Tuesday, April 26, 2005 |
Angels Notes
A Really Rankin', Base Production: Morales, Again
You better not pitch'cause Kendry Morales is comin' to town, or so imputes the Times. No, really:
You better not swing
You better not bitch
I'm tellin' you why --
"I'm hearing we're in the final stages," Reagins said. "Things are looking like they're headed in the right direction. We think we're close — but, every time we say we're close, we get another hurdle to overcome."
OBP? What's That?
I had some guys in my catty little comment on the A's offense suggest that "there's something to all this 'productive outs' stuff after all..." Well, not really; given two teams with roughly equivalent OBP but one of whom gets more of its OBPs from hits, the better-hitting team will win more ballgames. This trenchant observation underpins the Angels' lineup construction, something Tim Brown defends today:Scioscia's Angels, on a choppy course through three weeks, are 11-8 and again lead the American League West, which they won on the next-to-last afternoon of last season. They are again what they are; on-base poor, scoring-position rich, contact-driven and extra-base ambitious.If anything, what this shows is that the Angels could stand to take a cue from what the A's would do if they had the money to buy a Vlad Guerrero, and that is, buy another one. We've got, as it stands, Dallas McPherson, but his small-sample-sized .158/.200/.211 (19 AB) make it clear he's not up to snuff just yet against major league pitching. It might take him a year or two to really adjust, too.Perhaps little of it makes sense to some of the statistical gatekeepers of the new generation, or aligns with the philosophies in the pages of "Moneyball," but it reveals Scioscia's Dodger upbringing, and is particularly convenient at a time when Scioscia's lineup offers almost no alternative.
The season after the Angels walked and struck out fewer times than any team in the American League, led the league in stolen bases and committed its fewest errors, they are again on the same track, playing away from many of the Moneyball tenets, of walks and on-base percentage and conservative baserunning and letting the defense fall where it may.
Brown and I aren't the only ones to notice the consequences of the Angels' power outage, either. The team unloads two of their best hitters (Glaus and Guillen) and they're wondering why they're stumbling out of the gate? It's a problem Halo's Heaven bemoaned when noting Tim Salmon's absence this year:
The one thing we could use is a player with a career average 1.000+ OPS, someone who's averaged 25 - 30 homers a season.The way I see it, either D-Mac heats up or the team starts finding ways to get Rivera some more at bats. Jeff DaVanon is a poor choice for a DH, especially since hitting is never something he's done all that well.This team misses TIM SALMON. Percy was old, Glaus fragile, Eckstein limited. But if Righty Salmon were healthy and simply DHing, batting 5th behind Lefty Garret (followed L-R-L-R by Frosty, Cabfare, D-Mac and J/B Molina), this team would certainly be scoring more runs.
: 4/26/2005 12:07:00 PMIf Moneyball were written today, it would be a much different book. Moneyball was written by an economist. The baseball in it is merely an example of a larger economic theory applied to the acquisition of baseball players. It just happens that walks (and therefore OBP) were undervalued in the baseball market at the time of the book.
: 4/26/2005 02:57:00 PM36 years old. Missed 170 games over the past 4 seasons. Hit .253/.306/.323 when he managed to get on the field. Check, check, and check.
Anon:
I think you're right about Moneyball. Billy Beane and Micheal Lewis have said as much. It's entirely likely that at some point in the future speed will become as undervalued as OBP was at the turn of the century. But that time isn't now - just look at the deals given to Womack and the price paid by the Sox for Podsednik.
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