6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

More On Prior

Will Carroll fired off a special e-mail alert about Mark Prior's injury; there's no damage beyond the listed bad news, but if the Cubs choose to be "cautious", his season is over. The Cubs may designate swingman Todd Wellemeyer to take Prior's place in the rotation. The 26-year-old Wellemeyer has a 2005 record of 1-0 with a 1.35 ERA in 13.1 IP.

Lies, Damned Lies

From Neil de Mause's "Lies, Damned Lies: Revisiting PECOTA", we learn that

• Regarding the Orioles' startling second baseman Brian Roberts:

  I think we're looking at a guy who is probably among the 15 or 20 best players in baseball going forward. ... The precedent that I think works reasonably well here is Jim Edmonds, who did not hit for much power until he was 25 or so, but did a lot of other things pretty well, and didn't look back once he did start hitting the longball.

• Eric Chavez:

  Chavez was my MVP pick prior to the start of the season, and he has no obviously exploitable problems in his profile, except for his persistent problems against lefties (Chavez isn't hitting lefties this year, but he isn't hitting righties either). The base hits at least have come back during the past ten days or so and it's tempting to wonder whether there was some kind of undiagnosed injury problem at the start of the season. This exercise is not kind to Chavez, lopping a full 25 points off his long-term EqA projection, but I'm going to go on record as saying that I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt, and will be fine long-term.

• Jim Thome: "Players with this profile tend to lose it all at once--look at Mark McGwire...."
• Adrian Beltre:

  Some preliminary work that I've done suggests that flukish performance in contract years is a real phenomenon. Statheads might be guilty at times of treating ballplayers as automatons but economic theory suggests that players really do have every incentive to post the very best numbers they can when free agency is impending, especially in a world where one good season nets a player a $64 million deal that is widely lauded as a bargain.

  Whatever the reasons for Beltre's performance, it's virtually impossible that a player with a player with a "true" EqA on the order of the .332 that Beltre posted last year could have a run of performance this bad, even over just seven weeks or so: [graph excised]

  Beltre's revised EqA estimate is at .263, which is almost exactly at the baseline he'd established between 2001 and 2003, when his growth appeared to have stagnated. I see absolutely no reason to take anything other than the Occam's Razor explanation: Beltre's 2004 was one of the biggest one-year flukes in baseball history.

  That seems to be the rapidly converging wisdom around the blogosphere; another writer who recently came to this conclusion was Derek Zumsteg of U.S.S. Mariner slagging on him in the Seattle Press-Intelligencer:

  Beltre's striking out five times for every time he's getting a walk. He's being rung up over and over without taking the free pass. And with his power missing, pitchers aren't afraid to keep coming right after him -- and Beltre's watching a lot of those pitches go by, and not putting the bat on the ones he goes after.

  Theories abound. Beltre is vulnerable to low, outside pitches, chasing the unhittable. Did an injury he had last year keep him from diving after those pitches then, curtailing a bad habit developed over seasons? Or are umpires calling more outside strikes, frustrating him into swinging at balls he couldn't hit with a palm tree? Either way, couldn't hitting coach Don Baylor just have someone throw Beltre low, outside pitches over and over until the kid stops going after them?

Angels UTK Update

Will Carroll's "Under the Knife", yesterday (forgot, sorry):

Reader K.B. wrote in with this: "It absolutely kills me that the LA/OC/Anaheim media didn't get on Scioscia more for sending Vladimir Guerrero all the way from first when they had a 4-0 and thus, resulting in is injury that is going to sideline him for another 2-3 weeks. Of course some journalist questioned that call, to which Scioscia replied something like, 'If I had to do again, I would send him every time.' I am not even sure I know what that means but honestly, let's have a little bit more accountability. Anyone have any numbers on how many runs the Angels can expect to not get now as a result of this injury? Was the ONE RUN with a 4-0 lead really worth it?"

Tom Gorman did some amazing research that answers this common "How screwed are we?" question and others like it. For this one, Tom's system tells us that, no, the one run was certainly not worth it in isolation. While there were certainly other factors and no one has a slide rule in the third-base coaching box, we can look at this objectively. Assuming that Guerrero comes back at the 15-game minimum, the Angels stand to lose 4.77 runs. That's the difference between Guerrero's .276 expected runs per game and the -0.042 that Juan Rivera would be expected to contribute per game, plus some technical adjustments. So, a DL stint for an elite-level player with a near average player like Rivera is worth about a half game in the standings.

Regarding Escobar:

The Angels are tossing a grenade out on the mound every time they let Kelvim Escobar pitch. Sure, that could be said about most pitchers, but for Escobar, he's pitching with a bone spur that's already significant enough to cause problems in the elbow. It will need surgery, a procedure everyone hopes will wait until the off-season. Baseball is all about the calculated risk. For Escobar's sake, let's hope his elbow doesn't crap out.