Monday, June 25, 2012

How Interleague Play Could (But Won't) Make Baseball Better

            As I watched my Yankees hold on against the Mets tonight to finish the 2012 edition of interleague play, I had the briefest moment of mixed…feelings – to call them emotions would probably be hyperbole.  For as long as I can remember having cognizant baseball memories – not the ones that are vague visuals that you later in life reinforce with fact – interleague play has been a part of the game.
            The issue with interleague play, of course, is that the American League features the Designated hitter (DH) while the National League still forces pitchers to bat (or be pinch hit for).  I could wax historic about the aptness of this condition for thousands of words, but that’s not the point of this post.  (2,000+ word essays on the subject available upon request).  Instead, I would like to talk about next year’s interleague play, which will in fact encompass the entire season.
Interleague play was introduced in 1997 as a way to buoy baseball, which had struggled mightily in the public’s perception after the players’ strike in 1994.  It gave fans a chance to see players that they normally would not have the chance to watch their teams play against.  Unsurprisingly, this method had evident flaws.  If you were a Cleveland transplant to San Francisco, say, and your team came to town, instead of having the good fortune of watching your team swing away in all its glory with David Justice at DH, you were (mis)treated to the spectacle of aging hurler Blackjack McDowell flailing away for an at-bat or three.  (If you were real lucky, he got angry and gave the crowd the finger.)  This would happen for about 9 games every year, and for nine other games your team would go on the road and switch formats.  If you’re reading this and thinking that this has an element of intrigue yet at the same time might be categorically insane, then you’re right.  Imagine your favorite NFL team playing an inter-conference game in which field goals count for four points.  Or a basketball team’s inter-conference games using different three-point arc distances based on which conference the home team is from.  It would be chaos, not to mention a watershed moment for gambling as spreads and totals went all to hell…but I’m rambling.
The Houston Astros are moving to the American League West for the 2013 season, a condition of their sale to Jim Crane in 2012.  This means that there will be 15 teams in each league, and necessitates an interleague matchup for every slate of series, league rules dictated by the home team.  For an ultra-conservative sport like baseball, this move is massive, even if it only slightly increases the existence of a current oddity of the sport. 
One would think that the Astros’ realignment would provide a chance for baseball to end the split existence once and for all, but of course it won’t.  To entirely give up either the pitcher batting or the DH is to remove from the game either an intrinsic quality of its history or the chance for increased offense, and thus increased ticket sales and viewership and revenue, etc.  And in reality there are perks and drawbacks to both systems.  Ideally, the game would combine parts of both systems to form a better, more streamlined game.  Usually, crazy and simple ideas to revolutionize sports and other aspects of the world are the prerogative of my hero Bill Simmons, but here I’m giving the Grantland editor-in-chief a break, because I’ve got this one in the bag.

The best way for baseball to compensate it’s odd-split of the divisions is to make the following adjustment:  The game begins with all teams employing the DH, and as soon as the starting pitcher leaves the game, the DH spot in the lineup is replaced by the pitcher.  This change has a number of what I believe are positive impacts on both the pitching and hitting sides of the game.

1)            Starters immediately become more valuable.  The longer your starter goes, the longer you can keep your best hitters in your lineup.  This would be especially helpfully for offense-starved NL teams with good starting pitching like the Giants and Phillies.

2)            Rosters now are usually comprised of 13 hitters and 12 pitchers.  There is the off chance that some daring teams, especially those with strong starting staffs, could go 14-11 on this.  That move would have a twofold positive effect, as it would increase the job opportunities for position players who have a more limited set of skills – say 2 plus-tools and nothing more – while ridding teams of that pesky 5.00+ ERA middle reliever who somehow makes $3 million a year while specializing in walking enough hitters to give away any lead no matter how large. 

