They won today ... but the Cincinnati Reds are flat out awful at this point. Last in all of baseball in batting average (.239), on-base percentage (.308), and slugging percentage (.381) ... despite playing in one of the best hitting parks in baseball. In fact, if you look at their road hitting stats, which are not influenced by the offense-friendly GABP, their stats are a putrid .234/.297/.363. To put this in perspective I looked for the player w/ the closest stats to the Reds road split. The winner ... Astros backup catcher Humberto Quintero (.239/.291/.349). Essentially, you can view the Reds lineup on the road as nine Quinteros (which would be a good name for a metal/salsa band). Not surprisingly, they are dead last in runs scored (470). Big ... Dead ... Machine.
The pitching, while fading a bit from April/May, is right around league average which is reasonable considering park effects. The bullpen in particular has been ... well ... very good. Most of the time they are keeping games from getting out of hand rather than preserving leads, unfortunately.
They are 16.5 games out of the wild card lead and very clearly one of the worst 5 0r 6 worst teams in baseball. Their last winning season was 2000 and this decade they have been 116 games under .500. How to fix this mess? Dolberry has the answers.
Before getting to them ... recognize the cure is not going to be an easy one. Barring any massive increases in salary outlay, there are not going to be any easy fixes. You have to start now to build for 2012 or 2013. Yes, that's going to make it hard to sell season tickets next year ... but losing an additional 100-200K in attendance in the short term is worth the potential for an additional 1 to 1.5 million that you'll get when the Dolberry plan has you in the playoffs down the road. Also, realize that it's going to take some luck. The other MLB teams are not idiots, at least the majority of them. There will need to be some calculated risks (zigging when others zag) ... and some of them will have to pan out. But just eliminating the stupid things that the Reds have been doing will help get us started back to respectibility if nothing else.
Salary: Let's assume it's going to stay around $75 million like it's been over the past two years. That's not a problem. It's more than 11 teams, including some playoff candidates. Allocation of those resources has been the problem.
Distribution of salary: I like to view a baseball team as consisting of four parts: 1) the lineup, 2) the rotation, 3) the bullpen, 4) the bench. I'm not sure what the exact optimal allocation of funds should be but certainly you should weight the salary resources against potential contribution towards winning games. Some of this is gut feel ... some is statistical ... some is based on experience in fantasy and tabletop baseball (not a direct translation, admittedly) ... but I think the following distribution is close to right:
Lineup: 45% / Rotation 40% / Bullpen 10% / Bench 5%.
Some of the ideas that are built into this are:
- most of your ABs over a season (~ 70%) come from your top 8-10 players barring injuries
- similarly most of your IP (~60%) will come from your starters
- many relief IP are after the game's already been decided
- most of the bullpen $ should go to a quality pitcher who can be reserved for key situations
- it's easier to find cheap relievers than it is to find cheap position players or starters
- bench can usually be filled w/ useful 1-dimensional cheap pieces (e.g., lefty mashers)
One of the flaws w/ the Reds and their salary allocation this year can be seen in a comparison w/ the St. Louis. The Cardinals have a rotation/bullpen salary ratio of about 4. The Reds' pen of Cordero, Rhodes, & Weathers have pitched great ... but the $17.5 million investment in those three players has not translated to wins because there are few leads to protect ... having shortchanged the more win-relevant parts (lineup and rotation).
Lesson for today ... need to adhere more closely to optimal splits ... Reds bullpen should cost (on average) ~ 7 to 8 million. We'll talk in another installment on how to build a good bullpen w/ that kind of money.
Part 2: Amateur Draft / Free Agents / Minor League Free Agents / Rule 5 Draft / Trades ... general philosophy on how to build a winning roster.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Pitino thoughts
I don't really know what to think about the whole sordid saga involving Rick Pitino. Dolberry always had the sense that he was a master manipulator. I guess he's usually referred to as a master motivator, but those two terms are close cousins. The difference seems to reflect one's intent and I guess in big-time coaching they can be hard to disentangle.
