The Last Hours of Lincecum?

I went to the Giants game on Sunday, and watched Tim Lincecum throw 114 pitches, strike out ten, and make two mistakes, both solo home runs.... and when he struck out the last man he faced and walked to the dugout, I said aloud what many Giants fans were likely also thinking: “Was that the last pitch for Timmy in a Giants uniform?”

With SF in full implosion mode, (despite his line, Timmy lost on Sunday) I suppose Giants general manager Brian Sabean must at least listen to offers for anybody on the defending World Series Champions... but why would he get rid of The Franchise?

You can argue that Matt Cain is the number one on the Giants staff (you can also make a compelling argument that this year, everyone on the staff is going number two), but Lincecum is not some leftover piece of bad pizza. The only possible reasoning for trading him is that he is a free agent after this season and the Giants will likely want him to take a significant pay cut to return in 2014 and beyond, (he's making $22 million this season, I've heard SF will offer $15 or so if he stays.... and that somebody would scoff at $15 million a year is another column or seven anyway) so if he's not going to be back anyway, why not try and get something for him anyway?

There are several answers. One, that he probably will be back anyway. As a free agent, the Giants have first choice on him anyway (a “qualifying offer,”), so to get him, another team would have to go beyond the $15 million a year AND give the Giants draft picks. Um, isn't that what another team would be doing anyway if they traded for him now? Not only that, but to get him now they'd have to throw in prospects/actual major leaguers, not just draft picks. AND pay part of his current $22 million. AND then maybe only have him as a two-plus month rental anyway, because then he could go anywhere in free agency and leave the next team absolutely nothing.

The second answer is, have you noticed what the Giants have done the past few years? They won a World Series, they had a bad year, they won a World Series (with much of the same team as the year before), and now they have a bad year. Matt Cain, mentioned earlier, was dominant in 2012- a perfect game will allow use of the word “dominant”- but this year all of the Giants starters are having bad years. Timmy is now 5 and 11. Cain is 6 and 6. Ryan Vogelsong is hurt. (his wife Nicole Vogelsong, on the other hand, appears to be doing just fine). Barry Zito is winless on the road. Nobody makes the playoffs without at least one dominant pitcher. The Giants have no one, which means the bullpen is used more and more. And since SF can't score a run anywhere (Sunday they had the bases loaded with no one out and on the first pitch Buster Posey grounded into a 3^rd to home double play- and they only got one run when Panda doubled to the left field corner), that just makes it worse for the starters.

Finally, public relations. The Giants have sold thousands of Timmy jerseys. The SF faithful want nothing more than Timmy to snap out of whatever is ailing him (and so does he, obviously) and return to Freak status. For SF to get rid of him- yeah, it's a business, but it would be a bad move with a team that's floundering so badly to get rid of one of the top two personalities on the team (the other is Buster Posey- Panda is just a character because he looks like an orange creamsicle on Friday nights). The fans are whining right now, they would go bonkers if Timmy got traded.

There's no reason for SF to do anything before the trade deadline. To trade Timmy would be a panic move. This season is done. Wait 'Till Next Year.  Every other year seems to be working out just fine for SF.

Win One For the Chipper

Like many people who have followed Oregon football for a while, I am very interested to see how Chip Kelly does in the NFL. The Philadelphia Eagles opened fall training camp this week, and Chip had his first post-practice press conference. It sounds like Chip. Still weird to see him in a different visor, though.

The biggest question is not whether Chip will succeed in the league. That would merely be a product of what is, to me, the biggest question around every coach when they first take over a team- and that's whether the players buy in to what you're selling as a coach- how you practice, how you play, what you do to succeed. That's true at every single level of every sport, whether that's Pop Warner or the NFL, little league or the Pac-12.

You know this if you've played any sort of organized sport, from little league on up. A team takes on the personality of the most dominant coach in the program. Even in little league, there are teams that play rougher, there are teams that freak out in pressure situations- and there are teams that are laughing and joking no matter the situation, the down, the distance, how much they trail, or how much they're ahead. And that, from T-ball on up to the New York Yankees, comes from the most dominant coach on the team- and that should always be the head coach.

As for what's happening in the land of cheesesteak.... although it's very early, it appears that Chip's Win the Day culture has migrated three thousand miles to the city of Brotherly Love. Already, the guys are talking like Chip, saying every day is a competition (believe me, I heard that every day covering Oregon football).

Yes, Chip will win with good players. But Chip's idea of good players and “the establishment's” idea of good players are two different things. Oregon succeeded because Chip didn't go for guys that were five-star recruits, he got guys that fit what he wanted to do. And that's where I don't understand rating recruits at all. A five-star player for one team is a zero star player for another team. If you want fast running backs, a 300-pound fullback is not a five-star player for you. But if you're running a deliberate student body left offense, a 300-pound fullback will have immense value. Let's face it, most five-star players would be rated five-star players by 85 year old Swedes, because they're the best player on the field.

