Monthly Archives: May 2004

Stros go down meekly to Cubs to start long road trip

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Aging superstar Greg Maddux made it seem like old times today as he handcuffed the Stros over seven innnings and led the Cubs to a 3-1 victory at Wrigley. The Stros have now lost eight of their last 11 games as they begin a 12 game, two week road trip, which is their longest of the season.
Hard luck Roy O (3-4) pitched well again as he continues to receive poor run support from his teammates. Ex-Astro Moises Alou‘s two-run yak in the sixth was the game winner, while Lance Berkman‘s ninth dinger in his last 13 games was the only offense the Stros could muster.
With Andy Pettitte going back on the disabled list today, the Stros’ Brandon Duckworth makes the start tomorrow night at Wrigley against the Cubs Glendon Rusch.

How to torch a bridge

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This Gawker post passes along the following farewell email (or is it a flamethrower?) from a departing associate at Los Angeles-based Paul, Hastings, Janofsky, and Walker, LLP:

Subject: FW: Goodbye…
As many of you are aware, today is my last day at the firm. It is time for me to move on and I want you to know that I have accepted a position as “Trophy Husband”. This decision was quite easy and took little consideration. However, I am confident this new role represents a welcome change in my life and a step up from my current situation. While I have a high degree of personal respect for PHJW as a law firm, and I have made wonderful friendships during my time here, I am no longer comfortable working for a group largely populated by gossips, backstabbers and Napoleonic personalities. In fact, I dare say that I would rather be dressed up like a pinata and beaten than remain with this group any longer. I wish you continued success in your goals to turn vibrant, productive, dedicated associates into an aimless, shambling group of dry, lifeless husks.
May the smoke from any bridges I burn today be seen far and wide.
Respectfully submitted,
[SIGNED]
ps. Achilles absent, was Achilles still. (Homer)

Hat tip to Brian Leiter for the link to this hilarious post.

