> He let Roger go because he thougth he was over the hill. He let Mo Vaughn go > even though he was a key to the emotional health of the team. He signed and > kept Everett. His stupid moves outweigh his good ones. > > Me again: > While I think he underestimated Roger, he was clearly right about Vaughn. > Underestimated Roger. That is the understatement of the year (well maybe the day). The guy will have won two Cy Young Awards and the two throwing things at Mike Piazza Awards after the Sox let him go.
Me: And he'll actually have deserved one of them - Freddy Garcia was the best pitcher in the AL this year, whoever wins the Cy Young. Me (past): Just look at the disaster that Vaughn has been for the Angels, and tell me that he was worth _$80 million_ which is what his contract was for. Bob: He has been hurt. He meant a lot to the team and the city. You do not let the emotinal centers of your team walk if you want to build a champion. Me (present): His being hurt was eminently predictable. He's old and tremendously out of shape. Why not let the emotional center of your team walk? The Yankees let Babe Ruth walk. It worked out for them. As Charles de Gaulle said, the graveyards are full of indispensable men. The emotional center of the team isn't nearly as important as the hitting center of the team. Vaughn wasn't worth anything remotely like $80M. He was a somewhat-better-than-average first baseman. We're not talking about Frank Thomas or Mark McGwire here, for goodness sakes. > Now wait a minute young man. Best ever. How about Gibson, Kofax, Guidry (at > his peak) Roger himself, Whitey. Give me a break. He is the best active > pitcher not doubt about it. But the best ever? > I really, really mean this - it's not even close. Bob: I know you really mean it but that doesn't mean I have to believe it. Me: Yes, but you have to provide some data to back up your assertions, and I still haven't seen any. Me: You're just naming names here, Bob. Bob: Hey I watched Ken Burn's "Baseball". Seriously. I have named the names of players I have watched pitch. Kofax was unbeatable as was Gibson in the games I remember (mostly WS stuff). So is Pedro but not as consistently in big spots. I think the Yankess think (with reason) that they can win games Pedro pithces in; some how some way; that was not true for Kofax. I remember what the Yankees said about him. They were utterly defeated. Note that I am not arguing Pedro's greatness just that I don't think he has proven himself better than those I have mentioned and some I have forgotten. As to Guidry. He had one year when he was unhitable. He didn't bother to waste pitches on 0 and 2 counts just kept throwing is slider and fast ball. Pedro had two totally dominant years. But his team did not win the championship and he did not drag them there. To be the best ever, ever, you must do that. Think about it for a minure. You like stats. What are the odds that anyone playing now is the best at his position? Better than an yone who played the game for the past 120 years? I may be a Yankee fan but you are a "present fan". Me: To take your points in reverse order: Actually, the odds are very high that someone playing now is the best ever at his position. Think about it. The population from which baseball players are drawn now is the largest it has ever been, while modern surgical techniques mean that injuries that used to be career-ending can be overcome in months. The combination of the two means that the baseball talent base is deeper than it has ever been. Modern players would blow away old timers without even putting up a sweat. The old timers didn't begin to have access to the techniques that make modern players so good. What is more surprising is that there are players as dominant as there appear today. But they do, it's statistically inarguable. I note - playing this season were: Barry Bonds - the best left fielder of all time, period, and maybe someday soon the second best player of all time Alex Rodriguez - will probably retire as the best shortstop of all time, and has an outside chance of retiring as the best player since Babe Ruth Cal Ripken Jr. - currently the second best shortstop of all time (behind Honus Wagner) Roger Clemens - a plausible candidate for best pitcher of all time by the time he retires Greg Maddux - a pitcher who is almost as good as Clemens, and had perhaps the best four year streak of any pitcher ever when he won four consecutive Cy Youngs Pedro Martinez - again, the most dominant pitcher of all time :-) Rickey Henderson - the best leadoff hitter of all time, and the fourth best left fielder Mark McGwire - probably the second best first baseman of all time (after Lou Gehrig) Mike Piazza - the best-hitting catcher of all time by a very large margin There are probably some other candidates. But modern ballplayers are better than their counterparts, and the pool of talent today is vastly larger than that of any other time in history. Babe Ruth, in his entire career, never saw a slider, a circle changeup, or a split-finger fastball. They hadn't been invented yet. Much more importantly, he never saw a black player. Pedro Martinez is from the Dominican Republic - two generations ago he could never have played in the majors. The sheer size of the talent pool means that it's a virtual certainty that many of the best players ever are playing today. In absolute terms there's no question - everyone in the majors would have been an all-star fifty years ago, in just the same way that very good high school students now run 4:00 miles when it was impossible for anyone decades ago. But in relative terms as well, some of the best players ever are playing _right now_. We are living in the greatest talent explosion in baseball history. As for Pedro not being in big spots. Koufax had the advantage of one of the best _hitting_ teams in baseball behind him. As did all of the other pitchers you cite. Look at Clemens this year - he's 20-3 because he's averaged _almost 7 runs per game_ of run support. It's not Pedro's fault that his team can't hit. As for his big game performance - it would be hard to name a playoff performance superior to his in 1999, and this with an injured back. Mike Mussina in 1997 was close, I suppose, but not his equal. There have been others, certainly, but in his one chance at a sequence of really big games he did every bit as well as any other pitcher in history. I don't quite see how it's possible to argue that he doesn't perform well in big games when, the one time he got a chance, he was unbeatable. MeL Again, that's not analysis. His two most dominant seasons are the two most dominant seasons _ever_ by a pitcher, in terms of the > number of runs he allowed versus those that an average pitcher would have > allowed. Bob: I repeat, there is a realistic lower limit on ERA. I would argue that anyone under 2.00 in any era is a great pitcher. Bob: You understand that that argument makes Pedro look better, not worse? There is a realistic lower limit on ERA, and Pedro approached it in the highest offensive explosion in history. Koufax put up 1.6 ERAs when the league ERA was below 3. Pedro did it when the league ERA was