Gut Feeling (Hopefully Wrong)

As I've obsessively checked MLBTradeRumors.com all day today between assignments, I've come to a terrible conclusion. It's a gut instinct, but I also called Adam Dunn's Granny last night, so apparently I'm en fuego(alright, not the hardest thing to do, but hey it impressed and angered several people around me).

Per this Ken Rosenthal Article and quote:

"Trade Miguel Tejada? The Astros, bless their delusional hearts, are thinking quite the opposite. They're buyers, not sellers, pursuing bullpen help even though they're buried in the National League standings...The team's only discussions about Tejada, the source says, involve his long-term position. Tejada, 34, eventually will need to move to third base, but the Astros have a strong third-base prospect at Class AA, Chris Johnson."

in conjunction with this atrocious Richard Justice blog post (honestly, the man cannot possess a spine and still turn this crap out). I'm calling us trading away better than his ERA suggests and future stud reliever/closer, Bud Norris, and now essentially worthless to us because our organization can't think long-term to save it's life, Chris Johnson, plus one of our MLB Bench Crew for a marginal bull pen arm from whatever team will say yes to Ed Wade first. I hope to God I'm wrong, but reading Justice's and Rosenthal's article with five minutes of each other made that snap together in my mind.

Regardless of whether we make such a terrible trade, I think I will forever hold hate in my heart for this fiasco. We have SO many movable pieces that people are interested in. We could truly restock our farm system (not to mention free up some dough on the general ledger) and in a few years have positive things to look forward to for many years to come. Instead, we're going to sign Ben Sheets to a bloated contract -- because he'll finally reach 200 IP on a World Series Championship team and therefore must be ready to be a long-term Ace, thereby jacking up his asking price (and our bidding price) -- so that we can "compete" in 2009. Depression doesn't even begin to describe what I'm feeling right now.

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Trade talk with your breakfast/midnight snack

Update (12:32 AM) Stephen here. Having been in attendance at tonight's game, apparently there are a lot of Astros fans convinced we're still in contention. It's hard to say what is more depressing, that Ed Wade might try to acquire a free-agent reliever (Bud Norris, start packing your bags) or that we'd refuse to trade Geary to the Sawx for whatever they'd offer us from their well tilled farm system. Apparently the fact that we've won some games as of late has made the management and the "Astros Nation" forget that this is a team with a negative (57) run differential on the strength of averaging 4.33 runs per game while allowing 4.88 (Source. Those marginal .57 runs aren't from the bull pen (nor can they be made up from an bull pen acquisition) and Randy Wolf sure isn't going to make up for them either. I'm going to go to bed now and mutter obscenities under my breath.

Update (11:20 pm): Latest update is that the Red Sox have a scout in town for the Reds series, but not to watch Miguel Tejada. Geoff Geary is the more likely source of attention. Doubtful that he's moved, considering how Ed Wade has been actively searching for relief help since last week.

Update (11 pm): False Alarm. Should've known it was too good to be true.

Good morning (or night)!

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Baseball Knowledge 101, cont'd: ERA and Rate Stats

In our last installment, Stephen detailed why a pitcher’s W-L record is not necessarily indicative of their relative merit as a player. Indeed, rare is the case where a pitcher’s record runs parallel to their on field performance. ERA is often cited as a secondary indicator of a pitcher’s value, to be looked at after W-L. True, it is a better barometer of a pitcher’s success than W-L for one big reason: it isolates the performance of just the pitcher in question, not the team as a whole. Whereas entire teams win and lose games, ERA takes the team out of the equation as well as those runs that score due to errors.

