Following up: Peavy's rehab, Hahn's accounting

Catching up on some news that happened while preparing for the return of the curse of the creature’s announcement of the transition, two items bring to mind a couple old chestnuts of the recent past.
The first is Jake Peavy’s recovery from the detached latissimus dorsi, which — if you can believe it — is ahead of schedule. Is there any injury that isn’t rehabilitated earlier than expected? This was an exceptionally rare injury, and here we are in December, and we’re getting reports like this:

“With my eyes, he looked free and easy and was going through what he was doing pretty [darn] well,” said Don Cooper, who was joined by White Sox head athletic trainer Herm Schneider at Peavy’s workout. “I was immediately talking about how he looked looser, freer, easier and quicker.” […] “Just a very happy day for me,” Cooper said. “He’s still a ways away, but he’s building up distance, strength and his amount of throws.
“Seeing [Peavy] look like he did on Dec. 5, it makes me think about how he’s going to be on Jan. 5 and then Feb. 5 and then March 5 and then April 5. It was very encouraging.”

At this point, I wonder if back and shoulder labrum injuries are the only severe ones to fear. But before we speak too soon, let’s hope Jared Mitchell can cut the bases tighter when spring rolls around.
I”m still reluctant to trust Peavy’s self-assessments (he said, “I feel normal”), and we’ve debated that at length before. I’m still counting on him for the kind of start Jose Contreras had after he came back from Achilles surgery — his body is 100 percent ready, but his stuff lags behind early on. At the very least, it seems we can rule out the Sox collecting insurance money to pay for Adam Dunn. Unless, of course, Peavy injures himself in another way.
On a related note at White Sox Examiner, J.J. says Peavy’s questionable status “could very well be the biggest factor between the Sox contending for the division crown or falling out of the race by the dog days of summer.”
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A couple of weeks ago, I said this winter provided a ton of portfolio fodder for Rick Hahn. Regarding Paul Konerko’s tricky re-signing, Scott Merkin talked to Hahn about how it all went down. There’s a lot of good stuff regarding the wrinkles:

Hahn prefers to not directly talk with a player in the negotiating process, keeping the dealings primarily between himself and Landis, using Konerko as an example. According to Hahn, White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, who has a close relationship with Konerko, had a couple of offseason conversations with the team’s leader, but those were “more of an expression of appreciation and desire and hope.” […] This final agreed-upon offer to Konerko was different from the original one made, and Hahn explained how there are very few situations where the team can say of an opening offer, ‘Here it is. Take it or leave it.’ Without going into too much detail, Hahn mentioned how initially there were disagreements with Konerko’s camp over length and structure, and by the end, they had to work through issues about deferral and cash flow flexibility to get it done.

While reading this, the one thought I hadn’t had before: I wonder if Jerry Reinsdorf let Williams and Hahn go nuts to use the most out of both their talents, in the event Hahn gets a GM position somewhere else next season.
I don’t think that is exactly what Reinsdorf had in mind, but maybe it’s a nifty byproduct. in an event to maximize the window of opportunity in 2011, Reinsdorf maximized the wiggle room for Kenny Williams and his right-hand man.
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Christian Marrero Reading Room:
*Jesse Crain will be making $4 million in 2011, and then $4.5 million in each of the following two seasons.
*The White Sox made a lot of minor-league coaching changes. The results:

  • Joe McEwing gets promoted from managing Winston-Salem to Charlotte.
  • Ever Magallanes is now the organization’s infield instructor. He managed at Birmingham last year.
  • Bobby Magallanes, Ever’s brother, will take over the Barons.
  • Julio Vinas will take over for McEwing at Winston-Salem.
  • Tommy Thompson is the new Kannapolis manager.
  • Ryan Newman will manage Great Falls this year, getting moved from Bristol.
  • Pete Rose Jr. will take over at Bristol. (Note: I originally had Newman and Rose flipped)
  • Devon White is the organization’s new baserunning coach.

Rose is obviously the interesting one, considering his name and his legal troubles of the past, so I have a feeling we’re going to be getting more reports from the Appy League this year.
*James at White Sox Observer posts his guide to the stats he likes. It’s worth reading if you’re vaguely familiar with the terms.

