Leyland retired, Baker fired

With Leyland tired of being in the dugout and assuming Detroit doesn't want Dusty Baker to destroy their murderer's row of starting pitchers through letting them throw too many innings, that leaves  the immortal Bruce Bochy, he of the .500 career winning percentage, the active manager with the most wins (and tied with Terry Francona for most WS wins).

I kid, sort of, of course, because Bochy's seemingly unimpressive .500 career winning percentage is more a product of managing my beloved San Diego Padres for many years than any real ineptitude on Bochy's part.

Bochy started managing the Padres in 1995, and got to oversee the great Tony Gwynn's golden years.  While Gwynn was technically an active player in 00-01, he managed fewer than 200 plate appearances in those seasons.  Even in 1998 and 1999, Quilvio Veras posted a higher WAR than Gwynn. 

From 2000-2002, Phil Nevin and Ryan Klesko were Bochy's best position players by WAR, and Woody Williams and Brian Lawrence were the best pitchers. 

In 2003-2004, Mark Loretta was his best position player by WAR, and Peavy slowly established himself as the staff ace.

Bochy took over the Giants in 2007; this was Bonds' last year, Randy Winn was his 2nd best position player, and everyone already knew Zito's contract was an albatross.  What kind of masochist takes this job?  Someone who spent the previous 12 seasons managing the Padres, of course. 

In 2008, a 34 year-old Randy Winn was his best position player.

Despite neither Lincecum nor Cain reaching their 2009 peaks again, the Giants managed to win the 2010 and 2012 World Series with Buster Posey as the only position player who could crack the Yankees' starting lineup. 

If the '98 Padres had managed to sneak a WS win over the Yankees, Bochy might be the greatest manager of doing more with less of all time. 

Moping in the Meadowlands

As one of the last remaining New Jersey Nets fans**, I should be charmed by the prospect of Jason Kidd and Kenyon Martin playing significant playoff minutes for a "contender" ten years after making back-to-back Finals appearances***, but given that they're playing for the @%$@#& Knicks, it's really just depressing.


** and by "fan" of the Nets, I mean "person who is vaguely aware of and moderately cares about what the team is currently doing".  Really, it's the most a New Jersey team can ask for when Jersey is the Scottish and New York is the English:

 

*** it would have been three consecutive finals, if Kidd weren't playing injured during the 2004 playoffs (requiring microfracture surgery in the offseason). As it was, they took the eventual champion Pistons to 7 games with a one-legged Kidd.  There's NO WAY they lose that series if he's healthy.  IMO, Kidd's Hall of Fame ticket was punched when he managed to get to consecutive Finals, first with Keith Van Horn, Kerry Kittles, Kenyon Martin, and Todd MacCulloch as starters (with rookie Richard Jefferson coming off the bench), and then with Kittles, Martin, Jefferson, and Jason Collins as starters (and not much off the bench).

7 seconds or LA-LA

I had wanted to wait for Nash to come off the DL before saying something about Mike D'Antoni coaching the Lakers, but that seems a while off, so before the iron goes completely cold...

In the first article I read about the firing of Mike Brown and hiring of D'Antoni, it said that Mike Brown was trying to run the Princeton offense -- with a team that had 2 bigs (one of whom needs to be near the basket in order to be effective**) and no one (except Nash) in the projected starting 5 who could shoot the 3***.  WAT.  These are not guys who can effectively run the Princeton offense (with, I think, the exception of Pau Gasol, who is IMO an ideal big man to put at the top of the key).

Even if D'Antoni runs the "right" offense with this team, I think it will be extremely difficult for him to overcome the following problems:

1. Howard has been worse than ever at the free throw line, and
2. This Lakers team is not very deep (just look at the bench's +/- numbers to see that they're regularly being outperformed by opponent benches).

** To be extremely generous to Brown, he apparently (see last paragraph in this section) made the decision before the Howard trade... but then again, it was also before they had Nash.

*** Kobe is a career .337 shooter on 3's.  That's not even in the top-250 all-time, and lower than 6th man's Antawn Jamison's career .346 %.  He's horrible for a shooting guard, but we have a perception that he's "not bad" because he's made some 3's in big games.  Artest is a career .341 on 3's.  

By contrast, Vince Carter (currently of the Mavericks) is the 50th best active player at .3738.  R

NYT graphic: Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots

Even if you don't care for basketball, you should love the geographic shot analysis of the final two teams.  A few comments:

1. Some of the coloration appears broken, where a region on the chart has a "high" coloration but a low actual points per shot for the region (see, for example, the orange region on the right side of LeBron James' chart).  They appear to be regions with low numbers of shots, but that should be fixable with a decent spatial statistics algorithm.  
2. It might be better if more of the micro-regions were combined. 
3. You should look in particular at James Harden's chart (on the right, mid-page).  This is the reigning "6th man of the year", and you can tell how smart he is by his shot selection.  While he's athletic enough to get shots anywhere on the court, he eschews the midrange jumper because 3-pointers and shots near the rim are high-value shots.  In fact, the best part of the graphic, from an unintentional comedy standpoint, might be the "analysis" that states "However, he has virtually no midrange game; a vast majority of his shot attempts occur at the rim or beyond the arc, not many occur in between."  As if that's a problem with his game!  Midrange jumpers, even for a very good shooter like Durant, are not a high points-per-shot shot!

