The Sweet and LOWV Down News Hour debuts: your best source for LOWV scuttlebutt and speculation. The biggest gossips in the league sit down for a frank and balanced discussion of recent events around the League. This week, Andrew and Neil discuss the ballad of James Buchanan, grilling with the Sabathias, arbitration amnesia, VR: Behind the Music, the unBeleaguerable new trade model, the LOWV's possible entre into outsourcing, and the much anticipated auction and draft.
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For the majority of major league teams, this is the final week of their season. This means back to the planning board for the front offices as they decide whether to buy this off-season, sell, do both, or attempt to remain static moving forward. One thing is for sure: every team in the league – barring perhaps the Yankees – could use more star power. So how do you acquire stars?
Let’s start with the starting pitchers. Obviously “star” is a word with ambiguous meaning. For some it means a guy who will move tickets, sell jerseys, and land them a marquee spot in the highlights on nights he pitches. For others it means one of the best pitchers in the league whose performance should bring the attention and spotlight, but everyone knows that’s not always a guarantee.
For this set of exercises I’m choosing to define star as the latter. I’ve taken the top 30 starters as told by THT’s xFIP metric. Why xFIP? Because it normalizes home run rates and saves time in noting certain pitcher performances in ballparks like those Oakland and San Diego. From there I noted how each was acquired by their current team.
Anderson ends up concluding that signing an ace in free agency isn't the way to go, because few of the top-30 xFIP pitchers were obtained via free agency (11 pitchers acquired via trade, 13 in the draft, 3 as international FAs, and 3 as veteran FAs).
I decided to examine this same list of 30 pitchers in the context of LOWV, because like major league GMs, many LOWV GMs will be looking to pick up an ace this offseason -- witness the overheated Harden auction for evidence of that.
(Granted, it would be dumb to shell out for an ace without taking into account the park and defense he's dealing with, but at the same time players are known to change teams without warning, so ideally your ace will be a stud whether he's pitching in Metco or Yankee Stadium.)
So -- how did this crop of primo SPs end up with their current teams?
1. Javier Vazquez – 2007 auction 2. Tim Lincecum – free agent 3. Dan Haren – trade with Guapo (offseason) 4. Roy Halladay – trade with PMF (offseason) 5. Zack Greinke – free agent 6. Jon Lester – trade with LM (in-season) 7. Josh Johnson – free agent 8. Justin Verlander – free agent 9. Ricky Nolasco – trade with LM (in-season) 10. Adam Wainwright – free agent 11. Chris Carpenter – waiver auction 12. Felix Hernandez – 2007 auction 13. Josh Beckett – waiver auction 14. Joel Pineiro – free agent 15. Ubaldo Jimenez – free agent 16. Cole Hamels – free agent 17. Wandy Rodriguez – trade with ERdR (offseason) 18. Yovani Gallardo – waiver auction 19. Gavin Floyd – trade with unB (offseason) 20. Brett Anderson – trade with Guapo (in-season) 21. Jorge de la Rosa — free agent 22. Jason Hammel – *unsigned free agent* 23. CC Sabathia – 2006 draft 24. Ryan Dempster – free agent? 25. Roy Oswalt – 2006 draft 26. Aaron Harang – trade with VR (in-season) 27. Max Scherzer – JRL draft 28. Chad Billingsley – waiver auction 29. Joe Blanton – free agent 30. Clayton Kershaw – JRL draft
These results are both quite interesting and mildly misleading.
The first thing that jumps out at you is that fully 1/3 of these pitchers were signed to minimum contracts as free agents, who at one point were available for anyone to snag. However, this number includes two sets of players: scrap-heap finds, like de la Rosa and Blanton, and rookie pitchers turned aces, like Lincecum, Verlander, Hamels and Grienke. My guess is that in the future, ace-provenance lists will show fewer FAs and more Junior League draftees (whether developed by their organization or traded for, a la Brett Anderson). Still, it seems as though in any given year, several top pitchers will go into the season with low expectations and little hype, ready to be snared by the watchful GM. Keep that in mind before you splurge on an SP.
Eight top pitchers came via trade, four in midseason (defined as occurring after the draft/auction) and four in the offseason. Ace pitchers shouldn't get too comfortable in any LOWV city, because they may be traded at any time. If you're looking for a sweet starter, it seems advisable to hit up LM or Guapo, who have shown a propensity for shipping those dudes out of town...
