Tag Baseball

Designing A New Baseball Stadium

Danny Vinik 2 Comments

With the recent opening of Citi Field and New Yankee Stadium, I began thinking about what is necessary to build a great baseball stadium. I’m not talking about big concourses or large aisles. I’m talking about what will give my team the ultimate home field advantage. Baseball is amazing in that the field you play on is different from every other field in baseball. There are no standard regulations like every other sport. No football, hockey, or basketball team can make their field, rink, or court a different shape or size. Baseball teams have the freedom to do that and yet many decide not to do so. Let’s take a look at the best ways to design a stadium for the greatest home field advantage.

  1. The Field Shape. Make one field very short so that you can stack your team with hitters for that field and have a lineup that will put up huge numbers at home. Fenway Park in Boston has the Green Monster just 310 feet from home plate and they stack their lineup with right-handed hitters. Kevin Youkilis, Dustin Pedroia, Mike Lowell,  Jason Bay, and Jason Varitek (Switch) all rack up doubles by hitting balls off the wall that would be caught in others. Yankee Stadium and the New Yankee Stadium both have the short porch in left field. The Yankees stack their lineup with lefties such as Johnny Damon, Robinson Cano, Hideki Matsui, Mark Teixeira (Switch), and Jorge Posada (Switch). The Yankees and Red Sox offenses are built upon their home ballparks, because they play 82 games at home. Building a symmetrical park eliminates the opportunity to build a lineup designed for your home park. Continue reading “Designing A New Baseball Stadium” →

Joe Torre’s Flaw: Bullpen Management

Danny 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

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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” →