Its improvements over W/L record notwithstanding, ERA has its own share of blemishes, the majority of which have to do with the amount of data that is not included in calculating it. To start off with, ERA obviously only takes into account earned runs. This is important because no pitcher, not a starter or reliever, is held accountable for any unearned run. They sort of just fall into a baseball black hole, joining the likes of Derek Bell and Brian L. Hunter, never to be heard from again. The whole point of statistics is to allow baseball teams, fans and any other inquisitive person to take an objective evaluation of a player. The error is a sometimes arbitrarily arrived at number, handed down by an official scorer at the home ballpark (paid and employed by the home team). Already, a small chink in the armor of this venerable stat can be seen. To paraphrase the great Bill James, just think about where all the focus of anyone watching baseball is most of the time: the batter and the pitcher. The official scorer, like the guy spilling Budweiser in front of you at the park, isn’t focusing on how exactly Miguel Tejada has shifted just prior to the pitch in an attempt to get to a ball in play. In mere fractions of a second from batted ball to fielder, the official scorer gets to determine whether the ball in play and the resulting defensive attempt would have customarily resulted in a defensive stop or out. If he says yes, then the pitcher is no longer accountable for that run. Lots of human error is at play in this beloved statistic. Additionally, ERAs in certain ballparks cannot be compared to ERAs in other ballparks (or years). There is a lot of difference between pitch movement, the physical characteristics of the ball, and other factors that make balls in play easier or harder to turn into outs or hits. Further, runs credited to ERA are sometimes scored against the starter, but allowed to score by relief pitchers who weren't “responsible” for them being on in the first place -- meaning that starter had no say in preventing them from scoring, but is being tagged none the less. Finally, sample size makes ERA a less than worthy statistic when comparing a 200 IP starter against a 60 IP closer. These quibbles are of great importance in figuring out a way to analyze a pitcher’s performance.

ERA was created in an attempt to separate defense and pitching. This is one of the reasons why it’s still a semi-useful statistic. With the influx of sabermetricians and statistically minded fans and executives, new ways of evaluating a pitcher’s performance have been developed. Support-Neutral, Defensive-Independent and Fielding-Independent metrics go beyond ERA to give a more in-depth analysis of a pitcher’s performance. By in depth, I mean taking a look at what a pitcher can control, even more than ERA can. Understanding BABIP is a starting point for this. The basic premise is pretty simple, yet is pretty startling for any baseball fan not familiar with sabermetrics. In essence, BABIP (batting average on balls put into play) demonstrates the relative amount of luck that goes into balls in play being converted for outs. Consider that league average BABIP is generally reported to be with .290 and .300 and then take a look at this chart and its reported BABIP for pitchers. It’s all over the place, because even half way through a baseball season, luck hasn’t evened out for everyone.

To create a more concrete link to why ERA is a weak(er) stat because of the impact that BABIP has on it, let's look further at the batter-pitcher match-up. The “action” of a batter-pitcher match-up can be separated into two parts -- the first of which is the act of the pitcher delivering the ball to the hitter. Without a doubt, the pitcher has a great deal of control over this -- what pitch he throws, the velocity, spin, location, and deception are all within his ability to alter. The second part of this interaction begins after the hitter makes contact with the bat. This is the part that both hitter and pitcher have a relatively small impact on- other than as defender and base-runner. What the other 8 fielders do to the hitters’ ball-in play are out of their hands. Before Stephen and I learned about BABIP, we’d often be watching an Astros game where Jack Wilson would hit a little duck-snort over Adam Everett’s head for a single. Half an inning later, Lance Berkman would line out to Adam LaRoche. I’d turn to him and say, “typical Astros luck.” Well, I was partially right- it was obviously bad luck, which deep down I knew wasn’t just an Astros related phenomenon. What I didn’t know what just how much luck went into the batter-pitcher match-up.

So what does BABIP have to do with ERA? Well, ERA measures the runs that a pitcher is responsible for allowing to score. However, if a pitcher has very weak control over everything in a PA besides K, BB, and HBP, then how valuable of a statistic can it be in accessing the pitcher’s performance? The chart I asked you to click to earlier, which displayed randomly varied BABIPs and it was in an effort to drive home the point that BABIPs vary for really no discernable reason. If balls in play are unluckily landing for hits more often than they should, then we would expect a pitcher’s ERA to suffer disproportionately from his true skill-level or vice-versa if BABIP is extremely low.