Stros beat Cards; season evaluation to date

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Bags, Lance Berkman and Mike Lamb all cranked two-run dingers Sunday afternoon and Tim Redding pitched seven and a third shutout innings as the Stros won the final game of their weekend series with the Cardinals, 7-1.
Redding (3-3) allowed just four hits and, after a first inning single, retired 16 of the next 18 batters. The Stros got to Matt Morris (4-5) for three runs and four hits in seven innings with Lamb’s yak being the big blow, and then Bags and Berkman’s homers in the bottom of the eighth against Cal Eldred put the game away. Berkman has now hit eight home runs in his last 12 games.
The Stros now become road warriors for the next two weeks as they go on a 13 game road trip to Chicago, St. Louis, Seattle, and Milwaukee. Roy O starts tomorrow’s Memorial Day game against the Cubs’ Greg Maddux at Wrigley Field.
The Stros (27-22) are inching their way to the one-third mark of the season, and its an appropriate time to assess how the club is doing. This post from yesterday explained the helpful hitting statistic of “runs created against average,” or “RCAA,” which computes the number of outs that a particular player uses in creating runs for his team and then compares that number to the amount of runs that an average player in the league would create while using an equivalent number of outs.
Through yesterday’s games, here are the National League leaders in RCAA, courtesy of Lee Sinins:
1 Barry Bonds 41
2 Lance Berkman 33
3 Mike Lowell 30
4 Sean Casey 26
5 Craig Wilson 25
T6 Bobby Abreu 20
T6 Scott Rolen 20
8 Jim Thome 19
T9 Adam Dunn 18
T9 Todd Helton 18
Consequently, in case you didn’t know it already, Lance Berkman is currently the second best hitter in the National League behind Barry Bonds, who happens to be one of the best hitters of all-time. Why on earth does manager Jimy Williams continue to bat Berkman either fifth or sixth in the order?
Although the Stros are currently a respectable fourth in the National League in team RCAA, the individual numbers are more revealing:
Lance Berkman 33
Jeff Bagwell 10
Craig Biggio 6
Jeff Kent 4
Mike Lamb 3
Eric Bruntlett 1
Jason Lane 0
Orlando Palmeiro -2
Raul Chavez -3
Richard Hidalgo -3
Morgan Ensberg -5
Adam Everett -5
Jose Vizcaino -6
Brad Ausmus -9
Thus, Berkman is having a monster season, and Bags is solid. However, after a fast start (the peril of relying on a small sample of games), Biggio is falling back to his declining trend over the past several seasons of not being much better than an average NL player. The reality is that the Stros would probably get at least as good offense and much better defense by replacing Bidg with Jason Lane as the season wears on, but don’t expect Manager “I love my veterans” Williams to make such a move.
Moreover, despite the media’s touting of Jeff Kent‘s meaningless 15 game hitting streak, Kent also is hitting just barely above an average NL hitter and has no business batting in front of the torrid Berkman in the lineup. Likewise Richard Hidalgo has slumped badly in May after a hot start and Williams’ use of Palmeiro and Lamb in his place is actually a good move. Why can’t Jimy do that in regard to Biggio?
The perception is that Adam Everett is having a much better season to date than Morgan Ensberg, but the facts indicate that, at least from a hitting standpoint, they are doing the same. Of course, Everett is the best defensive player on the team, so some indulgence of mediocre hitting is more justified than with other players. Ensberg had a horrendous April and a better May, but his power numbers are still way down from last season. After hitting 25 yaks last season, Ensberg still does not have one this season.
And, as readers of this blog already know, Brad Ausmus and Jose Vizcaino are among the worst hitters in Major League Baseball and, thus, should be used as little as possible. Of course, under veteran-entranced Williams, Ausmus is a starter and Viz is a key regular. I’m not certain that the rest of the Astros’ hitters are good enough to make up for the regular negative hitting contributions of these two.
The equivalent RCAA statistic for pitchers is called “runs saved against average” or “RSAA.” RSAA basically computes the number of runs that a pitcher saves for his team relative to the number of runs that an average pitcher in the league would give up while obtaining an equivalent number of outs for his team (as with RCAA, RSAA is park-adjusted). As with RCAA, a pitcher can have either a positive RSAA, which indicates he is an above average pitcher, or a negative RSAA, which means he is performing below average.
The following are the current NL leaders in RSAA:
1 Randy Johnson 18
T2 Tom Glavine 17
T2 Livan Hernandez 17
T4 Roger Clemens 14
T4 Brad Penny 14
6 Ben Sheets 13
T7 Armando Benitez 12
T7 Horacio Ramirez 12
T9 Chad Cordero 11
T9 Zach Day 11
T9 Ryan Madson 11
T9 Tomo Ohka 11
T9 Jake Peavy 11
T9 Carlos Zambrano 11
Again, the Stros are a solid third in the NL in team RSAA, but as with RCAA, the individual RSAA stats are more revealing:
Roger Clemens 14
Roy Oswalt 8
Andy Pettitte 4
Octavio Dotel 3
Mike Gallo 3
Brad Lidge 3
Wade Miller 3
Dan Miceli 1
Chad Harville 0
Brandon Backe -2
Ricky Stone -3
Brandon Duckworth -4
Tim Redding -5
Jared Fernandez -6
The Rocket and Roy O are off to solid starts, but the rest of the pitchers are just barely above average or below average (note that Redding’s solid start of today is not included in the above statistics and will improve his negative RSAA considerably). The biggest disappointment has been Dotel, who has been one of the Astros’ leaders in RSAA over the past three seasons.
Consequently, the Stros are solidly in contention in the NL Central, but they are being carried by strong performances by a relatively small group of players (Berkman, Bags, Clemens and Oswalt) while the other players are grinding away at either just above or below average seasons. Inasmuch as older players such as Bags and Clemens will likely trend downward as the season wears on, other Astros will likely have to pick up their performances considerably if the Stros are going to remain in contention for the NL Central title. That’s certainly possible, as Hidalgo, Ensberg, Kent, Redding and Dotel are all candidates to improve their performance from the first third of the season. But it’s also far from a certainty.
The final element — and admittedly the least important — is manager Jimy Williams. As noted here earlier, Williams’ mishandling of Ensberg last season may have cost the Astros the NL Central title that they lost to the Cubs by a game. This season, Williams has continued his inconsistent use of Ensberg, inexplicably bats his best hitter in the five or six hole rather than third, and continues to overuse poor performers Ausmus and Vizcaino.
Again, these may appear to be relatively small errors in isolated circumstances, but over 162 games, those errors in judgment add up and can make a difference, particularly in a close race. The NL Central race looks like it will be a barnburner this season, and its doubtful that the Astros will have any margin for error. Here’s hoping Williams’ illogical prejudices don’t end up costing the Stros in a close race.

