The Second Coming of the Second Baseman

Brett Lawrie is back today, apparently, and will be playing at second base, as opposed to his usual third.  This isn't a huge surprise-- he was playing 2B in Buffalo during his rehab assignment and we all heard about it and reacted.  So what's the plan here?

Is Lawrie at 2B for good?  Is it a good thing?  He's certainly athletic enough to play second, given how well he plays third, and of course the bat plays a little better there as well, given how low replacement-level is among second basemen across the league.  I feel like putting him at 2B is a big of a waste of the arm, though I suppose he's made enough throwing errors over the past few years that whatever.

I think the bigger part of this, however, is the idea that replacing 2B internally allows AA to go dip within a larger market and find a suitable upgrade for the lineup.  There is a much larger market for quality third basemen than there is for second basemen.  And after all, if AA does decide that he wants to upgrade, and he finds a 2B, Lawrie can just slide back over to third.

A quick look at the 2B market shows a 34-year old, oft-injured Chase Utley, and not much else.  Second base is pretty barren these days.  If we're looking for bad offense and mediocre defense at 2B, we've got Kawasaki, Izturis and Bonifacio already, so there's no real need to go out and trade for another one.

The 3B market doesn't have a whole lot more, but there are some pretty good options if available.  The Padres have somehow not extended Chase Headley yet, and he's going to be nice and expensive in his last year of club control, given his $8.5MM salary this year.  San Diego currently sits 8.5 games out of the division lead (not that the Jays are doing much better), so if they choose to move Headley, they should get a pretty big return on their investment.  Beyond Headley, Aramis Ramirez is there as well, despite the fact that he shouldn't be playing third base anymore.  He'll be making $16MM next season, plus he has a $4MM buyout on a club option for 2015.  I'm sure Milwaukee would be ecstatic to move that contract, given the fact that they're worse than the Cubs at this point in the year.  Michael Young would probably be an overall upgrade over Bonifacio or Izturis or whatever, even with the shit defense.  Despite his $16MM salary, he should only cost a prorated $6MM (slightly less than $3), thanks to Texas paying $10MM of that.

Obviously they'll need another big winning streak after the break, but if the Jays can line up a bunch of wins together, AA might find himself looking to acquire a third baseman to upgrade second base.

Familiar Patterns, or Fun with Arbitrary Endpoints

I'm not sure if you remember this guy.  He looks a lot like the guy who was tearing the cover off the ball for about a month or so not too long ago, but it isn't.  It's actually a guy who I've pleaded and begged the Jays' front office to DFA and give up on about a hundred times.  That guy, right up there, is Adam Lind, at some point in 2011 or earlier, when he was terrible at baseball (from an MLB standpoint).

Lind had a good season in 2009.  We all knew this already.  In 2010-2012, he hit .246/.296/.428 and walked 99 times over 1400+ plate appearances.  We also knew that, to an extent.  That's probably decent production for a shortstop, catcher, and maybe a CF who plays good defense.  Not for a 1B/DH, who doesn't even do that well.

Ok, great.  We've beaten the "Adam Lind sucked from 2010-2012" horse long past it's time, regardless of how frustrated we were.  But it's 2013 now, and Adam Lind is good, with a .316/.375/.528 slash line.  All is forgiven, right?

Well, I wouldn't say so.  You see, I quite enjoy being the bearer of bad news, and am typically the first to point out that I atodaso.  Trailer Park Boys has been confirmed for an 8th season, by the way.

Lind's hot start was probably due to a multitude of different things; I can't really say a whole lot about the approach, any health concerns or lack thereof, or mental and physical fatigue, but here's an interview where he addresses that kind of thing.  As far as quantifiable evidence goes, though, we can see that Lind has a .363 babip on the year, versus a .299 career average, and a 9.3% walk rate, versus a 6.9% career rate.  It probably helps that he was being shielded for a little while against lefties, because he does mash righties pretty well, and being put in a position to succeed rather than fail is always good for a player. As result of all these things (or some of them? none of them?), his batting average and OBP are way up, his isolated slugging is kinda sorta approaching his 2009 one, and altogether, he has a 144 wRC+.

Just watching games early on, I can remember thinking things like "Man, Lind's approach seems a lot better.  He's not just flailing away at everything and SWANGING at everything trying to crush it.  He's waiting for strikes and letting garbage go and actually walking some."  I said something like this, live, from the 500 level on April 21, the day he went 0-for-0 with 4 walks.