Only a few pitchers who demonstrated 2009 brilliance have been with their teams since the 2006/2007 inaugural draft and auction, respectively. It appears that ZERO SPs of serious 2009 distinction were acquired in the 2008 or 2009 auctions. Again, expect this trend to reverse itself as the pinch of the salary cap boots quality SPs into the marketplace (and 2009 auctionee Tommy Hanson rises to prominence).
Shortpants is back with a sassy new haircut and ready to entertain and engage. The All-Star Break affords Mike an opportunity to discuss the first half of the season with regular guests FC, LU and PMF, as well as special guest DLBP. Mike leads the panel through a bevy of fascinating topics baseball and non-, including examinations of every team's performance, MLB analysis and the latest spicy celebrity gossip. We hear tales from the road, opining on films, tunes, tortilla chips and an introspective contemplation on whether ESPN hosting sucks creativity from the league and years off of GMs' ability to tap into the humor that keeps us joyful, youthful and fanciful.
Shortpants returns, even better than you remember.
Tommy's .523 thoughts at this point, but that's not much better, now, is it?
It isn't.
CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE YOUUUUU
The entire baseball world was rocked today when the news dropped that Manny Ramirez has been suspended 50 games for PED use. One of the two top teams in LOWV received the shocking news that its MVP had been busted and would miss a third of the season.
D'Lucious Bitch Pies has absolutely dominated the junior circuit thus far. Four convincing wins against division opponents has put DLBP way out front and starting to run away with the flag. Just like the Dodgers, the Manny-paced Pies were looking like playoff locks already.
Without Manny, DLBP loses its best run producer. But I contend that this is still probably the team to beat in the CTU.
Tim Wakefield has notched 2 complete games so far this season. When the veteran hit arbitration last winter, Chris said putting him out there could hurt! Rick called him "Old Noodle Arm!" Longtime owner John callously gave him a -3 and nobody blinked an eye! Chad wondered if he was even fantasy worthy!!!
Unbeleaguerable!!
VR compared Wakefield to the old ramblin gambler in Bob Seger's immortal "Still the Same." I think that was about right. Wake isn't going to sustain a 2.91 ERA and 1.09 WHIP for the whole season, but the dude is a warrior who can count on solid run support. When he's floating that bitch, he can be very difficult to hit. THREE DOLLARS for this pitcher was highway robbery of the arbitrary kind.
Shame on you, talent evaluators of LOWV.
Napoli, Cantu and Carlos Pena have brought hot bats into play...DLBP has been superb on offense. While losing Manny won't help their hitting game, they face Snatty and unB the next two weeks before squaring off against LM - and recent history shows that's an advantage for the Pies as well. If Javier Vasquez gets his act together, and Alex Rios and Chris Davis get their acts together, there's no reason this team can't absorb the loss of Manny (and the underperformance of Kazmir and injury to Zambrano) for a couple of months.
Manny will come back rested and ready to destroy NL West pitching...
I'm facing down the powerful offense and troubled pitching staff of Vicious Rumors this week. This team has had a great season, other than last week when they were mercilessly butt boned by D'Lucious in their biannual freeway battle. Emphasis on the bi.
Whether through blind loyalty or canny evaluation, VR believed in Kevin Youkilis and Dustin Pedroia when many other league GMs did not, and now he owns two of the best properties in the hitting-rich AL East. Matt Wieters stuck in AAA? No problem, Kurt Suzuki will destroy enemy pitching to the tune of .312/.830. Meanwhile fellow Hawaiian Shane Victorino goes .306/.878 and looks good doing it.
On the reverse, VR has had one of the weaker pitching staffs around, only buoyed by temporary thangs Kevin Milkweed and Edwin Jackson. Josh Beckett has been a wreck, Jon Lester has had some bad luck, Andy Sonnanstine has been stinky and Huston Street has sucked.
But it's hard for me to talk too much shit about VR's pitching staff when he taunts me with this picture:
Matt Garza, you lucky devil!! Why didn't I strategically have a kid at 17 so I could someday kick it with Hayden and Bristol P????
VR, I'm not going so far as to say "you're going down!" this week, but I will say that you will be fiercely battled to a near-draw, as my team has been pretty consistent in that regard this season.
A strong contender thus far in CTU has been the team from San Francisco, El Guapo. I faced this team a couple of weeks back and almost got routed. A brave comeback salvaged a respectable loss, because I'm such a good manager, but still, he kicked my ass that week. Although he was thrashed by DLBP (are you detecting a theme within this article), he's otherwise been a match for all other division competition.
Zack Motherfucking Grienke finally wiped the tears from his eyes, refused to let a good thing die, and hit the mound to carve up some strike zones. 3 complete games, 2 shutouts, 54K, 8BB. Skeet skeet goddamn!!! We can't build our dreams on suspicious minds, so I'm ready to believe this is the harbinger of a new Grienk-era.