Now, there is a heaping amount of gray area that go into saying BABIP is largely luck, but we’ll discuss those intimately in the “DIPS, LIPS, and FIP” next time. These measures seek to determine how well a pitcher pitched in the areas of a pitcher’s performance that they have an inordinate amount of control over: pitch speed, location and homeruns, but we’ll give you a small preview.

Hidden within BABIP are a few characteristics that need be mentioned. Earlier in this post, I attempted to impress upon the fact that BABIP itself is an essentially random statistic. Well, it is, and it isn’t. What is not random about it is the less than a second’s worth of time between the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand before either being hit by the batter, or caught by the catcher. Factors such as where the ball is pitched relative to the strike-zone, how many pitches the pitcher has in his repertoire, and how often the pitcher gets ahead or behind in the count are factors that all pitchers have under their immediate control and these all impact the degree of luck associated with BABIP -- because in the end these afformentioned factors make a pitched ball easier or harder to make solid contact with for the hitter. The further sabmetricians have probed the batted-ball issue, the more they have come to believe that LD% is almost completely a factor of luck. However, buregoning evidence suggests that he can control ground balls, and outfield flys and in-field flys. This seems reasonable given GB% has a year to year correlation of .807, statisitically significant, indicating it is repeatable skill.(Source, also click for explanation of correlation if your fuzzy on it).

Further influencing the degree to which BABIP plays a part in ERA are the skill sets of K/batter and BB/batter, which carry year to year correlations of .790 and .676 respectively (Source). These two skill sets are statstically significant and again indicate that their outcome is based on the pitchers skill. To the extent to which a pitcher limits balls in play by walking batters and striking out batters, he influence the amount of luck that will enter into his ERA. This is all the more reason why the aforementioned means of analysis (support neutral wins and losses, defensive independent pitching statistics, etc.) are important and valuable. Predictability is ideal for a franchise in evaluating a player, because they want to know ahead of time how a player will not only perform next season, but in seasons multiple years into the future, or whether past performances have been the result of skill or luck. Understanding, for instance, that ground-ball pitchersare overvalued in their ERA numbers because more unearned runs score when groundball pitchers are on the mound than do fly-ball pitchers is very important. Why? Because, as mentioned earlier, at the end of the game, they don’t subtract UER from the total score to determine the winner. We hope we demonstrated that so much of what goes into turning out an ERA does not accurately reflect the performance skill of a pitcher. Much of what ERA reports is context dependent on the “type” of pitcher, the defense backing him, the skill of the bull pen, and a measurable degree of luck; making ERA uninformative and often misleading. Support-neutral and Defense-independent statistics do a better job of capturing what is really happening on the baseball diamond -- something that ERA cannot do.

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Baseball Knowledge 101 - Wins (Suck)

We’re tackling Wins as our first stop in Baseball Knowledge 101. We had planned on including the full line from the syllabus: “Wins, ERA, and Rate Stats,” but quickly realized that these could get ugly and dense due to the quality and depth we wish to treat each subject with. So addendum one to the syllabus finds “Wins, ERA, and Rate Stats,” into two separate articles: “Wins (Suck)” and “ERA and Rate Stats”

