A CITIZEN'S BLOG

First of all, as some of you might have noticed, it has been two weeks since I posted anything on A Citizens Blog. No, I am not quitting. Between work and some other things I had a few crisis that needed to be resolved and I needed a brief break from thinking about the Phillies. Now that I'm back I am eager to make up for lost time. This week alone I'll be posting a big piece analyzing Charlie Manuel's managing style and a preview of the Phillies & Marlins series at the end of the week. My recent pieces have been short on analysis, a deficiency I hope to correct soon.


Let's start off with a book review.

The 1970's may not have been a great era for America - Watergate, malaise, gas shortages, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, bell-bottom pants and disco - but it was actually a good era for baseball in many respects. The game had declined in the late 1950's as the public left the cities near their teams in favor of the suburbs. Football, a game uniquely suited for television, took off in popularity following the 1958 NFL title game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, as the NFL-AFL rivalry in the 1960's spurred interest in the game. Baseball no longer seemed relevant in the rebellious era of the 1960's. Pitchers came to dominate the game in the '60s, great stars like Mickey Mantle retired, fans felt disconnected to the game and baseball seemed ill-suited to adapting with the changing times.

That changed in the 1970's as baseball emerged from the dark days of the 1960's and began to embrace a more exciting form of baseball. Speed combined with power and made baseball more exciting and multifaceted than it had been in the station-to-station, wait for the home run 1950's. Dramatic personalities entered the picture, a welcome departure from the staid conformity of the 1950's. George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees, that symbol of 1950's establishment corporatism, and injected some life into a dull entity. The Oakland A's won three consecutive titles between 1972 and 1974, featuring a team that was never dull and uninteresting. Oh, and some guy out in Kansas City took out some paper and began to write about baseball in his spare time as a night watchman. It was, in many respects, a great era for baseball.

It is with all of that in mind I sat down and began to read Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid, the story of the 1973 baseball season. Written by John Rosengren, Hammerin' Hank has a lot of material to move through and I wanted to see what the author did with it. I was very impressed with Rosengren's approach. He really tries to move the reader to get a feel for the season as it unfolded, practically day-by-day. As the story moves along we get to see how the '73 season unfolded, but we also hear about Nixon and Watergate and how events outside of the game drove the public and impacted the game.


Some things about the '73 season that Rosengren reminds us:


-Hank Aaron made his run on Babe Ruth's record of 714 home runs in the 1973 season before falling a little short and breaking the record early in the '74 season. Aaron's story is pretty dramatic: the virulent racism hurled at the quiet man whose sin was that he was black and exceptionally talented. Aaron made his run on Babe Ruth's record amid exceptional hatred and intimidation. Rosengren's book is worth reading alone for the discussion about Aaron's season from hell.


-The novel Designated Hitter Rule began in '73, an innovation which would dramatically alter the game. It would seperate the American League from the National League and be an excellant example of how innovations to the game in the '70s helped bring fans back.


-What a colorful and exciting group the 1970's Oakland Athletics were. Reggie Jackson, Jim "Catfish" Hunter, Joe Rudi, Dick Williams and Owner Charlie Finley - I doubt that baseball will ever see such an interesting and diverse collection of personalities to grace the game ever again. The A's feuded and fought and argued and won again and again and again. Aside from the Yankees, no other franchise has won three consecutive World Series as the A's did from '72 to '74. If Charlie Finley had the financial resources of Steinbrenner, who purchased the Yankees in '73, the A's of the 1970s might have stayed together and done terrific things. Sadly, we'll never know.


I loved every page of Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid and couldn't put it down once I picked it up. That's what a good book should do for you ...

Labels: Book Review

Labels: Book Review, Coste

For the second year in a row I got The Hardball Times Baseball Annual for Christmas. This is a book that I love getting and find very interesting but (and I think I made this point last year) it just doesn’t get where it is aiming.

