Walk Like a Sabermetrician

* I used to get emails when there were comments awaiting moderation. This stopped at some point, and so there were a handful of non-spam comments that had been lingering for some time. I want to thank Tango Tiger and David Pinto (along with a couple anonymous readers) for their comments and apologize for neglecting to publish them until now.

* I’ve watched the overwhelming majority of playoff games played since 1997, and I think Game 5 of the TB/NYA ALDS was possibley one of the ten best games I remember. I say I think because a) recency bias is real and 2) I haven’t sat down and comprehensively reviewed past games to make sure I didn’t miss any. Some that stood out off the top of my head are:

1997 ALDS Game 4 (CLE/NYA)

1997 ALCS Game 6 (CLE/BAL)

1999 NLCS Game 5 (NYN/ATL)

2001 WS Game 7 (ARI/NYA)

2003 ALCS Game 7 (NYA/BOS)

2004 ALCS Game 4 (BOS/NYA)

2005 NLDS Game 4 (HOU/ATL)

2005 NLCS Game 5 (STL/HOU)

2006 NLCS Game 7 (STL/NYN)

2011 WS Game 6 (STL/TEX)

2012 NLDS Game 4 (WAS/STL)

2017 WS Game 5 (HOU/LA)

I think the Rays/Yankees tilt belongs in the company of those games. So imagine my surprise when I perused some comments online and saw people using the game as an occasion to recite their evergreen complaints about modern baseball, particularly in this case focused on the fact that the game wasn’t decided by the starting pitchers, and that all of the runs scored on home runs.

In looking at the above list of eleven games that were particularly memorable, you know what I can tell you about only a handful of them – the identities of the starting pitchers (Nagy/Mussina, Schilling/Johnson, Pedro...that’s about all I got). If you are complaining that pitchers rarely complete games in October, well, you missed the boat twenty-five years ago. While one may aesthetically prefer games determined by starters, I think the Rays/Yankees game is an odd one to find flaw with on that front. The fact of the matter is that the playoff format preordained that a decisive game would not be decided by the starters. Gerrit Cole started on short rest and made about as many pitches as could have reasonably been expected. And the lack of an obvious choice of starter actually contributed to one of the great features of this game, namely Kevin Cash’s perfectly executed plan to essentially use one of his best pitchers for each time through the order.

As to the aesthetics of the home run/strikeout game, I think there is a lot of projection going on. People know that they don’t fancy high-HR, high-K baseball, which is certainly their prerogative, but they pretend to know universally what all potential consumers of baseball find aesthetically pleasing. I have not seen any convincing evidence that the current style of baseball is driving people away from the game – arguments that focus on TV ratings are guilty of presupposing that a multi-faceted phenomenon can be boiled down to the stated aesthetic preferences of those who advance them.

You know what wouldn’t have made that game any more memorable? If five strikeouts had been replaced by five ground balls rolled over to second.

When I flip over to the NBA Finals for a few minutes and see Anthony Davis shooting threes, I think that I would much rather see Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing battling each other in the post. Whenever I watch a NFL game, I think about how much more pleasing it would be to watch if teams occasionally lined up in the I or the Pro Set on 2nd & 7, and the quarterback was under center unless it was third & long. But I don’t suppose that my own preferences in these regards are indicative of those of the audience at large, or somehow representative of the manner in which basketball or football “should” be played.

Do the aesthetic flaws I find with those games reduce my interest in them from previous levels? Sure, although the primary reason I watch less NBA or NFL than I did previously is that as other obligations and interests reduce the total time I have available to devote to sports, I choose to achieve that by holding the time I allot to baseball reasonably constant, thereby crowding out the lesser sports. Even if the games returned to styles that I preferred, my time investment would not significantly increase – and I think the same is true for many of the complainers about baseball. In fact, I think many of them use the aesthetic argument as an excuse. For whatever reason, many of them have less time to devote to baseball, or feel that it is in someway childish or otherwise a waste of time. Aesthetics makes a nice excuse to justify to yourself why you invested all that time in the past (it was a different game!) or to try to not save face with your internet baseball friends who you fear are judging you for abandoning the thread that brought you together in the first place.

* I am strongly opposed to expanded playoffs. Yet I find hand-wringing about the Astros advancing to the ALCS to be bizarre. Yes, I realize that the Astros carry with them baggage for reasons beyond their 2020 performance, but these lamentations are ostensibly grounded in the fact that they had a 29-31 regular season record.

The fact of the matter is that a sixty-game season is very much incapable of producing the same level of certainty about a team’s quality that a 162 game season can. It should not surprise anyone that a good team could have a sub-.500 record over a sixty games. As fiercely opposed to expanded playoffs as I am, the fewer games are played in the regular season:

a) the more justification there is for an expanded playoff field b) more importantly, the more a team’s performance in the playoffs should change our perception of their actual quality

When the 2006 Cardinals just barely scraped over .500 and went on to win the World Series, I would argue that their performance in the playoffs should have positively impacted our perception of their quality – but only slightly so. Their mediocre record spoke more to their quality than their eleven playoff wins. But if the Astros obtain comparable success, it should provide a much greater positive lift to our perception.

In the preceding paragraphs I have been discussing the matter as if the 2020 regular season was the only information we had by which to gauge the Astros true talent. Of course, this is untrue, and I would argue that the Astros are a good baseball team (even with the injury to Justin Verlander which couldn’t be factored into pre-season assessments) that had a poor sixty games. Another playoff team, one that will be a very trendy pick for 2021, that had the inverse of Houston’s record (31-29), is one to which I would make the opposite argument. The Miami Marlins are a bad baseball team that had a lucky win-loss record over sixty games despite playing like a bad baseball team. (Their Pythagenpat record, based on runs per nine innings, was only .431; based on runs created, only .417. I know some of you are screaming right now about the 29 runs allowed in one game, but of course you can’t just throw that out – perhaps it should be truncated, but it can’t be ignored). The Marlins on paper before the season projected to be one of the worst teams in the NL. I can’t imagine a better under bet on team wins for 2021.

Yet because of a measly two game difference in their records, the Astros get scorn for advancing, while a Marlins advance would have been treated as a heart-warming story. In my world, the inverse is true. There’s no team I wanted out of the playoffs more than the Marlins; while I would have preferred that the A’s had beaten the Astros, and would prefer the Rays to do so, Houston’s success to date is a fantastic troll job of some very odd ways to think about baseball.

* Warning: what follows is not sports-related, and I don’t presume anyone reading this blog is here for anything other than my opinion on sports. The thoughts in this post would have been better expressed succinctly on a platform like Twitter, but I can no longer in good conscience use Twitter – it’s been two years since I tweeted regularly and a few months since I completely deleted my account.

Ostensibly, social media platforms like Twitter exist to facilitate free speech; in practice, regardless of whether it is/was the intent of their creators (and it now seems quite clear that it is the current intent of their owners), they serve as a mechanism for the suppression of free thought. It is their prerogative to do so (although I do not believe for one moment that this recognition of principle would be reciprocated), and it is my prerogative to refuse to use their service. I realize that I am writing this on a Google platform; the only thing I can say is that the value proposition of a free blogging platform makes getting in bed with the devil more attractive than getting in to participate in the cesspool that is Twitter circa 2020.

What follows is an abbreviated version of my annual collection of oddities that jump out at me from the year-end statistical reports I publish on this blog. These tidbits are intended as curiosities rather than as sober sabermetric analysis:

* The top ten teams in MLB in W% were the playoff participants. The top six were the division winners. A rare case in which obvious inequities aren't created by micro-divisions, in stark constant to 2015's NL Central debacle.

* In the NL, only Washington (.586) had a better overall W% than Chicago's road W% (.575). Of course, the Cubs were a truly great team, and with 103 wins and a world title on the heels of 97 wins a year ago, they belong in any discussion of the greatest teams of all-time. In Baseball Dynasties, Eddie Epstein and Rob Neyer used three years as their base time period for ranking the greatest dynasties. Another comparable regular season in 2017, regardless of playoff result, would in my opinion place the Cubs forwardly on a similarly-premised list.

Most impressive about the Cubs is that despite winning 103, their EW% (.667) and PW% (.660) outpaced their actual W% of .640.

* It is an annual tradition to run a chart in this space that compares the offensive and defensive runs above average for each of the playoff teams. RAA is figured very simply here by comparing park adjusted runs or runs allowed per game to the league average. Often I enjoy showing that the playoff teams were stronger offensively than defensively, but that was not the case in 2016:



This is another way to show just how great the Cubs were--only two other playoff teams were as many as 80 RAA on either side of the scorecard and the Cubs were +101 offensively and +153 defensively.

* The Twins have a multi-year run of horrible starting pitching, and 2016 only added to the misery. Only the Angels managed a worse eRA from their starters (5.61 to 5.58); only A's starters logged fewer innings per start among AL teams (5.39 to 5.40); and the Twins were dead last in the majors in QS% (36%). In their surprising contention blip of 2015, the Twins were only in the bottom third of the AL in starting pitching performance, but in 2014 they were last in the majors in eRA, second-last in IP/S (ahead of only Colorado and QS%; in 2013 they were last in all three categories; and in 2012 they were last in the majors in eRA and second-last in IP/S and QS%.