Traditional pitching statistics are pretty much useless when it comes to evaluating and helping us predict the performance of a pitcher – especially wins. To begin, let’s take a more detailed look at what goes into making a pitcher successful in the first place. The pitcher is one of nine defensive players on the field. He is responsible for starting play by standing 60 ft. 6 in. away from the batter and delivering the ball to him. His goal is to get the batter out. He can throw strikes that are actually strikes, but his movement or speed fool the hitter into missing the strike. He can throw a strike that isn’t a strike, but again, his movement could fool the hitter or it could be a deceptive arm-angle that fools the hitter. The hitter could take the pitch that pitcher pitched and put it in play. The hitter might get good contact through a variety of variables all coming together and he could hit a solid line drive through the gap and notch a double. Perhaps on that play though, the center fielder had cheated just a little and was able to make a Sports Center worthy diving catch to make the ball put in play, an out. Of course the hitter could have just meekly grounded to the SS, resulting in an easy 6-3 ground out. Yet, the SS could have a momentary lapse in concentration, perhaps he’s having marital problems or just really has to pee, and as a result of whatever is on his mind, he bobbles the ball and the meek ground ball turns into an E6. The pitcher, in the opinion of the official scorer, probably earned an on that batter, but because the SS had to pee, now has no outs, and a runner on first base.

I’m not going to go back and count, but there are a lot of variables that going into a pitcher getting a single batter out. A lot of which end as soon as the pitcher releases the ball from his hands. So it makes little sense that we put so much stock into a pitcher’s W-L record. Just last year, the Cy-Young race was just as controversial as a West African presidential election, because 20 game winner Josh Beckett trumped 19 game winner CC Sabathia. In 241 IP Sabathia struck out 209 while only walking 37. He was responsible for almost a 1/3 of all of his outs. Beckett threw 200.7 IP Beckett struck out 194 batters while walking 40. Again responsible for about 1/3 of his outs. The difference I instantly see is that Sabathia and Beckett were clearly two of the best in the business, yet the Red Sox had to use a lesser bull pen arm in 40.3 innings more then the Indians did. Sabathia is more valuable than Beckett in those terms alone. Yet, pundits everywhere were crying afoul because of that one win that separated them.

So what goes into to a pitcher winning a game? Well, take that first paragraph and multiply it up to as many as 50 times. Only sprinkle in fatigue for the pitcher and the ability of the hitter to better recognize a pitcher’s guile as the game progresses. Also, you have to have your team score more runs than the other team, before you exit the game, and then trust your lead in the hands as up to as many as five different relievers – other wise you’re heading for a no decision. In that exercise, how much responsibility does a pitcher have for a win? Especially the run-scoring for the two AL pitchers who never hit. Well, in 2007 Sabathia’s Indians provided him 5.10 Runs/9 in his starts. That’s not how many runs that got in the innings while he the pitcher of records, but it’s a best I can do. Josh Beckett, of 20 Win glory, had 6.42 Runs/9 in his starts from the Red Sox. Meaning that Beckett didn’t even have to be as good to earn a win as Sabathia did, but he could only muster one more win.

This doesn’t even to begin to say who had the better bullpen support. We’ll skip the nuances of measuring that for now, but it’s pretty straight forward. How many times can we recall Oscar Villareal blowing a lead this year? Or remember the time when Wesley Wright came in a game with 3 on and 1 out, but got us out of the inning with only one run given up? He converted a 2.42 Run Expectancy into a 1 run performance and saved 1.42 runs from scoring. Those 1.42 runs weren’t even his responsibility, but he saved them anyway. That’s the level of inane-ness that evaluating starting pitchers on wins is provided when you focus it through the lens of bull-pen support.

So a Win is certainly a very poor measure of how to evaluate a pitcher. I believe I’ve made a case for it, and I hope it makes sense to you. So how then do we then measure a pitcher’s performance if Wins an inept tool? To that effect, a very valid tool developed by Baseball Prospectus is the Support-Neutral Statistics. “The Support-Neutral name comes from the fact that [Baseball Prospectus] is removing, or neutralizing, the variability of different levels of run support and bull-pen support...This gives a truer sense of how well a pitcher performed, without the distortions of offensive and defensive support.” (Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know about the Game is Wrong, 2007 pg. 52). It works like this: say Roger Clemens went 7 IP of shut out baseball, BPro would then take that performance and assign it to a hypothetical league-average team and see how many times a league average team would win given that performance. It turns out, that is 85% of the time. So Roger Clemens earns .85 SNW and .15 of a SNL. These are the same things as the E(W) we presented in our statistical recaps earlier this year. While they are not the perfect tool for analyzing a pitcher’s performance, they certainly come closer to analyzing how much of a pitcher’s performance went into earning a win. Even there though, there are limitations. These will be discussed in DIPS, LIPS, and FIP section.