About that.

Lind's OBP peaked at .423, June 8th.  From June 9th to present, Lind has walked once, and is batting .268/.274/.537 since.  Sure, that's an .810 OPS, which is certainly effective, in the sense that he's not JP Arencibia.  But on June 8th, Lind had a 13% walk rate, and in a month, that's dropped down to a 9.1% clip.  In other words, a guy with a 13% walk rate went ahead and walked in 1.1% of his plate appearances over a not terribly small sample.*

*According to that link, Lind's 13%  through his first 180-something plate appearances should be pretty stable, or at least stable enough that his true walk rate shouldn't be miles from it over his next random cluster of 84.  Given his career totals, I don't think there was ever any reason to expect him to stay consistent at 13%, per se, but he probably shouldn't go down to 1% over his next ~100 either.

Need more?  Lind had a .387 babip from the start of the year through June 8th.  That's down, slightly, since then to .363.  Since June 9th, Lind's babip is a much more in-line-with-his-career-and-skillset .296, and his slash line over that span looks awfully familiar to his 2010-2012 one mentioned above.

I know that it's not incredibly useful to just look at 20 games and jettison the rest of the season, but I think we've all been agreeing with each other over the last three years, and the little streak he had against lefties early on was just that.  I mean, Vernon Wells would have gone to the all-star game if it were the Mid-April Classic for crying out loud.  Blips happen. Baseball is really random sometimes.

46 PA v. LHP, 213 v. RHP

We shouldn't need to regress the RHP numbers too much-- they're slightly better this year, but nothing outrageous-- but the LHP numbers need to be heavily regressed.  It's a pretty small sample, obviously, but DIPS theory is going to prevail on this one, and I just want everyone to be ready.  I just hope we can get everyone back on the "platoon Lind" train before someone blows a gasket.  Bargaining before depression.

Playoffs?!?

Well I'll start off by saying this: Do not blame that game on the pitching, okay?  I don't care who you play.  Whether it's a little league team, The Tacoma Rainiers, The UNLV Runnin' Rebels-- much less an MLB team; when you make three errors; two in the second inning, one that led directly to a 2-out, 2-run HR, two others to put guys in scoring position-- you ain’t going to beat anybody I just talked about. Anybody. All right?

And that was a disgraceful performance in my opinion. We threw that game. We gave it away by doing that. We gave them the friggin’ game. In my opinion, that sucked. Ah. You know? You can’t give the Detroit Tigers five outs in the second inning like that. Holy crap! I don’t know who the hell we think we are when we do something like that. Unbelievable. Three errors. One of them for-- Emilio Bonifacio has made 7 errors in a part-time role, not to mention his .244 wOBA this year. That might be an MLB record! And we’ve still got eighty games left, so there’s no telling how many he’ll have. That’s pitiful! I mean, it’s absolutely pitiful to perform like that. Pitiful!

What's that? Uh-- Playoffs?!  Don't talk about-- playoffs?!  You kiddin' me?  Playoffs?  I just hope we can win a game. Another 40 games.

Yet to See the Dream Team

This isn't just me saying something Jeff Blair-ish.  I'm not saying something like "Well, AA went out and spent all this money and all these prospects, and we haven't seen the results we wanted because they lost a bunch of games at the start of the year and now I'm sad and we should abandon until next year" or whatever.

No, this is actually a literal statement.  All the guys AA went and got to be on his team have yet to play a single game together with the guys that he deemed good enough to stay on the team and carry it to victory.  Obviously Johnson and Dickey and Morrow are never going to be in the same lineup, but beyond that.

I'm talking mostly of the guys with some star power.  Jose Reyes, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion, Josh Johnson, RA Dickey, Brandon Morrow, Brett Lawrie, Mark Buehrle and Melky Cabrera are the big pieces, while everyone else is a complement to them (though Adam Lind has stepped it up pretty hard).

Of the pitchers, only Buehrle has been healthy all year.  Dickey hasn't missed time, per se, but has struggled with neck and back pain, while Morrow and Johnson have both been on the DL.  Lawrie started the year on the DL, and wasn't back until well after Reyes hit the shelf.  Even with Reyes back, Lawrie is back on the DL, and Melky has joined him.  Beyond that, Bautista and Edwin have both, along with Adam Lind, missed time with day-to-day issues.

