Yankees are in win now mode, as they should be. I think they’ll still sign one of the top free agent pitchers.
Adrian Beltre has announced his retirement. Hall of Famer? When you hear the name your first thought might be ahh, probably not. But the dude played for 20 years and 10 of them were 5 WAR or better. Racked up a bunch of gold gloves, a handful of top 10 MVP finishes. Yeah, I think he’s easily a HOFer.
Adrian Beltre is absolutely a Hall of Famer, in my opinion.
Beltre is a Hall of Famer, by no means an inner circle player, but great enough and long enough to go in easily. In the old days of just 20 years ago in might take 2-4 ballots, so 1-2 now when eligible.
ETA: Just checked, 2166 hits & 636 doubles, 477 HR, I think there is no question he qualifies.
Yes thanks for explaining this better than I did. This is exactly the reason I heard for keeping the image minimally alive. One proposal I heard was only using it on the sale of “retro” jerseys for players like Rocky Colavito, and that these would not be available on line.
Yeah, he’s a guy where the numbers might surprise you. I mean, I never thought of him as the best 3B in the league. Maybe he was for one year (2004) and other that he just churned out a whole bunch of really solid years.
I don’t think so. The top third of the MLB is head and shoulder above the top of the AAA division. The pitching is also a lot better at the MLB level.
I think you could probably replace the bottom third of the mlb for AAA players and you wouldn’t notice the difference in 3 years.
The Boston Red Sox might disagree.
You could say that about every baseball team. Who gives a shit? Has the game been improved in the era of advanced stats? Just the opposite, IMHO.
One could certainly make this argument. Is it the sabermetrics that have turned baseball into a home run/strike out/walk game?
Other than the fact that they expect to win every year, I’m not sure this is true. They have a good core of young players. I’m surprised they gave up their #1 prospect, and a pitcher to boot, for an injury-prone, pretty good pitcher.
I certainly think it’s contributed to it, as it’s statistical analysis that’s led to the heavy use of defensive shifts (which has discouraged attempts to get ground ball hits, in favor of fly ball hits (homers or doubles)), more frequent pitching changes, the near-death of the stolen base, and the focus on launch angles.
I don’t disagree. And it’s quite a conundrum. Sabermetrics is nice because it gives us a meaningful way to analyze and understand baseball. However, that analysis has led to applications that are quite frankly making the game less fun. Baseball never was a nonstop action packed sport, half the fun of the game is the build up to some moment of action that could happen at any time. But now there is objectively less action and arguably less build up to it.
This is not a thing that has happened. Stolen bases are at a level that is, at worst, roughly average, and maybe even a bit above that.
This has happened before, though. Baseball for a very long time, between the 1930s and 1960s, was much, much more boring than it is now by any of the measures people say it’s boring now. The only plus was that the games didn’t take as long to play, but that had nothing to do with analysis.
The baseball of Mickey Mantle’s day was basically about drawing walks and hitting home runs and little else. Almost no one stole bases; **teams today steal more bases than in any year in the 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s, or 1960s. **(Swear to God.) There was very little in game strategy; not a lot of intentional walks, no defensive shifting, not as many sacrifice bunts as you’d think outside of pitchers, and most managers didn’t platoon. Batters didn’t strike out as much, that’s for sure, but they also walked more than they do now.
The baseball of the 1970s and 1980s was quite interesting - a wild mix of small ball, basestealing, platooning, power hitting and relief pitching approaches. In 1982, the World Series featured a team that hit only 67 home runs but stole 200 bases against a team that hit 216 home runs and stole 84 bases. One AL team - no pitchers hitting - made 114 sacrifice bunts, and another only made 22. It was, in my honest opinion, some of the most interesting baseball ever played, and it’s what we tend to comapre today to, but the 1970s-80s baseball WASN’T historically normal. It was the outlier. What you are seeing today is, in a lot of ways, actually closer to the game of Joe DiMaggio than was the baseball of 30 years ago.