So, 7IP of shut out baseball is actually worth about .85 of win, if we exclude defense backing the pitcher from this analysis. Now, I think every Astros fans can hearken back to 2005, when Roger Clemens went 13-8 on the strength of a 1.87 ERA. How could he have possibly gone 13-8 with that ERA? Because the Astros only averaged 3.43 Runs/9 in his starts. Roger Clemens missed out on the Cy-Young that year, in spite of the fact that he was clearly the best pitcher in baseball, because he was deficient in an asinine and almost entirely luck based statistic. So the next time you here Steve Philips, Joe Morgan, or Ed Wade talking about how many decisions a pitcher has won as a basis for defending an acquisition, you should bristle with indignation. If that’s the only good thing they can say about a pitcher, then they’re telling you he’s effectively worthless, but he sure did get a lot help from the bats and gloves backing him. Just to make it concrete. Knowing a pitcher’s winning percentage has a year to year correlation of .202 in predicting his future performance. For those of you have forgotten your Stats 101 (I had to Wikipedia it so don’t feel too bad) Correlation measures the linear relationship between two variables. In this case Win percentage one year, to the next. Correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1. -1 means that there is an opposite relationship, high one year predicts low the next year. 0 means the two variables are completely unrelated and knowing one tells you nothing about the others. 1 means that there is a lot of stability in predicting the variable from year to year, given the first (click the .202 link for better explanation then what I just paraphrased). In general Correlation co-efficient less than .3 any direction are weak and pretty meaningless. .7 marks the statistically significant level, but that won’t be important until later.

Next time (when we look at pitchers again), we’ll look at ERA and how valuable of a tool it is or is not at determining a pitchers performance and why looking at a pitcher’s rates stats paints a much better picture.

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Baseball Knowledge 101 - Introduction and Syllabus

Believe me, we could keep producing snarky comments about beat writers and Astros management for a long time -- late Septemeberish to be exact. Instead, we’ve decided we’d like to do something a little more productive. Something that, hopefully, will make your readership of this humble little blog all the more enjoyable.

Evan and I first were introduced sabermetrics and different ways of viewing the game like a lot of people our age: Moneyball. However, for us, Moneyball merely whet our appetite for “baseball knowledge” as it only talked about the sabermetric concepts employed by the A’s in their quest to succeed on a small budget. For myself, I consider that book to be life changing -- which I know is extremely sad, but what it did for me was take me from casual observer of the game of baseball to someone who appreciated the art form of winning baseball on an entirely different level. The nuances of which I’ve come to find so fascinating I had to blog about it.

While it allowed to us to think about the game differently, we still struggled to grasp how to think beyond those basic concepts or truly employ them in our observation of the game. This quest for deeper understanding lead us to the internet. We soon discovered sites like The Hardball Times, Baseball Prospectus, and Tom Tango’s personal site. We then found ourselves right in the thick of where a great deal of sabermetric thinking was formulated and expounded upon for the last decade plus. In an effort to better understand some of the complicated mathematical and often economic analysis, I even took a few college courses specifically to enhance my ability to employ sabermetric analysis. Again, sad. Once school was out last year, I picked up a copy of Baseball Prospectus’ Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game is Wrong. I’ll be the first to admit that in parts, it was like reading a college text book, but overall, it was easily accessible, well paced, and it completely changed how I thought about the game. Evan, to whom I’d report to on the brilliant and insightful ways to think about baseball from the book, eventually picked up his own copy.

