AJC > Sports > Braves > Blog > Archives > 2007 > June > 14
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Salty’s at 1B; Stark fires back at Boras
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The move that so many of you blog denizens have been pining for — can’t say I blame you — is happening. At least tonight it’s happening, and I’d guess it’ll happen some more.
Salty is starting at first base.
Yes, top catching prospect Jarrod Saltalamacchia is getting his first start at first base in place of slumping Scott Thorman. Good luck, kid: All you’ve got to do is face the game’s top left-hander, Johan Santana.
Oh, and if you’re in there again tomorrow in the series opener at Cleveland, you’ll face 6-foot-7, 300-plus-pound C.C. Sabathia.
If Salty gets multiple hits tonight and tomorrow against those guys, he’s officially earned a permanent starting job.
OK, not really. But he should. Santanta Consider that Sabathia has pitched 18 scoreless innings in his past two starts while allowing a total of eights hits and one walk, with 14 strikeouts.
Anyway, a lot of folks have been waiting for Cox to make this move, as Thorman has sputtered since a promising April. He was supposed to be in a platoon with Craig Wilson, but Wilson doesn’t do hitting anymore and was released.
Thorman was given a chance to play every day, and hasn’t made the most of it, to say the least.
He’s got a solid seven homers and respectable 27 RBIs in 55 games, but Thorman is hitting .225, including 10-for-50 with no homers, three RBIs and a meager .486 OPS vs. lefties (.260 slugging).
Since May 1, Thorman’s hit just .200 (27-for-135) with four homers, 16 RBIs, three walks and 30 strikeouts, for a .221 OBP.
Since Saltalamacchia arrived from Double-A Miss’ip, he’s hit .322 (19-for-59) with three doubles, two homers, eight RBIs and only nine strikeouts, quite impressive for a young kid with no previous experience above Double-A who’s playing a part-time role that’s included infrequent starts and pinch-hitting.
The switch-hitting 22-year-old could be playing a lot more now, if he continues what he’s been doing. He was 9-for-20 in his past (.450) with two doubles and a homer in his past five starts before tonight.
Salty is hitting .346 (9-for-26) with a .615 slugging percentage vs. lefties and .303 (10-for-33) with a .364 slugging percentage vs. righties.
And he’s hit better as the stakes are raised: .297 with none on base, .364 (8-for-22) with runners on, and .417 (5-for-12) with runners in scoring position. A small sample, obviously, but still encouraging.
He’s got a cannon arm and a swagger and presence you don’t see often in guys so inexperienced. He could be a standout catcher in the majors, but the Braves have one of those.
They’re going to have to decide by this winter whether to entertain trade offers for Salty or make him their first baseman. I don’t see many, if any, other options. He’s probably too big to be anything more than serviceable in the outfield, and they need a first baseman anyway, if Thorman isn’t going to be the guy (and I’m prett sure they’ve not made that decision just yet; it’s awful early to decide Thorman doesn’t have it).
I wouldn’t give up Salty for anything less than an impact starting pitcher, a young guy who’s affordable for several years, or a special talent like Dontrelle Willis. But we’ll see. It’s early. Let’s let the kid play some first base and see what he can do playing on a regular basis, assuming he’s going to get that chance.
The Braves could call up Brayan Pena to give them an extra catcher, and they’ve been playing Pena at a lot of positions lately, which tell me they could be grooming him as a utility guy and third catcher.
If that’s the case, they have a couple of underperforming utility men, and Pete Orr has all his minor league options remaining. But that’s just me talking, not anything I’ve heard. Just an educated guess, nothing more.
The Stark Rebuttal: Yes, I capitalized every word, because it’s rather epic. Jayson Stark called me today, a couple days after I wrote agent Scott Boras’s blistering critique of Stark’s assessment of Boras client as “the most overrated center fielder in history” in a new book that Jayson’s written.
He said he hoped I’d give him a chance for a counter to the rebuttal. And I like Jayson, and felt it was only fair. He wrote it out and e-mailed it to me.
(I’ll expect a slice of the first-month profits on this damn book, for all the publicity he’s getting for it here.)
Anyway, rather than paraphrase Jayson, I figured I’d utilize the luxury of unlimited space on this here internet de-vice and run the man’s comments in full (that, plus the fact it’s getting close to game time and I’ve still got to write my notebook).
Folks, it’s long, I warn you. So if you want to skip it, there’s no more Braves news on this blog. I’m running late.