Chip's idea is that all players must perform to the best of their abilities all the time- which is, admittedly, on surface a pretty normal thing to expect. But many coaches, when they use the term “all players,” don't actually mean “all players”- they mean “everybody who isn't a star.” Former Cowboys head coach Jimmy Johnson had the best line about this- he said to his players, “I'm going to treat everybody the same- I'm going to treat every one of you differently.” This is not talking at cross-purposes, it's actually quite plain. One third-stringer got cut for falling asleep in a film session. Michel Irvin could have driven to practice in a car made of cocaine and wouldn't have gotten cut (and that many have actually happened). Jimmy worked the star system- Chip doesn't. There are no slackers on a Chip Kelly football team, and anybody can end up number one. That's what Win the Day means.

It appears the Philly fans have taken a page from Duck fans, and bought into WTD as well. A recent poll question on PhiladelphiaEagles.com asked which non-starter had the best chance to make an impact during camp. The winner, with 43 percent of the vote, was a rookie, 7th-round draft pick Jordan Poyer, a cornerback from Oregon State. While with the Ducks, Chip always raved about JP during Civil War week. When Poyer was taken by Philly this spring, all Oregon media (myself included) and probably plenty of Philly media played up the fact that Chip liked him, and said so for the last four years. In that press conference I linked to at the beginning, Chip didn't go three minutes before he referenced JP. It's clear that he has high expectations for a seventh-round draft pick... and when was the last time you heard a head coach expect a seventh-round draft pick to compete for a starting job immediately? Even several years ago when Bill Bellichick drafted Matt Cassel in the 7th round, a quarterback who hadn't started a game since high school, everyone knew he was at least a two-year project (and also that it was a great pick- Bill got a good season out of him when he needed one, never mind that Cassel hasn't done a damn thing since.  Plenty of 7th round picks want one game). But this is Chip we're talking about. If you're on the team, even a 7^th round pick, you're on the team for a reason- he thinks you can be a great player in his system. Not in two years, but today.

With that, it appears that Chip has at least won the first day. I just have to get used to him in a different visor, that's all.

A blog that links to another page on that same blog

Yeah, and?  It's worth more than just one post, IMHO.

http://sporadicsentinel.blogspot.com/p/seconds-from.html

All-Star Al: A Statistical Anomaly

Al Lopez with the South Siders

Before this year's baseball all-star game, a friend of mine emailed me and several other baseball friends of his a link to a good article about the 1964 all-star game, which was also played in a new stadium in Flushing. He closed with a trivia question he made up: “Why did Al Lopez manage the American League team in the '64 game?”

This assumed that the reader knew who Al Lopez managed in 1963, and knew that Lopez did not earn the initial right to manage the AL 1964 All-Stars by winning the '63 AL pennant. This I knew, but I made the answer too complex- I actually skipped ahead a year, the reason of which is actually fascinating, and we'll get to that in a bit.

First, about Al Lopez. Al Lopez could have gone down in history as one of the most successful managers of all-time, but he happened to manage in the American League in the 1950's and 1960's, when that team from the Bronx had a historical run that will never be duplicated again: The New York Yankees won 14 American League pennants in 16 years. They didn't just repeat; they five-peated, then they four-peated, and then they five-peated again. Only two teams prevented the Yankees from 16-peating (think about that for a second- 16-peating): the 1954 Cleveland Indians, who won a then-AL record 111 games, and the 1959 “Go-Go” Chicago White Sox. Both of those teams were managed by... and you may have figured this out already... Al Lopez.

That much I knew before I went to the interwebs to get the correct answer to the trivia question. There I discovered several statistical anomalies about Al Lopez as a manager. (I would have written “interesting statistical anomalies,” but in the minds of baseball statheads, all statistical anomalies are automatically interesting.) Also, I then realized that every baseball player and manager has a statistical anomaly that stands out. Obviously the big ones are career numbers for your Hall of Famers, but the reason SABR (the Society for American Baseball Research) exists and that Bill James has a career and that Moneyball is now a front office strategy is because of statistical anomalies. Even if a baseball players' statistics are perfectly average, he becomes a statistical anomaly because no baseball player is perfectly average. Mind. Blown.

Anyway, Lopez has several statistical anomalies as a manager. First, that he finished second seven times in his first nine years as a Major League manager, all to the same team, those Yankees. From 1951 to 1959, with the Indians and Sox, Lopez finished second except in those years he won the pennant, in '54 and '59. That means he also four-peated... he just did it in second place, and with two different teams, as he left Cleveland for the South Side of Chicago after the '56 season.