The Hardball Times is the primary website I read for information, argument and stats on baseball. I like THT stats more than ESPN.com or Yahoo! Sports (ESPN.com lost credibility for me by never updating their formula for Runs Created and by removing fielding stats for the longest time) and I find many of THT essay’s to be insightful and interesting. The Baseball Annual is THT’s effort to put out a piece of work that calls to mind the glories of Bill James Baseball Abstracts in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when James dazzled baseball readers with fun, interesting and always insightful writing. I can’t say the same for THT, although this year’s Annual is a little bolder, a little more fresh in its writing. James wrote in a vernacular that the average fan could understand while still talking to the hard-core baseball fan. The Baseball Annual is still a book for the hardened fan, by the hardened fan.

The Baseball Annual begins with a lengthy overview of the 2007 season division-by-division before moving into analysis, some history and commentary, before we get the stats. The analysis and commentary sections are interesting if a little dry. Don’t pass up Bill James essay on clutch hitting, which is thought-provoking and interesting all at the same time.

I really liked the historical section once more. Last season featured a terrific essay on the Federal league, the short-lived league that competed with the N.L. and A.L. in the mid-1910’s (largely causing Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s juggernaut to collapse) before failing. This season features an interesting profile of 1940’s St. Louis Cardinals skipper Billy Southworth, noting Southworth’s tendancies and skills (although the profile, authored by Jon Daly, oddly seems to end in mid-sentence) and also has a terrific – and timely – article about the MLB Players Association and its struggles in the aftermath of the 1994 players strike. The article, written by John Brattain, is insightful, well-written and very interesting with a dynamic point. This is the sort of writing that I wish the Baseball Annual would always feature.

Statistically, we get to take a look at a few new things in 2007. A welcome addition is the tabulation of Base Runs, a stat developed by Dave Smyth that is generally considered to be Bill James Runs Created’s primary competitor. What I don’t like: I’ll say this again, I’m not sure what THT’s Pitching Runs Created is supposed to measure, so it is a stat that I typically ignore.

This is the second year in a row I got the Baseball Annual. I intend on buying it again in 2008. The information it contains is interesting and valuable, and I think the quality of THT’s writing in the Annual is getting better and better. As they continue to find their voice, I’ll keep reading and some day, maybe next year, I’ll give their work an A instead of a B+, which is what I am giving them this year.

Labels: Book Review

I got the 2008 Bill James Handbook for Christmas and spent the ensuing days after Christmas tearing through it, checking out what is new and interesting. This is my review …

For those curious, the Handbook is very unlike the Baseball Abstracts that James used to write in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Whereas the Abstracts were full of little written blurbs by James on various topics, the Handbook is wall-to-wall information. There is very little in the way of actual writing, but it is, for me, the indispensable tool that I utilize to make this blog happen. There is information and new ways of looking at things that are vital to my blogging.

The main section, the player register, is largely unchanged from years past, listing hits, runs, RBI, Wins & Losses, etc. although with some sabremetric information (Runs Created for position players, Component ERA for pitcher, for example), before the book moves onto the stuff that really interests me:

Player Baserunning is in the book for the third year in a row and James continues to refine his research. James separates base-stealing from base-running (advancing from first to third, making outs on the basepaths, etc.) and actually gives us team totals, something that I complained that the 2007 book lacked. This is an interesting topic and I look forward to seeing where James goes with it in the future.

For the second year in a row, James has a discussion on the idea of Manufactured Runs, which looks at how many runs teams score off of Small Ball strategies like bunting and base-stealing (Type-1) and off of strategies like aggressive base-running and sacrifice flies (Type-2). This is an interesting section chiefly because James now notes how many Manufactured Runs a team surrendered and how many the Top 3 individual players contribute from each team. I hold out hopes that in the future James will give us the Manufactured Runs for each player individually.

After that, James made adjustments to the Manager Index, now noting how manager’s intentional walk strategies turn out (Good, Not Good, and Bomb). I think it is an interesting way of trying to give the reader concrete results of strategies that Managers embark on.

After that, player projections for 2008, park factors (always an interesting topic for Phillies fans because of Citizens Bank Ballpark), fielding stats, etc.

This is not a book for the average baseball fan. James is pitching this book to one market only – the hard-core baseball fanatic who wants to know how often Charlie Manuel utilized pinch runners in 2007 (A: 56, most in the National League). I find the information invaluable because it gives me real insight into the strategies of teams, what works and doesn’t work, etc. Without the Bill James Handbook, this would be a very dull blog.