* There were a lot of great things from my perspective about the 2016 season from a team performance perspective, chiefly the Indians winning the pennant and playoffs in which the lesser participants did not advance their way through. Both were helped along by the comeuppance finally delivered to the Royals. It wasn't quite as glorious as it might have been, as they still managed to scrap out a .500 record, but the fundamental problems with their vaunted contact offense were laid bare. KC was easily the lowest scoring team in the AL at 4.05 R/G, with the Yankees of all teams second-worst with 4.19. They were last in the majors with .075 walks/at bat (COL, .084 was second worst). They were last in the AL in isolated power by 12 points (.137) and beat out only Atlanta and Miami, edging out the 30th-ranked Braves by just .007 points. Combining those two, their .212 secondary average was sixteen points lower than the Marlins for last in the majors. But they were at the AL average in batting average at .257, so that's something.

* Andrew Miller averaged 17.1 strikeouts and 1.3 walks per 37.2 plate appearances (I use the league average of PA/G for to rest K and W rate per PA on the familiar scale of per nine innings while still using the proper denominator of PA). If you halve his K rate and double his walk rate, that's 8.6 and 2.6, which is still a pretty solid reliever. A comparable but slightly inferior performer this year was Tony Watson (8.2 and 2.8).

* Boston's bullpen was built (or at least considered by some preseason) to be a lockdown unit with Tazawa, Uehara, and Kimbrel. Tazawa had a poor season with 0 RAR; Uehara and Kimbrel missed some time with injuries and were just okay when they pitched for 10 RAR each. Combined they had 20 RAR. Dan Otero, a non-roster invitee to spring training with Cleveland, had 26 RAR.

* Matt Albers (-18) had the lowest RAR of anyone who qualified for any of my individual stat reports. I don't think that save is very likely at this point.

* Just using your impression of Toronto's starters, their talent/stuff/age/etc., just try to associate each to their strikeout and walk rates (the five pitchers are RA Dickey, Marco Estrada, JA Happ, Aaron Sanchez, and Marcus Stroman):



The correct answer from A to E is Dickey, Sanchez, Stroman, Estrada, Happ. I never got a chance to play this game without being spoiled, but I'm certain that I would have at least said that Aaron Sanchez was pitcher D.

* Jameson Taillon made it to the majors at age 25, and the thing that jumped out at me from his stat line was his very low walk rate (1.5, lower than any NL starter with 15 starts save Clayton Kershaw and Bartolo Colon. note that Taillon just cleared the bar for inclusion).

John Lackey, at age 38, chipped in 49 RAR to Chicago (granted, fielding support contributed to his performance). Taillon and Lackey are always linked in my head thanks to a Fangraphs prospect post from several years ago that I will endeavor to find. I believe the Fangraphs writer offered Lackey as a comp for Taillon. A commenter, perhaps a Pittsburgh partisan, responded by saying it was a ridiculous comparison, essentially an insult to Taillon.

My thought at the time was that if I had any pitching prospect in the minors, and you told me that if I signed on the dotted line he would wind up having John Lackey's career, I would take it every time. That's not to say that there aren't pitchers in the minors who won't exceed Lackey's career, but to think that it's less than the median likely outcome for any pitching prospect is pretty aggressive. And this was before Lackey's late career performance which has further bolstered his standing. What odds would you place now on Jameson Taillon having a better career than John Lackey?

* Jeff Francoeur had exactly 0 RAR. Ryan Howard had 1, before fielding/baserunning which would push him negative.

* I mentioned in my MVP post how unique it was that Kyle and Corey Seager were both worthy of being on the MVP ballot. They performed fairly comparably across the board:



Chase and Travis d'Arnaud also had pretty similar numbers. Not good numbers, but similar nonetheless (which in Chase's case was probably a triumph whilst a disappointment for Travis):



* It wouldn't be a meanderings post without some Indians-specific comments. It has actually been harder than usual to move on to writing the year-end posts because of the disappointment of seeing the Indians lose their second, third, and fourth-consecutive games with a chance to close out the World Series. Three of those losses have come by one run and two in Game 7 in extra innings. The Indians have now gone 68 seasons without winning the World Series, losing four consecutive World Series after winning the first two in franchise history. That now matches the record of the Red Sox from 1918 - 1986, which if Ken Burns' "Baseball" and plagiarist/self-proclaimed patron saint of sad sack franchises Doris Kearns Goodwin are to believed was a level of baseball fan suffering unmatched and possibly comparable to the Battle of Stalingrad. Well, except for the initial two World Series winning streak--Boston won their first four World Series.

The two Cleveland notes I have are negative, which is only because I have been thinking about them in conjunction with Game 7. One is how bad Yan Gomes was this season, creating just 1.9 runs per game over 262 PA, dead last in the AL among players with 250 or more PA. I did not understand Terry Francona's decision to pinch-run for Roberto Perez with the Indians down multiple runs in the seventh inning. He must have felt that a basestealing threat would distract Jon Lester, but given the inning and the extent of Cleveland's deficit, it basically ensured that Gomes would have to bat at some point. And bat he did, with the go-ahead run on first and two outs in the eighth against a laboring Chapman who had just coughed up the lead.

Also costly was the decision to bring Michael Martinez in to play outfield in the ninth. That move made more sense given Coco Crisp's noodle arm, but to see Martinez make the last out was a tough pill to swallow (and had Martinez somehow reached base, Gomes would have followed). And don't even get me started on the intentional walks in the tenth inning.

Also, it must be noted that Mike Napoli, who struggled in the postseason, was a very average performer in the regular season, creating 5.2 runs per game as first baseman. This is not intended as a criticism of Napoli, especially since I have been kvetching for years about the Indians inability to get even average production out of the corners. Napoli fit that need perfectly. But it felt as if the fans and media evaluated his performance as better than that (even limited strictly to production in the batter's box and not alleged leadership/veteran presence/etc.)

* For various reasons, a few of the players who were in the thick of the NL MVP race a year ago and were surely considered favorites coming into this season had disappointing seasons. These three outfielders (Bryce Harper, Andrew McCutchen, Giancarlo Stanton) all wound up fairly close in 2016 RAR (28, 27, 23 respectively), yielding the MVP center stage to youngsters (Kris Bryant and Corey Seager), first basemen (Freddie Freeman, Anthony Rizzo, Joey Votto) and a guy having a career year (Daniel Murphy).

More interestingly, those big three outfielders combined for 78 RAR--five fewer than Mike Trout.

This is an annual, largely analysis-free look at some things that I found interesting when compiling my end of season statistical reports. My whole series of annual posts will be a little late and a little brief thanks to some computer issues that prevented me from working on them for a few weeks. They might be the better for it:

* Minnesota was 46-35 at home and 37-44 on the road, close to an inverse record. Nothing noteworthy about that. More amusing is that they almost had an inverse R-RA, scoring 373 and allowing 323 at home while scoring 323 and allowing 377 on the road.

* Every year I run a chart showing runs above average (based on park adjusted runs per game) for each playoff team’s offense and defense. Usually I do this and get to slyly point out that the average playoff team was stronger offensively, but that is not the case this year, and it would be bad form not to show it even when there are no guffaws to be had:



Although it is interesting narrative-wise that the Mets’ offense wound up being twenty runs better than their defense.

* There were nine teams whose starters had a lower eRA than their relievers, led by the Dodgers (3.67/4.36) and also including the A’s, Red Sox, Mariners, Cubs, Rays, Braves, Cardinals, and Mets. One might note that four of the five NL playoff teams are represented; only the Pirates had a lower bullpen eRA (4.09/3.50).

In 2014 there were eight teams with a lower starter eRA and two made the playoffs; in 2013 seven with two playoff participants; in 2012 five with just one playoff club; and in 2011 eight and two.

I certainly would not claim that this little piece of trivia demonstrates any larger truth about the importance of starters and relievers, but it certainly is the kind of factoid that could be used in the style of a Verducci to do so. Of course, the blessed Royals completely break the narrative as the team with the biggest difference in favor of their relievers (4.74/3.34; that 1.39 run gap was much higher than the next closest team, the Brewers (4.92/3.88)).

It is also interesting to see the Rays on the list given the attention they got for aggressively pulling starters on the basis of times through the order. Tampa was 23rd in the majors in innings/start, but second to last in the AL (TB starters worked 5.65 innings per game, KC 5.63).

* Speaking of things you’re probably not supposed to say about the Royals, they were an excellent fielding team with a .690 DER, fourth in the majors. But the two teams they best in the AL playoffs each had a better DER (TOR .696, HOU also .690; San Francisco led the NL at .694).

* Minnesota starters had a 4.68 eRA, above the AL average of 4.47 and in the bottom third of the circuit. But this was a big improvement from their deplorable pitching of the last three seasons. That leaves Philadelphia as the team that can make everyone else feel good about their rotations. Phillie starters had a 5.59 eRA, much worse than their closest competition, Colorado at 5.08 (these figures are all park-adjusted). Rockie starters were last in IP/S (5.29, .2 innings fewer than PHI and ARI) and QS% (33%, MIL at 39% and PHI at 41%).

* If you’d have given me ten guesses, I’m not sure I would have come up with San Francisco leading the majors in park adjusted OBA (.342). In my defense it was a BA-driven performance as their .278 BA was nine points better than Detroit and their walk & hit batter per at bat ratio was .097, just three points above the NL average.

* Dellin Betances and Andrew Miller were 1-2 among AL relievers in strikeout rate. Granted he and Miller wouldn't have both been in the same bullpen, but David Robertson was third.

* Evan Scribner had one of the craziest lines you will ever see. He struck out 64 and walked 4 in 60 innings, but he yielded 14 homers, so he was sub-replacement level (I have him at -4 RAR, which is based on runs allowed adjusted for inherited and bequeathed runners). Scribner had the best K/W ratio among relievers; the next best was Kenley Jansen at 80/8.