I don't really know what my point is here.  I guess I just wanted to point out that we're halfway through the season, and we still haven't seen a single game with the whole crew that was assembled.  Maybe I should research and compare other teams' success levels with the amount of injuries they sustain, but I'd be surprised if there weren't all kinds of data out there already that would suggest that the more games your best players play, the more wins you'd get, but whatever.

I guess sometimes not everything that comes to my brain needs to be said.

Maicer's Mirage, Or Why Chase Utley Needs to Happen

That doesn't look like Maicer Izturis, and it looks like it's autographed by a guy named Abe Stewart or something.

Maicer Izturis didn't exactly hit the ground running this year in his first games as a Blue Jay.  He and Emilio Bonifacio pretty much tried to test each other to see who could be less competent at second base over the spring, and that battle stretched in to the regular season, to the point where Brett Lawrie was being tested out at second instead of third during his rehab from his first injury.  Izturis' was below the Mendoza line in April, and wasn't much better in May (.232/.283/.339).

If, however, you've been watching Jays games on TV, you would have noticed that Buck Martinez hasn't shut the hell up about how well Maicer Izturis is playing lately, both offensively and defensively.  Obviously a 10-or-15-game streak isn't going to completely override a horrific start such as the one Izutris had unless he did something ridiculous like hit .600/.700/.950 or whatever.  He definitely hasn't done that, but he's been a little better of late.

At one point this year, Izturis was clocking in at a handy -1.1 WAR (I think you're just going to have to take my word on this one, since I don't know if I can retroactively look something like that up on Fangraphs or not and probably won't try since we've got a reasonable idea of how pointless that would be).  Since that mystery date about three weeks ago, Izturis has raised that figure up to -0.9 WAR.  Couldn't be happier.

I knew that replacement level at 2B was low, but I didn't think it was this low.  I mean, if Muni can be worth 0.8 fWAR over 60 games with an empty .336 OBP, then the world is crying for shortstops.  Shortstop is, naturally, harder to play than 2B, so that makes sense.  Anyway, Izturis, over his last arbitrarily selected 16 games, has hit .328/.344/.508 (babip of .360) to bring his season line up to .237/.271/.348, or a 67wRC+.

Fangraphs says that Izturis has been worth -7.4 fielding runs to the Jays, and his baserunning has cost them another run or so.  Call that -8.5 runs, which translates to right around -0.8 WAR, depending on just how outdated that runs/10 formula is (I've read that using 9 instead of 10 is probably a little more accurate given the success of the pythagenpat and Clay Davenport formulae).

Maicer Izturis' has been terrible this year, save for his last cherry-picked 16 games.  Maicer Izturis' bat has been replacement level.  Sweet Jesus.

On Win Streaks

So Annie Edison is a Jays fan, or a bandwagon jumper.

Anyway.

Jeff Sullivan at Fangraphs had a look at 11+ game winning streaks since 1970, and as Jeff is wont to do, he did a great job at writing something that was kind of funny and pretty informative and all that good stuff that makes the things that people read worth reading.

I had a similar idea that I had been sitting on, but then I forgot until I read that, but now that I've read that, I kind of want to expand on it in my own little way.

More or less, what I was going to do was really just look at teams that had done well over the last few years, and find their longest streaks of the year and go from there or something.  I don't think we would have learned a whole lot though-- we all know that streaks make up such a small portion of a season, and even a scattered loss sandwiched in between 10 wins is almost as good as 11 straight.  Winning 11 straight and then playing .500 ball for the rest of the month isn't really all that different than, say, winning 3 and then losing 1 over and over for a month.  The streak itself doesn't matter so much as just losing less in general over a large sample.

Jeff sorta points that out in his 2004 Tampa example there, I guess, but yeah.  The thing I'm really curious about is the mediocre teams from the last few years.  Good teams are going to go on big rushes of wins, and bad teams are less likely to do so.  Jeff's point is very valid, in that we shouldn't ignore the Jays' poor start just because there's a hot-streak going on here, but stashed within that point is that the Jays might very well be an average-or-so team who just happen to have won 11 straight.  I dunno.  I mean, everyone picked them to win the division before the year, which, granted, is super common to say of the team who has the most active offseason (Miami in 2012 anyone?), and they were projected to get 95 wins or whatever.

In 2012, there weren't a whole lot of teams that were mediocre; teams seemed to really only be good or terrible.  Probably had a lot to do with mediocre teams punting the post-deadline games, but who knows, really?