It'll be interesting to see what it's like in November when Pitino's sitting on the Cardinal bench. I doubt it'll affect his coaching and I doubt it'll affect recruiting. I'm just not sure Dolberry will be able to see him and not think of infidelity, abortion, and that scary extortion lady.
motivator: to provide someone with something that causes a person to actClearly, no one involved in this mess has managed it w/ any thing resembling skill.
manipulator: to utilize something skillfully, so as to serve one's purpose
It'll be interesting to see what it's like in November when Pitino's sitting on the Cardinal bench. I doubt it'll affect his coaching and I doubt it'll affect recruiting. I'm just not sure Dolberry will be able to see him and not think of infidelity, abortion, and that scary extortion lady.
Friday, August 07, 2009
Farewell to a former friend ...
Guess all of us of a certain age have had friendships that we once really treasured ... but ... for one reason or another (distance, drift, etc.) ... seen steadily fade w/ time until at some point the relationship no longer existed. Dolberry! has made the decision to drop our subscription to the News and Observer and I feel really conflicted about this.
I grew up in household where the morning paper was treasured. My favorite stories about me (are there really any other any kind of stories?) are the ones about how I was reading the newspaper at 3 or how I knew all the current batting averages of MLB players by the age whatever. It used to be a battle for me to get the Sports page before Dad could get to it. The comics section was a consolation prize if the Sports page was gone. In middle school and high school, one of the joys of waking up (besides the cold potato soup breakfast) was knowing that you were but a 4 minute shower, 45 second teeth brushing, and maybe 3o seconds of garb-assembling away from that day's Calvin and Hobbes. In middle school we had current events quizzes that Dolberry always nailed thanks to the newspaper. Even Dolberry's first public writing was published in the newspaper ... a hard-hitting letter to the editor against political action committees. (I'm still agin' 'em.).
By all accounts, the Louisville Courier-Journal was one of the best papers in a medium-sized city back in the day. (Now it appears to be mostly a mechanism to present Belk's ads.) I can't really remember if I had a Post-Dispatch subscription but do know I read it whenever practical. Of course the Chicago Tribune was an awesome paper for our days in and around the Windy City. And the News and Observer down here has been a great paper at least 11 of the last 12 years. Basically, I would guess that 50-75% of my days since Dolberry was five have started w/ a perusal of the newspaper.
Sadly, the newspaper industry contracted a fatal illness sometime over the last 10 years or so. It's been painful to watch. A few corporations bought up a bunch of newspapers and started careful monitoring of the profit margin often at the expense of quality. Many people started getting their news from cable networks or the internet. I think a lot of people (mostly younger) tuned out news for the most part ... staying informed via alternate media / social networks / more effective word of mouth. Circulation numbers started falling. Ad revenue dropped. Production costs rose. Further steps to reduce cost were made and quality suffered further. More people dropped their subscription. Rinse and repeat.
I probably would have kept ponying up the $200 a year for home delivery, but my once close friend started sending signals that he didn't really care about Dolberry! that much any more. And I don't really blame him ... he had to worry about other things ... namely survival. So, not to make it more acrimonious than it needs to be, but I didn't appreciate what my friend started doing:
1) Printing articles in our paper that were originally written for the Charlotte Observer. Dolberry does not care about the Panthers or the Bobcats or PGA events in Charlotte any more than I care about local events in Richmond or Atlanta.
2) The Monday paper became a mini-paper ... one that doesn't even last me the whole bus ride to work.
3) The number of individual voices (sportswriters, columnists, features writers) kept getting whittled down to where the paper seems 75% wire services. What's the point of a local paper that doesn't have a set of distinctive voices that you can enter in to a relationship with?
4) Most damaging to our friendship ... the newspaper quit getting the west coast baseball scores into the next day's paper. There are more "Late Yesterday" boxscores in our paper now than actual ones. Any game that ends after 9:45p is not getting in the next day's paper. I challenge anyone to offer up anything more useless than a 36 hour old boxscore. It's not old enough to be of historical interest and it's not new enough to be news. If you can't get the game in the paper the next day, just skip it.