Although Guapo has a closet full of sketchy pitchers (Zito, Sheets, Chien-Ming Wang, Anibal Sanchez), he's getting solid pitching stats overall, and Grienke has been a killer weapon for him. The problem for Jim is on offense, where his team ranks in the bottom quartile in nearly every category. EG is the only LOWV team with less than 250 hits, is one of only two teams to fall short of 30 HR, and ranks dead last in RBI with 118. Unless his veteran-stocked team improves its work with the stick, Guapo is not going to sniff the playoffs in 2009.
Can't hurt that Alex Rodriguez is limbering up for a return. One league GM mentioned to me that A-Rod's 50 game absence is wicked suspicious.
Last week I topped the Mothership 11-7-4, which by the way is one tick better than DLBP managed the week before. When controlling for opponent, LM is clearly superior! It's Science.
Of course, it helped that Josh Hamilton went down the week we battled. Without Hamilton and Doumit out there, I hardly can tell that I'm playing the Ship. If it wasn't for Adam Jones tearing it up out there (see, I told you that was a fair trade), I would have been pretty baffled.
With a poignancy so real you can caress it, Mothership has continued to carry Nick Adenhart on his roster in a tribute to the lost pitcher.
Some GMs find it heartbreaking, but at least one confided in me that he thinks it's gay and "you gotta move on."
Less touching is the Mothership organization's failure thus far to deliver an ante to the league office, according to the meticulously maintained "TranCounter" page...
Mothership has a lot of nice pieces once its two most exciting players return from injury, and with Clayton Kershaw continuing to develop, along with a startlingly good bullpen, the Ship will fuck some people up this season. John Maine, on the other hand, seems determined to play himself into LOWV free agency.
Snatty Bobolatty laid a bing bong biznatty on Flash this week. When the dust settled the Snaturals had laid a 13-4-5 deuce on the face of the only Boston-area team headquartered in the city itself.
Things went quickly downhill from there, and I want to be the first to share it with you. Flash went out to drown his sorrows at a Jimmy Buffett concert and was later captured on film in a state of Parrotheadedness:
I'm not even sure how to follow that up.
Uh...the Snaturals have gotten their offense going recently, even without the help of David Ortiz. Torii Hunter, Johnny Damon, and Nick Swisher have been bopping. Mike Pelfrey and Brad Penny have been crappy, but Zach Duke, Glen Perkins and Jordan Zimmermann have been unexpectedly strong contributors.
That said, this team still sits several games below .500 and well out of the division lead a mere month into the season.
Of all teams in the LOWV, Snatty is the most poised to make dramatic changes in search of rebuilding efforts. He has a collection of 30-something offensive players who could potentially be appealing to a contending club in a trade: David Ortiz, Jorge Posada, Derek Jeter, and the 29 year old Adam Dunn. Major Beans has come to the realization that he needs to move some of these older players and establish a solid core of young, promising talent.
Who wasn't surprised to see Mark Teahen and Xavier Nady shown the door by an organization that once laid a carpet of rose petals before their path? Snatty could make a splash this season if he decides to jettison high-salaried stars in search of future glory - unless the LOWV's noted obsession with youth and potential depresses the market for a veteran All-Star.
PAY YOUR ANTE SNATTY!!!
OK, now for the biggest mystery in the LOWV right now. What the hell is going on with ERdR ownership?
In recent weeks, ERdR's NCaV very publicly courted Pelle Smith, a one-time LOWV target after the collapse of Chupacabras and H Cloud, to come on board. He announced the "signing" of a co-owner to several GMs at a summit at Major Beans' estate in Medford after an outing to the People's Republic saloon in Camridge in celebration of Mr. Smith's pending nuptials. Coq au Vin explained that his upcoming work to sponsor Somalian piracy would prevent him from fully seeing to day-to-day operations, as which time the vim and vigor of Smith's viking spirit would guide Equipe into battle. Two days later, this agreement was validated by the addition of Mr. Smith to the ownership ranks of the LOWV league page.
Since that time, however, no announcement has been made through any of the public channels routinely used by ERdR to proclaim his team's achievements, even those that take place only in the realms of his mind. So what gives? Sources say that Mr. Smith still appears primarily concerned with a team in an odious CBS Sportsline league. Is this apparently brilliant stroke legit or not?
My guess and hope is that Smith will eventually become an active entrant into the fray, prosecuting Equipe's Christian Temperance agenda upon the infidels of the Anti-Saloon League. This would establish a major power base of the CTU in a small-hectare zone of Somerville and Medford. From which the LOWV will be completely and totally conquered!!!!
