Said Halladay: “I want to stay, but I think it’s a situation you have to evaluate. I’m really not at that situation just yet. If something does come up, you weigh your options at that point. I hate to put the cart in front of the horse and start saying ‘Do I want to do that?’ I think you just evaluate the situations when they come.”

Where could he be headed. Here are a few Roy Halladay rumors about his possible destinations:

Los Angeles Angels
The Angels have the hitting to win a World Series, however their pitching needs a lot of help. Halladay could answer a lot of questions.

Philadelphia Phillies
The Phillies are looking for starting pitchers all around the world. They have even gone to the Dominican Republic to take a look at Pedro Martinez.

Boston Red Sox
Although they probably have enough prospects and talent to get him, the Red Sox may opt to instead hold onto their young studs.

New York Yankees
If there is a big name on the trade market, you just know the Yankees will be interested. Like with the Red Sox, do the Yankees want to trade their minor league talent for Halladay?

Post from: Knuckle Curve

The Yankees are now 20-22 and in last place in the AL East. The Rays, with a record of 24-17, are in first place.

How can the Yankees turn save their season?

1. Get Healthy
The Yankees are dealing with a number of injuries at the moment. Most prominently, the team is without Hall of Fame third baseman Alex Rodriguez. Rodriguez has a strained quadriceps that has kept him out of the lineup for the entire month of May. In that time, Rodriguez has only been seen choking in the delivery room. Besides Rodriguez, veteran catcher Jorge Posada and young starter Phil Hughes are also battling injuries. Posada has a shoulder injury, while Hughes has a broken rib.

2. Get Hitting
The Bronx Bombers are more like the Bronx Bunters this year. No player on the team is having that great of a season at the plate. Jason Giambi leads the team with seven homeruns – but he also has a batting average of .184. Veterans like Bobby Abreu and Derek Jeter are having decent but not great seasons. Young players like Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera haven’t lived up to their potential. The Yankees need a hot bat to emerge.

3. Get Pitching Depth
Chien-Ming Wang has been very good for the Yankees this year. Mike Mussina and Andy Pettitte have had their ups and downs but overall they have been good enough. The problem is the rest of the rotation is in shambles. The Yankees were hoping that Hughes and Ian Kennedy could be the other two starts, but Hughes is hurt and Kennedy has been ineffective. Whether it’s a trade or a young pitcher stepping up, the Yankees need a more balanced rotation.

4. Get Torre?
While the Yankees are struggling, Joe Torre has the Los Angeles Dodgers at 21-19. Could the Yankees be showing signs of missing Torre? Perhaps. George Steinbrenner and his twin son Hank Steinbrenner won’t give current manager Joe Girardi as much leeway as they gave Torre. If the Yankees don’t turn it around ASAP, Girardi might be sent packing.

Does Joe Girardi Hear Joe Torre’s Footsteps?

Photo: Newscom

Post from: Knuckle Curve

However, I do have a lingering questions regarding Arizona’s batting order.  The Diamondbacks top their order with Chris Young, Eric Byrnes and Orlando Hudson.  While that is an impressive trio of players, I don’t see the logic in this batting order.  Young is fast and has shown a good eye at the plate this season, but the rest of his talents point towards a middle of the lineup type player.  Hudson, on the other hand, seems more built to bat second in the order with his high OBP and average power.

To best make use of the talent on the Diamondbacks, it makes most sense to me for Arizona to lead off with the speedy Byrnes, use Hudson as the second batter and move Young to bat third.  Additionally, with the way Justin Upton has been mashing this season, it may be time to start thinking about moving him higher in the batting order.

While there is much to be excited about in Arizona, it appears to me that things could be even brighter for the Diamondbacks.

Do you agree?  Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Post from: Knuckle Curve

For example, as chronicled in Moneyball, the Oakland A’s at one time were able to exploit teams’ lack of demand for players with high on-base percentage. Now that this is common knowledge, they are no longer able to use that particular inefficiency to their fullest advantage.

But the A’s, as any smart organization will do, have adapted and found new ways to help level the playing field. And they’re not the only ones. Here are some concrete examples from the article:

That could mean, as in Cleveland’s case, starting the year with a bunch of platoons with the understanding that some halves of those platoons won’t be available for a month here and there. For Toronto, it means fully expecting to use eight or nine starters to get through the year. For Oakland, it means accepting that you may have to improvise to put three outfielders and a designated hitter in the lineup every night.

