Silly Season

I went ahead and checked the #nats hashtag on twitter for the first time in ages.

Bad choice. Some damn fool is out there ranting about how Storen shouldn’t be back with the Nats, and looking at Rafael Soriano, the Yankees’ reliever, as a possible “savior.” This is the stupidest thing I have read in many weeks.

Go ahead. Compare Storen with Soriano head-to-head since 2010. They’re not all that different from one another, actually. So, on the surface, it doesn’t seem like an implausible suggestion, if, for instance, Storen were to be injured or otherwise unavailable.

But consider that according to Cot’s Contracts, Soriano would be owed some $14 million in 2013. If he takes a $1.5 million buyout and becomes a free agent, it’s safe to assume that Rafa Soriano would demand a contract at least as generous as the one the Yankees had given him, and perhaps even more so. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say the Nats could sign him for whatever the Yankees would be due to pay him–14 million.

Now let’s look at Drew Storen. According to Cot’s, Storen made $498,750 in 2012. He’s arbitration-eligible this year, so he’ll be owed a raise in arbitration. We don’t know how much of a raise Storen will get [I'm hoping to figure that out in a few weeks--watch this space!], but let’s just stipulate right now that no arbitration panel could possibly award Storen a $14 million salary for next year.

One more thing, too: Drew Storen is 25 years old. Rafa Soriano is 32 years old.

So, you’re left with a choice between two substantially similar pitchers. One of them will cost you 14 million. The other will cost you, hell, let’s just say he’ll cost you 2 million. Why would you pay seven times more to get substantially the same thing, but seven years older?

If you’re seriously thinking that this sort of transaction is a good idea, I can only conclude that you hit your head on something hard when you drank yourself to sleep after Black Friday’s blown save.

The Human Element

Presented, by means of the TexasLeaguers’ Pitch/FX Database, the top of the ninth inning of last night’s game. Please pay attention to the two green dots inside the box.

Drew Storen, October 12, 2012, as called by Alfonso Marquez.

The first green dot came during Allen Craig’s at-bat. It didn’t matter, because Craig struck out.

The second meant all the difference: The second green dot was to Yadier Molina. If that call had been correct, the Nats would have won.

Epilogue

Sometime after midnight, as the delirious twelfth of October gave way to the dismal thirteenth, with the bases loaded, with two out, with two strikes, a pitch left Drew Storen’s hand. Unfeeling robotic eyes would record it for posterity as a sinker, traveling at 94 miles an hour. Elsewhere in Nationals Park, perhaps forty-five thousand pairs of eyes watched it intently. The air throbbed with their shouting, as if they believed they could clear a path for it safely through the strike zone and into the waiting mitt of Kurt Suzuki.

The Cardinals Daniel Descalso swung his bat. Somewhere in front of the plate, the bat struck the ball, which now rebounded to shortstop Ian Desmond. It skipped on the infield dirt and struck his glove.

Forty-five thousand pairs of eyes already saw the end: Desmond would knock this baseball down, flip it to a waiting Danny Espinosa, and send those forty-five thousand watchers into ecstasy.

But in that instant, the visions diverged. Instead, on the field, the baseball uselessly off Desmond’s glove–too sharply to be fielded properly–and into the outfield. Two runs scored. The Nationals’ advantage vanished.

If you’re reading this, the odds are pretty good that your eyes, like those of many of the forty-five thousand watchers at this game, began to fill with tears at that instant. I can offer you no consolation. I wish I had some to offer myself.

I can only offer this thought: Every ball that leaves a pitcher’s hand–as that pitch left Storen’s–is little more than a roll of the dice. Innumerable, unimaginable things have to happen to that baseball. It has to leave the pitcher’s hand cleanly. It must travel the distance to the plate, through an ocean of air (and sometimes other things) . Once it reaches its destination, it has to hit something. If that something is a player’s bat, it strikes that bat in a particular way, spinning in yet another direction. To come to rest in a fielder’s mitt, it may bounce one or more times.

Every step along the way introduces a little bit of randomness; a little roll of the dice.

We don’t live our lives as hostages to Fortune, though. The pitcher has a good idea, roughly, of where his pitch will end up; a fielder, observing the ball, will have as good an idea of where to field it, and so forth. These ideas are not innate; they are learned by practice and observation–by seeing the patterns in a thousand thousand repetitions of the phenomenon.

But every so often, just enough randomness comes along. Maybe the ball doesn’t leave your hand clearly. Maybe the ball strikes a pebble. Maybe it’s cold, or maybe it’s too hot, or maybe it rained too much or not at all. Something you didn’t expect will change the path of that ball. You should have gotten it; you didn’t.

These variations are measurable and unique. Each little quirk is like one voice, telling a story. Over time–over a pitch sequence, an inning, a ball game, a series, a season, a career– the changes seem smaller and smaller, until each individual voice fades into the loud background hum of forty-five thousand people finding their seats, buying a hot dog, filling out a score card, and milling about before a ballgame.