If you rank AL relievers by the difference between strikeout and walk rate ((K-W)/PA), a better metric, Scribner ranks eighth. The seven relievers ahead of him were all at least 15 RAR except David Robertson (6). The next sub-replacement level relievers on the list are Aaron Loup (17th) and Mike Morin (19th), but both of them were hit-unlucky (.352 and .353 BABIP respectively) and comfortably above average in dRA. To find the next sub-replacement level performance you have to go all the way down to 46th and Danny Farquhar.

Scribner's 2.2 HR/G (games based on 37 PA rather than 9 IP) rate was the highest among major league relievers. The top three AL relievers in HR rate were all A's: Fernando Abad (2.0) and Edward Mujica (1.9), but OAK's HR park factor of 93 is tied for lowest in the AL.

* My stat reports set a minimum of 40 relief appearances to be included as a reliever, but sometimes I cheat and let in players I’m interested in. One case this year was Jeff Manship. Manship pitched 39 1/3 innings over 32 games. But if you include him, he:

1. Led in RRA (.67 to Wade Davis’ ridiculous .75 over 67 1/3 innings)
2. Led in eRA (1.51 to Davis’ 1.79)
3. was 13th in dRA (2.92, teammate Cody Allen led the way at 2.24)
4. And as you probably surmised by now, led the AL in lowest BABIP (.194, Will Harris was next at .201. Manship’s teammate Allen of the league-leading dRA gave up a .348, eleventh worse of the 95 AL relievers)

Terry Francona frequently used Allen in the eighth inning. Allen’s .37 IR/G was fifth among AL relievers with double digit saves, and Roberto Osuna was the only one of those five with twenty or more saves (twenty on the nose and .49 IR/G). Allen allowed only 4/26 inherited runners to score, lowering his 3.38 RA to a 2.86 RRA

* Does Jerry DiPoto know that Joaquin Benoit had a .190 BABIP? (That's not intended as shot at Jerry DiPoto, Benoit was in the news so it stood out.)

* Ground zero for DIPS intrigue was Toronto. Toronto led the majors with a .696 DER, and their starting pitchers with 15 starts were:

1. Marco Estrada, who had the highest ratio of dRA/eRA (basically, my DIPS run average to a component run average, both based on the same Base Runs formula but the latter considering actual singles, doubles, and triples allowed) of any AL starter (4.73/3.40) thanks to a .223 BABIP

2. RA Dickey, who ranked eighth with 4.72/4.00 and as a knuckleballer falls in one of the first categories of pitchers Voros McCracken carved out of DIPS theory

3. Mark Buehrle, whose dRA/eRA ratio in his final (?) season was an unremarkable 4.52/4.41 but who over the course of his career was an occasional DIPS lightning rod

4. Poor Drew Hutchison, who had the third lowest ratio at 4.46/5.50 and was pounded for a .344 BABIP. On the other hand, he had a 13-5 record despite his BABIP-fueled -6 RAR (second worst in the league, ahead of only...)

* One of the more amusing bits of media silliness during 2015 was Bill Madden's fixation on Shane Greene, which included a caption on an article that asked if Shane Greene was Brian Cashman's biggest mistake, and Madden pondering whether the Yankees would still rather have Nathan Eovaldi and Didi Gregorius than Greene and Martin Prado.

Greene was the worst starting pitcher in the AL with -13 RAR.

I like that as a punchline, but the alternate punchline is that while Prado hit fine (20 RAR) for Miami, Gregorius hit enough (only -3 RAA versus an average shortstop) and gave New York their first good fielding shortstop in goodness knows how long, while Eovaldi chipped in 22 RAR. 36 RAR to 7 RAR, I think Cashman is pretty happy with his choices.

* I will point out that my RAR formula includes no leverage adjustment (which I defend), but then leave this without further comment because you can get chastised for talking about this:

2015 RAR
Jake Odorizzi +36
Wade Davis +30
James Shields +26
Wil Myers +14

* Would you concur that it’s plausible that all five of these seasons could have been produced by the same pitcher?



These are by no means the five most similar in value seasons you could pull out of this year’s pitching lines, but they are broadly similar, no? The reason I like this group so much is that the pitchers are John Lackey, Shelby Miller, Jaime Garcia, Carlos Martinez, Lance Lynn, and Michael Wacha. Not only did St. Louis use five clones as their rotation, they traded a sixth away.

* Ichiro was last in the NL in RAR as a 42 year old corner outfielder. His batting average--Ichiro's batting average--was .229. It is almost inconceivable that he will get another job and that my Twitter feed will react with anything but scorn. But sometimes the inconceivable is reality.

* Speaking of Marlins with terrible secondary averages, Dee Gordon posted a .128, same as Suzuki. The only NL hitters with 250 PA and SECs lower than .128 were Milwaukee's sometimes double play combination of Jean Segura (.110) and Hernan Perez (.101). Ben Revere posted a .128 as well, and both Revere and Gordon were above average offensively, but the next lowest SEC by an above-average NL hitter was .151 (Brandon Phillips). I remain skeptical about Gordon's long-term outlook; it is exceedingly rare for a player to be able to remain an offensive contributor with so little to offer other than singles.

Nonetheless, for 2015, Gordon was a defensible choice for the Silver Slugger, as only Joe Panik had a higher RG and he compiled 220 fewer PA. Still not a good look for NL second basemen.

* The Speed Score trajectories of Bryce Harper and Mike Trout have been something I’ve been watching as much has been made of Trout reconstituting his offensive game as more of a power hitter and less of a baserunning threat. But as of last year his Speed Score was still quite high, albeit lower than when he broke in. With a fourth season under his belt, Trout’s Speed Score sequence is 8.7, 7.0, 7.2, 4.9. So 2015 did mark a significant downturn in terms of Trout’s speed manifesting itself through the official statistics (or at least stolen base percentage, stolen base attempt frequency, triples/BIP, and runs scored per time on base).

Meanwhile, Harper’s sequence is 7.5, 4.9, 2.7, 3.0. If that keeps up Dusty Baker will accuse him of clogging the bases.

* The best season you probably weren’t aware of (which is really to say the best season I wasn’t aware of): Logan Forsythe hit .287/.370/.454 over 609 PA, good for 39 RAR. It was basically the same season as Jason Kipnis had trading some BA for SEC.

Rarely has the performance of a single team led to so many attempts to rationalize, explain, project virtue, and the like as the 2014-15 Royals. Focusing on the 2015 edition, here are just a handful of Royals myths that I have been particularly annoyed at hearing. The "analysis" that follows is not comprehensive nor is it intended to be. That's kind of the point. The level of extraordinary claims that have been made about the Royals should be apparent even with the crudest of inquiries into the objective record.

Myth #1: Whatever the Heck Andy McCullough Tweeted

"The entire point of the Royals is that baseball is a hard game and if you make your opponent do things, sometimes they will screw up"

The Kansas City Royals reached based on error 58 times in 2015. The AL average was 57. In 2014 they had 51 ROE versus a league average of 57.

Myth #2: The Royals Don't Make Mistakes

Errors leave a lot to be desired as a metric, but when traditional thinkers talk about making mistakes, errors are first and foremost on their mind. The 2015 Royals had a mFA of .973; the AL average was .971. The 2014 Royals had a mFA of .968; the AL average was .970.

Myth #3: The Royals had a long World Series drought

There are 30 MLB teams. It should be obvious, then, that 30 years is the expected time between world titles. Thus a streak of thirty years is not particularly long in theory. It's also not long in practice, as it was only the 12th longest drought (the Mets had the 13th longest drought). Last year en route to the pennant, two of the three teams Kansas City beat had (slightly) longer droughts and the other had a slightly shorter drought.

To find the Royals worthy of any particular sympathy, one must give extra credit for how poorly the franchise performed for much of that period. While this is unfortunate for the fans, it seems like such a group would be less traumatized by losing the World Series and more appreciative just to get there. Fan "suffering" is very low on my list of factors in deciding which teams to pull for in the playoffs, but to the extent I consider it, I tend to side with teams that have been good and just have not had the bounces go their way in October. Teams like the Marlins and the Royals who parlay their only two playoff teams in an extended period into pennants and world titles are quite galling to anyone who has rooted for a titleless yet competent franchise.

But more broadly, I think that the media and fans have yet to understand how championships will be distributed over the long haul in leagues that are double or close to it in size from what they were for so many years. Lengthy droughts, the types that the Red Sox, Cubs, or to a lesser extent Indians and Giants have suffered will be quite commonplace. Basic logic tells you that they have to be.

I did a "simulation" (which is a pretentious way of saying I used the RAND() function in Excel) to simulate 1,000 seasons of a thirty-team league in which each team had a 1/30 chance to win the World Series in any given year. Remember, this is the height of competitive balance. The probability of a championship could not be any more evenly distributed. There are no market disadvantages, no bad franchise stewardship, no billy goats. It is theoretically possible that the timing of championships could be more evenly distributed, but admittedly my imagination is insufficient to describe a specific scenario that would force a more even temporal distribution.

After 1,000 years, the average team should have had 33 1/3 titles. The most successful had 45; the two least successful each had 22 (as an aside, and granting that it was a sixteen team universe for an extended period, think about the Yankees' 27 in this context).

For years 501-1000, I calculated the average of the quartiles, as well as the percentage of active droughts as of a given year greater than 30 years. Since droughts for these 500 years are not independent of one another, be cautious with extrapolating those averages to anything else (for what it's worth, the medians are similar).

