Every April, baseball is full of surprises.
This April has been no different. In fact, it has been one of the more unpredictable April’s in recent years. This is a good thing, of course, because if all of the predictions regarding this season turned out to be accurate, how boring that would be?
Luckily, teams like the San Diego Padres (14-8), the Washington Nationals (12-10), and yes, even the New York Mets (13-9) exist to make a mockery of our pre-season predictions. In a more negative fashion, so too do the Atlanta Braves and the L.A. Dodgers, both 8-14.
Among the players, April has had its share of heroes and goats as well. Some come as a surprise (one way or the other), while others do not.
One of last season’s break-out players, second baseman Aaron Hill of the Toronto Blue Jays, for example, has been a huge bust to this point, batting just .162 with just six hits in 37 at bats, including one home run. Some regression to the mean was expected from this 28-year old, but no one expected Hill to suddenly morph into the second coming of Alfredo Griffin.
Meanwhile, Kelly Johnson, second baseman for the Arizona Diamondbacks, has been a revelation playing in the desert south-west. Last season, while with Atlanta, Johnson lost his job to Martin Prado (himself off to an outstanding start this year.) This year, Johnson has already belted nine home runs and driven in 18, along with 17 runs scored.
But the real question isn’t, “Who has been hot and who hasn’t?”
It is, “Which trends are real, and which are just April illusions?”
Let’s begin with a team from which no one expected anything other than a last-place finish in the annual dog-fight that is the N.L. West. I am referring to the first place Padres, of course. At 14-8, with a .636 win-lost percentage, they are on pace to win 103 games. Is this a trend that is likely to continue?
Of course not. But, in the mediocre National League, do they have a shot at making the play-offs, perhaps as the Wild-Card team? Well, to answer that question, we have to take a closer look regarding how it is they came to be 14-8 in the first place.
Going into last night’s games, they had scored 103 runs in April, good for an 8th place tie in the N.L., although all but one teams in their own division actually out-scored them. Their pitching and defense surrendered 77 runs, good for 4th best in their league. Their differential then (runs scored minus runs surrendered) is a positive 26, again, 4th in the N.L.
Importantly, though, both Colorado and San Francisco – teams in their own division – are two of the three teams that have better run differentials.
Taking a look at specific Padres players, Adrian Gonzalez, no surprise here, is having a fantastic start to the season, having already slugged six homers with 16 R.B.I and 45 total bases. His OPS is an outstanding .999. He is easily one of the top five first basemen playing today.
Gonzalez’s teammates, third baseman Chase Headley and outfielder Will Venable have also been quietly productive. Headley has hit an unsustainable .333 with 29 hits and 38 total bases. Venable has a .239 batting average, but has slugged .507, primarily due to his four home runs.
The Padres as a team have hit just .249 which suggests that they have enjoyed good luck maximizing their relatively few run scoring opportunities. In short, there is no way this offense will remain in the middle of the pack in the N.L. in scoring runs.
Taking a quick look at their pitching, the story is similar, if somewhat brighter. Kevin Correia has taken to his new role as de facto ace by sporting a 4-1 record over his first five starts with 26 strikeouts and 10 walks in 28 innings. His stuff is good, and he pitches in a pitchers paradise, so there is reason to believe that he should remain at least somewhat productive throughout the season.
But Correia also has an ERA of 3.86, which translates into over 4.00 in most N.L. parks, and he will only win as many games as the Padres are able to score runs for him. In other words, he is not a break-out gem; he is a decent pitcher who has enjoyed some good fortune.
Meanwhile, his teammates Wade Leblanc, Jon Garland, and closer Heath Bell have also enjoyed some early season success.
Bell is a legit top-notch closer. LeBlanc, however, is a decent young left-handed starter who rarely touches 90 with his fastball. He is a classic case of, the more the league sees this kid, the less successful he will be. Garland has been a league-average starting pitcher for a few years now.
Mostly a ground-ball pitcher, Garland has fanned 20 in 28 innings, but he has also walked 15. His ERA stands at 2.58, but whenever he leaves the friendly confines of PetCo Park, the worse he will look.
If, at this point, if you are scratching your head wondering how in the hell the Padres are 14-8, you are not alone. Although they may be a bit better than most of us thought before the season started, in reality this team will gradually slip back down to .500, and probably a bit below that, by season’s end.