That pitch, this game, this series: all of them together tell a certain story about the 2012 Nationals, and it isn’t a pretty one to hear. But looking back on a 2012 season that saw the Nationals amass 98 wins–best in all baseball–and play brilliant baseball almost every night? All of those moments together, telling their stories sound like a crowd in thunderous, rapturous applause.

So before you get down on the Nats for losing this series, step back. If you get far enough away, you will hear the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the howling of an umpire calling a third strike. You will hear the fireworks going bang zoom, and Charlie Slowes telling you about it; of F.P. Santangelo informing you of the death of a no-hitter; of the stranger in the next row cheering.

In all of that wall of sound, there will be a small, sad voice, describing the flight of that wayward pitch from Drew Storen’s hand.

Which would you rather hear?

Wild Ride

Mr. Walkoff did it again for the Nats at Opening Day in Nats Park…with a walkoff wild pitch!

It’s too bad the usually-reliable shutdown artist Brad Lidge blew the save in the top of the 9th. Gio Gonzalez’s pitching was a joy to behold from my perch in Section 309. Watching highlight reels of him grinning like a Little Leaguer after getting a hit? Amazing. How can I not love this kid?

Oh. Uh, ahem. Sorry. The Nats walk-off win at home today gives them sole possession of first place atop the National League East, a half-game ahead of the Mets. The Nats now have a record of 5 wins against 2 losses (.714 winning percentage!). They have scored 28 runs, allowing only 17.

If current trends hold, the Nats Pythagorean win expectation is .731. Wow.

How’s my model looking? Well, my preseason Natstradamus projection has the Nats scoring 26.66 runs by now and allowing 24.59 runs.

Even without Michael Morse, Drew Storen, Chien-Ming Wang, and Bryce Harper, the Nats are, to this point at least, outperforming my preseason projections. My rational mind knows this may not be sustainable. But when I’m sitting up in 309 and rooting for my Nats, it’s really really tough for me to care.

Looking at the Bullpen: Shutdowns and Meltdowns

Not even in my most optimistic moments would have said that the Nats would win two in a row out of the gate! As I write this on Easter Sunday morning, the Nats are sitting pretty, sharing first place atop the National League’s Eastern Division with the Mets (the Mets!).

And all this despite a lackluster debut for Gio “the Motown Kid” Gonzalez. The Nats won yesterday behind the unexpected heroics of former Hiroshima Carp Chad Tracy, and some absolutely phenomenal pitching from the “B” bullpen, with Craig “Matinee Idol” Stammen in long relief, followed by Ryan “Firework” Mattheus, Tyler Clippard, and some pitching from Hot Rod that was pretty frickin’ bueno.

The Nats’ late-inning heroics aren’t great to my stomach lining, though. I’ve been wondering how I could better quantify the feeling I have when relievers come in. I attempted this earlier, of course, when I introduced my heartburn index–but I’m now convinced that the heartburn index doesn’t give a complete picture.

Fortunately, FanGraphs has ridden to the rescue again, with a new, and, I think, extremely helpful, pair of statistics for measuring relief pitcher performance: Shutdowns and Meltdowns. As the proponent of the new stats explains them:

Shutdowns (SD) and Meltdowns (MD) are two relatively new statistics, created as an alternative to Saves in an effort to better represent a relief pitcher’s value. While there are some odd, complicated rules surrounding when a pitcher gets a save, Shutdowns and Meltdowns strip away these complications and answer a simple question: did a relief pitcher help or hinder his team’s chances of winning a game? If they improved their team’s chances of winning, they get a Shutdown. If they instead made their team more likely to lose, they get a Meltdown. Intuitive, no?

Using Win Probability Added (WPA), it’s easy to tell exactly how much a specific player contributed to their team’s odds of winning on a game-by-game basis. In short, if a player increased his team’s win probability by 6% (0.06 WPA), then they get a Shutdown. If a player made his team 6% more likely to lose (-0.06), they get a Meltdown.

Shutdowns and meltdowns correlate very well with saves and blown saves; in other words, dominant relievers are going to rack up both saves and shutdowns, while bad relievers will accrue meltdowns and blown saves. But shutdowns and meltdowns improve upon SVs/BSVs by giving equal weight to middle relievers, showing how they can affect a game just as much as a closer can, and by capturing more negative reliever performances.

Nats fans are by now intimately familiar with WPA, thanks to the hard work of Federal Baseball. The squiggly-lined graphs he pots after every game show the ebb & flow of the game as measured by WPA. A “Shutdown” happens when a reliever bends the line towards the Nats’ favor. A “Meltdown” happens when a reliever bends the line in favor of the opponent. The Shutdown/Meltdown stat pair thus give us a good indication of whether a reliever is helping or hurting his ballclub–which is kind of neat!