The average for these seasons was a first quartile drought of 8.4 years; a median drought of 20.2 years; a third quartile drought of 39.8 years, and a maximum drought of 115.0 years. In the average season, 34.4% of droughts exceeded 30 years (note that the current MLB figure is 12/26 = 46.2% of droughts exceeding 30 years, excluding the four subsequent expansion franchises, which suggests but in no way proves that, not surprisingly, the observed title distribution is not as egalitarian as the theoretical one used here).

Freezing it at year 1,000, this is what the drought picture looks like:


Even with new champions in 7 consecutive and 16 out of 20 seasons, a pretty typical 1/3 of droughts exceed 30 years, one team has exceeded the Cubs, and two more have exceeded the Indians.

The longest drought for any team during the millennium was 215 years. The poor fans of Team 6 celebrated a title in year 306, then went through many generations (or not, who knows, it's the future) before finally winning again in year 622. Then they waited another 120 years for good measure. Should baseball survive for 1,000 years with 30 or more teams, think about all of the narratives that the sportswriters of the future will get to craft.

Myth #4: The Royals Need to Be Explained

This is more of a meta-analytical comment than specific to the Royals, but there is an underlying notion, seen even on some sabermetrically-inclined outlets, that the Royals are an anomaly that demands our attention and an explanation. Please note that I am not criticizing the act of questioning ones premises, of attempting to update hypotheses as new data becomes available, of recognizing that we don't know everything about baseball, or anything of the sort. This all laudable. But such inquisition must not be confused with an imperative to find fault in one's null hypotheses either.

But there all too often is a reflexive desire to be too conciliatory, too eager to throw out one's existing knowledge and toolkit in an attempt to explain something that may just be a fluke. Witness "The Year That Base Runs Failed" (an article that demands a thorough undressing that I just do not have the will to give justice to right now). Recently this has seemed to manifest itself more at outlets that rely on 1) boisterous, opinionated writers and 2) daily content production.

When you are boisterous and opinionated, you need your opinions to be right in order to maintain credibility. If you have to blame the tools (Base Runs, W% Estimators, the entirety of sabermetric theory) that you used to justify your initial opinion, that's fair game. On the other hand, my position on the Royals doesn't demand I apologize for it (maybe I should--as I acknowledged above, I could be wrong, and inquiry into why that might be the case is healthy). My position is simply that the Royals were a fairly average team as indicated by their component statistics, but that sometimes teams outplay their component statistics. The Royals made the playoffs and over two seasons went 22-9, but a .500 team would go 22-9 or better with 1.5% probability--it's not likely but it also must happen now and again. You can disagree, but it's inherently a passive argument.

If you need to produce content daily, then you have to write about something, and writing "the sample size precludes us from drawing firm conclusions" over and over again doesn't drive readership. So there's a temptation to overfit your model, to declare that the secret sauce has been found, to cheat on the degree of certainty you require before you declare correlation to be causation, to investigate one positively correlated variable at the expense of other potential explanatory variables, to overreact to a year in which your metric's standard error is higher than it typically is.

Even great sabermetricians can get caught in this trap, and I have never been confused with a great sabermetrician but I have written things along these lines that I am not proud of as well. Bill James and Nate Silver have both, using different but understandable means when considered in the context of their work, failed pretty miserably at predicting playoff success based on historical data. The simple fact of the matter is that there were 32 playoff games (not counting the wildcard games) this season, which is fairly typical. At 30 games/season, you need five seasons to have a sample size the same as that of one major league team-season.

This is particularly problematic when so many of the attempts to explain playoff performance are based on theories about changes in the game. Contact superseding Moneyball, bullpen construction and usage patterns which have been in a constant state of change throughout baseball history...you could never have credible data without the conditions of the game shifting. This is not to say don't try to advance our understanding, it's to say be extremely cautious as you attempt to do so.

So what winds up happening is that a potential explanation ("Contact works, allow it" is a particularly poor paraphrase since it makes it sound like your pitchers should allow contact, but I saw that Colin Cowherd promo to many times not to use it) is honed in on, and maybe there's evidence of some effect, so other potential explanatory variables are ignored and the correlation is exaggerated and soon there's a truism that must be disproved rather than a hypothesis which must be proved.

There's a difference between saying "I don't know" and "No one will ever know". If it seems as if my school of thought arrives at the latter, that's a fair criticism. But I personally would rather be too certain about how much I can't know than to be too quick to think I've learned something new.

This is an abridged and belated version of one of my standard annual posts, in which I poke around the statistical reports I put together here and identify items of curiosity. Curiosity is the key, as opposed to those that encompass analytic insight--any insight to be found is an accident.

* Since 1961, the ten teams with the largest differential between home and road W%:



And the ten largest ratios of HW% to RW%:



* One chart I always run in this piece is a table of runs above average on offense and defense for each playoff team. These are calculated very simply as park-adjusted runs per game less the league average:



It has not been at all uncommon for the average playoff team to be better offensively than defensively and such was the case in 2014. Two playoff teams had below-average offenses while four had below-average defenses, and the world champions had the worst defensive showing of the ten.

* You can’t turn around without reading about the continual rise in strikeouts. Unlike so many, I don’t consider the current strikeout rate to be aesthetically troublesome. But you can get a sense of how crazy strikeout rates have gotten by looking at the list of relievers who strike out ten or more batters per game (I define “game” in this case as a league average number of plate appearances, not innings pitched; eligible relievers are those with forty or more appearances and less than fifteen starts):

Al Alburquerque, Cody Allen, Aaron Barrett, Antonio Bastardo, Joaquin Benoit, Dellin Betances, Jerry Blevins, Brad Boxberger, Carlos Carrasco, Brett Cecil, Aroldis Chapman, Steve Cishek, Tyler Clippard, Wade Davis, Jake Diekman, Sean Doolittle, Zach Duke, Mike Dunn, Josh Edgin, Danny Farquhar, Josh Fields, Charlie Furbush, Ken Giles, Greg Holland, JJ Hoover, Kenley Jansen, Kevin Jepsen, Sean Kelley, Craig Kimbrel, Jack McGee, Andrew Miller, Pat Neshek, Darren O’Day, Joel Peralta, Oliver Perez, Yusmeiro Petit, Neil Ramirez, AJ Ramos, Addison Reed, David Robertson, Fernando Rodney, Francisco Rodriguez, Trevor Rosenthal, Tony Sipp, Will Smith, Joakin Soria, Pedro Strop, Koji Uehara, Nick Vincent, Jordan Walden, Tony Watson.

That’s 51 of the 189 eligible relievers (27%); lower the bar to nine strikeouts per game and it would be 82 (43%); at eight or more there are 110 for 58%.

The lowest-ranking NL reliever by RAR was Rex Brothers (-8), whose strikeout rate was 7.4. The second worst was JJ Hoover (-7), who struck out 10.4 per game. I am not a huge user of WPA metrics, but Hoover’s season was noteworthy for just how bad it was from that value perspective as he was involved in a few huge meltdowns. Per Fangraphs’ WPA figures, Hoover was second-to-last in the majors with -3.56 WPA; only Edwin Jackson at -4.11 was worse, and Jackson pitched 78 more innings. Even among position players, only Jackie Bradley (-4.00) and Matt Dominguez (-3.76 ranked lower). Brothers was the closest reliever to Hoover, but his WPA was -2.31, 1.35 wins better than Hoover.

The anti-Hoover was his teammate Aroldis Chapman, whose numbers over 54 innings are simply ridiculous, with a 19.3 strikeout rate. It’s difficult to fathom that a pitcher with a walk rate of 4.4 could have a RRA of 1.02, an eRA of 1.15, and a dRA of 1.32, but Chapman did and led narrowly missed leading major league relievers in eRA and dRA (Wade Davis had him by a more-than-insignificant 1.1466 to 1.1471 in the former).

* In 2010, the Giants won the World Series with Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain combining to pitch 435 innings and compile 101 RAR. Over the last five years:



While the potential for starting pitcher ruin is well understood, if you’d told me in 2010 that the Giants would win the World Series in four years getting no contribution out of Lincecum and Cain, I would have thought that black magic was at work. It probably is.

* Speaking of bad starting pitchers, only two teams had multiple starters (who made fifteen or more starts) with negative RAR. The Cubs had two--Travis Wood and Edwin Jackson combined to start 58 games, pitch 314 innings, and compile -27 RAR. The Indians had three--Zach Allister, Josh Tomlin, and Justin Masterson combined to start 56 games, pitch 319 innings, and compile -25 RAR (figures do include Masterson’s time in St. Louis). Both of these teams may well be trendy picks to compete in the Central divisions, and this is a one reason that may make sense. The Cubs and Indians are taking different approaches to shore up the back end of their rotation, Chicago by bringing in an ace and a mid-rotation free agent and the Indians by counting on continued strong performances from young starters who stood out in the second half. Either approach figures to work out better than -25 RAR.

* Despite the poor CHN and CLE individual starters, there’ still nothing quite like Minnesota’s utter and complete starting pitcher futility. In 2012, they were last in starters’ eRA and second-to last in innings/start and QS%. In 2013, they completed the triple crown--last in IP/S (5.38), QS% (38%), and eRA (5.76). In 2014, they “improved” to their 2012 standings--second last in IP/S (5.64, COL starters weren’t far behind at 5.59), second last in QS% (41% to the Rangers’ 38%), and last in starter’s eRA (5.08, with Texas second at 4.95).

* Clayton Kershaw had a great season, and was a reasonable choice as NL MVP. I’m not trying to run him down--but there is some notion out there that he had a transcendent season. I think this notion can be tempered by simply comparing his rate stats to those of Jake Arrieta:



Kershaw was better overall than Arrieta, and pitched 42 more innings. But no one should confuse Kershaw 2014 with Pedro 1999 or anything of the sort.