Yet another N.L. team that has enjoyed its share of luck this season is the Pittsburgh Pirates (10-12). Why do I describe a team with a record of 10-12 lucky? Because, with their major league worst run differential of -75, (nearly twice as bad as the 4-18 Orioles), the Pirates are a truly awful team. They have scored just 80 runs, second worst in their league, and they have surrendered 155, the most in either league.
The Pirates have virtually no legitimate major league-caliber starting pitchers, and perhaps one or two good hitters (outfielder Andrew McCutchen, hitting .305 with 14 runs scored and ten stolen bases, is an excellent young player.)
The Pirates, going into last night’s game against the scuffling Dodgers, shouldn’t have a record anywhere near .500, and, by the end of this season, they certainly won’t.
On a positive note, don’t look now, but your where’s-the-starting-pitching New York Mets, having just defeated the Phillies as I type this, are now a stunning 14-9 on the season. The Mets have now won eight games in a row. If nothing else, this puts off the inevitable firing of manager Jerry Manuel for at least another month.
Everyone knew that the Mets certainly had a few high quality players, but the dizzying array of questions that surrounded this team just a month ago seem to have been rendered irrelevant by this scorching start.
So, then, why and how have the Mets managed to perplex the pundits up to this point?
It seems that a few key players have made all the difference. The biggest surprise by far has been 26-year old starting pitcher Mike Pelfrey. Pelfrey had been maddeningly short on showing any actual progress as a major league-caliber pitcher up until, uhm, about three weeks ago.
Then suddenly, Pelfrey became the second-coming of Kevin Brown or Mike Scott (in their Glory Days.) Apparently, Pelfrey discovered a split-fingered fastball that has been the true out-pitch he had been lacking. And he has been using it to devastating effect throughout the league. Pelfrey’s record now stands at 4-0 with a miniscule 0.69 ERA.
Over the past sixteen games, the Mets team ERA has been 1.55.
Their offense, on the other hand, is in the middle of the pack with 105 runs scored. So, as David Wright said recently, “We will go as far as our pitching will take us.” He is right about that. But no team can sustain an ERA at this level indefinitely. Pelfrey’s ERA figures to go up a couple of runs, perhaps more, new pitch or not. His 19-13 strike-out to walk ratio suggests a little less dominance than meets the eye.
Overall, I am sticking with my pre-season prediction that the Mets won’t win more than 84 games, and will miss making the playoffs by about five wins.
Among players that have busted out thus far, look no further than outfielder Colby Rasmus of the St. Louis Cardinals.
Rasmus is an excellent combination of speed and power. He is what Grady Sizemore was supposed to have been, and more. Rasmus is hitting .333 with six home runs, 12 RBI’s and he has already scored 19 runs. He has also drawn 17 walks and has three stolen bases. His on-base percentage is nearly .500, and he is slugging over .700.
Rasmus’ only downside to this point is that he hasn’t had much success against lefties. He is just 2 for 13 so far this year, with ten strikeouts.
But Rasmus is just 23-years old, and figures to gradually improve his success-rate vs. lefties over time. Rasmus is one of the reasons why the Cardinals are off to an N.L. best 15-7 start.
Another break-out player is 24-year old David Price of the Tampa Bay Rays (17-6, the best record in baseball, if you haven’t noticed.) Price was a highly touted rookie last season, but disappointed many unrealistic fans with a mediocre overall performance.
That appears to have changed this season. After just four starts, Price is 3-1 with a 2.20 ERA. The A.L. is hitting just .202 against Price, and he has 26 K’s and just nine walks in 28 innings, suggesting that his overall numbers aren’t a fluke. It’s not a stretch to suggest that Price could end up winning somewhere between 16-18 games this season, with many more to come in the future.
Best Players in the National League: 1) Albert Pujols 2) Chase Utley 3) Ryan Braun 4) Hanley Ramirez 5) Matt Kemp. Honorable mention: Adrian Gonzalez.
What are we to make of the defending N.L. Champion Phillies? At 12-10, they are actually in third place in their division. Why isn’t their record more like the 15-7 Cardinals?
Well, don’t blame Roy Halladay. He has done everything expected of him up to this point. He is 4-1 with a 1.80 ERA and an 0.975 WHIP. Moreover, he has a ridiculous strikeout-to-walk ratio of 33 to 3!
Meanwhile, Halladay has again exhibited supreme durability by averaging eight innings pitched per start.
Ryan Howard, who the Phillies just signed to a huge mega-contract that almost certainly won’t turn out well for them, has been a bit of a disappointment so far. Although he has four homers and 17 RBI, his OPS is just under .800, not a strong showing from your cleanup hitter.
