It may be football season, but that doesn’t stop Chronicle sports columnists from continuing to bludgeon us with their seemingly insatiable capacity to analyze the Stros and matters relating to Major League Baseball badly.
First, there is this blog post from the inimitable Jose de Jesus Ortiz, who already has quite a legacy of poor analysis of the sport that he covers for the Chroicle:
Willy Taveras, who holds the Astros franchise record for consecutive games with a hit, has been a difference maker for the Colorado Rockies heading into the third game of the National League Championship Series.
The Rockies obviously valued his speed and defense, which is why he was added to the NLCS roster even though he hadn’t played in three weeks because of an injury.
In Game 2, he was the player of the game after making an awesome game-saving catch in the seventh inning and then driving in the game-winning run with an RBI walk. Oh, he also had doubled and scored a run in a game that was 2-2 heading into extra innings. [. . .]
General manager Tim Purpura and Phil Garner weren’t fired until August, but they hurt the franchise tremendously by never understanding the true value of Willy Taveras. They valued Chris Burke out of position over Taveras at his natural position. Because of this mistake, the Astros’ pitching staff suffered.
It’s pathetic to see Taveras starring elsewhere when he should have been playing here. Cecil Cooper and Jose Cruz saw something special in Taveras and kept working with him in 2006. Unfortunately, Cooper wasn’t the manager then.
Do you miss Taveras?
In this prior post, I explained why Ortiz is simply wrong about Taveras’ value as a Major League player. But in his latest blog post, how can Ortiz overlook that Taveras had a pathetic .250 on-base average and an even worse .222 slugging percentage during the National League Championship Series? Or that the Rockies won 17 out of their last 18 games to get into the NLCS without any contribution from Taveras, who sat out those games with a hamstring injury?
What Ortiz simply does not understand is that anecdotal flashy plays do not prove that a player is a good Major Leaguer. It only proves that the player is capable of making a good play every once in awhile. To be a good Major Leaguer, a player has to be able to generate more runs consistently for his team than what the team’s alternatives would likely generate using the same number of outs as the player. Not only is it far from clear that Taveras did that this season for the Rockies (and the Rockies’ late season streak without him suggests that he did not), the fact of the matter is that the Stros’ CF-RF combination of Hunter Pence and Luke Scott was far more productive this past season than a Taveras-Pence tandem would have been.
Meanwhile, the equally foggy Chronicle columnist Richard Justice chimes in with this recent column in which he bemoans the Stros’ poor evaluation and development of minor league players (for a far more insightful analysis of how the Rockies developed their World Series team, see this Alan Schwarz NY Times article). This revelation comes from the same columnist who contends that the Stros blew this season because the club elected not to re-sign aged free agent pitchers Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, and who continues to beat the drum that Stros owner Drayton McLane made a terrible mistake in allowing former Stros General Manager Gerry Hunsicker to resign after the 2004 season. Of course, Hunsicker’s tenure as Stros GM coincided with most of the period from 1997 to date during which the Stros’ minor league system has been in decline. Apparently, in Justice’s odd world, the man in charge of the Stros’ player drafts during those years had nothing to do with the failure of those drafts to produce enough good Major League-quality players for the Stros.
My purpose is not to be overly critical of either Taveras or Hunsicker. Taveras is still a young player who, although a below-average National League player so far in his career, could develop into an above-average player. Similarly, despite his deficiencies in overseeing the Stros’ drafts during the period from 1997 to 2004, Hunsicker is still the best GM that the Stros have ever had. My point is simply this: Why do Ortiz and Justice refuse to provide a balanced analysis of them?
It’s not all that important in the big scheme of things, but are Ortiz and Justice really the best the Chronicle can do for baseball analysis?
I knew that if I kept reading I would eventually agree totally with at least one of your posts. This is it. Justice’s column blew me away. He would have been the first, and has often been the first, to squawk about needing to get an overpaid, aging veteran to play, uh, anywhere. Now he lauds the Dbacks and Rockies for doing what he would have been bitching incessantly about the Astros doing – if they had.
Instead, I think they listened to him and his ilk. And here we are, watching the other guys on TV.
You make a good point about Taveras but fall into the same error as the Chronicle thinkers in undervaluing the importance of Tal Smith to the franchise. He won a division title with a club he built under the ownership of two credit companies that had acquired it, reluctantly, from Judge Hofheinz and were trying to unload it. And who do you suppose hired Hunsicker? Drayton didn’t know him from Daffy Duck. Smith (who trained Pat Gillick, about whom Justice constantly raves) brought back Hunsicker, one of his former employees. Now he has brought back another one, Ed Wade. Keep your eye on the ball: Smith is the reason the Astros have been so successful in the McLane era. They won’t stay down for long as long as he’s around.
Dr. Gonzo, as noted in this earlier post, I agree with you about Tal Smith and view him as a valuable adviser to McLane. I put him in second behind Hunsicker among Stros GM’s. My only real criticism of his tenure is that he struggled to develop above-average hitting for the Stros clubs of that time, much like the current Stros situation.
The Chronicle sports page doesn’t do true commentary on any sports really. Usually, things are written about on the most superficial level or are merely press release clip stories.
As a general rule, they write things from a very touchy-feely right brain perspective with very little left brain sort of analysis based on facts.
Correction: “the Stros’ CF-RF combination of Hunter Pence and Luke Scott was far more productive this past season than a Taveras-Scott tandem would have been”
Remember, the only reason Pence got recalled from Round Rock is that Burke was playing poorly, not Scott. Scott never played himself out of a job, and Taveras played well enough this season to not lose his job in Colorado, so there is no reason to believe Pence gets recalled at all in 2007 (plus you have Purpura, who had ZERO roster management skills, running the show). Your analysis did show that moving Taveras wasn’t a bad move (because you replaced him with Pence), but moving him for a slug like Jennings was (because you got essentially nothing in return).
jdallen: if you think that’s bad, I’m guessing you haven’t read Justice’s recent post saying that Padres OF Mike Cameron is interested in signing in Houston, and that they should make that move ASAP.
What’s up with the Stro’s now?