above 4. Which is more impressive? It is also, again, statistically possible to measure this difference in performance fairly easily - use standard deviations. Pedro was more standard deviations superior to the mean pitcher than any other pitcher in history in terms of adjusted ERA in 2000. He was just that good. Is Pedro the best pitcher in history? No, because his > career hasn't been long enough. I'd probably pick Whitey Ford, but Roger > Clemens just might end up with that title by the end of his career. He's > well on his way. But his two peak seasons - 1999 and 2000 - were the two > most dominant seasons by any pitcher ever. Bob: The stats you site are of course interesting and revealing but stats are used in an attempt to characterize past performance so that future performance can be predicted. Kind of like economic indicators. The numbers don't lie but they may not capture the important element in any system. Me: Not sure what this has to do with your argument, but the nice thing about stats is precisely that they allow us to capture the most important elements of the system in a way that subjective judgments cannot. The stats aren't deceived by fallible memories or wishful thinking. The numbers are the numbers. The sabermetric community actually has _peer-reviewed_ journals, for goodness sake. It's hard to aspire to a higher standard of reliability. > Me: > Jeter is a very, very good player. Bob: He has too many errors but he has great range and makes the big play. You can't have seen him play every day and argue that he is a poor fielder. Me: What he absolutely does not have is good range. He has _terrible_ range. He just looks very good. Defensive performance is almost impossible to judge by eye, because the most important component of defense is the _first step_ - when you're still looking at the batter. Not the last step, when you're looking at the fielder. I note that it is very hard to judge statistically also, but the stats are more revealing than judging by eye. Furthermore, there's selection bias. You only remember the plays he makes, not the plays that he does not. Jeter looks extremely impressive, but in fact he should be playing third base - as, I should point out, Cashman realizes and has been very quietly saying. But he is a phenomenal shortstop, because he hits the snot out of the ball. Me: Who all of this underserves is Alex Rodriguez, who is so > far superior to the other two that even comparing him isn't fair. Bob: I think this may be one case when we really are seeing the best ever at a position. It is his power that seperates him from the great shortstops of the past. But note. He was with Seatle for many years. They were a very good team but not good enough. He is gone and Seatle survived quite well thank you very much. Texas has not faired nearly as well. Jeter had a poor first half. He was hurt for most of it. He has been phenomenal in the second half of the year. Let me give you the penultimate anti-stat guy. Larry Bird. He had very ordinary stats (ordinary for a superstar) poor 3 pt % but trust me as a Knick Fan I can tell you that if he made one in three each one of them put a dagger through the heart of the knicks or the lakers or whoever else he was playing. That is what stats can't capture; part of what I think you see as "luck". The key play. It is nice to know how many runs a player drives in the ninth inning of games. But even a good stat like that may not capture the fact that the ninth inning of some games are more important than the ninth inning of key games. Me: I have already argued that basketball and baseball are so different that you can't analogize from one to the other. As for the ninth inning - well, a good team can score enough runs in the first 8 that the ninth doesn't matter. Let me ask you a simple question. Do the great teams win close games? I happen to know the answer, but I'm curious as to what you will say :-) If you are right, and the great teams are "clutch", then great teams (like the 1998 Yankees) should win 1-run games with at least the same frequency as they had for all games over the course of the season. Me: A 7-game series is always going to be nothing more than a flip of the coin. Bob: But then why have a championship at all. Seven games is actually quite a few. Football has one game. To get to the last 7 games you have to get through the LCS etc. This is not luck. but it is a different game than the regular season. Now you could argue that the regular season is more important but that is not how we judge and not how the players judge success. Winning the championship is all that is important. Me: Because baseball is different than other sports. In football the better team probably wins 95% of the time. The same thing in basketball. But in baseball the best team in the league playing the worst might not win 80% of the games. The best playing the second best, it's going to be much closer. Close enough that it's just a flip of the coin. Do the math yourself, Bob. If the Yankees have, say, a 60% chance of beating the team they're playing in the world series in any given game, the odds are still fairly high that they'll lose. There's even a 2.56% chance that they'll be _swept_ by the opposing team. 60% is surely too high. A team that wins 60% of its games in the regular season will win 97.2 games - or almost certainly make the playoffs, and most years be the best team in the league. So a very good team has a 60% chance of beating mediocre competition - surely it doesn't have as high a chance of beating the second best team in the majors. Winning the championship is emotionally more important. I would certainly rather the Orioles had won 5 fewer games in 1997 but won the world series. I've never argued otherwise. I was far happier the year my state team won the championship when we were an inferior team than I was the year we came in second but were, in both my opinion and that of many who saw us play, probably the best team ever. _But_ I don't think winning the championship necessarily tells you who the best team is. There's no way on this earth that the 1997 Marlins were the best team in baseball. They were just lucky. The regular season tells you who the best team is far better than the postseason. Me: The Orioles were lucky in 1997 - good, and lucky. The Yankees > were phenomenally good in 1998. In 2000 they were lucky. Oakland was a > better team. Bob: They have yet to demonstrate that they are a better playoff team than the Yankees. They may very well be. We will see how they handle the pressure. How they handle the game within a game that goes on in championship series. Me: I do think that the playoffs may be somewhat different than the regular season, largely in that I guess that managers and bullpens become more important - one reason that the Yankees have done quite well. But that's almost certainly less important than the simple factor of random luck. Me: Winning teams are usually lucky. Last year the Yankees > weren't very good. Bob: They were good when they had to be. Me: Or they were lucky. If Terrence Long had caught that flyball in Game 5, then we wouldn't be having this discussion. Gautam