But the Phils run differential of +16, coupled with their 9-6 road record, suggests that they will be fine, and, despite tonight’s 9-1 drubbing at the hands of the Mets, they are still likely to overtake the Mets at some point this season.
Finally, if you haven’t done so already, take a look at the standings in the A.L. West, where all four teams are separated by just one game, and try to predict a winner.
Surprising Oakland has the best run differential of the bunch (+7), but I’m sticking with my pre-season pick, Seattle, to win this division. Cliff Lee is due back soon, and he could be the piece that puts the Mariners over the top.
Have a bone to pick with me? Are there players or teams that you think I should have mentioned? Let me know, and I’ll consider them in my next blog-post on this topic.
Meanwhile, if you are in a Fantasy League and he’s still available, make sure you go pick up Colby Rasmus.
And, as always, thanks for reading.
Posted in
Baseball Analysis,
Baseball Commentary,
Baseball Players,
Baseball Today,
Fantasy Baseball and tagged
Aaron Hill,
Andrew McCutchen,
Chase Headley,
Colby Rasmus,
David Price,
Jon Garland,
Kelly Johnson,
Kevin Correia,
Mike Pelfrey,
Roy Halladay,
Run Differential,
Ryan Howard |
Baseball, Wages, and the American Middle Class
As you can clearly see from this graph, the middle class has been trending in the wrong direction, regarding its share of national income, for over 40 years now. If you are at least over 45 or 50 years old, you may recall a time when a one income household (usually headed by a male breadwinner) could adequately, even comfortably, provide for itself. My father, for example, was a factory worker his entire life in Bridgeport, CT. With a sixth-grade education, and a lot of hard work, he was able to support my mom, my younger brother and I until I moved out of the house in the 1980’s and began to support myself. By that time, (a bit earlier, actually) my mom had gone back to work as well.
My dad worked in a union shop and received a fair wage for hard work, as had his parents’ generation before him. I, too, worked for a couple of years in a union shop. The Teamster’s Union negotiated wages and contracts for us at UPS in Stratford, CT in the early 1980’s. When I started working there (loading and unloading trucks) I was earning about $10.00 per hour. Even in Connecticut, that was a pretty nice wage for a kid just out of high school. Within about a year, I was earning around $12.00 per hour, shared an apartment with a friend of mine, bought a car, and was able to save a little money.
It should be noted that UPS was enjoying prosperity in those days as well, despite the presence of labor unions in its midst.
In the late fall of 2011, a month or so before Christmas, I thought about making a little extra money down here in Greenville, S.C. where I now live. My wife is the primary breadwinner in our family, but I like to work, so I thought, just for the hell of it, I would check out what UPS here in the greater Greenville area was paying its employees for the same job I used to do around thirty years ago. It turned out their starting wage, in a non-union facility, was around $8.00 per hour. Now, adjusting for thirty years of inflation, I can’t even imagine what this “modern” wage would have equated to thirty years ago.
Now let’s turn to Major League baseball for a few minutes to see how the ball players, represented by the Major League Baseball Player’s Association, have fared over approximately that same time period.
As you can see, the players, represented by a very strong union, have become wealthier than they probably ever could have dreamed of just forty years ago. Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees will earn $28 million dollars this season. Derek Jeter’s net worth is around 125 million dollars. Now, obviously supply and demand is an important factor here. As long as baseball remains popular, the money will be there to pay this select group of highly talented athletes.
But it’s equally important to remember that baseball has been a capitalist enterprise for well over a century now, yet ball players have not always grown rich, and least not this rich. The minimum salary for a player (his contract negotiated by his union) is now over $400,000 dollars, around ten times the average salary of a non-union teacher here in South Carolina. I am not making an argument over the relative fairness of what a teacher makes vs. what an athlete makes. Great teachers are rare, but so are great athletes. Still, children understand and respond to incentives just like the rest of us. What choices are we encouraging our children to make based on the incentives available to them now and in the future?
The primary arguments I’ve heard from people (some of whom haven’t earned a middle class wage for years) against unions is that either A) Unions are corrupt, B) Union workers are greedy, or C) We can’t afford them.
Let’s take each of these three arguments as they relate to baseball.