Labels: Book Review

Last night's 9-3 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks was one of the most stunning victories I've seen in recent memory. Ryan Howard's seventh-inning, pinch-hit grand slam illustrates how the momentum in a game can shift with just one swing. Thankfully the Phillies escape their road trip with a 4-6 record. Now they get a chance to make up some ground starting with the Cubs tomorrow night. Anyway, let's talk literature...

Mark Twain famously said that there were three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics. Twain was referring to the fact that people could twist and manipulate numbers to their own agenda and for their own cause. I thought of Twain’s aphorism as I read The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz. Published in 2004, the book’s forward begins with a searing event that transformed how baseball teams approached statistics: Grady Little’s decision to leave Pedro Martinez in to pitch Game 7 of the ALCS. Numbers analysis showed that the decision was a disaster waiting to happen – once Pedro hit the seventh inning he fell apart – and yet Grady Little did what managers had traditionally done and “went with his gut” by leaving Pedro in. Pedro got shelled, the Yankees won and the cursed was prolonged for a year while the Red Sox retooled and got a manager who wasn’t afraid to use numbers when making decisions.

Then the curse was broken.

Schwarz has written a very confident and interesting look at the history of stats in baseball. I want to compare and contrast The Numbers Game to Moneyball, which covers a lot of the same ground – Bill James, Henry Chadwick, etc. – but Schwarz does it without Michael Lewis’ revolutionary tone. Lewis knew he was writing a biased book when he wrote Moneyball, a revolutionary document that recast history to suit its own ends, while Schwarz has a much more value-neutral approach to the topic. Schwarz’s work is more balanced and a little deeper. Dealing with the Oakland A’s adoption of numbers-based stats in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, I think Lewis missed the boat on the evolution of the A’s thinking about stats when he jumped straight from Sandy Alderson to Billy Beane. The process was much more gradual and subtle. Alderson was a lawyer, not a traditional baseball man, looking for new ideas and came across them when he read Eric Walker’s The Sinister First Baseman, which preached the gospel of On-Base Percentage. Alderson taught Beane, and the march of numbers went on from there. In many ways, Lewis misses the boat in Moneyball. The key figure in stats is not Beane but Alderson, the man who brought the thinking into the mainstream and indoctrinated the A’s. (Lewis makes fleeting references to Alderson in the book.) Once Alderson made numbers a part of the A’s thinking, the genie was out of the bottle.

Naturally there are many more figures of note in Schwarz’s book. Branch Rickey utilized stats as the Brooklyn Dodgers GM in the 1940’s before he was forced out and the Dodgers sent his designated stat man packing. George Lindsay and Earnshaw Cook, are figures lost to the pages of history and whose memories are resurrected. Lindsay, an officer in the Canadian Military and Cook, author of Percentage Baseball, were people who had suspicions about the game and wrote daring reinterpretations about numbers and how they were used well ahead of their time (1950’s and 1960’s).

In particular I loved Schwarz’s opening chapters on Chadwick and the development of the box score. The high value that was placed on defense in the early days of baseball is really a fascinating topic to behold. That opening chapter is well worth the cost of the book right there.

So is The Numbers Game a superior book to Moneyball? I found them to be different, one a book about advocacy which interpreted history in a manner that supported its conclusions, the other a dispassionate take on people and ideas that people feel passionately about. I rather enjoyed Schwarz’s writing style and how he covers all of the bases when it comes to numbers in the history of baseball. It is hard not to be impressed. A very good read, in fact it is a must for my baseball fan to have in their library.

Labels: Book Review

Before I get into my review ... Tonight the Phillies send Adam Eaton to the mound to pitch to the Mets Perez. A loss drops the Phillies to 1-7 and would probably put Charlie Manuel in-line to be fired shortly. The Phils need to embark on a winning streak and soon. This team is capable of running off a 5-6-7 game winning streak, so nothing is done that cannot be undone. However, they need to start banking some wins and soon. Alright, now back to my review...