The rest of the summer was spent emailing articles we found archived on sites back and forth and trying to play catch-up on the bounty of baseball knowledge available to us. While we had briefly tried our hand blogging during our baby steps in baseball analysis, we pretty much put it on hold as we dug deeper into the wealth of knowledge sabermetrics provided us. During the waning months of the season, the post season, and the entire off season pretty much the only dialogue between us was applying our new found baseball knowledge to the game and the wheelings and dealings between teams during the off-season.

After pestering another Astros blogger for sometime with our pious indictments of this opinion or that (which have since proved dutifully flawed because of our subjective bias, more on that at th end), we eventually picked up the blogging torch again in attempt inspire Astros fans to think about their hometown heroes in a different, more objective light. We’ve found a lot of the responses to the stat laden posts to be rather tepid and we fear it might because we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. In an effort enhance the insight with which we are trying to provide you, our reader, we are going to try a weekly(ish) serious of installments walking you through the same inquiries we made into baseball and the knowledge they yielded. You should think of them as essay’s almost, as we’ll provide all the research and attempt to summarize and analyze them for you. Our hope is that we can open up the slowly growing readership we have developed to the ways that we have come think about the game of baseball.

To start, it’s probably necessary to briefly define sabermetrics and explain what it aims to do. The best definition I found with a quick Google search came from Wikipedia:

"Sabermetrics is the analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. It was coined by Bill James, who was among its first proponents and has long been its most prominent and public advocate.

From David Grabiner's Sabermetric Manifesto:

Bill James defined sabermetrics as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." Thus, sabermetrics attempts to answer objective questions about baseball, such as "which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team's offense?" or "How many home runs will Ken Griffey, Jr. hit next year?" It cannot deal with the subjective judgments which are also important to the game, such as "Who is your favorite player?"[1]

It may, however, attempt to settle questions such as "Was Willie Mays faster than Mickey Mantle?" by establishing several possible parameters for examining speed in objective studies (how many triples each man hit, how many bases each man stole, how many times was he caught stealing) and then reaching a tentative conclusion on the basis of these individual studies.

That gets us close to what I have come to regard what sabermetrics does. Its benefit, in my mind, is its ability to answer objective questions by providing the inquirer with facts. It allows you to say whether or not a team should search out someone with a good batting average vs. someone with a average batting average, but superior on-base percentage because you can test the correlation to run production between the two. It allows for analysts to test strategies in baseball by determining the cost/benefit of different strategies (like sac bunts, stolen bases, IBB, etc.) in different game states. It can’t provide definitive answers, but it can help point you to the “truest” answer because it objectively provides the facts. Like all objective inquiries and the test surrounding them, sabermetrics, at most, provides support for a hypothesis, not concrete answers. Akin to a peer-reviewed journal, there is a lot of testing of findings and from those tests, the nuances of the truth are uncovered.

As we paint the picture of what we have come to understand about how to better analyze baseball, we encourage you to get hands on with the sources we cite. Over the last 18 months, Evan and I have read a lot of argument, counter argument in formulating our knowledge and we hope to boil that process down for you. However, we don’t want to be thought as presenting the truth about subject X or subject Y. These articles are to serve as a guide to getting your feet wet in the sabermetric world, not a cliff notes for baseball knowledge. We hope you’ll enjoy our offering of the next few weeks and further more we hope that you’ll engage in the information.

In the end, we hope that if we can open up or readership to the concepts we so love to employ in baseball analysis so that we can all keep each other honest. As I stated earlier sabermetrics provides objective answers to objective questions, however if one subjects the objectivity to biases, then often times you weaken the tool. I myself am guilty as charged. On May 13th I looked deeper into the Astros stats to see if their lightening hot streak was legitimate or not. Because I so desperately wanted the answer to be yes, I did a poor job of interpreting the numbers. The best face saving I could bring myself to do came on May 27th, and even then I couldn’t bring myself to say that the numbers indicated that our streak was based on luck and that the numbers pointed to a crash burn. In the end, we hope that this exercise will force us to be more honest with ourselves before we report on the Astros, or enable you to call us on any BSing we try to put forth.