3)            A change that I believe to be aesthetic in nature, we would likely rid ourselves of the goddamned tiresome arm-side matchups in relief that were made (in)famous by legendary Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa.  I’m normally a stats aficionado and advocate, and I’m sure there’s plenty of data that backs up these matchups, but consider these contextualizations.  The most likely reason that arm-side matchups pan out so well is that the ball travels from behind the hitter’s head into the strike zone.  Moreover, lefty-versus-lefty matchups probably yield the gaudiest numbers because there are simply far fewer left-handed pitchers in baseball.  Less exposure and less reps lead to less confidence and less production from hitters.  Were the numbers equalized, our data would be better, especially because it would not be so heavily correlated to certain characteristics that are predetermined.  In LaRussa’s tedious 'strategy' the outcome is heavily weighted in one direction before the first pitch of the at-bat is even thrown.  That may be strategy, and it may be playing percentages, but those numbers are miniscule at best and ugly as hell to witness and it takes a lot of fun out of the game.  And…

4)            …while relief pitching would probably align greatly to the AL model of 1 IP per reliever, you would still have the double-switch!  Take, for example, today’s 1-0 10-inning game of futility between the Brewers and the White Sox.  Both teams decided to have their DH hit cleanup.  In this case both starters went 7+ innings, but could you imagine what happens when the Red Sox have to pull Big Papi from the three hole after only one at-bat because Beckett gave up 7 ER in 4.1 innings?  The possibilities here could be endless and awesome.

5)            Not only that, but we might finally be able to grasp how good managers are at actually managing.  It’s kind of the same as how we’ve come to understand that Andy Reid is a great offensive football mind but has serious issues with the usage of timeouts.  For all the advanced metrics available in baseball, we still lack a solid way to evaluate managerial impact.  This would also confirm my suspicions that current manager of my beloved Yankees Joe Girardi is actually good at everything else involved in baseball other than managerial decisions.  (I’ve threatened to give him a binder-colonic on more than one occasion.)  Could you imagine Girardi’s face trying to decide whether to sacrifice Jeter’s bat from the fifth inning onwards because he had his DH hit leadoff or to let Phil Hughes continue to strikeout the side while giving up at least one home run each inning?  At the very least, the media would have a field day second guessing managers’ moves and we could spend the time between the end of the NBA Finals and the start of college football (i.e. summer) talking about actual sports in season (read: baseball) instead of prognosticating the NFL season based on OTAs or making much ado about Tweets or something.

6)            This last point is very personal to me.  This small change in the way baseball is played would revolutionize baseball gambling.  Right now, the baseball betting market is awash in foolish pricing as books continue to set lopsided lines based solely on the starting pitcher, forgetting in the interim that Justin Verlander could throw 14 no-hit innings with 30 strikeouts but there’s no way he can actually score runs to win the game.  Now these lines would become a little sharper by default.  As the starting pitcher goes deeper into the game, their respective team is able to keep its (theoretically) best available lineup together, thus increasing their chances of winning the game.

Alas, this is all wishful thinking, and will file it away in a box that also contains placards for “Chicago Bears 2006 Super Bowl Champions” and the imaginary invitation to my wedding to Emma Watson in 2015.  And I’ll still keep betting against overvalued starting pitching lines and winning.  And I’ll still keep daydreaming about simple fixes to a complex world.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Celebrating LeBron

As I’m sure you have probably heard, the Miami Heat won the NBA Championship on Thursday, giving current best player in the game LeBron James his first career title.  The media that surrounds the NBA – and becomes a veritable circus whenever “Finals” and “LeBron” are added –  has gone from critical to  a strange mix of reverence and neutrality.  The most popular discussion seems to be wondering how, and if, LeBron can be compared to Michael Jordan.  Unsurprisingly, this particular discussion lacks about as much perspective as all the other questions that have swirled around these players and teams and the NBA itself, but I’m not interested in dealing with that question.  I’ll compare the shit out of LeBron and Jordan…after LeBron retires.  Here, however, I would prefer to discuss some aspects of the last two years of James’ career that are often confused, or simplified, and used to support some kind of interpretation about him as a person and a player. 

Ever since “The Decision” happened in 2010, the two distinct occurrences of that evening have been unfairly intertwined.  The spectacle of the TV special was a horribly un-self-aware choice, buoyed according to LeBron’s camp by the fact that they gave a bunch of money to the Boys and Girls Club.  I hate to break it to LeBron’s business advisors, but there is not a single person on Earth who framed The Decision in terms of anything other than “LeBron’s TV special that will end his free agency and let us know where he’s playing next year”.  Even the Boys and Girls Club people remember it that way.  And that was settled before he announced that he was leaving Cleveland.  Add to it the fact that some business-savvy LeBron confidant thought that it was a good idea to utilize the services of Grade-A tool and part-time asshole Jim Gray as the anchor for the special and you have the perfect storm of stupid and self-important. 
            I still hold that against LeBron.  It’s become a permanent part of his image.  And when he and Wade thought it was a good idea to poke fun at Dirk Nowitzki for being ill prior to Game 5 in 2011, the German Moses made sure to deliver a swift and pointed comeuppance.
            So this year LeBron got back to making news with his play, delivering a legendary performance in Game 6 of the Easter Conference Finals in Boston and throwing down the hammer in the NBA Finals.  It only took him two year to realize that the best way to deflect criticism of his late game performances had nothing to do with empty gestures to non-profit organizations or mocking opponents.  The best way was to make sure that his team was so far ahead that the fourth quarter literally didn’t matter.

