is OPS but with adjustments to park effects and other outliers to normalize the data. Indeed, as most people know some parks are harder to hit at than others, which this stat compensates for, 100 being the baseline of league average
ERA+ - similar to OPS+ its a more highly sophisticated way of evaluating a pitcher's performance adjusted for park effects, this also is on a numerical basis with 100 as league average.
FIP - short for fielding independent pitching, FIP measures the only aspects of the game that a pitcher has total control over, strikeouts, walks, and home runs. Scaled to ERA, FIP gives a truer indication of a pitcher's true talent by removing the luck apparent with balls in play.
WHIP - Walks and Hits per innings pitched, a little more well known stat, but a good indicator of how effective a pitcher is. Chances are if a guy is walking a lot of guys and giving up a hot of hits, he's not pitching all that well.
xFIP- a variation of FIP which normalizes home run rates as a way to discount aberrational home run rates that are either too high or too low to reasonably sustain.
UZR- Short of Ultimate Zone Rating, this is the number of runs above or below average a fielder is in both range runs and error runs combined. This is a difficult stat to understand because it's not one of those stats you can figure out at home, because it includes a bevy of factors including park effects and speed. As a consequence, its not a perfect stat, but its the best defensive stat we have. Also seen as UZR/150 is the Ultimate Zone rating per 150 games.
RngR - Range Runs is defined as the number of runs above or below average a fielder is, determined by how the fielder is able to get to balls hit in his vicinity. Also not a perfect fielding stat, but one of the many fielding stats that help as as fans get a fuller picture of a player's defensive prowess.
About Me
- burnsie77
- Morristown, NJ, United States
- I write and read everything I can about baseball and have some thoughts about it.