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buford

Fine job by James at White Sox Observer about stats.
This Baseball Prospectus excerpt from a 12-13-10 column by the talented Christina Kahrl may be very revealing to those who value the defensive stat UZR:
“I was struck by two separate conversations I had, one with a statistician, and another with an assistant general manager.
Between the two, the subject of defensive metrics came up, and both were fairly dismissive of UZR.
… the AGM’s remark, in response to my question about who’s using what, was the one I found telling: “NOBODY USES IT—why would they? They’ve all built their own, better metrics …”

buford

Thanks for the link. Just amazing.
Before I knew nothing about defensive metrics. Now I know even less.
However, now when I’m told that Carlos Quentin is a terrible defensive RF, I can now articulately reply without fear or trepidation “Oh yeah? Sez who?”

dalton

“Sez me eyes, that’s who.”

sars

@buford & dalton: do either of you have season tickets? do you think watching a game on television is an adequate way of measuring defensive ability?

dalton

Not necessarily. Do you think he is a decent outfielder?

dalton

And no, I don’t have season tickets. Wish I did, but I live five hours away.

sars

i don’t. i don’t think he’s even servicable in the outfield. i also don’t think that our eyes can safely evaluate the defensive abilities of baseball players by watching television games. especially outfielders. positioning, jumps, routes…rarely are these things captured by the typical camera angles.
to what extent i trust defensive metrics has been up in the air since reading a lot of what colin wyers has written in 2010. it’s still incredibly subjective. the book blog thread tells us just that.
one thing i can say is that the dudes who are generally regarded as awesome defenders have very good UZRs; ichiro, eric chavez, alex rios, alexei, nick punto. and the dudes who are employed because they mash, don’t; dye, brad hawpe (was a 1B in the minors, for gods sake), dunn, cust, et al.

dalton

You’re absolutely right about the drawbacks of evaluating a player’s defensive abilities – particularly in the outfield – on television. Although if the camera cuts to an outfielder who is consistently chasing down balls hit in his area, it’s safe to say he either positions himself poorly, has poor range, gets terrible jumps on the ball, takes bad routes, is slow – or some combination of those. Some guys, like Quentin, need to be seen in person to appreciate the magnitude of their ineptitude.

buford

No season tickets.
If you see a player enough times on TV, you should be able to form an adequate opinion (the “eye test” if you will) regarding his speed and arm strength. And, with the aid of instant replay, an opinion can be formed on his ability to react quickly to the crack of the bat and the angles taken to the ball.
These opinions are easy to form when viewing players at either end of the spectrum such as an OF with a rifle arm vs. a noodle arm. And its these “really good/really bad” players that trigger most discussions (e.g. Quentin).
Self-analysis is typically useless, but my big problem is that the great plays are fresher in my memory than the bad plays. This results in my giving more weight to the good and only lip service to the bad when formulating my final “eye test” grade.
Using Quentin, I happily recall Quentin’s doubling up a Detroit Tiger at 1B on a fly ball to LF with a laser throw. Just as I remember his “You’ve got to be bleepin’ me” catch this year. I also recall balls clunking off his glove or skipping by him. But the sadness does not equate to the aforementioned happiness. It’s called bias.
Regarding UZR, one of its criteria is range. My question concerns a corner OF deferring catchable balls to the CF.
Using Quentin again. If an easy fly ball comes into Quentin’s “zone” which he could catch, but he continually defers to Rios to make the catch, then to what degree, if any, do these “deferrals” negatively impact Quentin range and his final UZR ?
Some day better defensive ratings based upon advanced laser technology will be commonplace and made available to the public.
This will close the book on UZR. And hopefully my biases as well.

mechanicalturk

Every team has a lot of proprietary metrics, which makes a lot of sense. They can give more weight to the things they value and less to those they don’t. You’d never catch a GM saying that he uses one specific metric or another, because if others know how he evaluates and values players it gives them an upper hand in negotiations.
I still like UZR, though. Mostly because I went our and read up on the methodology behind it. It’s far from perfect, for a few reasons, such as that each park is different and thus has different zones and that the data is entered by a human who must evaluate and choose the appropriate zone for a given play, etc.
UZR is still, in my opinion, the most objective publicly available advanced defensive metric. Systems like Dewan plus/minus that award points based on how many players probably would have been able to make that play are not only objective but really are only a sorting system to order players by defensive ability. I don’t trust the actual numbers they assign to defense.
Probably the most important thing to remember, though, with ANY defensive metric is that players only play about a third as much defense as they do offense. To achieve a sample size comparable to one season’s worth of PAs, you need about three seasons of defensive data. And given how much a player’s offense can vary from year to year, determining true talent level through an objective metric requires quite a bit more than that. When you add in how much players can change physically from season to season and how easy it is for an injury to cost them a step in the field, it can become very hard to get an objective measure of defensive ability from any metric.
Take Alex Rios, for example: last season up until the All-Star break he was rated as one of the top three defensive outfielders in baseball by UZR. By the end of the season, he fell to 21st. Having watched him all season and followed the numbers (which are updated every week), I did see him having a down period in the second half, but generally he seemed to be ranging well and catching everything, and yet his numbers went down. There are no weekly or monthly UZR splits available that I know of, either, so we’re left to speculate about what happened. Did Rios really play that much worse defense in the second half, did a down period totally drag down his UZR, or did some flaw in the metric create this disparity between what I saw and what the numbers show me?
All in all, to me UZR is just like any other objective statistic: it’s great if you know what it’s telling you. I like advanced stats and I roll my eyes at people who worship the RBI and the pitching win, but the flaw is not so much with the statistics as the application of them with failure to understand what they really evaluate. A lot of people take one season or a partial season of UZR as a general measure of defense or of range, but really I think this is a misapplication of the stat.
A lot of words to not say much, perhaps, but consider this: among my baseball hangouts on the internet, the favorite go-to stat for measuring player value is fangraphs’ WAR. I like the stat myself, but fWAR draws its measure of defensive value for most position players from that year’s UZR data, which I think is a misapplication of UZR.
I wouldn’t call UZR useless as a stat- far from it, in fact- but I do think it is one of the more misunderstood and misused stats in baseball, which can give it a bad name.
To those who feel they have been burnt by the red hot sting of UZR misapplication, I implore you, find solace in the soothing salve of statistical understanding and give UZR another chance. It’s impossible to really properly use a statistic until you know where the numbers come from and exactly what they mean, but instead of dismissing statistics that seem inconsistent, embrace them. Learn their quirks and foibles and use them to your advantage, bettering your understanding both of the statistics and data and of baseball itself. Then, turn them on your enemies and use this new found power to crush them like a hemophiliac baby beneath the foot of a titan.