So here goes, in full (and Jayson, send the check to my home address, please):
Hi Dave,
I just got a chance to read our pal Scott Boras' retort
to my book, which I found highly entertaining. And, as usual, Scott distorted what I wrote and what I’ve been saying about Andruw publicly since the book came out. So I’d like the chance to respond if you could find any room in your little sector of cyberspace for me.
First off, I knew when I wrote this book there was a 100-percent probability that Scott would disagree with this assessment of Andruw. I knew lots of people would. This book is about perception. It’s about one of the great debates in sports - who’s overrated, who’s underrated. So we’re SUPPOSED to disagree.
I’ve said from the beginning that this book wasn’t intended to settle any debates about these players. But it looks as if it has STARTED about 100,000 debates. And that was the whole idea.
It wasn’t written to make people angry. It wasn’t written to call attention to me. It wasn’t written as some misguided attempt to throw a bunch of names out there for the shameless sake of (in Scott’s words) “stirring up controversy.” It was supposed to make people think, and to raise questions about why we perceive players in certain ways, when in lots of cases, the facts don’t quite match the perceptions.
But when Scott Boras starts accusing ME of “manipulating the numbers” in the name of “profiteering,” I have to laugh. Isn’t Scott the number-manipulation champion of the world? And when he does it, his ONLY motivation is profiteering. All I did was write a book.
And what’s that book about? It’s about who’s overrated and who’s underrated. So it was bound to hit a few nerves - unless I’d confined it to the most overrated and underrated players in the Federal League or something. But the whole point of the book was to explore the myths and illusions that surround recognizable players.
Scott just happens to represent one of those players, whom he’s now openly comparing to Willie Mays so he can inspire some team to pay him 100 zillion dollars next winter.
Speaking of Willie Mays, if Scott’s line about how Andruw was the first centerfielder since Willie Mays to record five straight seasons of 400 putouts sounds familiar, it might be because IT’S IN THE BOOK. (Actually, the factoid Scott threw out to you was wrong. Mays isn’t the ONLY centerfielder to do that. Richie Ashburn did it right before Mays, in fact. Mays was just the most recent before Andruw. But I’ll take the high road and not accuse Scott of “failed research” on that one.)
The reason that fact is in the book is that I didn’t set out to “overrate” Andruw, or hurt his market value, or go out of my way to demean him. I included that fact because I wanted to make clear that the Andruw who ripped off that string of 400 putouts WAS the greatest defensive centerfielder I ever saw play. If I just wanted to manipulate facts in this book, why would I have spent so much time - in Andruw’s chapter and all the overrated chapters - giving him and all those players credit for why we’ve come to believe they were so great in the first place?
I did my best in this book, and certainly in this chapter, to avoid being mean-spirited. I specifically said Andruw is still highly employable. I specifically said Andruw is sure as heck still better out there than, say, Brian Asselstine. I’ve said in about 1,000 interviews since the book came out that Andruw is still a tremendous player.
But was he exactly the same player over the last few
years that we perceived him to be? No. And Scott can manipulate his own numbers and “indexes” all he wants. But he can’t explain away those 100 balls a year that Andruw used to catch that he wasn’t catching anymore - until, by some remarkable stroke of fate, he got himself back in A-1 shape this year in a contract year (and now is magically catching them again). Do the math. If the guy was down 100 putouts a season, that’s four balls a week he used to catch that he wasn’t catching anymore.
I said in the book that I was surprised to see those numbers myself. But I didn’t make them up or manipulate them. They’re real. And Scott’s trashing of Zone Rating is purely his way of discrediting research he doesn’t agree with.
I only looked at Zone Rating because my initial inclination, as I wrote in the book, was NOT to believe the raw numbers. I wanted to factor out variables like whether the Braves’ staff had more ground-ball pitchers than it used to, etc. The defensive stat that does that best, in my opinion, is Zone Rating.
I've asked plenty of sabermatricians about Zone Rating.
And they sure characterize it differently than Scott does. It doesn’t assign wider zones to players like Andruw because he’s so good. All centerfielders are assigned the same zone. So how does it penalize players with more range?
Andruw's Zone Rating dipped in exactly the way his
other numbers dipped. He used to lead the league. Last year, he finished at the bottom of the league. Any attempt to explain that away is an attempt to make the conclusion differ from the facts - which was the opposite of the way I went about it.