Archibald Cox dies

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Here is the NY Times obituary on Archibald Cox, the Harvard Law School constitutional law professor who became famous as the special prosecutor who investigated the Watergate scandal during the second Administration of the late president, Richard M. Nixon. President Nixon’s firing of Mr. Cox during a crucial phase of the investigation into the Watergate scandal eventually was a galvanizing event that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation of the presidency and the granting of a pardon to Nixon by his successor, Gerald R. Ford.
Mr. Cox was a solicitor general of the United States in the Kennedy Administration and a Harvard Law School professor when he took over the the Watergate scandal investigation in May, 1973. He was appointed to that position largely because of his friendship with his former student, then Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson. The appointment of Mr. Cox came on the heels of President Nixon’s announcement in late April 1973 of the forced departure from his administration of four top- level appointees after they were swept up in the Watergate affair. The scandals had begun with the June 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate office complex during 1972 Presidential election campaign between Nixon and Democratic nominee, George McGovern.
As the special prosecutor, Mr. Cox soon wound up in a constitutional confrontation with the White House. After the discovery of secret tape recordings of Nixon’s Oval Office conversations, Mr. Cox subpoenaed those tapes and, when the White House refused to comply with the subpoena under principles of Executive Privilege, Mr. Cox sought to enforce the subpoena through the federal courts and won.
When Nixon resisted the federal courts’ orders requiring him to turnover the tapes and Mr. Cox persisted, Nixon ordered Attorney General Richardson to fire Mr. Cox, but Richardson refused as a matter of principle. As a result, Richardson resigned and Nixon then ordered the deputy attorney general, William D. Ruckelshaus, to fire Mr. Cox. Mr. Ruckelshaus refused and was then fired. Finally, Robert H. Bork, the solicitor general, finally complied with Nixon’s order to fire Mr. Cox. Many powerful people in the U.S. government never forgave Mr. Bork’s compliance with Nixon’s order to fire Mr. Cox, and that probably had more to do with Mr. Bork’s eventual rejection years later as a Supreme Court Justice than any of his more relevant views on application of constitutional law.
These extraordinary events were eventually dubbed “the Saturday Night Massacre” of the Watergate scandal, and the resulting public outcry against Nixon was the beginning of the end of his Presidency. Nixon eventually appointed famed Houston trial attorney Leon Jaworski to replace Mr. Cox as special prosecutor, and Mr. Jaworski continued Mr. Cox’s relentless pursuit of the tapes. Nixon eventually turned them over to Mr. Jaworski, their contents proved Nixon’s involvement in the cover up of the Watergate burglary, and Nixon resigned the Presidency in disgrace shortly thereafter.
After his involement in the Watergate affair, Mr. Cox returned to Harvard, where he taught constitutional law and became a professor emeritus in 1984. Rest in peace, Professor Cox.

