James Shields got there first. Of course he did. Shields takes the ball and makes his starts. Some years you notice, some years you don’t, but he’s always out there, 32 times or so every season, toiling in a small market, doing his job.
Shields consumed a lot of our attention late last winter because he was the last major free agent to sign a contract, and not much else was going on. He went to the San Diego Padres, who made a lot of exciting moves that produced a rather forgettable team.
Even so, I have looked at every one of their box scores, and marked down the line of their starting pitcher in a notebook — and the crazy part is that I love it.
With his 32nd start of the season, on Sept. 20 in Colorado, Shields made it to the bottom of his page in my red spiral notebook. I filled it in before boarding a flight at La Guardia on Monday morning.
Let me explain:
For 10 years I was a beat writer at The New York Times, covering the daily drama of the Mets or the Yankees. Every day at the ballpark, most of your area of responsibility is right in front of you: the players in the clubhouse, the games on the field, the executives in the hallways and around the batting cage.
In 2010, I became the national baseball writer. My beat would now be the entire major leagues. The details of covering a team — anticipating and chronicling the subtle shifts in players’ health, usage and performance that are so critical to a die-hard fan — gave way to something new. I could think in broad strokes about players, teams and trends. But every team would matter.
I wanted to believe that I would always know what was happening with every team. Watch the highlights, work the phones, travel to ballparks, talk to players. And that is all part of it.
But I cannot imagine doing this job without that notebook of pitching stats.
With advice from some other national writers — whose identities are withheld to conceal their membership in the Unabashedly Old-School Nerdy Baseball Scribe Association — I decided to track every starting pitcher, every day. No mere glance at a box score or highlight. No giving up on a team when it is hopelessly out of the pennant race by Memorial Day.
Every guy. Every day.
The mechanics of this are tricky, but possible. Every spring training, I find a college-ruled notebook with 150 pages, measuring 8 1/2 by 11 inches. I never paid attention to this while I was actually in college, but college-ruled notebooks have more lines per page than wide-ruled notebooks: 32 lines, at least in the version I use.
So think about those numbers, 32 and 150, as they apply to this very specific exercise. Thirty-two starts is roughly a season’s worth for a pitcher who takes every turn in the rotation. Draw a vertical line through each page, and 150 full pages become 300 half-pages. Most of the 30 teams use at least 10 different starters a season. That’s 300 half-pages, enough to fit every starter.
The methods to do that are imprecise. The Philadelphia Phillies used 10 different starters by June 19, when Phillippe Aumont lost to St. Louis, allowing six runs and walking seven in four innings. He never pitched again, but that column was his, with 31 blank spaces below. Now he shares it with Jerad Eickhoff.
Likewise, Chad Billingsley doubles up with Aaron Nola; Dustin McGowan shares his column with Adam Morgan; and Sean O’Sullivan rooms with Alec Asher. Plenty of space still remains below Severino Gonzalez and Kevin Correia. The Phillies, you might have guessed, have the worst record in the majors.
In a way, that illustrates the point of the practice. The pitchers’ precise numbers — the 6.56 earned run average for Correia, the 7.92 ERA for Gonzalez — matter much less than the general sense of the team. If you know how a team’s rotation is doing, at all times, you have a critical insight to the fortunes of the team as a whole.
I won’t pretend this gives me special perspective in forecasting October. Everyone tends to follow the playoff-bound teams and pitchers closely, by now. It is all about having a general idea of the what and the why for each team, a cursory sense of each starter’s progress, all year long.
Tracking the game-by-game march through the season gives a clearer picture of what it all means for each pitcher. Detroit’s Justin Verlander, for example, is 3-8 with a 3.46 ERA, both misleading figures. He started late, in mid-June, so three or four bad games have skewed his ERA. Many times he has pitched well without winning.
The daily ritual helps telegraph a pitcher’s string of good (or bad) performances, but if I write about it, I use Baseball-Reference.com to add it up. All of this is widely available on the Internet, obviously, with no scribbled mistakes that could mess up the numbers. At the ballpark, the notebook sometimes never comes out of my bag.
There are imperfections and cross-outs in there, a hazard of filling it in with pen — blue or black only, but no distinction between the two. I can’t be too particular; the lines are filled in at coffee shops, at airports, in ballparks, aboard trains, at hotels, in my home office. If I miss a day — incredibly, I do have time for a family — I’ll get to it the next day.
Sometimes the impressions do not stick. When Matt Boyd made his first start for the Detroit Tigers in August, I gave him his own column, with the Detroit pitchers, forgetting he was already listed in the Toronto section. Boyd had made two starts for the Blue Jays — including, perhaps, the worst one in the majors this season: seven runs allowed, and no outs recorded, on June 2 against Boston.
Usually, though, I remember things better if I write them down. There is value in the discipline of doing that, and besides, it gives me a reason to look at every box score. Often there is a game recap that goes with it, depending on which website or newspaper I use, and that helps, too.
(There are pet peeves, of course, mainly box score services that start over with a new record and ERA when a pitcher changes leagues. Don’t they realize this gums up the whole system?)
Sometimes, I admit, it can feel like mindless logging of yet another rough start for a pitcher named Kyle — Kendrick of the Colorado Rockies, Lobstein of the Tigers, Lohse of the Milwaukee Brewers. But sometimes it inspires useful ideas for my coverage.
More than anything, though, I just like it.
I enjoy that half-hour, at the start of the day on the East Coast or the end of the day out West, to catch up on everything in baseball. The notebook is a companion for six months, and as those columns fill up, it means that October is almost here.
The usefulness of the notebook, for those general impressions, is obsolete by then. One winter I even threw the thing out. I felt bad about that, but it is strictly a tool for the regular season. When this postseason starts, it will go home — like James Shields and so many others whose toils make up the baseball tableau, and whose efforts I wouldn’t want to miss.
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