In the meantime, the team stinks, but injuries and underperformance have bedeviled this unlucky squad. ERdR is a better team than its .438 winning percentage suggests. I don't project ERdR to dominate in 2009 after this start, but this team will certainly be a factor at some point in the season assuming Teixiera starts to hit and Webb comes back strong to team with Haren and the always-wily bullpen. It's worth noting that this team has one of the strongest corps of young prospects in the game, so one more last-stand-of-the-Devil-Rays type seasons might not be the worst thing in the world.
LASORDA'S MANICOTTI
A perfectly average team thus far. I don't like to see the world in shades of gray when black and white are available, so let's look at who was awesome and who sucked.
Adam Lind. Keeping him onboard was more of a borderline call than I want to admit. With the emergence of Snider and the lack of openings in the Jays outfield, Lind turned uncertainty into a rampage by shifting to DH and has kicked ass for me. He's among the AL leaders in RBI. The infield: Even with Hardy scuffling, Marco Scutaro stepped up to fill in at three positions, and all three 1bs - traditionally slow starters - have been raking. Ryan Howard hit a fucking triple!!!! Jose Arredondo. A bullpen monster with 18 k against 3 bb and 8 holds.
The accumulator of the most Tommy Points recently has been the unbelievably speedy Carl Crawford, who the New York Times dubbed "The Ice Man" in a recent fawning piece:
Carl Crawford has an important ritual after almost every baseball game. He finds a tub, fills it with ice and submerges his body into the frigid water.
“I just sit there and act as if I’m taking a bath,” said Crawford, the Tampa Bay Rays’ left fielder.
Crawford morphs into the ice man to help rejuvenate his muscular legs, the legs that help make him one of the most dynamic players in the major leagues. He is fast and he is fearless, an ideal combination for someone who hopes to damage another team every time he reaches base...
Crawford, who is probably the fastest player in baseball, has solidified his position as the best base-stealer with a major league-best 20 in 20 attempts. He swiped a base in a 4-3 victory against the Yankees, giving him a steal in nine straight games. That includes a record-tying six steals against the Red Sox on Sunday. Jason Varitek, Boston’s catcher, is still trying to catch him.
How fast is Crawford? Longoria estimated that Crawford, after taking his usual lead, can zoom to second in about 3.1 seconds. After Crawford victimized Boston so spectacularly, Red Sox Manager Terry Francona lamented how Brad Penny had twice thrown pitches to the plate in 1.28 seconds and Varitek had fired both of them to second in 1.9 seconds. Those are better than average times.
“We can’t go faster than that,” Francona said. “He outran it.”
Those are words to warm the bitterest owner's heart.
Other players have not made their mark yet this season. David DeJesus saves his best performances for days on the bench. Milton Bradley took about five seconds to get into it with people in Chicago. Russell Martin has been playing quite poorly, although he did deliver a little value-added with two swipes in the past week.
The real problem for LM has been the pitching staff - SO MANY pitchers have solid underlying peripherals, but have gotten lit in several key games. Joel Hanrahan imploded and Carlos Marmol has had issues.
However, I concocted a plan to get Justin Verlander, Aaron Harang, and Cliff Lee back on track. These guys are basically healthy and sound, but they were just not focused to begin the season. Tommy knows the chi of managing like you wouldn't believe, and my many years of coaching baseball all over the globe have blessed me with an encyclopedic knowledge of some crazy ass tactics.
I found an old VHS tape that was as obscure as it was bizarre.
I sat them down and said, "Watch this video. This is some fucking weird shit that will drive all the demons out of your head and replace them with baffled astonishment, and a odd ass song stuck in your head for days."
After they viewed this, I tried to explain to them the puzzling fact that this song was #1 for a month in the UK, but they all stared with blank expressions on their face. "What the fuck?" said Cliff Lee and the others nodded.
The effects lingered as the SPs took the mound and delivered impressive performances for me the past couple of weeks. Distractions were banished, leaving only sharp strikes, few beebs and "HEEETHCLEEEF" running relentlessly through the minds of the young hurlers. God bless you Kate Bush and your weird ass song!
My methods are unorthodox. But the results are undeniable.
A totally healthy LM is a threat to any team, and if I ever get my pitching ironed out and my lineup shuffled to optimum, you guys are so screwed.
Ps. Stephen Strasburg: 9-0, 1.54 ERA, 0.82 WHIP, 135 K/13 BB, 17.27 K/9.