Stros’ buzzard’s luck

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The Stros lost their seventh game in the last nine on Saturday afternoon as the Cards scored six runs in the last two innings in their 10-3 victory. Albert Pujols went nuclear on the Stros, going 4 for 5 with two mammoth yaks, a double, and three RBIs.
The game was close until the eighth when things really got out of hand. Jeff Kent went after a foul pop-up from Ray Lankford that appeared to richocet into fair territory (and unfortunately away from Kent) off of one of the Juice Box‘s roof beams. Under Minute Maid Park ground rules, the ball should have been declared a foul ball, but the umpiring staff blew the call, just as they blew the balk call against Dotel the previous game. The flustered Kent overthrew third base on the play, allowing another run to score, and a Vizcaino throwing error on the next batter allowed two more runs to score. After that chaotic interlude, the Stros were toast.
Tim Redding takes the mound tomorrow in the Sunday afternoon game to try and salvage one for the Stros in this series. Ace Matt Morris goes for the Redbirds.

Another milestone for Bags

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Stros first baseman and future Hall of Famer Jeff Bagwell played in his 2000th career game last night.
Bags has been good for so long that it is easy to take him for granted. Although he is clearly in the autumn of his career (this will likely be his fifth straight season of declining offensive numbers), Bags in decline is still better than most players.
A team wins baseball games by scoring more runs than the other team. So, the amount of runs that a player creates is the best indication of a player’s hitting ability. In that connection, sabermetricians who have studied hitting statistics over generations have concluded that two particular hitting statistics are the best indicators of how many runs that a player will create — on base average (“OBA”) and slugging percentage (“SLG”). This makes sense because players who get on base frequently (OBA) and who hit the ball hard (SLG) tend to create the most runs. OBA and SLG are combined into a cumulative statistic called “OPS,” which is OBA + SLG = OPS.
Building on these statistics, Lee Sinins, a lawyer turned sabermetrician, has developed another statistic called “runs created against average” (“RCAA”) in connection with his website Baseball Immortals and his related Baseball Sabermetric Encyclopedia, which is an excellent baseball statistical database than can be purchased through Lee’s site.
RCAA is a particularly valuable statistic to evaluate hitting because it focuses on the two most important things in winning baseball games ? that is, creating runs and avoiding making outs. RCAA basically computes the number of outs that a particular player uses in creating runs for his team and then compares that number to the amount of runs that an average player in the league would create while using an equivalent number of outs.
RCAA is computed by taking a specific player’s runs created (“RC”) statistic minus the amount of runs created that an average player would have created using the same amount of his team’s outs based on the league average and adjusted to the player’s home park. The hypothetical average hitter in the league has an RCAA of exactly zero. Thus, a player can have either a positive RCAA — which indicates he is an above average hitter — or a negative RCAA, which means he is performing below average.
For example, as you might expect, Barry Bonds led the NL and MLB last season with a positive 115 RCAA ? that is, he produced an incredible 115 more runs for the Giants than an average NL player would have created using an equivalent number of his team’s outs. On the other side of the ledger, the Stros’ Brad Ausmus was one of the five worst hitters in the NL last season, producing a horrid negative 32 RCAA, which means that he created 32 fewer runs than an average player would have created using an equivalent number of his team’s outs.
In acknowledging Bags’ milestone of playing in his 2000th game, Sinins noted the following:

After 43 RCAA/.966 OPS and 38 RCAA/.919 OPS seasons, Bagwell hit .524 SLG,
.373 OBA, .897 OPS, 21 RCAA in 160 games in 2003 and is off to a .465 SLG,
.411 OBA, .876 OPS, 9 RCAA start in his first 45 games. He has a .957
career OPS, compared to his league average of .762, and 672 RCAA in 2000 games.
Bagwell ranks 8th on the NL’s career RCAA list (since 1900)–
RCAA
1 Barry Bonds 1385
2 Stan Musial 1204
3 Rogers Hornsby 1081
4 Hank Aaron 1039
5 Willie Mays 1008
6 Mel Ott 989
7 Honus Wagner 938
8 Jeff Bagwell 672
9 Joe Morgan 657
10 Eddie Mathews 652

That’s pretty good company for Bags, who is simply the best Stros player ever.