* One of these starting pitchers is now forever known as a clutch pitcher, a modern marvel who harkens back to the days of Gibson and Morris and whoever else has been chosen for lionization. The other is an underachieving
prima donna who Ron Darling thinks is "struggling" as a major league starter. Their regular season performances were hardly distinguishable:



Madison Bumgarner and Stephen Strasburg.

* Cole Hamels was fourth among NL starting pitchers with 55 RAR, but won just nine games. This has to be one of the better pitcher seasons in recent years with single digit wins. Through the last decade of my RAR figures, here is the highest-ranking starter in each league with single digit wins:



This is an interesting collection of names--a number of outstanding pitchers and some who I hadn’t thought about in years (John Patterson, the late Joe Kennedy and Geremi Gonzalez). Since this comparison is across league-seasons, in order to rank these seasons it is necessary to convert RAR to WAR. Using RPW = RPG, Hamels’ 2014 actually ranks highest with 7.0 WAR (Harvey 6.9, Schilling 6.7, Jennings 5.9) since the 2014 NL had the lowest RPG (7.9) of any league during the period. Given that the likelihood of a starter having an outstanding season with fewer than ten wins is greater now than at any point in major league history, it’s quite possible that Hamels’ 2014 is the best such season. Sounds like a good Play Index query if you’re looking for an article idea.

* The worst hitter in baseball with more than 400 plate appearances was Jackie Bradley (2.2 RG). The Red Sox have collected a large collection of outfielders and Bradley is unlikely to be in their plans. The second-worst hitter with more than 400 PA was Zack Cozart (2.5 RG). His team traded for a young shortstop who had 3.4 RG in 266 PA (granted, Eugenio Suarez does not appear to be the fielder that Cozart is), yet Walt Jocketty was quoted as saying "Cozart is our opening day shortstop and he’s one of the best in the league."

In addition to Cozart, the Reds featured three other hitters with 250+ who were essentially replacement-level: Chris Heisey (3.4 RG for a corner outfielder), Bryan Pena (3.3 for a first baseman), and Skip Schumaker (2.9 for a corner outfielder).

* San Diego liked Justin Upton (or Matt Kemp?) so much that they traded for two clones of the same player (in 2014 performance, at least):



* Many hands have been wrung regarding the apparent shift in Mike Trout’s game to old player skills rather than young player skills, particularly with the dropoff in his base stealing exploits (54 attempts in 2012 to 40 in 2013 to 18 in 2014). Yet it should still be noted that Trout ranked fifth in the AL with a 7.2 Speed Score (I use Bill James’ original formula but only consider stolen base frequency, stolen base percentage, triples rate, and runs scored per time on base). In fact, his Speed Score was up from 2013 (7.0) although down from 2012 (8.7). Here are Trout’s three-year figures in each of the four components of Speed Score:



Just to make clear what these numbers represent, Trout attempted a steal in 29.3% of his times on first base (singles plus walks) in 2012, had a 85.2% SB% when adding three steals and four caught stealings to his actual figures, hit a triple on 2.1% of his balls in play, and scored 45.2% of the time he reached base. (These are all estimated based on his basic stat line as opposed to counting actual times on first base or attempted steals of second, etc.)

While these categories certainly don’t capture the full picture of how speed manifests itself in on-field results, it is clear that Trout has been dialing back the most visible such part of his game, basestealing. And his 2014 SS rebound is due to two categories that are subject to more flukes (triples) and teammate influence (runs scored per time on base). Still, it may be a little early to sound the alarm bells on Trout as a one-dimensional slugger. Eventually, the sabermetric writers who have developed a cottage industry of Trout alarmism will be right about something, but there’s no need to prematurely indulge them.

Meanwhile, Bryce Harper’s Speed Scores for 2012-14 are 7.5, 4.9, 2.7.

What was the most important game in the history of the major leagues? Perhaps it was one of the games that could be argued to have been the very first major league game (the National Association’s first game on May 4, 1871 between Cleveland and Fort Wayne; the National League’s on April 22, 1876 between Boston and Philadelphia; or the American League’s on April 24, 1901, between Cleveland and Chicago). Maybe it was October 3, 1951 as Bobby Thomson hit The Shot Heard Round the World. You would get a lot of support for April 15, 1947 as Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and rightfully so. From a business standpoint, consider April 14, 1953, the Braves’ first game in Milwaukee after fifty years of franchise stability, or April 10, 1961 as the second Senators hosted the White Sox to open the expansion era.

Or maybe you’d point out that I’ve not attempted to define what makes a game important as opposed to the circumstances that led to it, and that too many factors would go into doing so to produce a coherent result. There have literally been hundreds of thousands of games in major league history, and so this exercise is inherently silly. But one question I can answer with absolute certainty is “What was the most important game to you, personally?” And that was the 1994 Opening Day game between the Mariners and the Indians, the first regular season game ever played at Jacobs Field.

By late 1993, I was pretty interested in sports, but not baseball. Baseball simply had not captured my interest the way that football and basketball had. I really can’t put my finger on why that was, as my personality even at a young age was well-suited to quiet contemplation, patient and passive spectatorship, and interest in numbers and factoids. It is obvious now that baseball is the perfect sport for me, but it was no less true long before I knew that.

I suppose I can assign some of the blame for this to the Indians. The organization was mired in a few decades of persistent losing, and there was no excitement surrounding the team. I was (sadly) a sports talk radio listener at this point and the Browns dominated the Cleveland scene (they still do, of course, but to a lesser extent). There was no social or peer pressure to follow the Indians, and thus in a pre-internet, no cable household, baseball in general. My dad was a casual baseball fan; I remember watching some of the 1993 World Series on a Friday or Saturday night. We also went to one of the Indians final games at Municipal Stadium in September 1993, but it was on a Sunday and my most indelible memory of the whole thing was fans huddling around a gentleman watching the Browns on a mini TV.

However, the tone started to shift a little bit in the spring of 1994, as there seemed to be genuine optimism regarding the Indians and excitement for the opening of Jacobs Field. I added free agent signings Dennis Martinez and Eddie Murray to the list of Indian players whose names I knew (Albert Belle, Carlos Baerga, Kenny Lofton, Jose Mesa, maybe Sandy Alomar), but was obviously still far from engaged as any sort of fan.

Then April 3, 1994 rolled around, the first regular season game at Jacobs Field between the Indians and the Mariners. Dennis Martinez v. Randy Johnson. Even as a kid I had a decent sense of history, so I believe that I was aware and interested in this event, but sadly not solely for it just being an Opening Day baseball game. It was pretty much the last time that I wouldn’t be interested in a major league game just on the basis of it being a baseball game.

The details that follow are all courtesy of the play-by-play account, as I have very little memory of the specifics of this game. The details of most games become fuzzy over time, replaced by memories of specific moments and a general haze. This is especially true for me with the earliest games I remember, and while the (gulp) decades that have elapsed are certainly a contributing factor, I don’t think it’s the only one, or even the primary one. Rather, my memories from this time suffer from my inability at the time to process baseball in context--the lack of a real-time knowledge base from which to differentiate those events that were truly memorable from those that were more mundane. I also would cite the lack of keeping score, which could be dismissed as a crutch in lieu of actual memories, but in my opinion is an essential tool with which to place the events of the game within the context of the game itself, let alone across time. Even in a typical game with seventy-five plate appearances, I find it’s easy to lose track of the truth and replace it with one’s own narrative in absence of a trusty scoresheet.

Seattle scored in the first and third to take a 2-0 lead. Meanwhile, Randy Johnson was pitching a no-hitter, which was notable for a couple reasons beyond the obvious. One, Johnson, while not yet established as a Hall of Fame super-ace, had already pitched a no-hitter and was clearly one of the leading candidates to do so again among active pitchers. Secondly, the only Opening Day no-hitter had been thrown by Bob Feller for the Tribe, and Feller was in attendance for the opening of the new era in Indians baseball. It was sometime around the seventh inning when I got home from school and started listening to this familiar yet also newish (to me) sport of baseball on the radio. It may sound overly dramatic and absurd, but it is not untrue to say that, literally, my life would never be the same.

In the eighth, the Indians finally got something going offensively. Candy Maldonado led off with a walk (that was about the only thing he did well in 1994), the fifth surrendered by Johnson (a reminder that this was pre-super-ace Johnson). Sandy Alomar singled to break up the no-hitter, a wild pitch moved the runners up, and Manny Ramirez doubled them in to tie the game.

Johnson was relieved by Tim Davis in the ninth, and the Indians rallied with two out on an Albert Belle double and Eddie Murray infield single, but Paul Sorrento struck out. In the tenth, the Mariners scored off Jose Mesa thanks mainly to singles by Ken Griffey and Kevin Mitchell, but Bobby Ayala and Kevin King couldn’t close it--the Indians rallied again. After Alomar struck out swinging to open the inning, Ramirez walked (Wayne Kirby pinch-ran) and Jim Thome hit a pinch-hit double. That’s right--Mark Lewis started the game at third over Thome given the latter’s perceived ineptness against southpaws. Somewhat bizarrely, Kenny Lofton was intentionally walked, Omar Vizquel hit into a fielder’s choice to score Kirby, and Carlos Baerga flew out, pushing the 3-3 game to an eleventh inning.

Eric Plunk retired Seattle in order in the top of the inning. In the bottom, King got Belle to ground out before Murray doubled. Sorrento flied out and Murray took third. Seattle intentionally walked Alomar to get to Kirby, who was now batting in Ramirez’s spot. Kirby lined a single down the left field line, and the Indians won the game 4-3.