I began reading Eight Men Out recalling the aphorism that a movie is never as good as the movie. I had seen the 1988 movie starring John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, David Strathairn, and many others, a long time ago and remember that it was one of my favorite movies growing up. 1988 was a terrific year for the game of baseball being in the eye of Hollywood, as Bull Durham came out in the summer and Eight Men Out followed in September. Bull Durham, a wry comedy about life in the minors that featured some of the best, wittiest bits of dialogue I’ve heard (e.g., “Don't try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls - it's more democratic.”) was a very different movie compared to Eight Men Out, a serious movie that sought to get to the truth of the infamous 1919 “Black Sox” scandal. The movie captured the passion and feeling of the game in those early, pre-Ruthian days as the vaunted 1919 Chicago White Sox stumbled when eight players allegedly conspired to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, to the stunned amazement of fans across America. The resulting scandal nearly destroyed the fabric of the game and has been the specter haunting such incidents as Pete Rose’s betting on baseball in the late 1980’s. The trauma of the scandal led to earth-shaking changes in the game: the tooth-less old commission that oversaw the N.L. and A.L. was cast by the wayside in favor of a Commissioner who bent the will of the game to his own, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the formidable Federal Court Judge.

The book itself, written by Eliot Asinof, is a very readable account of the scandal, capturing the tenor of the game and the lives of the players. Charles Comiskey was a self-made man who paid his players pretty much nothing. Compared with their rivals in New York and Boston and Cleveland, the White Sox were a bargain-basement operation. Stars like Eddie Cicotte and Buck Weaver made less than subs on their rivals. The perennially cheap Comiskey, along with the gamblers, emerges as the villain for the scandal. His cheap, penny-pinching ways drove his players to look for ways to supplement their income. He was so cheap he was the only owner not to pick up his player's laundry bills. An a self-righteous man who thought of himself as honorable, Comiskey was consumed by his pursuit of success on the baseball diamond and vindicating his own sense of superiority. Comiskey, more than anyone else, is the reason why the scandal happened and emerges as a lamentable figure in the pages of Asinof’s book. If he hadn’t lorded over his players, holding them to absurdly low salaries, refusing to listen to their pleas for better pay and treatment, perhaps the scandal wouldn’t have occurred.

When it did, Comiskey’s long-running feud with American League President Ban Johnson and the weak power structure of baseball’s commission prevented Comiskey from taking any action, allowing the scandal to ride its course in the 1919 series. The truth, when it came out, was catastrophic for baseball. At the end of a passionate pennant race in 1920 that the White Sox nearly won came the news that the previous World Series had been fixed by the players. Asinof captures the stunned outrage that swept America and shook the game to its very foundations. A Chicago Grand Jury investigation turned up the scandal as the 1920 season came to a close and turned into a full-scale media sensation.

I found the picture that Asinof paints of the scandal to be a fuller picture than the 1988 movie presents, not surprisingly. How involved was Buck Weaver really? What about Joe Jackson? There was a lot of murky gray area that made reconstructing the story difficult. The movie is a little more clear-cut about who was involved, but the actual actions of the players is a little more difficult to comprehend. The testimony of the players before the Grand Jury in Chicago only filled in bits and pieces of the story, the machinations of the gamblers – Arnold Rothstein, Sport Sullivan, Abe Attell – is shrouded in mystery. The moment when Happy Felsch notes to a reporter that the joke was on the players because the gamblers had approached them about the fix, gotten rich off their work and were never held accountable rings true. While the players were the ones to fix the series it is hard not to feel some sympathy for them. The gamblers profited off their actions and the politicians and owners offered them as sacrificial lambs to a public that was desperate for blood. In the end, they were the only ones to be held accountable for their actions. The gamblers left them holding the bag, the owners and politicians moved on. The players suffered their ban from the game in silence.

It is hard not to be impressed with the work that Asinof devoted to reconstructing the scandal. His book captures the story and does what any good book does, put the reader in the story and makes them care about the heroes and how they turn out. You feel pity for the great Eddie Cicotte, the proud, flawed man who emerges as the hero of Eight Men Out. (Primarily Asinof focuses on Cicotte, Buck Weaver and Joe Jackson at the end of the book.) Worried that he couldn’t provide for his family, he made a decision that he hoped would secure his family’s future, but it ultimately destroyed his career as a ballplayer and left him a humiliated man. More than any other person, Cicotte jumps off the pages of Asinof’s book the hero of the story.

Enjoy, I highly recommend.

Labels: Book Review