Now one more thing, and I’m done. Scott suggests that I made up that “old scout crap” in which I said a scout I knew was the first to steer me toward Andruw as a player who - while still good - wasn’t what people perceived him to be anymore.
I’m not sure if Scott is suggesting that I made up the quote or made up the scout. But let me assure you, this scout is not just real, he’s a guy who has been scouting for many years and is one of the sharpest people I’ve ever met in baseball. And here’s the other thing: He’s not alone.
Scott would be shocked, apparently, to hear what other
scouts say about Andruw. And what other general managers say about Andruw. And what even some guys who spent years working for the Braves say about Andruw.
In fact, the scout I originally quoted happened to read Scott’s quotes in your blog this week. And he checked in to tell me that if “Scott thinks Andruw is the same outfielder now he was when he was younger, he should visit” (a prominent sports ophthalmologist who shall remain nameless).
If I were out to “get” Andruw or to “rip” Andruw, I could have used lots of quotes much stronger than the ones I used in this book. But that isn’t my style. And it isn’t the tone I hoped to set in this book.
Lots of people, I think, have gotten the wrong idea about what I meant by “overrated” in Andruw’s context. I even suspect you’ve gotten the wrong idea. It was never supposed to mean, “Aw, he’s not that good.” I never, EVER suggest he’s turned into some kind of washed-up stumble bum, because that’s ridiculous. Even before he whipped himself back into shape, he was still a terrific player, even though he wasn’t the same player.
Did I ever say he couldn’t carry Torii Hunter’s wristbands? Why would I? Scott and I are in agreement on the fact that if I could sign either Andruw or Torii, I would sign Andruw - assuming I had 100 million bucks in my checking account.
But that doesn’t mean Andruw hadn’t changed as a player over the last few years. And that’s all “overrated” means in his case. Lots of people were out there, assuming he was as good as ever, when clearly, if you’re willing to take a rational and impartial view of this, he hasn’t been. That’s all I was trying to establish. When what’s taking place on the field differs from our widely held assumptions and perceptions, that’s exactly the kind of theme I tried to explore in this book.
I know I’ve practically written a whole ‘nother chapter just in what I’ve written to you. But I’m not big on having people like Scott challenge my credibility. I’ll be happy to stack up my body of stats and research over the years with Scott’s any time. And I’ll let the world judge for itself which of us has been the real manipulator.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to give my side of
this.
Whew, I’m tired just pasting it to the blog. But you get the idea. It’s a very reasoned and cogent response from Jayson, albeit quite long.
Anyway, I told him on the phone I still don’t buy the zone rating argument because I’ve had many insiders and sabermetricians tell me that the inventor of the zone rating himself has since disowned and/or altered it several times because he conceded it penalized players such as Jones who go out of their “zone” often for balls, by not giving them credit for plays made there, etc.
But like I said, it’s late and I don’t have time to get those quotes again. I’m sure a couple of the denizens here can offer that angle again, as they have in the past couple days. A lot of folks here have been on top of this thing, so someone please give that definition or rebuttal to the zone rating thing, if you will.
As for the reduced putouts, Andruw laughed today when I asked him about it, and pointed out one often overlooked fact: Guys are hitting more home runs. Teams have three guys who hit 35 homers in their lineups now. What do you want me to do, go in the stands to get them?”
OK, enough snipping and clinical analysis: Take it away, legendary Minneapolis band The Replacements (while I run to get some BBQ at Dave’s BBQ stand here at the Metrodome).
“THE LEDGE” by Paul Westerberg
All eyes look up to me/High above the filthy streets
Heed no bullhorn when it calls/Watch me fly and die, watch me fall
I’m the boy they can’t ignore,/For the first time in my life, I’m sure
All the love sent up high to pledge/Won’t reach the ledge
Wind blows cold from the west/I smell coffee, I smell doughnuts for the press
A girl that I knew once years ago/Is tryin’ to be reached on the phone
I’m the boy she can’t ignore,/for the first time in my life, I’m sure
All the love sent up high to pledge…
I’m the boy she can’t ignore,/for the first time in my life, I’m sure
All the love sent up high to pledge.
Priest kneels silent, all is still/Policeman reaches from the sill
Watch him, watch him try his best/There’ll be no medal pinned to his chest
I’m the boy they couldn’t ignore,/for the first time in my life, I’m sure
I’m the boy they couldn’t ignore,/for the first time in my life, I’m sure
I’m the boy for the last time in my life
All the love that they pledge
For the last time will not reach the ledge
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