            The other aspect of The Decision was the fact that he left Cleveland.  If you took issue with this you are one or more of the following:

a) A Cavaliers fan.

b) A person who has great nostalgia for baseball’s reserve clause.

c) Entirely out of touch with reality and the structure of free agency in American professional sports.

And if you are all of these things, you are Dan Gilbert.

            Still, though, the fact that LeBron played out his rookie contract and had his team in the Eastern Conference Finals in the last year of said contract means that his departure was far less subversive that that of Carmelo Anthony from Denver or the impending departure of Dwight Howard from Orlando.  Fans in Cleveland suffer from a pathology that occurs for almost every sports team that endures a lengthy era of failure.  This pattern manifests most often as a singular event that is revised as the watershed moment for future futility.  Think Bill Buckner, or “The Drive”.  Sadly for Cavaliers fans, this watershed moment seems to be its inception, as the 42 years from their creation in 1970 have seen three Central Division titles, one Eastern Conference championship, and no NBA Finals championships.  Not surprisingly, two of the division titles (2009 and 2010) and the conference championship (2007) came during LeBron’s time there.  For those of you not so hot at math, this translates to LeBron being responsible for 75% of the banners hung in the Quicken Loans Arena.  That fact makes polemic, whiny “sports writers” like Scott Raab very angry, but his anger is, unsurprisingly, misdirected. 
            We’ll never know if LeBron would have left for less money, or gone somewhere else, and none of it matters because in 2010, nearly anywhere would probably have been better than Cleveland.  The narrative that Cavs fan have of LeBron abandoning them is shallow and foolish.  He gave the Cavaliers their chance to build a winning team around them, and it was their habitual failures, not money, that drove him from the Midwest.
            In the two years (2001-02 and 2002-03) before LeBron arrived as a rookie, the Cavaliers went 29-53 and 17-65, good for second to last and last place in the East, respectively.  In seven years with LeBron, the Cavs were 349-225, good for a .608 winning percentage, including an impressive 66-16 2008-09 season.  In the two years since LeBron left?  The Cavs are 40-108; a .270 winning percentage.  In layman’s terms, the Cavs sucked before LeBron, he was great, and they sucked after he left. 
            The argument I hear most often in opposition to this is that LeBron’s supporting cast wasn’t terrible…except it was.  Yes, Mo Williams was an All Star in 2009.  You know why?  BECAUSE HE PLAYED WITH LEBRON.  As a Wisconsin resident, I had the unfortunate chance to watch Williams play amazingly mediocre basketball for the Bucks from 2004-2008.  In Cleveland, he took an average skill set, paired it with a superstar player who allowed for Williams to receive above average situations, and produced above-average numbers.  Even more telling than a continued over-evaluation of Mo Williams by the esteemed sports media is the fact that in LeBron’s rookie year the Cavs more than doubled their previous season’s win total (from 17 to 35), while in the year after he left, they lost 42 more games, going from 61 wins to 19.  Even averaging wins per season during LeBron’s career (49.9) means that based on expectation the Cavaliers would have been 30+ games worse than usual.  A swing that big after the departure of a superstar means two things:  that player is more valuable than anyone else in his sport, and the team that surrounded him was barely a legitimate professional team, let alone a contender. 
           
            If LeBron can come to the conclusion that The Decision was a good idea, and then band together with his friends Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, having decided to do so on their own, and if that team can win games at a .702 clip (104-48) and have two Eastern Conference and one NBA Finals championship to show for it then there a whole lot of GMs out there that should be fearing for their jobs today (I’m looking at you Billy King).  As a Knicks fan, I hold out no hope for a shot at a title while Miami still has their Big Three.  It only took LeBron and Wade figuring out how to complement each other’s play to win their first title, imagine what happens when they can maximize Bosh and add the right role playing pieces.