Miracle Braves

I found "Miracle Season," a book by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the 1991 season and made just after it, at a thrift store today for about .65 and bought it. I figured some select passages would be humorous in retrospect. Just flipping through the book, here are some:

"[John Schuerholz] promised to rebuild the Braves in the image of the Royals, who had won six American League West titles, two pennants and one World Series and had a gleaming stadium complete with a huge fountain, appetizing food and good treatment of the customers." Yeah, build in the image of the Royals...that's never been a good thing to do from my experience, but it was then.

"[T]he Royals[']...1990 record of 75-86 was the second-worst in franchise history." They've only had 6 seasons that good since then.

"But the money! Bream got $5.6 million over three years, and that paled against Pendleton's four-year, $10.2 million contract, the biggest in Braves history." Earlier, it talks about eating a $475,000 option on Ernie Whitt. That's barely an hors d'oeuvre now.

Never knew that before Schuerholz got there, Ernest P. Worrell was their main advertising frontman. That says a lot...

Question in spring training: "Could first baseman Nick Esasky overcome the vertigo symptoms that threatened a premature end to his career?"

"Shortstop Jeff Blauser wondered if Belliard's acquisition meant he was going to be traded." No, it means you hit in contract years only. Duh...

After driving in 5 against the Cardinals, Belliard on hitting: "They say I can't hit, but I showed them I'm more than a fielder, more than just a glove." In one game? Okay.

I had never heard of their original fifth starter, Paul Marak. That one's new.

In a game somewhere in the second half, it mentions Charlie Leibrandt giving up Darren Lewis's first major league home run. There would be only 26 more over the next 11 years. Just seems like a weird thing to mention.

An L.A. columnist wrote late in teh season: "The unwritten rule of sports continues to be that no professional team based in Atlanta ever wins anything, which is why the hockey team moved to Canada."

Same guy on David Justice: "He could give ego lessons to Rickey Henderson."

There's even an afterword by the Cox man himself. It's not remarkable for anything, but it's cool to have.

All in all, this was a cool buy for a few cents, one of those "after the event" books with tons of full page pictures and just a ton of fervor, not knowing that the next 14 years would be even better.

A bunch of bull...pen

Any Braves fan I've known has been patently scared when Cox sends for a reliever. (My best friend had to leave the room every time Chris Reitsma pitched because if he watched Reitsma would lose...) I decided to test whether the panic was justified in the Mazzone era off two main considerations: bullpen ERA relative to the league and bullpen W-L records. There's not a whole lot to say about the starters except that they led the NL in ERA from '92 to '02, which is utterly ridiculous. Sometimes it was by a full run over league average, which is utterlier ridiculous or utterly ridiculouser. Anyway, to the rankings (loss rankings are ordered fewest to most losses, so tied for second is good):

1991: 3.57 ERA v. NL's 3.60 (#6 best bullpen in league for ERA), 22-19 record (T6/T2)
1992: 3.68 v. 3.42 (#9), 26-22 (T5/T5)
1993: 3.15 v. 3.98 (#1), 26-16 (7/1)
1994: 4.44 v. 4.19 (#10), 16-13 (T8/1)
1995: 3.93 v. 4.15 (#6), 28-16 (2/1)
1996: 3.72 v. 4.06 (#6), 26-18 (T4/1)
1997: 3.56 v. 4.30 (#2), 26-24 (T6/T6)
1998: 3.83 v. 3.99 (#6), 16-16 (T15/1)
1999: 3.58 v. 4.39 (#2), 33-14 (1/1)
2000: 4.05 v. 4.56 (#4), 19-18 (T15/1)
2001: 3.73 v. 4.12 (#2), 24-23 (T7/T8)
2002: 2.60 v. 3.84 (#1), 30-14 (T4/1)
2003: 3.98 v. 4.06 (#6), 27-22 (T5/T8)
2004: 3.57 v. 4.09 (#3), 28-17 (T6/T2)
2005: 4.74 v. 4.23 (#12), 25-29 (T5/3)

You can see that most of the time, the bullpen wasn't actually that bad as a unit, and they certainly didn't do that much harm; that's 8 times in 10 years the bullpen had the fewest losses of any NL bullpen. Mind you, they were almost never as good as the starters, but that's because the starters were ridiculously good. Put up relative to other bullpens, though, they were above league average 11 times, and occasionally they were brilliant.

Random things I learned in researching this (I used baseball-reference.com's Splits function to find all this stuff out): In 1997, NL relievers were worse than NL starters, and there was a year that the Reds got more wins out of their relievers than their starters (36-33 or something like that). Yeech.

