Bill James Mailbag - 10/22/12 - 10/24/12

Skipped the part about the Lakers not wanting Kobe “in charge” so that robinred‘s head doesn’t explode.

Bill have you read “Scorecasting” by Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wetheim. It contains a couple of chapters discussing why home field advantage exists, in many sports. In their section on baseball, they say it mostly comes down to calling balls and strikes. I did my own tabulations, and it certainly appears (simplifying some) that there’s about a 0.5 difference between strikeouts and walks per game for home and road teams. The outcome per ball-in-play is nearly the same (except triples), but visitors lose half a BIP per game because of the extra strikeout. Is this well-known in the sabermetric community?

... Ball in Play results IN GENERAL are much the same, right?  If you eliminate strikeouts and walks, Chris Reitsma is much the same as Pedro Martinez.  (Haven’t checked that out. . ..feel free to challenge.)  Can we conclude, therefore, that the only difference between Curt Schilling and Todd Van Poppel is that the umpires liked Schilling and disliked Van Poppel.

I haven’t read the book and can’t comment on the specific finding.  But it is POSSIBLE, based on what you just told me, that the authors underestimated the extent to which strikeouts and walks are why ALL teams win and why they lose, and, if you take them out of the game, you’re taking the fish out of the breaded fish sticks.

[Frank Robinson] was an intense player, completely committed, team leader. Any chance Reds management saw him as over the top that way? Younger players couldn’t hope to live up to his standard, might have shaken their self-confidence or otherwise intimidated them. Maybe that’s why he was traded…

... The usual explanation given for the trade is that the Reds owner/GM, Bill DeWitt, was a Branch Rickey diciple, and Rickey always believed in trading a star player about age 30, before his value crashed… I don’t know that that’s a GOOD explanation for the trade, and perhaps a better one can be found here...

Frank at that time was young, angry, and had had a DUI incident in the off-season a year or two before.  I don’t know that he was PERCEIVED as a strong leader until he went to Baltimore.  In that era, frankly, it was very difficult for a black player to be perceived as a leader.  But since we’re here, this “too strong leadership” concern is something that, from an insider’s perspective, we do hear about a great deal.  That was part of the rap on A-Rod in Texas, that the young players on the team paid TOO MUCH attention to A-Rod and not enough to the manager.  I remember hearing the same thing about Mike Schmidt anytime the Phillies didn’t win big; it was Schmidt’s fault because the young players all followed Schmitty.  You do hear that, and I know for certain that insiders do give credence to that in some situations.

Hey Bill, putting aside the most important part of the job (managing the clubhouse), what can we expect from John Farrell as a tactical manager?

You can understand my limitations here; anything I said could be misconstrued by reporters to represent the Red Sox’ expectations of John, and it’s not my place to speak for the Red Sox, not my intention to try to set expectations for John Farrell.  In Toronto he was a fairly close-to-the-vest manager in terms of in-game moves, didn’t use a lot of pinch hitters or pinch runners or defensive subs, except that his teams did steal a lot of bases, but in part that may be related to the artificial turf up in Toronto.  He was relatively willing to use relievers on back-to-back days.