Fascinating concept. The San Diego Padres have been doing this with their bullpen for years. While other teams are throwing money at guys with more of a track record, the Padres tend to gravitate toward pitchers that are flawed in some way. Grab enough of them, and you increase the odds that you’ll make it through the season with a decent aggregate performance from your relievers. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but that’s where “risk” comes into play — and why these players don’t cost as much as Danys Baez or Jeff Suppan.

How will teams exploit this “new inefficiency”? This is an excellent question; however, I expect that we’re a bit late in asking it. Jeff has pointed out several examples where organizations already are using risk to their advantage, which most likely means that organizations only just now getting around to it may have missed the proverbial boat.

The good news is, there will be other inefficiencies down the line to exploit. Such is the nature of markets…

Post from: Knuckle Curve

Peterson says pitchers usually agree that the four biggest elements leading to success are movement, location, velocity and change of speed. The trick is in which order to rate them.

Peterson’s goal is to get his pitchers to appreciate that location comes first. Then comes change of speed and movement, with velocity bringing up the rear. That ranking comes as a surprise to some pitchers, Peterson said, because they have had years of receiving their most positive feedback for throwing hard.

Peterson raises a good point about the premium placed on velocity when evaluating amateur pitchers. The general thought is that if a kid possesses the ability to throw hard, he can learn the nuances of pitching later. (Robbie Beckett would disagree, but I digress.)

He goes on to cite Tom Glavine, Pedro Martinez, and Orlando Hernandez as examples of pitchers who rely on hitting their spots for success. Here in San Diego, we’ve got guys like Trevor Hoffman, Greg Maddux, and David Wells who do the same. Hoffman, in particular, is a marvel to watch because batters generally know what’s coming and they still can’t hit him.

Peterson’s task is a challenging one. He has to convince kids who have relied on and been rewarded for their ability to throw hard that location is the primary determinant of success from this point forward. In other words, what got them noticed initially isn’t necessarily what’s going to give them staying power.

If Peterson can’t convince these kids that hitting their spots is more important than lighting up the radar guns, then big-league hitters surely will. I know which one I’d rather learn from.

Post from: Knuckle Curve

Post from: Knuckle Curve

That said, there is a post up at Timed Finals called “Science Says Athletes Perform Better At Night” that caught my eye. It’s pretty self-explanatory, really, but I wonder if there is any way this information can be leveraged where baseball is concerned. Or maybe it already is and we just don’t know about it.

When you look at a baseball player’s statistics nowadays, one of the many bits of information you can find is his day/night splits. In other words, you can see how he did during day games as opposed to during night games. I’ve seen some discussion on perfomance based on time of day, and going back a little further, Jim Albert and Jay Bennett did some research in this area in their book, Curve Ball, concluding that differences between day and night performances were essentially random.

I remain skeptical. It seems to me that if there are physiological differences, then they should manifest themselves in statistical output. This could be an area of further inquiry for someone.

And no, I’m not volunteering.

Post from: Knuckle Curve

A lot of guys who are starters in the minors come up to the big leagues and become closers. Mariano Rivera and Billy Wagner are two that immediately leap to mind. Wagner, in particular, was a stud prospect as a starter before moving to the bullpen. I’m not sure how many pitchers have made the move, been as successful in that role as Papelbon has, and then returned to the rotation. Not to say it isn’t possible, of course, but I wonder what kind of precedent there is.

Back to Ian’s piece, he advocates a strategy of gradually re-acclimating Papelbon to a starter’s role by having him work out of the ‘pen to start 2007 and then moving him into the rotation around mid-season. This is an an intriguing approach, and I think one that makes a lot of sense for many of the reasons Ian mentions — it would allow Papelbon time to develop a third pitch and presumably help reduce the chance of injury by limiting the number of innings he pitches.

Ian brings up another advantage to having Papelbon start the season in the bullpen, working longer stints, before returning to the rotation:

MLB teams’ adherance to the save rule and its offspring, the one-inning closer, is one of the more backwards, aggravating and impractical things in all of sports. There is no reason that a team’s best relief pitcher should be used with no outs in the ninth inning and his team up by three while sitting in the bullpen with the game tied in the eighth inning while an inferior pitcher takes the hill.