The White Sox won 85 games, including 9 in a row beginning May 23rd (or 13 of 15 starting May 17) and 9 of 12 starting .  They also lost 10 of their last 14 to finish the season and blow any chance of catching the Tigers.

The Phillies were 81-81, which is probably the definition of mediocre.  Perhaps I need to brush up on my English though.  Either way, they were pretty bad in the first half of the year, and traded away a few pieces, only to play well down the stretch and finish up at .500.  Their last 42 games included 26 wins (.619 win%), but they never won or lost more than 6 in a row at any point. The problem was that they had multiple stretches of losing 4 of 5, 5 of 6, or 7 of 10.

Milwaukee finished with 83 wins, with a huge streak coming down the stretch.  The low point of their year was a 1-9 stretch beginning July 21.  On July 27th, they traded their ace, Zack Greinke, to the Angels for prospects, one of whom being starting SS Jean Segura.  They finished the year playing 34-20 (.629), without ever winning more than 6 in a row.  That doesn't make any sense.

Pittsburgh embarrassed themselves over the last month or so of 2012, winning 7 of their last 23.  They had separate losing streaks of 4, 5, and 7 in September alone.  They also won 15 of 21 heading in to the all-star break.  They didn't make any big trades or anything-- Acquiring Wandy Rodriguez at the deadline was the biggest one-- so the fall from grace wasn't really expected or anything, they just started sucking or something.

Arizona is probably the wackiest case in this study.  Just look.  Win 3, lose 5, win 6, lose 6 of 7.  Crazy that they were never any farther than 4 games above or below .500 after May 16th.

So our sample of 5 cherry-picked teams kind of leads us to believe that, yeah, teams can streak a little.  As is often the case when I try to do something like this, I don't have access to a large enough database to make any worthwhile conclusions here, which largely defeats the purpose of doing this at all.  I know this already.  Going through individual seasons on baseball-reference is tedious.

I dunno, that's pretty much it.  I can't really prove it empirically or anything, and maybe I'm biased, but I think Jeff is downplaying the usefulness of an 11-gamer when evaluating teams and that's really just my opinion and not much else.  Nothing against Jeff; he's smarter than me.  He includes a table that illustrates that a significant percentage of teams that have had 11-game win streaks, from a historical standpoint, weren't <.500 teams.  I doubt many started the year as shittily as the Jays did this year, mind you, but he's the one with access to the data.

Go Time: Going Streaking

This is fun.

I went golfing yesterday and then got drunk, so I didn't see the (compressed version of) game until this morning.  Bautista hitting that jack off O'Day was poetry.  Time to crank it up to 11.  One louder.

And it gets better!  Freddy Garcia pitches for the Orioles today!  I say that despite the fact that he's won consecutive starts against the Jays, but whatever, 14 hits over 11 innings shouldn't get the job done.

Those 14 hits over 11 innings probably do a lot to explain the outlying strand rate of 83%, and the 6.50 FIP Garcia is sporting for the season, albeit over a sample of just 50 innings.  And really, what would an Orioles' pitching staff be without some unsustainable success?

I mean, I get solid defense and everything-- Manny Machado has been worth 1.5 fWAR counting only his defense, and JJ Hardy, Alexi Casilla and Ryan Flaherty have all been pretty solid as well, so babips for pitchers are certainly going to be a bit lower than average.  Even still, I see some pretty glaring red flags here, in that this is a team with a 42-33 record and a rotation full of guys who have FIP's in the mid-4's, save for Wei-Yin Chen, who has suppressed homeruns at an astounding rate for a fly-ball pitcher in a bandboxey park.

I sound like a broken record, I'm sure, but the O's are going to break.

As for stuff, The Mariners have DFA'ed former Blue Jay Eric Thames.  Thames, of course, isn't Travis Snider, but was traded for Steve Delabar, in what has become one of the more hilarious schemes that AA has pulled off in his time.  Of course, at the time, the deal was perfectly fine for both sides, in that Thames had some upside if he could ever not hack at balls outside the zone, and that Delabar had a 30-year old robotically repaired arm.

BBB looks back at the 2008 Jays 10-game winning streak down the stretch.

Lineups
Jays
Melky
Bautista
Edwin
Lind
Rasmus
JPA
Izturis
Bonifacio
Muni

Johnson

Orioles
McLouth
Machado
Markakis
Jones
Davis
Weiters
Hardy
Dickerson
Flaherty

Garcia