So what does that mean for the Nats bullpen in 2012? Using my standard measuring interval (2008-2011 seasons), here’s how the pitching staff looks:

Name	Holds	Saves	Blown Saves	Shutdowns	Meltdowns	Heartburn
Brad Lidge	9	100	16	92	28	6.85
Tyler Clippard	64	1	18	77	35	5.22
Sean Burnett	54	8	9	63	42	5.62
Drew Storen	13	48	7	59	22	4.34
Henry Rodriguez	13	2	4	13	13	8.51
Tom Gorzelanny	7	1	2	12	5	6.01
Ryan Mattheus	8	0	0	7	6	5.63
Craig Stammen	2	0	0	5	2	4.09

A few things jump out at me at once:

• Since 2008, Brad Lidge is unquestionably the Shutdown King of the current Nats bullpen. The 100 Shutdowns mean that he left his ballclub in a better position to win after his appearance than before one hundred times–and only made them worse 28 times. This makes me wonder whether Philadelphia unloaded him more because of his relatively high heartburn factor than any other measurable quality as a relief pitcher. On the other hand, Lidge’s ridiculous 2008 season may have gone a very very long way towards inflating his stats here. In any case, Lidge was pretty good on opening day this year.
• We all know that Tyler Clippard is an awesome relief pitcher. He was an all-star in 2011. But now we have a clearer idea why. He’s second only to Lidge in shutdowns since 2008, and leads the staff in Holds.
• Sean Burnett has collected 63 shutdowns since 2008–apparently, while I was averting my eyes in terror. The more I study him, the more I am forced to conclude that I have been terribly unfair to Burnett over the past few years.
• We also now have a better idea why Drew “Batman” Storen is such a good reliever. He hasn’t been relieving nearly as long as Lidge, but he’s already accumulated 59 shutdowns. His 2.68 Shutdown/Meltdown ratio is second only to Lidge’s.
• Henry “Hot Rod” Rodriguez is, by this set of measures, not even nearly in the same class as Storen or Lidge. 13 Shutdowns and 13 Meltdowns, giving him an abysmal SD/MD ratio of 1.00–the lowest on the staff. I’m still hoping that he will improve during 2012 and pitch to his potential, though.
• Tom Gorzelanny has a shutdown/meltdown ratio of 2.40. That’s fourth, behind Lidge, Storen and Stammen. I guess he really is better as a reliever than as a starter? Then again, he’s only recorded 12 shutdowns, total–so maybe we don’t know enough about him to judge.
• I was expecting a tighter correlation between high shutdown numbers and low heartburn index numbers. That’s not what we see. Lidge, for instance, ought to give me more heartburn than his shutdown numbers suggest. Mattheus looks pretty bad next to his heartburn near-equivalent Burnett–but then, Mattheus hasn’t had all that many chances yet.

If the Nats’ starting rotation can routinely get through 6 or 7 innings, there are enough high-shutdown arms in the bullpen to keep the game in hand. This is very encouraging news for the rest of 2012.

The Cone of Silence Descends

In what Mark Zuckerman called “the biggest news of Nats training camp so far,” Bryce Harper has deleted his Twitter account.

I don’t need to go over all the ridiculous things Harper has tweeted over the past year.other bloggers have done a better job of that.

But what interests me most is the apparent cone of silence that has descended over Nats players’ twitter accounts over the past week. At about the time that Nats players attended a media meeting where Davey Johnson issued some stern warnings about Facebook and “Tweeter” and “a whole bunch of web sites”, Nats player twitter accounts lit up with the same message:

Follow @NationalsPR for a behind-the-scenes look at the Nationals and Spring Training 2012!

Who carried these robo-tweets? Well, Stephen Strasburg, Craig Stammen, Tyler Clippard, and Edwin Jackson reproduced it verbatim. Closer Drew Storen varied the wording a bit. This blogger is aware of only two Nats players in major league camp in Viera who seemed to evade this apparent pronouncement from Nationals PR: Danny Espinosa, and Jesús Flores. I wonder if these two escaped because of Nats PR’s oversight, though. Espinosa hasn’t tweeted since September. Flores’s background image still shows him in his Navegantes del Magallanes uniform–maybe the PR hacks don’t read enough Spanish to know that Flores is active on Tweeter.

Has there been a team-wide social-media blackout? Likely not. Flores, Storen, and Jackson continue to be their gregarious selves on Twitter. But the sudden intrusion of the team’s PR apparatus on player Twitter accounts seems to point to a Nationals organization that is much more interested in the careful management of its public image.

Perhaps this is what the League and the Union meant when they agreed that “all players would be subject to a social media policy.” The summary of the 2011 Collective Bargaining agreement is very terse on the subject, acknowledging only that such a term exists, but not fleshing out any of the regulations to which players would be subjected.

For as much as Harper’s tweets and his front-running ways may have annoyed me, personally, it’s tough for me to see this as anything other than a warning to other players: tone it down before the social-media rules let us force you to tone it down. Players–and fans and writers–will take notice.