Look for us to alternate between pitching and hitting before we jump to fielding, but here is a tenative syllabus of what we hope to accomplish:

Pitching Stats
-W, ERA, and Rate Stats
-DIPS, LIPS, FIP
-Relievers
-Pitch/fx and the next frontier

Hitting Stats
-BA, RBI, R, OBP, OPS
-BaseRuns, RC, etc.
-Line-ups and Protection
-Batter/Pitcher match-ups and other splits

Fielding Metrics
-Fielding percentage, and the rest

Putting it Together

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John Kerry Ain't Got Nothin' on Richard Justice - Why Sports Writers Matter

As I sat bleary eyed at my kitchen table, having hit the snooze button three times this morning, I began my typical morning trudge through the Chronicle’s Sports section. Usually, in such a state, I just mutter obscenity laden curses to Richard Justice and Steve Campbell. This isn’t because I’m angry at the world entirely at 6:30 AM, in the end, it’s because I know they have journalistic responsibility to educate the fans of Houston’s sport franchises and when it comes to the Astros, they’re pretty awful at their jobs. Justice and Campbell both have spent the last month-ish trying to explain why the Astros don’t need a fire sale in order to be a better team. That they’re just a FA pitcher next season away from the play-offs. That we can’t underestimate this team because one time, in 2005, they did something spectacular. Never mind that only a handful of those men are left in the Astros dugout, this team might just still have something up its sleeve. All we need to do, Justice and Campbell have urged, is just trust in Drayton.

Then, Ed Wade makes a move that signals to the entire baseball world that he and Drayton McLane are prepared to run this ship into the ground before they even think about trying that rebuilding thing and suddenly Richard Justice, this morning, thinks this organization is doomed. That’s quite the turn around don’t you think? Richard Justice went from a don’t give up on this team, it’s a free agent pitcher away from glory, company line guy to this guy overnight:

"Maybe McLane lacks patience. Maybe he still thinks there’s a quick fix out there.

That might be why he’s willing to spend $100 million on Carlos Lee and veto $1.2 million in spending on three draft picks.

If he’s really smart, he’ll realize he could save money by splurging on draft picks and cutting corners on Wolf, Shawn Chacon, etc.

When he finally understands this, when he studies how the Twins and Marlins and A’s have succeeded on dramatically smaller budgets, he’ll understand that less might actually be more."

Where did that come from Richard? Either you finally grew a pair or you truly are just the most easily swayed flip-flopper around. I hope it’s the former, because that means the pair will stick around and perhaps do something to influence the taste and preferences of Astros fans. If we had legion of beat writers condemning the fool-hearted arrogance of our owner and the ineptitude he inspires in our management, then perhaps fans would be not just be accepting, but welcoming of a rebuild. They might want to tune into Hooks and Express games that show up on FSN about once a week. If Richard Justice had parted with the company line a month ago and printed those statements, Astros fans as a collective body, might have been screaming for anything not buckled down to be moved or at least the pieces that could fetch something of worth.

Instead of rebuilding the farm system, like the smart organizations (Justice’s own words), a month ago this was Richard’s proposal for how to fix this team:

“This course has its price. Signing premier free agents [pitchers] will cost the Astros the draft choices they need.

But there's no perfect solution for a franchise that's broken in so many areas.

It's just one way out. Maybe the best way” (emphasis added).

I’ve read a few articles recently about the biggest villains in baseball, the owners, and that’s probably well and true in most cases. It's hard for anyone to stand up against monopolists with government protection. However, I have a bone to pick with our beat writers. It’s their responsibility to inform the fans of what’s going on in an organization, to help drive the taste and preferences of the general public. If you believe any part of how a market economy works, then you probably understand that taste and preferences are the most important part of demand and to that end, the beat writers may just be the most important aspect of shaping our demand for sports franchises. With this great responsibility, they have failed to do anything other then repackage hokey and tired company lines about this and that in order to get everyone to believe that this franchise isn’t busted. Instead of inciting a riot, they’ve tried to continue to pull the wool over our eyes. Now that the cat is out of the bag, they’re changing their tune -- it’s too little, too late.