Colchester Triathlon: Week 1 training results

Last Friday I decided that I would try to get in enough shape to do the Colchester Triathlon, at least to finish, and ideally under 1:30:00.  The course is a 1/2 mile swim, 12 mile bike ride, and 3 mile run; close to 1/20/5 km.  I like that, but better yet if the bike ride were 15km.  I'm going to try not to dwell on this too much, but looking at the 2009 results, the run and swim times are roughly equal**, but a disproportionate amount of the race time is spent on the cycling.  This is especially unfortunate because it seems to me to be the leg in which the (really expensive) equipment is closest to being as important as the athlete -- the "cheap" Trek triathlon bikes are nearly $2,000.  By contrast, you can easily spend under $200 (combined) for a good racing suit, goggles and running shoes.


At any rate, the good news of the first week of training is that, even when tired at the end of the day, I can maintain a decent jogging rate that does about 3 miles in 25 minutes.  I'll take 12kph on the last leg of the tri, but if I can up that to 15kph, that would be better.


The iffy news is that I did 12 miles in 50 minutes on my Trek 7100 (yes, it's not a racing cycle, that's why I'm grumbling about the bike leg being so long  ;-).  24kph won't cut it on the bike; I have to get that under 45 minutes (26.67kph) and ideally under 40 (30kph).  Toe clips are high on my priority list (no, they didn't come with the bike and I just never bothered to get them before) and frankly I'm hoping that just getting the clips will bring my time under 45 (no, I don't know anything about racing bicycles, so this may be wishful thinking).  Alternatively, I could rent a racing bike, but since this is my first tri, let's do this in baby steps.


A big unknown at the moment is the swim leg.  I jumped in the pool at the Y today and casually swam 1200 yards in 20 minutes (i.e., swimming at a pace I could keep up more or less indefinitely), but I've never swum competitively in open water.


** and bully for the Colchester on that score!  My impression is that the swimmers usually get screwed because the swim leg of most sprint triathlons appears to be 500-600 yards (to be fair, I think this is because the swim leg is in a pool, and the swim leg has to be abbreviated simply to accommodate all the racers, but it still stinks).  Making the swimming and running legs roughly equal is a huge step in the right direction.  Shrink the biking to 15km and it's still the longest leg, but much closer to being fair.

Reporting statistics without a license

Firstly, I call shenanigans on the ESPN news services for reporting the results of an ABC News/ESPN poll by stating:

"most of those polled are ready to give Woods a mulligan, but they don't think his wife should be so forgiving. Fifty-five percent said they are ready to forgive Woods, while only 29 percent say Elin Woods should do the same. Twenty-one percent say she shouldn't forgive him, and 42 percent of those polled said it's none of their business."

Um... the 29 percent who say Elin Woods should forgive Tiger are not directly comparable to the 55 percent who say they are ready to forgive Tiger because of the little matter of 42 percent who (correctly) pointed out it's none of our damned business!  If you want to try to compare those groups, you should at least factor out the people who essentially declined to give an opinion one way or the other on each question.  Unfortunately, as usual there isn't enough information in the report to make any kind of correct comparison, and of course there's no link to the poll results.


Secondly, I call shenanigans on myself for clicking on a link to a fluff story about Tiger Woods.  I don't even follow golf.

16-14 in the fifth?!

Wow. We've been out of town and away from internet access, and spent the last week recovering from the trip. Our flight took off right at the end of the 1st set, so we saw the last few games on the airplane's TV, including Roddick breaking Federer, and I figured we'd see the whole match, but we landed in Orlando at 8-8 in the 5th. It's too bad Roddick couldn't close out the 2nd set tiebreaker -- there was one point that stood out, where he mis-hit a high backhand volley (practically an overhead) that he "should" have gotten. It was a difficult play, but he wasn't quite able to make it, and I couldn't help but think that it's the kind of play Edberg or McEnroe would have made. If the sets (before the 5th) didn't go to tiebreakers, I'll bet Roddick would have won. Federer simply couldn't break Roddick that day until the very end.

One last addition: I really hate it when I read articles by people who think that Roddick isn't an elite player because he doesn't have more slam titles. It's really hard to win slam titles when Federer and Nadal are out there; Djokovic (2008), Gaudio (2004), Hewitt (2002), and Roddick (2003) are the last people not named Nadal or Federer to win each of the four majors, in order). There have never been a pair of men's champions like this; even Seles/Graf and Navratilova/Evert might not have been quite this dominant. To suggest that their greatness is due to a lack of competitiveness at the top is not really fair to anyone.

