Joe Torre’s Flaw: Bullpen Management

June 19, 2009May 23, 2010Danny Vinik 3 Comments

I was recently reading The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci and I came across this quote:

I was trying to do whatever I could to stay away from Mariano to have him for two innings the next day. Chamberlain got through the seventh with the low pitch count. Now my choice is to go with someone else in the eighth, but if I don’t get a clean inning, then I’ve got to get Mariano up, which was the one thing I was trying to avoid. I guess I never really had enough trust in everybody else down there to think that getting three outs in that spot is so simple

Before dissecting that quotation, let me give some background for you. This was game 3 of the 2007 ALDS where the Yankees were down 2-0 in games to the Cleveland Indians. Entering the 8th inning, New York lead 8-3 and had already used their set-up man Joba Chamberlain in the 7th, throwing 16 pitches. Torre made a critical mistake here by sending Joba back out to the mound to pitch the eighth. Up 5 runs, there was no reason to where Chamberlain’s arm out in a game that was close to out of reach. This wasn’t a two or three run game. It was a five-run game. Using Chamberlain for an inning is fine (especially, considering it was 5-3 at the time), but using him in the eighth was a big mistake. Eventually, Chamberlain faltered in game 4 and the Yanks lost the series. This can all be traced back to Torre’s unwillingness to use the rest of his bullpen. This was not something new in 2007 though. Thinking about Torre’s managerial style, I realized that he has faith in only a couple guys in his bullpen each year. The last sentence in that quote says everything. “I never really had enough trust in everybody else down there”. That’s a big problem over the course of a season and I decided to take a look into Torre’s problem managing his bullpen. Continue reading “Joe Torre’s Flaw: Bullpen Management” →

The 6 Man Rotation: A Good Idea

June 18, 2009May 23, 2010Danny Vinik Leave a comment

The Boston Red Sox are in a very interesting situation right now. They have six (well, actually eight) starting pitchers all who should be pitching in the majors. Yet, no staff in baseball uses a six-man rotation; everyone uses five. There is the solution.

Look at the pitchers they have right now:

Josh Beckett – He is 7-3 with a 4.15 ERA and has 81 strikeouts in 82.1 innings. That doesn’t sound great, but then remember that since the beginning of May, he is 5-1 with a 2.52 ERA. Beckett started slowly, but has gone at least six innings in every outing in the last two months and is back to his dominant form.

Jon Lester – Lester is 5-5 with a 4.76 ERA. Like Beckett though, he is finding his form as he given up just 3 runs in his last 22 innings pitched and has a mind-boggling 34 strikeouts during that span.

Tim Wakefield – Maybe the Red Sox most consistent pitcher so far this season, Wakefield is second in the league in with 9 wins and possesses a 4.39 ERA. He’s tied with Beckett for the team-lead with 9 quality starts (tied for 9th in the American League) Continue reading “The 6 Man Rotation: A Good Idea” →

Raul Ibanez and JROD: What Baseball Needs

June 12, 2009May 23, 2010Danny Vinik Leave a comment

Phillies Padres Baseball Raul Ibanez is having a career year, having already hit 21 home runs and driven in 58 runs. Over his career, Ibanez has averaged 23 homers a year and yet this year he has almost hit that many in less than sixty games. Add to the fact that Ibanez is 37 years old, and something seems a little off here. This is what another blogger, JROD, looked in to in his article The Curious Case of Raul Ibanez: Steroid Speculation Perhaps Unfair, but Great Start in 2009 Raising Eyebrows.

JROD examined Ibanez’s year to the finest detail. He looked at the ballparks in which Ibanez homered in and examined their “HR Factors”. He looked at the dimensions of his new home ballpark since he signed this year with the Phillies in the offseason. He looked at the pitchers that Ibanez had homered off of, checking to see if Ibanez had just seen a lot of bad pitchers early on in the season. As he went through these stats though, nothing stuck out as that out of the ordinary. Certainly there was nothing that would explain the increase Ibanez’s home run rate from a homer every 23.9 plate appearances (2006-2008) to a homer every 12.1 plate appearances.

At the end of this specific, well-researched article, JROD threw out one possible explanation for Ibanez’s dramatic increase in home runs: Steroids. He did not claim that he had any first-hand knowledge that the Phillies’ outfielder was on the juice, but he just said that you cannot ignore that it is a possibility. Unfortunately, baseball has reached the point where great starts like this are not something to be in awe of, but something to be suspicious of. JROD never said that Ibanez used steroids, he just said, “it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that “other” performance enhancers could be part of the equation”. Continue reading “Raul Ibanez and JROD: What Baseball Needs” →