But, more important to this particular trivia question is that he is (as far as I can tell) the only man to twice be chosen as a “replacement” All-Star game manager- and it happened in consecutive years. You see, the rule for the All-Star game is that the manager who won the pennant the previous year gets to coach the game for his league. Lopez had already taken the helm twice the normal way, in 1955 and 1960. However, the Sox finished third in that 1960 season, meaning that Baltimore's Paul Richards became the first American League “replacement manager” when Casey Stengel retired/got fired after the Yankees lost the 1960 World Series in dramatic fashion to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 7 games.

The Yankees replaced Stengel with Ralph Houk, who won the next three AL pennants. However, he was already scheduled to move to be Yankees GM after the '63 season ended so Yogi Berra could become manager in 1964. And that happened, allowing Lopez- whose South Siders came back to finish second in '63- to manage the AL All-Stars in 1964. Thusly, the correct answer to the initial trivia question.

However, the biggest All-Star game managerial statistical anomaly (see? I told you everybody in baseball is part of one) happened in 1965. It started when Yogi and the Yankees won the AL pennant in '64, and played the St. Louis Cardinals, managed by Johnny Keane, in the World Series.

Well, the Yankees lost in 7 games. And even though this was pre-Steinbrenner, the Yankees still knee-jerked their way to a decision, firing Yogi (even though these Yankees were aging rapidly- most of them were at least ten-year veterans, Mantle's weakening knees and boozing and pill-popping were increasing rapidly in opposite directions- and the Cardinals were the up-and-comers, with Bob Gibson and Lou Brock, who would help the Cards make back to back series appearances a few years later).

And, in a bizarre twist, to replace Yogi, the Yankees hired Johnny Keane, who had just beaten them in the series. So both the managers of the pennant winning teams were gone. As a result, for the first and only time (again, so far as I can tell) both All-Star game league managers were replacements. Lopez, who of course finished second to the Yankees again in '64, got the gig again for the American League, the becoming the only man to twice be a replacement manager and do it in consecutive years.

However, in the National League, a much darker turn. In 1964, the Philadelphia Phillies collapsed in historic proportions late in the season, allowing the Cardinals and Keane to overtake them for the pennant. The Phils actually tied for second with Cincinnati, however the Reds manager, Fred Hutchinson, died days after the season from lung cancer at just 45 years old, meaning that the NL spot went to the third tie-breaker, as it were. So Phillies manager Gene Mauch became the National League's manager in 1965 after all, although you know it's not the way he wanted it to happen.

As for that 1965 regular season, his final full year as a big league manager, Al Lopez and the Chicago White Sox finished.... second. Of course. Lopez managed 15 full years in the bigs, and never won fewer than 82 games (which in a 154-game season was ten games over .500). (He's also fourth in all-time winning percentage for managers who got to at least 2,000 games.) In 12 of those 15 seasons he won at least 88 games, in ten of them hit at least 90... and only has two pennants to show for it, that '54 season (111 W's) and '59 (94). He finished second ten times, which has to be a record (even the great Connie Mack, who managed 50 years, only finished second eight times). His final three years, he won 94, 98, and 95 games, and finished second all three times. (And yes, he's in the Hall of Fame.) So he started with three consecutive second place finishes, and finished with three consecutive second place finishes. A three-peat, a four-peat, and a three-peat. Now that's a statistical anomaly.

Al Lopez Field in Tampa, demolished for Raymond James Stadium

Photos courtesy: thefamouspeople.com, wikipedia.org

Giant Mess

This feeling shouldn't be happening.  Not now, at least.  After two World Series Championships in three seasons, orange and black people like myself should be basking in the glory.

But how many times does a defending World Series Champion look this bad? (the Florida Marlins do not count)  It's like the men of McCovey Cove went from the Yankees to the Cubs in three months flat.  In the nominees for "worst Giants game of 2013," last night's game is the clear front runner.  It's so far ahead it's a Ferrari vs a PZEV.  It's Duke vs St Mary's Sisters of the Blind.

In a 16 inning game, the Giants stranded 18 baserunners, and lost. (to the METS!!!!) They had 13 baserunners from the 8th inning on, and not one of them scored.

I can't.... I can't even.  This is a defending world series champion?  These guys haven't won more than two games in a row in two months. They last won two in a row in mid-June.  They've lost 15 of 17.  I do not understand what's going on here.  The good thing is that neither do they.  Only three of those 15 losses have been by more than three runs.  Tim Lincecum struck out 11 last night.  MVPosey homered.  There are signs.

I have World Series Champion hats.  I should be totally satisfied.  But that's what winning does to people.  We want more.  And so do they.