A) Unions are Corrupt: There’s no question that the Player’s Union hindered the development and implementation of any rules regarding testing for steroids. One reason for this was that they believed protecting a player’s privacy was an important consideration. How could they be sure this wouldn’t turn out to be a witch-hunt? In that regard, they turned out to be right. The so-called confidential list of players who tested positive was partially leaked to the press, then on to the public. From that point on, all players have been branded guilty until “proven” innocent. Many of the Hall of Fame voters themselves seem to be waiting for “more information” regarding players they suspect might have used PED’s. Perhaps more names from another “confidential” list will someday illegally be made public. Then, with illegally obtained information at hand, they can penalize still more “dirty” players.
Sure, there are other kinds of corruption. These kinds also exist in non-union corporations, and among many of the Congressmen on Capital Hill, some of whom feel the need to remind us of the corruption of unions for political purposes while finding loopholes around and through the rules in an effort to enrich themselves at public expense.
B) Union Workers Are Greedy: Like us, baseball players seek to maximize economic gain within the realm of their chosen occupation, appropriate to their level of talent and experience. My friends in the private sector routinely do this as well. This is called (for better or worse) pursuing the American Dream. A couple of my friends are now quite wealthy. More power to them. This is not a zero-sum game where their prosperity comes at the price of someone else’s poverty (well, not directly, anyway.)
Public sector employees are also often accused of being greedy, despite the fact that they often earn less money than their private sector counterparts who have similar levels of education and job experience. My first year as a teacher, in a small town in rural Maine, I earned $20,900. That was in the mid-1990’s, not all that long ago. In my final year as a teacher, after a dozen years of experience and 36 Master’s Level college credits, I was earning $49,000. A friend of mine who graduated college the same year I did, who now works in the private sector, earns about twice as much as I did then.
We are all greedy. But for public sector unionized employees, as for MLB players, this is not a zero-sum game. The money a teacher, fireman or policeman makes is part of the tax base that pays for their own salaries, as well as the benefits received by others. Moreover, their disposable income is just as vitally a part of the consumer spending that promotes and supports local business as the dollars spent by private sector employees. Therefore, any attempt to “control” the costs of public employees by destroying their unions may have, at the local level, the unintended side effect of hurting overall consumer spending, which benefits no one.
C) We can’t afford them. This argument, that unions will destroy the economy, was an argument that MLB franchise owners made over and over again in the years leading up to the creation of the Baseball Player’s Association, and especially during the dawn of free agency. Exploding baseball player salaries will kill the game. Tickets will no longer be affordable, and player greed will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Also, team owners will be put out of business because they won’t be able to afford these new, extravagant salaries.
None of these things came to pass. When George Steinbrenner purchased the Yankees in 1973, he paid just under ten million dollars for the franchise. Estimates are that the Yankees franchise is now worth around three billion dollars. Certainly, not every franchise can boast that same level of economic success, but in the rare occasion when an MLB franchise does go on the market, it rarely lacks a plethora of interested millionaires seeking to purchase it. Moreover, the eight best years of attendance in baseball history have each occurred in the past eight years. Clearly, if you build it, they will come, no matter how much the employees are getting paid.
Map usa unions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Similarly, beyond the world of baseball, the argument has been made that we can no longer afford unions. Yet many corporations that argue against unionized employees are among the richest companies on earth. Keeping their employees unnecessarily poor may allow them to please their shareholders, but the end result is a two-tiered economy that undermines real economic opportunity, upward mobility, and democracy itself. Even Henry Ford, who was anti-semitic and an early admirer of European fascism, declared that it was right to pay his assembly line workers a fair, living wage if for no other reason than that they should afford to buy the cars they were manufacturing.
It should also be noted that in the richest states like Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York, public-sector employee unions have been strong for decades. The strength of those unions did not prevent those states from becoming and remaining wealthy. Conversely, many so-called “right to work” anti-union states, especially in the south, have long been among the poorest in the nation. The lack of unions has not, nor will it ever, lift these states out of their second or third-rate economic performances. Yet, counter-intuitively, most of the residents in these same, relatively poor states, harbor negative opinions of unions.
The anti-union propaganda machine has long been effective in keeping people poor and ignorant. Thirty or forty years of union decline in this country has not made the nation richer, it has made the middle class poorer. One only has to look at the recent history of Major League baseball to see the obvious solution to this state of affairs isn’t to continue to undermine, even outlaw, the few remaining unions we have left. True, fortunes can be made in the private sector outside of unions. But trends are trends, and in the long run, if current trends continue, there may not be a middle class in the future to enjoy Major League baseball. It will be a game of the few, by the few, for the few.
If that day comes, baseball and America will both be greatly diminished.
Related articles