There is a lot of blame to go around in baseball when things aren’t going right. I think Drayton and his front office deserve and hearty portion of it. Yet, as demonized as we can make those men and Union Station, we shouldn’t forget that there were a select group of men who had the freedom to say anything they wanted and have it read by millions of readers each day who stood by the dopes at Texas and Crawford instead of living up to their responsibility.

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Trades, Pads and Compensatory Picks

Tumbleweeds rolling, crickets chirping, Ed Wade bringing in an average at best starting pitcher. As Astros fans, we seem to be in a lose-lose situation. If management does do something, odds are it will be poorly conceived and cost the team money. If management does nothing in the next week, the team will have bypassed another good opportunity to strengthen our minor league system.

When this team was constructed, there were holes in the lineup and the starting rotation. If the Astros can’t get through the end of July without scrounging for bullpen help, the efforts Wade went through to create a new team this past off-season was all for naught. Trading away much of your bullpen from last year for an entirely new crop may have been the right move. Chad Qualls in essence yielded Jose Valverde, who despite Monday's debacle, has pitched well as the closer. When Dan Wheeler was sent to Tampa Bay, Ty Wigginton came in return and has played more than adequately, to the tune of an OPS+ of 113. He has helped to solidify a position that would have seen a Mark Loretta and Geoff Blum platoon day in and day out; negating two more chips to trade with. Michael Bourn has struggled, yes, but trading Brad Lidge to Philadelphia was the right move because despite having the break on his slider return to pre-2006 levels, the fact remains that every piece of that deal that came to Houston has been used. Geoff Geary has been a more than serviceable arm for the bullpen, and Mike Costanzo was sent to Baltimore in the Miguel Tejada trade. Michael Bourn is who he is: a speedster who has trouble getting on base. I know that is a strong indictment against a table setter, but until Bourn has 600 AB’s under his major league belt, I won’t completely dismiss his ability to be a competent player on this level.

While he has done just about everything he possibly could with the roster, farm system and owner he was given, I’d like to know what kind of GM Wade really is. He came to Houston as the man who drafted Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard and Cole Hamels. But, what sort of stimuli does he respond to when the deadline approaches? This is a question that we baseball outsiders will probably never able to answer, as we aren’t privy to the information necessary to arrive at any conclusions. No question though, this will be the time that Ed Wade can define his first year as the Astros GM. As it stands right now, I doubt that he will be able to land another relief pitcher. Teams that are in contention have both greater needs and greater resources (i.e.- farm systems) by which to acquire players.

Stephen and I are were both under the assumption that Wade was looking to the future, despite the comments he’d given to the media in the past few weeks. Then yesterday happened. The only benefit I can see from this trade is that maybe Randy Wolf can put together a solid second half and qualify himself as a Level “B” free agent, thus giving the Astros another draft pick next year. If not, millions of dollars will have been in essence wasted. Jack Cassel could very well provide the same amount of success in the second half as Randy Wolf. Cassell has a very high HR/FB ratio, which should come down some in the second half if he pitches enough innings for the regression to the mean to occur. This is based of his 2007 season, in which he pitching sparingly, and like Wolf, luckily for the Padres. Wolf, as Stephen mentioned yesterday, has been unlukcy with his LOB%, but very fortunate in other categories. Moving from PETCO Park, which is an extreme pitcher’s park, to Minute Maid, which is neutral as far altering the runs scored/prevented in a game, should stand to bring him back to earth. There’s still more than a week left until the non-waiver trade deadline passes by, but Ed Wade’s first move is a head scratcher for sure.

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