2008 MLB Awards : AL Cy Young

Let's start with an easy one: the AL Cy Young award should go to Cliff Lee, right?  Well... first let's quickly dismiss everyone lower than Mike Mussina on the ERA list, out of respect for Moose's first 20-win season.  And I would probably argue that Mussina was better than Jon Lester this year; their numbers are very similar, except for Mussina's considerable advantage in Walks.  What about Mussina's season vs. Matsuzaka's?  Well, Matsuzaka's winning percentage, strikeout rate, and ERA are relatively impressive, but his walk rate was terrible, he averaged well under 6 innings per start, and made 5 fewer starts than Mussina, so I'd be sorely tempted to rank Mussina's season as "better".

But Matsuzaka and Mussina just don't stack up against Cliff Lee this year.  Lee's winning percentage is just as impressive as Matsuzaka's (but with more wins) and his K/BB ratio is even better than Mussina's.  And he's got the lowest ERA in the league.

But... there's this other guy, Roy Halladay.  He's got 11 losses to go with his 20 wins, but Cliff Lee benefitted from 6.13 run support, compared to 4.72 for Halladay.  Give Roy another 1.4 runs per game, and his W-L record would look more like Lee's.   Halladay also had a superior K/BB ratio, better WHIP, and pitched 23 more innings (9 complete games to Lee's 4).

But Halladay already has a Cy Young award, so even though he was arguably better this year than in 2003, it'll probably go to Lee.

Three Cheers for the Royals

The MLB's last undefeated team in 2008! And reverse-cheers for Detroit, the last team to get a win in 2008.

Another Question, No Answers, About Spygate...

There's been a lot of hand-wringing about the possibility that the Patriots might have derived some advantage over the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI by taping the Rams' practice the day before the game. What I don't understand is why nobody mentions that the Buccaneers gained a clear advantage over the Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII because Jon Gruden, the head coach of the Buccaneers and head coach of the Raiders the previous year, told his defense everything he knew about the Raiders' offensive schemes. Is Gruden a cheater, or were the Raiders at fault for not changing their offense? Is Belichick a cheater, or were the Rams at fault for not having better security at their practice?

Yes, there is a difference in the situations, but it's odd that what similarities do exist have gone completely unremarked.

Out of the playoffs

I've read the Sports Guy's articles since he was picked up by ESPN.com and greatly enjoyed them. Recently, he updated his "Levels of Losing" in honor of the Mets' collapse and falling out of the postseason.

Too bad they didn't wait until Monday night's game was resolved to finish the article. Don't you think that the career saves leading blowing two critical games in a three-day span to drop his team out of the playoffs (hell, not to mention that the first blown save occurred on a triple given up to the son of Mr. Padre, and the second blown save came in a game where a. the starters were Peavy vs. Fogg and should never have come down to being decided by a shaky Hoffman in the first place, and b. the hit by Holliday handed him the batting crown and likely the MVP award, despite being a product of Coors) deserves to be categorized? Gaaaaack.

Here's the final cumulative games over .500 by division. Can all 17 Padres fans take solace in knowing that their division was really tough this year? Given that Norv Turner is coaching the Chargers... no.

Week ALE ALC ALW NLE NLC NLW
2007-09-30 6 -2 18 0 -54 32

Win the games you can

Cumulative games over .500

Week        ALE  ALC  ALW  NLE  NLC  NLW
2007-09-09    8   -8   22   -5  -47   30

The competition in the NL West is absolutely brutal (see above), and you have to just win the games you can win, and not worry about the rest. This past week Jake Peavy made a start on 3 days rest, but for Ed Whitson's sake, why?!!?

Sure, Arizona had taken the previous game and would take the division lead with a win on Wednesday, but that single game would hardly make or break the Padres' playoff chances, so there's no need for Peavy to even try to be heroic. I could understand if pitching Peavy on Wednesday would allow Bud Black to slate him in for an extra start by the season's end, but looking ahead, that can't happen. Jack Cassel pitched all right in his previous start, so it's not like Stauffer or Hensley would have to be out on the mound. Saving Peavy for Friday gives him, Maddux, and Germano good rest for the weekend series against Colorado and Chris Young a full week between starts (not to mention the luxury of pitching at Dodger stadium instead of Coors and against a weaker lineup**), and gives you the best chance to win the games you can win. Squeezing Peavy in against a team you're tied with when there are 20 games left is a little panicky.

There's a little bit of hindsight here, because I'm writing after the disastrous weekend results, but that's how I felt on Tuesday -- I just don't like modern pitchers working on 3 days rest without a good reason.

** Young was looking a little healthier in the game against the Rockies than in his previous two starts; here's hoping he's good to go for the playoffs