Mark Wohlers attacked the strike zone. Mark Wohlers missed!
John Rocker attacked the different people. It was a crushing blow. John Rocker dealt 250 HP damage!

P.S.

My Hardball Times article from yesterday (http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/candles-in-the-wind-part-1/) has a reference to Bob Horner towards the end. Did you know that Horner is only about 10 months older than Wade Boggs? That just seems weird...but that's kinda the point of the article.

And for the record, I don't like the Elton John song at all...it's just the best title my copy editor came up with by the deadline. I hadn't thought of a good title at all.

On strikeouts, graphics, and gratuitous Dragon Warrior references

A mixture of conventional reasons for the rise in strikeouts and my own thoughts:

A. Batters aren't taught as much to "just make contact" with two strikes - there' s much less going the other way, defensive hitting, etc. Hardly anyone chokes up to punch a ball over the infield on 0-2 anymore. Getting a strikeout in the old days was something like beating an enemy in RPG who's constantly guarding; you can do it, but it takes forever and you wish you could have just used some magic to finish them off. (Walter Johnson chanted the spell of HURTMORE. *flash of glorious NES light* The George Sisler took 50 damage. Thou hast done well in defeating the George Sisler. Thy experience increases by 40. Thy GOLD increases by 197.)

2. Strikeouts aren't the stigma they once were for batters - sort of the flipside of A.

III. Back in "the day," there was usually a batter not far removed from the pitcher in terms of offense. Eddie Perez was the norm, Javy Lopez the exception; Jeff Blauser most years was the norm, Jeff Blauser in contract years the exception. Normally, pitchers - who were trying to complete whatever they started, which of course took a lot of pitches - conserved their energy on the banjo hitters, just pitching to contact and not that hard to get an easy out. Nowadays, there aren't many lineups (other than the Astros') that afford such easy outs. Going through two more real, non-Ausmus hitters means they're actually dangerous when they hit, so you might aim for the strikeout there.

Quatre. Along with that change has come bullpens so starting pitchers don't have to conserve energy that much. Why bother turning into Kirk Rueter for the bottom of the order when you could strike 'em out and be done with 'em? There's no incentive not to try to strike out whoever's in front of you now.

Fifthly. Personal theory here, but Nolan Ryan made striking out batters a really awesome thing to do. Perhaps Ryan is to the K what Ruth is to the HR...? Probably not, but who knows.

Anyway, K's per game in the AL reached an league all-time high of 6.57/game (per team, so about 13 for both sides combined). The AL hit 4.5 for the first time in 1956, crossed the 5 line in 1961, and the 6 line in 1964, but when the strike zone shrank down in 1969, it took until 1994 to cross 6 again. It's been at 6 ever since. The story's similar in the NL, except that pitchers batting has upped the numbers. The NL hit 4.5 for the first time also in 1956, crossed 5 in 1958, and hit 6 in 1969 (shrunk strike zone, but the Expos and Padres for the first time to more than make up for that), hit 6 again in the mid-'80s, and then has been at 6 every year since 1994. The NL's current high is 6.98 from 2001 - over twice what it was in the '30s, and about 2.5 times what it was in the '20s.

It's not like whiffing people was the sign of a great pitcher back in the day either. http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/SOp9_leagues.shtml/ is the year-by-year league leaders in K/9. All the recent leaders are good pitchers (Randy Johnson/Clemens/Nolan Ryan/Smoltz in '96). Before 1922 or so, though, the list is Walter Johnson and the Randoms, and it wasn't necessarily even guys who were good that year - Doc Ayers, Eric Erickson, Hod Eller, Heinie Berger, Louis Drucke, Ben Tincup (who I presume has nothing to do with the Kevin Costner golf movie), and the immortal Buttons Briggs are just some of the illustrious strikeout artists of yesteryear. Just like doubles and triples and average were better indicators of a good year way back when than home runs, so the strikeout didn't say quite as much back then as it does now. Well, that's not quite true - the leaders in total strikeouts for a given year were usually good, although that was as much a function of pitching a gazillion innings than anything.

Extra K's of today are just a function of the style of the game changing. It's kinda like comparing an NES game (yes, I'm going there again) to a Wii game in terms of graphics and gameplay - the graphics are clearly better on the Wii, but the NES game might be as fun or more so, and might even have better graphics in context. Still, if you make a "games with best graphics" list, they're all going to be new.

(By the way, the best RPG ever is Earthbound. Feel free to disagree, as long as you know deep down in your heart that I'm right.)

Posted with minimal editorial content

Folks I would l like to apologize for the lack of posts of late. Finals seem to be drastically deterring the staff from their blogging assignments.

For now we will have to settle for this pic of Roger Clemens that is surely going to need to be updated as new names are added along the right side of the pic.