I’m lazy today, so I’ll just send you guys to some interesting stuff I’ve seen lately:
–Baseball America Scouts vs. Stats: Allan Schwarz leads a roundtable discussion with Voros McCracken (Mr. DiPS and Red Sox consultant), Gary Huckabay (BP writer and A’s consultant), Gary Hughes (Cubs Assistant GM), and Eddie Bane (Angels Scouting Director) about evaluation techniques.
–Brian and the Nationals. Brian makes his second apperance at the Hardball Times detailing how an Expo becomes a National. Also, check out his comparison of Ryne Sandberg and Lou Whitaker at Tigerblog. Whitaker was always my favorite player, so I of course think he should be a HoF’er. However, knowing my bias I try to be reserved about Whitaker so it’s nice to see other people sharing my feelings.
–The Oakland Press doesn’t have the readership of the News and the Freep, but for Tigers coverage maybe it should. Crystal Evola has had a pretty good week covering the Tigs. On Wednesday, Crystal had the quotes of Dombrowski saying that the Tigers weren’t pursuing Beltran. The Free Press, News, and sports talk radio didn’t pick it up until yesterday. Then today, she was the only source to include Dombrowski’s comments on Anderson Hernandez.
-Another Hardball Times article from last week took a look at one out guys. While Trammell received lots of criticism for bullpen utilization, his use of pitchers to come in and face only guy was pretty successful. The Tigers brought in pitchers 33 times last year to face only one batter. Those 33 batters faced resulted in 32 outs. If you wanted to know who was best at this, check out Steve Colyer who was called on 11 times to face one batter, and came away with 11 outs.
I’d like to see the “after effects”, if you will, of the one-out usage pattern, particularly as it pertains to the Tigers otherwise woeful 2004 bullpen. Because while its nice to see 32 “successes” in 33 opportunities, what still bugs me is
a) the guy that was successful got yanked immediately, and
b)in Detroit’s case that probably meant handing the ball to someone of even more dubious quality.
I can see the merits of the one-out reliever strategy if the next guy out of the pen is a solid pitcher (or at least better than the one-out guy), or if the next batter at the plate has some freakish platoon split you simply have to exploit. But its rearranging the deck chairs if all you’re doing is going from bad to worse, or equally bad, simply because of a lefty-righty fixation.
We can give credit to Tram for making the right call 32 out of 33 times over the course of the season, but I dont know that it was the right call to then remove the pitcher 32 times and go to the next guy.