Beyond the question of what to do with Papelbon, this is a fascinating issue. One of the great things about baseball is that it’s constantly evolving. From throwing pitches underhanded in the 19th century, to Babe Ruth revolutionizing the game with his home run prowess, to pitcher dominance in 1968, to the emphasis on speed in the ’80s, change is as much a part of baseball as it is of life.

The role of one-inning closer has precisely three advantages that I can see:

1. It gives the closer a predefined role so that he knows when he can expect to be used.
2. It gives the manager an excuse if his closer blows the save.
3. It helps come contract time, when the closer can point to the number of saves he’s accumulated as justification for receiving huge wads of cash.

It may be that there are others I’m missing. Or it may be that the one-inning closer ain’t all that great and eventually will run its course the way throwing underhanded pitches did. Who knows?

I keep straying from the topic of Papelbon here, but the truth is, Ian raises some good points in his post that force us to look at the bigger picture. With that in mind, my parting questions to you are these:

1. What would you do with Papelbon? (I’m interested to hear your opinions, and I’m sure Ian would like to hear them as well.)
2. What do you think of the one-inning closer, and what are some alternative ways to utilize a bullpen?

Talk to me, folks.

Post from: Knuckle Curve

There’s no doubt that the A’s have had a prodigious number of wins with the resources they’ve had in the Moneyball era. But what has it gotten them? A baseball team is an entertainment business; a group of professionals putting on a show while patrons spend money on concessions and souvenir t-shirts.

I can’t presume to speak for anyone else, but I don’t go to the ballpark for concessions and T-shirts. I’m pretty much there for the game.

She does raise an interesting question: What is the goal of a big-league franchise? Is it to reach the playoffs on a regular basis or to sell merchandise? Or maybe it’s a little of each.

In Red Hot Mama’s view, the Oakland A’s are “so concerned with putting together 90 wins a season that they aren’t noticing that they had less than 2 million visitors during the regular season.” In my view, as a fan, that’s exactly where I want their focus to be. The team’s marketing department can figure out how to pitch the club after the front office has taken steps to ensure that there’s a product worth marketing.

I’ve also got an issue with the contention about the A’s that “they’re so dependent on the aggregate in their playing philosophy that they can’t win when it actually matters.” I’m not sure that a particular philosophy is keeping this club from winning consistently in the post-season. More likely, it seems to me, is that they’ve been victims of the fact that anything can happen in a short series.

The A’s “playing philosophy” didn’t prevent Jeremy Giambi from sliding into home against the New York Yankees in the 2001 ALDS. And it didn’t cause the Detroit Tigers’ pitching staff to dominate A’s hitters this post-season. Sometimes (Albert Pujols, are you listening?) you just have to give the other guy credit for doing a good job.

Red Hot Mama concludes by asking folks whether they would “rather have a team that’s fun but can’t win or a boring team that makes it to the postseason” and answering her own question in the same way I would:

I want both. The teams that are a success–not just division winners, but also winners of the hearts of fans–are exciting as well as effective.

This is a great sentiment, and one that I think just about any fan can endorse. Unfortunately it does leave open a few questions (which you are, of course, free to answer in the comments):

1. Assuming that most organizations aren’t in a position to deliver both division winners and also winners of fans’ hearts, which side should they err on and to what degree? (Hint: Think about which aspect a club has most control over.)
2. Assuming that the team you’re a fan of isn’t in the “both” category just yet, how long are you willing to wait for that to happen? What steps would management need to take (or avoid) to ensure that you don’t jump ship mid-journey?
3. What is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

As always, I look forward to your thoughts…

Post from: Knuckle Curve

She’s got some ideas on how to make things better, but my favorite part is her “frustration at people that think that throwing money at a problem is the quickest and best solution” to whatever ails an organization. Several so-called small-market ballclubs, chief among them the Minnesota Twins and Oakland A’s (as documented in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball), have demonstrated that if you have a solid plan and execute it well, it’s possible to overcome any financial inequities that might exist.

Post from: Knuckle Curve