I've been thinking lately (always a dangerous practice, I know), and was wondering:
- How much pure luck is needed to build a good pitching staff?
As any disciple of Bill James will tell you, hitting is fairly predictable. Sure, there are players who make an unexpected leap forward in any given year (Crash Myers, Melvin Mora), and others who inexplicably drop into the toilet (Pat Burrell, anybody who ever plays for my NL roto team). But, for the most part, hitters' careers follow a fairly consistent pattern.
Pitchers, on the other hand, defy analysis. Can anybody, for example, explain the career of Jose Lima? And did anybody predict that Esteban Loaiza would explode on the league this year?
My point is that the Beanes and Ricciardis of this world (or, rather, the DePodestas and Laws of this world) can crunch numbers, project performance, and find hitters who can provide value at low cost. But even the world's most sophisticated analytical model of baseball cannot predict which pitchers are going to suddenly find their control or lose it, or which pitchers are going to luck out and have their hard-hit balls land in gloves and which aren't.
In which case, can we blame J.P. for not building a good bullpen, when building a good bullpen basically depends on chance?
(By the way, I still think that the main reason that Billy Beane is considered a genius is because the A's have Mulder, Hudson and Zito. And that might just be plain old luck, though Moneyball claims that Beane signed Zito when other teams passed on him.)
- Is it possible to be too good at hitting a baseball to be successful?
I've had the privilege of watching Frank Catalanotto swing a bat for the better part of a year, and I'm impressed by his plate coverage. He fouls off pitches he can't hit hard, and can usually do something useful with almost any pitch in or anywhere near the strike zone. (During the Boston series, he got a solid base hit on a Wakefield knuckleball that wound up at ankle level.) But I'm wondering: is he hitting too many borderline pitches hard, when he should be taking them and thus increasing his chances of a walk?
Cat's hitting nearly .300, but he's tied for ninth (!!) on the team in walks, with 18. He's also ninth on the team in strikeouts, with 48, and ninth on the team in OBP with .334. Would he be better off risking being called out on strikes more often in order to increase his walk total? Can a hitter like Cat even learn not to swing hard at borderline pitches? Should teams be trying to avoid "bad-ball hitters" that can hit balls out of the strike zone hard?
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20030721012157999