It is difficult to exaggerate how much this game changed my attitude towards baseball. It might not have been entirely immediate, but if not it was pretty close. Memories are a bit fuzzy at this point, but for whatever reason, I remember being dragged along by my parents to shop for a refrigerator on Sunday April 10. The Indians’ fifth game of the season had been rained out at Kansas City on Saturday, so Chris Nabholz was skipped in the rotation and Dennis Martinez was pitching again on the TV at the appliance store. This confused me, and my dad explained to me that the fifth starter is often skipped in such a situation. The point of this mundane story? I knew who the fifth starter was.

That spring and summer, I became obsessed with both the Indians and collecting baseball cards. I hated the White Sox as the Indians chased them in the division, I followed all the intrigue of Albert Belle’s corked bat suspension and rejoiced when he homered in his return. I penciled Kenny Rogers’ perfect game into the list in my Information Please Sports Almanac, the baseball section of which had previously not gotten much attention but now was well-worn. By the end of the year I had subscriptions to two baseball publications (Beckett Baseball Card Monthly and Baseball Digest). I was starting to apply my natural interest in figures and analysis into what would, by spring of the next year, be a nascent interest in sabermetrics and by the next year be a full-blown obsession.

And when the players went on strike? I was disappointed, to be sure, but an event that potentially could have crushed a young fan before he had a chance to be fully invested had zero impact on my newfound infatuation. The next spring I eagerly learned all the names of the Indians’ replacement players and was ready to cheer for our ace Joe Slusarski, our middle-of-the-order thumper Joe Biasucci, our Kenny Lofton replacement Eric Yelding. After April 4, 1994, none of that really mattered. I was a baseball fanatic for good.

Would I have found the game in lieu of the excitement of this game? Given the Indians’ 1994 resurgence, I assume I would have, just not as soon. But had the Indians not emerged as a competitive team at that point, it gets murkier. Had I grown much older without discovering the wonder of baseball, it would have been too late to have it as an integral part of my mid-childhood and I can’t imagine being the same level of fan that I am today. But after the Opening Day game, I’m convinced that the Indians could have lost the rest of their games and the spark would not have been extinguished. I know precisely when I became a baseball fan--twenty years ago today.

Below are my annual observations from perusing the end of season stats I post on this blog. They are generally nuggets that I find interesting or amusing rather than an attempt to engage in serious analysis and should be taken in that light. You’ll notice a bit of an Indians bias in terms of what I found interesting:

* Only one team in MLB finished with between 79 and 84 wins, which seems rather remarkable--the 81-81 Diamondbacks. Making the range an even three wins on both sides of .500 (78-84, or more appropriately a W% between .481 and .519), there were two teams in this range (the Angels were 78-84). The last time there were two or fewer teams in this range was 1994, which of course was a strike-shortened season. Prior to that, one must go back to 1978, 1969, 1967 (with 26, 24, and 20 teams in the majors respectively). The last time only one major league team in that range was 1965 as the Cardinals were 80-81, falling in the range, while the Phillies were 85-76 and the Yankees were 77-85. It has been 1937 since there were no teams in this range. There were a whopping ten teams in this range in 1991.

Obviously the particular range I’ve chosen doesn’t have any particular significance, and there are some more rigorous ways one could measure the lack of centrality in 2013 team records.

* No sub-.500 team had an EW% (based on runs scored and allowed) or PW% (based on runs created and runs created allowed) above .500. The Angels were the closest in both (.481 W% with .497 EW% and .497 PW%). Only the Yankees managed a winning record with an EW% or PW% below .500 (.525 W%, .485 EW%, .446 PW%). The RMSE of EW% (Pythagenpat) as a predictor of W% was 3.66 which is definitely lower than the long-term average, although I’ve never looked at the annual breakouts closely enough to tell you if it’s unusually low or not).

* Atlanta had a 56-25 record at home (thanks largely to just 2.96 RA/G at home), which makes one wonder why they’d want to tear Turner Field down; their .690 mark has been matched or exceeded in the last five years only by the 2009 Yankees and Red Sox, 2010 Braves, and 2011 Brewers. On the other hand, Houston was 24-57 at home, tied for fifth-worst since 1961.

The flip side is that Atlanta was the only playoff team(for the sake of this post, I’m counting the two wildcard losers as playoff teams, which I know sets some people off) with a losing road record (Tampa Bay and Cincinnati were both a win better at 41-41). The Mets were .099 points better on the road (they actually had a winning road record at 41-40 but were just 33-48 at home). That was the biggest discrepancy in favor of road since the 2011 Mets, and in the non-Mets category since the 2002 Red Sox.

* I always like to look at the playoff teams by runs above average on offense and defense (park adjusted and just based on runs per game to keep it simple). This often gives me an opportunity to snark about the usual nonsense about pitching being paramount, and this year is no exception:



Note that I’m not making the opposite argument.

* It was probably never a great idea to lump teams into sabermetric and non-sabermetric front office buckets, or assume that the sabermetric front offices would surely produce teams with higher secondary averages, and it’s even sillier to attempt that now. Still, I find it satisfying on some level that the top four teams in secondary average were Oakland, Tampa Bay, Boston, and Cleveland.

* Drew Smyly ranked tenth among AL relievers in RAR with excellent peripherals to back it up. I didn’t realize this, and based on his playoff deployment of Smyly, neither did Jim Leyland.

*Relievers are a little hard to keep track of due to their somewhat fungible nature and the bloated size of modern bullpens--at any given moment there are roughly 210 full-time relievers in the majors. I watch enough MLB Network, enough games of teams around the league, and read enough box scores to be reasonably familiar with all major league players, but there are without fail a couple relievers on the list every year of whom I have no useful knowledge. The highest ranking in RAR was Seattle’s rookie Yoervis Medina, who was 23rd in the AL with 14.

* Brandon McCarthy had something of a disappointing season after signing with Arizona, pitching 135 innings with a 4.68 RRA for 7 RAR. I was amused last offseason, though, that McCarthy signed for 2/$15.5MM while another free agent Brandon signed with the Dodgers for 3/$22.5MM. To the surprise of just about no one, McCarthy was still a much better value than League, who ranked dead last among NL relievers in RAR and strikeout rate (-16 RAR thanks to a 7.11 RRA with a 4.4 KG).

* In the celebration of Ben Cherington’s makeover of the Red Sox that followed their World Series triumph, one move was convieniently glossed over. In pointing this out, I don’t mean to suggest that Cherington was not worthy of praise or that perfection is a reasonable goal. But the Joel Hanrahan trade made little sense to me when it was made, and as Melancon was one of the NL’s best relievers, it looks much worse in retrospect.

* It’s once again time to play: Which Yankee Reliever Whose Name Begins With R Is It?



* Jose Mijares had one of the largest gaps between his eRA (estimated RA based on opponent’s runs created) and dRA (DIPS-style estimate RA) that you’ll ever see as they were 6.53 and 3.57 respectively. This was driven by an eye-popping .428 %H. Granted, he only faced around 230 hitters, but that jumps off the page.

* Q: What do Arolids Chapman, Craig Kimbrel, Kenley Jansen, Jason Grilli, Trevor Rosenthal, Kevin Siegrist, Jim Henderson, Francisco Rodriguez, Manny Parra, Blake Parker, David Carpenter, Jordan Walden, Paco Rodriguez, Pedro Strop, Nick Vincent, Tyler Clippard, Rex Brothers, Steve Cishek, Carlos Marmol, Antonio Bastardo, Sam LeCure, Mike Gonzalez, Mike Dunn, David Hernandez, AJ Ramos, Heath Bell, Mark Melancon, Jake Diekman, JJ Hoover, Tony Sipp, Luke Gregerson, Will Harris, Sergio Romo, Jean Machi, Dale Thayer, Javier Lopez, Adam Ottavino, Jose Mijares, Alex Wood, Tom Gorzelanny, Logan Ondrusek, and Craig Stammen have in common?

A: They were all NL relievers with higher strikeout rates than Jonathan Papelbon. That Papelbon’s KG was 8.6 speaks a lot about the current environment.

*Paul Clemens appeared in 35 games for Houston with a 5.13 RRA over 73 innings for -3 RAR. His peripherals were worse (6.12 eRA, 6.27 dRA, 5.8 KG, 3.1 WG). My honest question: could Roger Clemens have done better?

Speaking more generally of Houston’s bullpen, it had an eRA of 5.76, 1.04 runs higher than the second-worst bullpen (PHI) and 40% higher than the AL average of 4.11. For comparison, the dreadful Arizona pen of 2010 had a 5.54 eRA in a league with an average of 4.35, only 27% higher than average.

I was overly optimistic about the Astros’ outlook this year, but this is an area that an intelligent organization should be able to improve, should they deign to devote any resources to it all.

* Travis Wood was among the better starters in the NL this year, at least from a non-DIPS perspective, pitching 200 innings with a 3.10 RRA and 3.36 eRA. Even if you start from his 4.15 dRA, he was at worst an average starter pitching a lot of innings. Sean Marshall, on the other hand, pitched just 16 innings for the Reds and made about $4 million more. I wouldn’t advise trading a potential starter for a reliever, even a good one like Marshall, particularly when you intend to use that reliever as a LOOGY and when the starter you’re trading could probably fill the reliever’s potential role nearly as well anyway.