But really, I'm not really angry about it. I understand why it's happened. But ... it's time to move on. This week I've been reading novels or work stuff on the bus and I haven't missed the paper. A 10 second glance at Google News keeps me up to date w/ all that anyone could ever care to know about cash for clunkers, homicidal maniacs, Russian-Georgian relations, or Paula Abdul. Meanwhile my favorite writers are available via the web: here, here (though he's retiring), here, and here.
So ... newspapers ... thanks ... I'll miss what we had.
I grew up in household where the morning paper was treasured. My favorite stories about me (are there really any other any kind of stories?) are the ones about how I was reading the newspaper at 3 or how I knew all the current batting averages of MLB players by the age whatever. It used to be a battle for me to get the Sports page before Dad could get to it. The comics section was a consolation prize if the Sports page was gone. In middle school and high school, one of the joys of waking up (besides the cold potato soup breakfast) was knowing that you were but a 4 minute shower, 45 second teeth brushing, and maybe 3o seconds of garb-assembling away from that day's Calvin and Hobbes. In middle school we had current events quizzes that Dolberry always nailed thanks to the newspaper. Even Dolberry's first public writing was published in the newspaper ... a hard-hitting letter to the editor against political action committees. (I'm still agin' 'em.).
By all accounts, the Louisville Courier-Journal was one of the best papers in a medium-sized city back in the day. (Now it appears to be mostly a mechanism to present Belk's ads.) I can't really remember if I had a Post-Dispatch subscription but do know I read it whenever practical. Of course the Chicago Tribune was an awesome paper for our days in and around the Windy City. And the News and Observer down here has been a great paper at least 11 of the last 12 years. Basically, I would guess that 50-75% of my days since Dolberry was five have started w/ a perusal of the newspaper.
Sadly, the newspaper industry contracted a fatal illness sometime over the last 10 years or so. It's been painful to watch. A few corporations bought up a bunch of newspapers and started careful monitoring of the profit margin often at the expense of quality. Many people started getting their news from cable networks or the internet. I think a lot of people (mostly younger) tuned out news for the most part ... staying informed via alternate media / social networks / more effective word of mouth. Circulation numbers started falling. Ad revenue dropped. Production costs rose. Further steps to reduce cost were made and quality suffered further. More people dropped their subscription. Rinse and repeat.
I probably would have kept ponying up the $200 a year for home delivery, but my once close friend started sending signals that he didn't really care about Dolberry! that much any more. And I don't really blame him ... he had to worry about other things ... namely survival. So, not to make it more acrimonious than it needs to be, but I didn't appreciate what my friend started doing:
1) Printing articles in our paper that were originally written for the Charlotte Observer. Dolberry does not care about the Panthers or the Bobcats or PGA events in Charlotte any more than I care about local events in Richmond or Atlanta.
2) The Monday paper became a mini-paper ... one that doesn't even last me the whole bus ride to work.
3) The number of individual voices (sportswriters, columnists, features writers) kept getting whittled down to where the paper seems 75% wire services. What's the point of a local paper that doesn't have a set of distinctive voices that you can enter in to a relationship with?
4) Most damaging to our friendship ... the newspaper quit getting the west coast baseball scores into the next day's paper. There are more "Late Yesterday" boxscores in our paper now than actual ones. Any game that ends after 9:45p is not getting in the next day's paper. I challenge anyone to offer up anything more useless than a 36 hour old boxscore. It's not old enough to be of historical interest and it's not new enough to be news. If you can't get the game in the paper the next day, just skip it.
But really, I'm not really angry about it. I understand why it's happened. But ... it's time to move on. This week I've been reading novels or work stuff on the bus and I haven't missed the paper. A 10 second glance at Google News keeps me up to date w/ all that anyone could ever care to know about cash for clunkers, homicidal maniacs, Russian-Georgian relations, or Paula Abdul. Meanwhile my favorite writers are available via the web: here, here (though he's retiring), here, and here.
So ... newspapers ... thanks ... I'll miss what we had.
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