Daniel Drezner on the Iraq War plan

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In this New Republic ($) Online article, Daniel Drezner does a good job of concisely analyzing the Iraq War plan and the execution of its goal. The entire article is well worth reading, and the following is a tidbit to pique your interest:

Say what you will about the neoconservatives’ skills at manners or management; their big idea cannot be dismissed lightly. There is a compelling logic to the argument that the primary source of frustration among Arabs in the Middle East is a sense of powerlessness. Trapped in a region littered with authoritarian and corrupt regimes, they are encouraged by these regimes and their Islamic critics to blame their situation on Israel and the United States. This is an ideal environment for fomenting terrorism. Creating an open society in Iraq would put the lie to this kind of hate-mongering.
To be sure, democracy promotion is far from easy. Indeed, regime change in the Middle East looks like a lousy, rotten policy option for addressing the root causes of terrorism, until one considers the alternatives–appeasement or muddling through. The latter option was essentially the pre-9/11 position of the United States and its allies, and has been found wanting. Appeasement or isolation has the same benefits and costs that the strategy had in the 1930s: It buys short-term solace but raises the long-term costs of facing a stronger and potentially undeterrable adversary.
For all their criticism of Bush’s grand strategy, Europeans and left-wingers have offered very little in the way of alternatives to his vision. Some say that American soft power could bring about change in the Middle East. But decades of alternately coddling, cajoling, and ostracizing Arab despots has not led to liberalization or democratization. We have showered Egypt with aid, but have succeeded only in propping up an authoritarian monster in Hosni Mubarak. We have tried to isolate Syria, but have only strengthened that country’s anti-American credentials. Maybe U.S. soft power is part of the solution to the Middle East’s woes, but soft power alone cannot accomplish our desired ends.
The craft of foreign policy is choosing wisely from a set of imperfect options. While flawed, the neoconservative plan of democracy promotion in the Middle East remains preferable to any known alternatives.

VDH quotes Al Davis

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Victor Davis Hanson quoting Oakland Raiders‘ owner Al Davis? Read about it here. One of Professor Hanson’s typically insightful observations is the following:

If one goes back to the fifth week of Bill Clinton’s 79-day bombing campaign against Serbia ? no U.N. approval, no congressional sanction, NATO partners backing out ? one reads of castigation from the American Right about bombing a Christian Orthodox country in Europe, from neoconservatives about not committing ground troops, and from the Left about going to war at all. But with Milosevic in the dock and the mass murder stopped, we now are told that the Clinton administration’s efforts to stop the bloodbath in the Balkans proved to be about the only success of his scandal-ridden administration. Why? He persevered and won ? and we can imagine what would have happened had he caved in at week six and called it another Mogadishu.
The truth is that for all our education, nuance, and professed idealism, too many of us think and act with our limbic systems, which are hard-wired to appreciate perceived success and feel comfortable with consensus. Like most in the animal kingdom, man wishes to identify with good fortune and abhors apparent failure, and thus seeks conveniently to find distance from it. After Abu Graib and the insurrections in Fallujah and Najef, the loudmouth critic Michael Moore is praised as a gifted filmmaker at the Cannes Film Festival even as prominent conservatives and ex-generals, now in their newfound genius, trash the war and claim they were brainwashed, naÔve, or not listened to.
Our leaders should remember this volatility. In the long run, of course, the present strategy is sound and in a decade will be judged as such by historians. How could it not be sound to remove a mass murderer who posed a threat to the region and our country and then sponsor a consensual government in his place?

Listening Al Gore?

Ouch!

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The Stros lose to the Cards 2-1 as Dotel balks in the winning run in the 10th on a dubious call by Ump Hunter Wendlestadt. I suspect that the phrase “chicken shit” is being uttered more than once in the Stros’ clubhouse this evening.
Wade Miller goes for the Stros in the Saturday afternoon game against the Cards’ former but recently struggling Astro-killer, Woody Williams.