* Last year I made a big point of comparing the aggregate performance of Drew Pomeranz and Alex White (not good) to Ubaldo Jimenez (just as bad and a lot more expensive). To be fair, this year I will point out that Ubaldo wiped the floor with them and was a key contributor to the Indians wildcard spot. Jimenez chipped in 35 RAR, good for 24th among AL starters. As you probably know he was his old (Cleveland-style) self in the first half but much better in the second half. This lack of consistency is captured crudely by his QS%--just fifty percent, ranking tied for 46th among AL starters and a tick below the league average of 51%. Jimenez led all AL starters with a below-avergae QS% in RAR and strikeout rate, and was second in innings pitched (behind AJ Griffin) and RAA (behind Alexi Ogando). Only seven AL starters had a RRA better than the league average with a subpar QS%, and three of them pitched for Cleveland (Jimenez, Cory Kluber, and Scott Kazmir).

* The Indians’ starting pitching was easily the worst of any playoff team. Cleveland’s starters had an eRA of 4.55, just ahead of the AL average of 4.60 and 21st in MLB. The next poorest playoff team was Tampa Bay (4.36, 14th in MLB), with the other eight playoff teams ranking in the top ten (only the Nationals and the Cubs missed the playoffs among the top ten). Cleveland starters averaged 5.7 innings/start compared to the league average of 5.9, and only Pittsburgh was similarly poor among playoff teams (also 5.7). Seven of the playoff teams were in the top ten in this category. The Indians’ QS% of 45% was fourth-worst in MLB; Tampa Bay was next worst among playoff teams (49%, 23rd) and six of the playoff teams finished in the top ten.

* How quickly the mighty can fall when they are built on elbows and shoulders: San Francisco had one starting pitcher with positive RAA (Madison Bumgarner) along with the second and third to last NL starters in RAR. Barry Zito ranking down there was no surprise, but Ryan Vogelsong’s magic ride came to a halt with a line that pretty much made him Zito’s right-handed twin:



* Minnesota’s starting pitching was terrible once again; in 2012, they were last in starters’ eRA and second-to last in innings/start and QS%. In 2013, they completed the triple crown--last in IP/S (5.38), QS% (38), and eRA (5.76). No team was even close to being as hapless in this department as Minnesota--Colorado starters worked 5.43 IP/S and had 40% QS, while Houston and Toronto had the next highest eRA (5.24). Rockies starters were actually respectable with a 4.43 eRA versus a NL average of 4.24.

* I came to age as a baseball fan during the mid-90s, so the recent dip in runs scored is difficult for me to process when I peruse the stats--from an analytical perspective I understand the context issue, but there’s something jarring to me about looking at a list of hitters for a league and seeing only seven players with 100 Runs Created as was the case for the NL in 2013 (there were ten in the AL). 2003 is the earliest year for which I have my end of season stats at easy disposal, and in that season 24 NL and 21 AL players created 100 runs.

Another way to express this is to look at the batting lines of NL hitters with 0 HRAA (that is average batters, albeit compared to a league average that includes pitchers). They include Luis Valbuena (.213/.319/.370), Eric Young (.254/.314/.343), Marcell Ozuna (.264/.297/.387), Brandon Crawford (.256/.316/.374), and Jesus Guzman (.232/.300/.388).

The AL average runs scored per game was 4.33, while the NL was at 4.00. For both leagues, it was the lowest scoring output since 1992 (4.32 in the AL, 3.88 in the NL).

* A quick way to see which players had seasons that most surprised me is to look down the list sorted by RAR and find the first name that makes me do a double take. In the AL, that player is definitely Jason Castro. Castro hit .277/.352/.488 over 485 PA for 39 RAR and was arguably the best catcher in the AL as the only two ahead of him on the RAR list spent a significant amount of time at other positions (Carlos Santana and Joe Mauer). Castro was an All-Star, which should have caused me to look at him more closely in-season, but then again I probably just figured that they had to pick someone from Houston.

* Texas’ once-vaunted offense was below average in 2013, scoring 17 fewer runs than an average AL team when adjusted for park. A look down the list of individuals is jarring; only Adrian Beltre, Ian Kinsler, and Nelson Cruz ranked as above average. There’s an interesting case to be made for the Rangers as a cautionary tale for something (anointing a team as the best since the 1998 Yankees in June, maybe? Obviously that was in 2012, not 2013), but I’m not quite sure what it is.

* I list a variant of Bill James’ Speed Score in my stats (I switched from my own knockoff Speed Unit a few years ago because it’s easier to disclaim the results when you just use someone else’s method), but it really serves very little purpose--it's purposefully not expressed in a meaningful unit, it’s a skill measure rather than a value measure and therefore really should consider more data than one season, and the results usually aren’t surprising. One name that popped out at me, though, was Matt Dominguez, who has a Speed Score of 1.1. The AL players with lower Speed Scores are all catchers, first basemen, or DHs, except for fellow third baseman Alberto Callaspo.

I saw five or so Astro games on TV this year but don’t Dominguez’ speed or lack thereof standing out, and my impression was that defense at third was his calling card (not that speed is a key factor for third base defense, but my mental picture of a good third baseman is a big but athletic guy--he wouldn’t have a high speed score, but neither would he be sandwiched between Joe Mauer and Justin Morenau on the list).

But by the components that go into Speed Score, he’s really slow. He’s only attempted one stolen base in 200 major leagues games (and he was caught). He has two triples, but neither came in 2013. And he’s only scored 25% of the time when reaching base, which of course is somewhat attributable to playing for Houston.

* You may have noticed in reading through that I am easily amused by comparisons of players otherwise connected, that is traded for each other or where one replaced the other. My very favorite combination this year are the AL and NL trailers in RAR, who were once swapped as counterweights in the Zack Greinke deal. Alcides Escobar was 12 runs below replacement considering only offense and position, hitting .232/.255/.297 for 2.5 RG over 626 PA. Yuniesky Betancourt was -9 RAR, hitting .211/.238/.354 for 2.7 RG over 405 PA. And I for one am shocked that “Yuniesky Betancourt, first baseman” was a resounding failure.

There isn’t any baseball topic that is more of a cop-out, more of an admission that the author is flat out of ideas, then penning an article about one’s opinions on the Designated Hitter rule. I’ve managed to write roughly three posts a month for eight years without going there, so you’ll have to excuse me this one time.

Allow me to put my bias on the table upfront: I support the DH rule. I don’t think it is a perfect rule, but I think that baseball is a better game when the rules recognize that the defensive primacy of the pitcher has resulted in a systematic offensive deficiency. I do not demand that the DH rule be expanded to the National League, but I would certainly not oppose it and would strongly oppose any effort to eliminate the DH from the American League.

I’m not arrogant or naïve enough to believe that I have unearthed some new angle on this topic that you haven’t read before. The DH debate is relatively common, usually picking up extra momentum during interleague play and the World Series, and a large proportion of baseball fans have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. It now has entered the zeitgeist thanks to perpetual interleague play and the notion that universal adoption of the DH is inevitable.

There are two common pitfalls of those discussions that I think are unfortunate, and I’d like to address them before I make my points on the DH rule itself. This post doesn’t have any natural flow, so I’ve gone ahead and used topic headings:

Two Silly Arguments

The first is that participants in a DH debate sometimes accusingly point out that DH proponents tend to be fans of AL teams (or, from the other side, that proponents of pitchers batting tend to be fans of NL teams). It is undoubtedly true that this is the case…but so what? Whenever subjective preferences are on the table for human beings, there’s a good chance that one’s formative experiences or familiar experience will be reflected. To the extent that something is a matter of subjective preference without the insertion of any logical process, does where the preference arises from really matter? And if facts and logic are introduced into a discussion, does the background of the person presenting them matter? Facts are either true or not, and logic is either sound or faulty.

The second is the use of the "real baseball" card...namely, that baseball is somehow not baseball if pitchers are not allowed to bat. I’m not sure there’s a pro-DH counterpart to this argument; there certainly are specious arguments made in favor of the DH, but DH supporters generally don’t try to say that it’s not really baseball if pitchers bat. Arguments of this type are a convenient way to avoid making any sort of logical defense of one’s position.

One of the worst arguments put forth by DH supporters is that "Everyone uses the DH except the National League and the Central League". It’s true, more or less, but it’s still an appeal to the majority. The fact that the DH is widely adopted is evidence that many decision makers felt that it was a good idea, but that doesn’t necessarily make it so. This argument is the pro-DH answer to the "tradition" argument of the anti-DH diehards.

The Historical Trend of Pitcher Hitting

Of course, I’m not above snark and derision myself, and while I’ll try to avoid that for the rest of the post, I can’t pass this one up. You will occasionally see the claim that the DH rule exacerbated the decline of pitcher’s offensive production, and that pitchers did not or were not on a path to become the offensive zeroes they are in modern MLB until the DH rule was implemented. To this I say: nonsense. There are only two things constant throughout the history of major league baseball: the National League tries to position itself as morally superior to its rivals, and pitchers hit worse with each subsequent generation.

By 1972, pitcher hitting (in terms of RC/G relative to the league average, which I call ARG but his conceptually similar to OPS+ or wRC+) had already declined to levels near where it is today; for 1963-1972, the yearly averages were 10, 8, 7, 13, 7, 4, 11, 13, 14, 12. This was a continuation of a trend--pitcher ARG had never dipped below 20 prior to 1952, below 30 prior to 1934, below 40 prior to 1903--with each generation, a new low was being reached, and the race to the bottom was accelerating. (See this post for a more detailed look at positional offense in the twentieth century).