mechanicalturk

tl;dr UZR is still useful but is often misapplied, try looking at three year averages of defensive metrics for better results

sars

one problem is that we all seem to think defense is a static ability. much in the same way we think “speed never slumps.” if players can have awful games defensivly (cough cough iguchi in texas), why can’t they have an awful week? month? season? rios’ 2009 is a perfect example, posting the only negative UZR season of his career.

stopdrop8

If the plan is to assume peavy will be ready and effective by the start of the season and for some reason he isn’t, what’s the backup plan? Harrell? Torres is gone now, so would there even be another option that has started a major league game? The only options i can even think of would be sale (not going to happen if the plan is to use him in the bullpen), pena (probably also fairly unlikely), and marquez.

buford

Because of the potential 5th starter problem, this is the year the Sox could use a lot of off days in April and go with 4 starters.
Unfortunately, we have 28 games and only 2 off days in April.

dalton

Oh crap. There goes my four-starters-in-April-plan. Why haven’t we re-signed Freddy?

stopdrop8

The rumor was that we offered kerry wood about 3.5 million. If thats all thats left in the budget, they’d probably want to wait as long as they can to learn about peavy’s progression before designating about half of that towards a back of the rotation arm instead of another solid bullpen arm.

buford

He might not be enamored with the Sox since he would have to go the bullpen when Peavy returns and he would probably like to remain a starter.
More importantly, Guillen has stated that Garcia isn’t a bullpen pitcher because it takes him too long to warm up.

jofpgallagher

Jim Margalus stated: [Quote]With the addition of Crain, Pena isn’t as crucial to important situations.[End Quote]
God forbids bringing Pena in “crucial important situations”. He was rarely used in key situations last year and for a reason: He is not a good pitcher! He was what some people called a “mop guy”, and I hate that term. To me he is a below average reliever with some rare occasional good starts….same as Quentin, but that’s another topic.

buford

From Scott Merkin’s Mailbag 12-22-10:
“…I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews about Phegley’s development in talking to people within the organization during this offseason. White Sox director of player development Buddy Bell believes Phegley could have helped the club in 2011 if not for a blood disorder..”
Maybe Phegley replaces Castro as backup catcher in 2012.

buford

2013 makes more sense because he does need more AB’s and at higher levels.
Maybe Bell meant Phegley could have helped in 2011 but only as a last resort in an emergency situation.

brettdavis

I love the comment from Coop that Peavy was freer and easier. If you remember, Peavy seemed robotic a few times last season before getting hurt. I wonder how much of that has to do with colder early season weather? I saw him pitch live in KC in mid May in a cold drizzle, and he almost went the distance, but he really looked uncomfortable several times and gutted it out. Possibly his lat was tightened and tearing during the season? If that is so, and the problem has been corrected, then we can look for a big run by Peavy in 2011, once he gets into a groove. I think we are all about to see one heck of a season by Jake.

Shinons

Holy Toledo, I hadn’t ever heard about junior’s run in with the law being drug trafficking…to fellow players. That seems, uh, concerning…

buford

Per Keith Law: Washington offered RHP Jordan Zimmerman, RHP Drew Storen and C Derek Norris for Greinke.
I would love to acquire Zimmerman and Storen. And we can’t sign John Danks long term and will lose him to free agency after the 2012 season then…

dalton

This is an intriguing thought…

buford

Also draft choice compensation for losing a free agent may be terminated by the time Danks hits free agency. We could receive nothing if he walks.
If we can’t sign Danks long term, then a trade seems inevitable.
Wouldn’t it be ironic: John Danks back to Texas (for Derek Holland and more). We could throw in Jordan just to keep the family together.