The thing is, what created the baseball of Rickey Henderson wasn’t rule changes, it was a bunch of stuff. Large Astroturf ballparks, for instance, were a big part of encouraging the speed game; it makes way, way more sense to have a team like the 1985 Cardinals in the Busch Stadium of that day than it would in the Busch Stadium of today. No one wants Astroturf back, surely, but it is absolutely not a coincidence that the revitalization of the running game exactly coincided with the widespread adoption of Astroturf.
anyway, sabermetrics is increasing strikeout rates, but you can’t blame it for the interminable length of games. That is absolutely on MLB for not keeping pace of play up and selling so many damn commercials.
Sure, so a little bit of action packed into 2.5 hours is more rewarding than the same amount of action over 3+ hours. This miscellaneous list of statsper MLB game is interesting, but tells us a lot of what we already know. Runs per game have stayed pretty constant over the years, bouncing up and down here and there. But the trend of number of pitchers used per game is astounding.
2018: 4.36
2008: 3.92
1998: 3.46
1988: 2.75
1978: 2.40
The question is whether this is something that should be mitigated. I honestly don’t know the answer.
What has absolutely happened is that stolen bases (and stolen base attempts) are substantially lower now than they were from the late 1970s through the 1990s, when it was a far more common strategy (and, when you had a number of proficient base stealers, like Henderson, Raines, and Coleman). That said, what happened in the 1980s and 1990s reversed a tendency against the steal during the 1950s into the early 1970s. So, in the very long run, you’re probably right, it’s at about “average” now.
From Baseball Reference, here’s the average steals per game, per team, and the average attempted steals, per game, per team, in five-year increments:
2018: 0.51 / 0.71
2013: 0.55 / 0.76
2008: 0.58 / 0.79
2003: 0.53 / 0.76
1998: 0.68 / 0.97
1993: 0.72 / 1.09
1988: 0.79 / 1.13
1983: 0.79 / 1.17
1978: 0.71 / 1.09
1973: 0.52 / 0.83
1968: 0.47 / 0.76
1963: 0.38 / 0.62
1958: 0.30 / 0.51
1953: 0.27 / 0.48
Here’s an article by Buster Olney on ESPN about it; he notes that at least one of the factors is that teams have, in fact, used analytics to determine that trying to steal if your likelihood of success is less than 80% isn’t worth it. So, what’s happening is fewer overall steal attempts, but a higher success rate. The days of a guy like Henderson just being given a green light to steal when he got on base are likely over.
Yes, I went into this in some detail three posts ago.
The stolen base left the game long before the 50s, though. It started falling out of fashion when Babe Ruth was in his prime.
Barkis makes the point that many more pitchers are being used these days, and raises the question as to whether something should be done about that. Honestly, that is one of the last places I’d change anything. It’s not that pitcher changes aren’t kinda boring - they are - but that it would require a really dramatic rule change, and there are ways pace of play can be improved with more subtle approaches. It’s also quite possible this trend will reverse a little on its own.
At some point, it has to at least plateau, right? I mean, there are only so many pitchers on a roster. I would agree any rules intended to mitigate the growing number of pitching changes would be murky. You either limit the number of roster spots, the number of pitchers allowed on the roster, the number of pitchers allowed per game, or create a minimum batters faced per pitcher. I don’t love any of those and neither would the MLBPA.
I am not in favor of a rule that eliminates defensive shifts, either. Probably the best way to speed up the game is reduce TV commercial breaks. During the playoffs there were a great number of commercials within the game. How much crap did Joe Buck plug between batters? Years ago I’d have hated it, but now I think if it means shorter breaks between innings, go for it.
I stand corrected. Your earlier point is probably relevant, in my brain – I started really following baseball just as the stolen base explosion of the 1970s started, and my brain probably associates that style of play with what baseball “should be,” rather than recognizing that that era was an anomaly.
Trust me, I’m the same way. I started following baseball in 1980; people stealing immense numbers of bases was normal to me. I suspect that is a common thing; what we grew up with is what we assume is correct. It’s true of music, for instance.