Pitcher ARG has declined further on average since the DH was introduced, but none of the observed figures would look particularly out of place in the 1963-72 figures. I suppose one must acknowledge that it is possible that the post-DH decline is understated due to the possibility that good hitting pitchers are more valuable to NL teams and thus get a greater share of pitcher plate appearances, but any such effect would have to be quite small unless the other forces at work were reversed or strongly diminished.

Radical Change to the Rulebook

A more popular argument against the DH is that it represents a fundamental change to the rules of baseball, a radical and unnecessary departure from the game as it was played for a century. (This is the refined, non-inflammatory version of the “real baseball” argument). Sometimes special attention is given to the first rule in the book, 1.01, which starts "Baseball is a game between two teams of nine players each". Since the DH is a tenth player, this rule is violated, and it is the first rule and thus the DH is completely antithetical to baseball itself.

It’s piling on to spend any time arguing against an argument that most people will immediately recognize as specious, but indulge me:

1. The baseball rulebook is not the Constitution. If you somehow demonstrate that the DH violates rule 1.01, then rule 1.01 can be revised just as easily as the DH can be added.

2. Read literally, nine players doesn’t leave room for substitutes of any kind. OK, you say, what it’s trying to impart is that there are nine players in the lineup for any one team at any time. If that can be read into the rule, then why can’t you just read it as nine players in any particular half-inning? After all, the DH does nothing to change the fact that there are nine players in the field and nine players in the batting order; it simply allows two players to alternate between an offensive and defensive role while sharing one lineup spot. The rules prevent these two players from ever being active simultaneously (viewed from a half-inning perspective).

Getting back to the more general issue of the DH being a radical rule change, I’m not going to try to argue that it’s more or less of a change to the rulebook than other changes that have occurred over the years. I am going to argue, however, that there have been many other changes to the game that have done much more to alter the way baseball is played than has the DH rule. Certainly the dawn of the “live ball era” changed the game much more than the DH, despite not being directly traceable to any rule change. (There are rule changes that certainly contributed, like banning the spitball and requiring clean balls in play, but there is also the composition of the ball and the approach of batters, both things that are not decreed by a line in the rulebook but can change the way the game is played).

The offensive outage of the 1960s that served as the catalyst for the DH rule is another example, and one which it could be argued was more of a direct result of a rule change (the expansion of the strike zone). Many would argue that changing the definition of the strike zone is not as radical of a change as introducing the DH, because it was simply a tweak to a pre-existing element of the game. My contention is that the amount of actual change to the game caused by a rule change is not necessarily proportional to the perceived radicalness of said change. The ultimate example of this is the way that the usage of pitchers as pitchers (not as hitters as in the case of the DH) has constantly changed throughout the game’s history.

Tradition

I’m not opposed to tradition. If something has been done a certain way for a long time, and the end result has been favorable, I have no problem accepting tradition as a point in its favor. But it’s just that--a point, not a game, set, or match. Tradition is also a very dangerous argument to make at this stage in the game if you hate the DH, since nearly forty years of the DH is in the American League has to make the tradition argument close to ripe for those who’d like to keep it around.

I have more to say on tradition, but it ties into the ultimate reason why I support the DH, so I’ll hold off for a second.

Strategy

Proponents of the DH like to claim that it introduces more strategy to the game; opponents sometimes argue the opposite, often citing Bill James’ article in the Historical Baseball Abstract that pointed out the higher standard deviation of sacrifice attempts in the American League. I’m not eager to take a position on which side (or either) is right. I’d grant that it’s probably true that the pitcher being forced to hit introduces more choices for a manager; but some of those choices have obvious answers. If you like strategy, is it more important to have many points at which a choice must be made, or more variation in the choices that are actually made (assuming for the moment that the DH actually does that)?

However, the debate about strategy takes for granted more fundamental questions: what is the optimal amount of strategy in a baseball game, and what exactly constitutes strategy? One could posit that there are three basic types of strategy, which I’ll label by the people responsible for making the choices.

1) Player-level strategy: Decisions about how to pitch to a batter, whether to dive for a ball or not...all of the choices that a player must make while taking the game state into condition

2) Manager-level strategy: Pinch-hit, pinch-run, change pitchers, bunt...the level of strategy that is most relevant to this discussion

3) GM-level strategy: How to evaluate players, which free agents to target, draft strategy...

I suppose Bill James would want us to consider a fourth level, Commissioner-level, which would be relevant to a discussion of the DH, but I’ll ignore that because it’s not particularly relevant to the game on the field.

Sabermetricians have spent most of their time, historically, on GM-level strategy, with Manager-level strategy second. Investigations into player-level strategy have increased in recent years, particularly with the flowering of Pitchf/x data, but still lags behind the other two.

The digression was probably unnecessary, except to set up my opinion--GM strategy fascinates me, player strategy is beyond me, and managerial strategy is interesting but there can be too much of it. Giving the manager more strategic options only interests me if those options allow baseball players to demonstrate their excellence.

Even then, it can be too much. While managers sometimes go overboard in their attempt to utilize their relievers in an attempt to gain the platoon advantage, in theory it’s a good idea. That doesn’t mean it makes for compelling baseball as a spectator. At least in that case, players are being used in a manner that most efficiently converts their ability to value, and the players are better than their peers at the task they’ve been assigned. While the former might be true when strategic choices are made with respect to pitcher hitting, the latter is not. Pitchers are not world-class hitters, and even the lowliest defensive specialist position player would be a standout hitter for a pitcher.

From where I sit, even if I accept that forcing pitchers to hit adds manager-level strategy, I don’t see that as a good thing. I’d rather see players asked to do things they excel at than watch a manager try to make the best out of a player who has no real talent at the task he is forced to engage in.

Conclusion

I don’t begrudge those baseball fans who think that pitchers hitting should be a part of the game at its highest level. While I would prefer not to ever have to watch a pitcher hit, I’m fine with the status quo.

I believe that the DH rule is a correction to a fundamental flaw in the initial design of baseball (to the extent that baseball was "designed"). Initially, the pitcher was a facilitator of action, more like a beer-league softball pitcher than a Greg Maddux. Of course, this lasted for about five seconds--competitiveness ensured that the rules constraining the pitcher would be constantly assaulted until the latter part of the nineteenth century when the rulemakers finally raised the white flag.

I contend that the balance between offense and defense that supporters of pitcher hitting sometimes cite has never existed in baseball and was never possible in a game in which one player’s defensive responsibility so dwarfs that of his teammates. A shortstop certainly has more defensive responsibility than a first baseman, but the difference is not so great as to make the shortstop’s offense a trivial matter when evaluating him as a player. The difference is not even so great as to ensure that when selected in practice, individual shortstops always hit worse than individual first baseman.

With respect to the pitcher, though, the value placed on hitting has been in decline from the beginning of professional baseball. Beyond the importance of selecting pitchers who can retire opposing batters, the relatively unabated trend of pitcher workloads declining with time has reduced the number of plate appearances an individual pitcher gets. At first pitchers were everyday players, more or less, and then there were two-man rotations and three-man rotations, and then the pitchers stopped completing all of their games, and there were four-man rotations...well, you know the story.

Natural selection (I’m sure my use of this term leaves a lot to be desired if you happen to be an evolutionary biologist) dictates that when one trait is so important, it will dominate, and pitching dominates in the selection of pitchers. It dominates to an extent that makes the fact that pitchers are lousy hitters a fait accompli, and it means that the notion of balance between offense and defense for a pitcher is folly.

The DH is admittedly an inelegant solution to this problem. It creates another position for which there is no offense/defense balance (although I don’t hold the ideal of offense/defense balance in particularly high regard). It is a solution that would have been unlikely to have been adopted in the early days of baseball had what I call the fundamental flaw been recognized as such.

I could have included this in the "Silly Arguments" section, but thematically it fit better here--DH opponents sometimes use a slippery slope argument that the DH is a harbinger of two-platoon baseball. Even by the standards of slippery slope arguments, this one strikes me as awfully specious. The DH has been in existence for forty years; there have been no serious proposals to expand the DH beyond the pitcher. There are no other positions that exhibit an inexorable historical trend of declining production with each generation. Given the nature of the game, it is difficult to imagine that such a situation could ever occur. No defensive position is even comparable to the pitcher in terms of its influence on run prevention.

I am all for continuing discussion about ways to tweak the DH; I’ve floated at least one of my own before. One option that is a non-starter as far as I’m concerned, though, is the notion of an eight-man lineup. While proponents like that it would remove the one-platoon DHs, it would fundamentally change the balance between offensive and defensive value for players of every position. It would instantly increase the incentive to carry defensive liabilities and make offensive production a more important factor in selecting players.

The eight-man lineup would cause far more fundamental change to the game than the DH has. Instead of having one offensive position (DH) and one defensive position (pitcher) in which there is no tradeoff between offense and defense, it would tip the scales at the other eight positions more towards offense. Traditionalists would be aghast at the impact of all the extra plate appearances on the record book; that consequence wouldn’t bother me, but perhaps we could shift to eight innings to balance things back out.

That last line is not meant as a joke. In the early 1880s, Henry Chadwick was convinced that baseball would soon be adopting a tenth fielder--a second shortstop of sorts, who’d play on the right side of the diamond and a tenth inning to go along with it.

That never happened, of course, but it’s worth remembering that a number of things that we take for granted in baseball were once anathema to whatever version of "purists" were around at the time they were introduced. The defensive dominance of the pitcher, which was decried well into the 1880s by some people who were upset that fielding just wasn’t as valued as it once was, is one example. What was radical a generation ago is accepted now is tradition a generation from now. Feel free to argue against the DH, but you’ll have to do better than the tradition or real baseball cards, because they could have been played against you in the past, and will be in the future.