Prospectus Preview: NL... (10/10)
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October 10, 2008 Prospectus TodayNotes on NLCS Game One
We write a lot about how very little separates post-season teams, which is why the result of a short series between them is so unpredictable. Well, that idea stems from this one: what separates them within games is very little. Last night, the difference between Derek Lowe throwing a shutout and losing Game One of the NLCS wasn't three feet. It might not have been two feet, and most of that was the gap between James Loney's glove and the baseball flying above it as Rafael Furcal overthrew first base in the sixth inning. That error, which put Shane Victorino on second base, kicked off a six-minute stretch that turned a dominant effort by Lowe and the Dodgers into a 3-2 deficit that would hold up as the final score. For the better part of five innings, Lowe was keeping the ball way down and getting great results. Of the game's first 16 batters, just two managed to get the ball out of the infield. Carlos Ruiz and Cole Hamels hit back-to-back singles with two outs in the fifth, but Lowe was able to retire Jimmy Rollins on a fly to left to end the threat. However, Ruiz's at-bat, and in fact that whole sequence, might have been a red flag. Lowe got a 1-2 pitch up to Ruiz, enabling the poor-hitting catcher to single sharply to right, one of the few pitches he mislocated in the first five innings. Location is what killed him in the sixth. Lowe still had velocity and movement, but on pitches to Chase Utley and Pat Burrell, he caught too much of the plate too high in the zone, and was burned by the long ball. The difference between where each pitch was supposed to be and where it ended up was tiny; Utley's home run, which didn't look like much off the bat, came on a ball just a few inches higher than it should have been, allowing him to square it up and yank it out to right-center. Burrell's homer came on a sinker that Lowe seemed to be trying to bury inside and that he just left too much over the plate. Combined, the pitches might have missed by 12 inches, and more likely by eight. Those eight inches, added to the foot or two by which Furcal overthrew Loney, were good for three runs and, in effect, the ballgame. Baseball is hard, and at this level, with very good teams, pitchers, hitters, baserunners, and fielders the difference between winning and losing an at-bat or an inning or a game is just so very small. That's one reason why I have always dismissed the character arguments, the idea that teams win and lose because individuals are strong of mind or will. Baseball isn't a test of character, it's a test of ability, a test of skill, and of the thousand small movements that go into the outcome of a game. The Dodgers played a good baseball game last night. They hit three doubles off of a tough pitcher, turning them into two runs. Manny Ramirez hit a ball about as far as you can hit one in Citizens Bank Park while still keeping it in play. Casey Blake battled back from 0-2 in the fourth, with a runner on second and no one out, to avoid a strikeout and advance the runner to third. Lowe's start, while a bit less than they needed on this night, wasn't bad. The Dodgers made a number of fine defensive plays. They just made, as a team, a small number of mistakes along the way. The Phillies made fewer, and won.
I think we'll see a few more runs today. Chad Billingsley allowed a .360 OBP to lefties this season, which won't help him any while navigating the Phillies' lineup. Brett Myers had been scuffling a bit before coming across the Brewers, who don't take quite the same disciplined approach at the plate that the Dodgers do. Look for the bullpens to be more involved today, which could bring Manuel's lineup choices into question. Later today, I'll have some notes on the ALCS.
Joe Sheehan is an author of Baseball Prospectus.
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"Baseball isn't a test of character, it's a test of ability, a test of skill, and of the thousand small movements that go into the outcome of a game."
Something that difficult is always in part a test of character. Maybe that's not true equally for everyone. But I'm sure KG could tell us a thousand stories of guys who had the skill and not the character and for that reason never sniffed the big leagues. *That* I think is what really comes closest to diffusing the morale, momentum, character arguments. Guys who can't cut it mentally are generally weeded out long before they sniff the bigs.
I realize I'm picking on a throw-away paragraph in a piece that's about other things. Really, I'm just trying to make sense of this for myself. The influence of morale on baseball is something I'll keep turning over in my head for a long time.
The ability to focus and get the job done is still an ability. That we call is character doesn't make it reflect any better or worse on the person beyond it being a baseball-relevant skill.
Evan,
Thanks for making that point. That ability to focus while different from a physical skill is just as necessary for a baseball player to succeed.
You're not nitpicking a throw-away paragraph. This sentence is fundamental to all of Joe's analysis. The human response to the situation in which one finds himself matters little.
Is one player more apt to give up when faced with a string of failures? Bag it on the 4th AB, after 3 K's. In my mind, certainley so. Is that character?
If one has had a run of good success, does that make the person less apt to be discouraged by a string of recent misfortune? Does confidence inspire better performance?
Jow would have you believe that you're just looking at random rolls off a Strato card but in reality you're looking at the performance of human beings.
I think the larger point that baseball is a game of millimeters and split-seconds is more important to the warm-up of the piece than the bit about character, which is something of an asside. There's a take it or leave it character to that paragraph and I couldn't do either, so I felt apologies were in order.
I do believe that the importance of such minute details is one of the things that makes us love and appreciate the sport, and I like how Joe uses it in his opening.
"Joe would have you believe that you're just looking at random rolls off a Strato card but in reality you're looking at the performance of human beings."
Joe would (as I interpret him) have you remember that you're looking at the performance of that tiny fraction of human beings who had so much ability, physical and mental and emotional, that they made it to the major leagues. This is NOT a random sample of the population at large, and there's no reason to think that they will show the same distribution of 'character' traits as the population at large, any more than they show a typical distribution of physical traits. You might as well argue that lots of major league players are probably women -- after all, you see women around you every day, it's perfectly natural for someone to be female.
Treating players as if they were stratomatic cards does a remarkably good job of predicting how they're going to perform in the future. That doesn't mean they're robots; it just means that they're selected in part for NOT being the kind of people who respond to that kind of pressure the way you or I might.