Not in a zaillian years…with overseas DVDs and Blu-ra…huh, oh.
As recent as last year, swinging 3-0 was not allowed at this level of the Oakland organization. This year, Ports hitters already have taken hacks at 3-0 pitches four times.
And because hitters used to be held responsible for driving up opposing pitch counts as a way to force mistakes and get into the other team’s bullpen as early as possible, the notion of needing only 83 pitches to get 24 outs was completely foreign.
In short, the concept of uber-patience at the plate — one of the benchmarks of Oakland’s fabled Moneyball approach — is dead.
“It’s a different philosophy throughout the entire organization,” said Ports manager Webster Garrison. “We want guys to be a little more aggressive, that is aggressive in the zone and not just taking pitches in order to get into the bullpen. We’re swinging now to do some damage and score some runs.”
...And in 2004, Modesto A’s manager Von Hayes was forced on more than one occasion to bench outfielder Andre Ethier to break the future star’s habit of swinging in forbidden counts.
“I remember them taking Ethier out of the game once when he didn’t take a pitch,” said Modesto manager Lenn Sakata, who managed against that system in San Jose and Bakersfield. “They used to take a strike. They also struck out more than any other team in the league.
“That philosophy is passé already, or at least they’re not focusing as much on it anymore.”
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1. Sunday silence Posted: April 23, 2012 at 09:34 AM (#4113527)I'm perplexed, is the opposing pitcher doing this being considered a positive?
The swinging on 3-0 I think is great. I would love to see a lot more swinging on 3-0, Major League hitters when they can sit on a pitch and rip are a pretty good bet to drive it. Yeah there are times where you want to wait it out but a smart hitter who can be disciplined enough to zero in on a pitch and location should be aggressive on 3-0.
Is this true? Talk about unintended consequences...
I'm not sure how this is the death of "Moneyball," though - it's a failure of execution and management within a particular organization, not an overall failure of the concept of finding and exploiting market inefficiencies using statistics.
"We thought this guy was good, but he keeps getting hits instead of taking walks! Seriously, you should avoid swinging at pitches in the zone if you have not walked enough this month."
I guess I have trouble believing any MLB org would be this stupid - that seems like "bosses-on-'The Wire'-level" dumb.
And the source is... an opposing manager, describing one game, eight years ago? Skeptical.
Maybe it helps explain why the A's can't develop hitters.
Exactly. It's great to read articles like this, since you can easily see who actually understood the core idea of Moneyball and who didn't.
Or else...what, they weren't paid?
I'd heard that at the time (well, 10% of PA as the requirement), fwiw. You'd be ineligible for PoTM, hurt your chances at promotion, etc... Don't know if it was true.
Or else they were not eligible to be promoted to the next level. IIRC, that is in the actual book.
If you create an incentive structure, people are going to act accordingly. The key for management is to design an incentive structure where individual goals align with organizational goals. If you believe that walking is a learnable skill -- which the A's clearly do -- then you set up clear incentives for players to learn that skill.
I think they appointed some guy as pitching coach for the State College Spikes who was about 25 and had no professional experience. Vlad probably remembers the details of this and would know if the micromanaging is still going on.
understood the core idea ofread Moneyball and who didn't.This seems to be more likely in most cases.
Moneyball as a concept is exactly what #5 says. However I do think some of these "moneyball" types believed they personally were superior to the old system and fell in love with themselves.
Buckley quit, but the basis of his approach and Stark's principles remain. So, yes, long story short, the micromanaging remains (Stark was even promoted).
there should be a difference between - wait for your pitch - and - make sure you take the first pitch or you have to walk so many times or don't swing at good pitches because you need to up your walk total
the - every player has to do things the exact same way as every other player - approach is too stupid for words. you teach a person to his/her skillz
By the time guys get into professional ball they are pretty much set on what they like to do at the plate. Sure you can teach guys to "zone in" when they get ahead in the count and to go up with the approach that they are going to see a few pitches -- but you are never going to radically adjust a guy's mindset.
Often times, and I say this as a player whose best offers were from community colleges -- you can get away with swinging early in the account as a talented HS player because an 80mph fastball is a batting practice pitch. When you get to college and pro ball and guys can actually a) throw really hard, and b) can get their breaking stuff over you have to adjust and be more patient.
Usually the guys that can do that are the ones that move on, irregardless of coaching.
_______________
All that said, while in theory it might be a good idea to try and set tangible plate discipline goals for your minor leaguers, I don't think it's anything that is going to result in your major league club having a higher than average OBP and pitches per pa.
Having actual good hitters will help that, something Oakland seems to struggle with.
It's apparently just as hard to fix grammar errors once out of HS as well.
- that is very interesting, and i can understand it if you are succeeding.
but why wouldn't you try something different if you are NOT succeeding? especially because once you get picked in the draft, you WANT to go to the majors.
men will try to change their approach on all KINDS of other things, so why on earth not that? If you can't teach a man anything about baseball once he leaves hs, what is the point of even having batting and pitching coaches, or any sort of instructor? is this the reason so many guys, even top picks, fail?
Hmm, I wonder if the A's scout too much for plate discipline and forget that sometimes you actually have to square up on a ball and rip it somewhere.
This doesn't sound like it would be any more destructive than teaching guys to "be aggressive" and swing early in the count. I think a hard-and-fast policy to draw x number of walks is probably a bad idea, but it's not immediately obvious that it would lead to worse approaches at the plate than what a lot of players have already spent their lifetimes hearing.
Often times, and I say this as a player whose best offers were from community colleges -- you can get away with swinging early in the account as a talented HS player because an 80mph fastball is a batting practice pitch. When you get to college and pro ball and guys can actually a) throw really hard, and b) can get their breaking stuff over you have to adjust and be more patient.
Usually the guys that can do that are the ones that move on, irregardless of coaching.
I'm with bbc, I think that's nonsense.
Nobody learns anything or makes any adjustments in the minor leagues?
I'd say exactly the opposite. The guys who don't change their approach as they face better pitching never sniff the majors.
And you've been a troll since grade school I'm sure. You know I used to be a huge grammar nut, than I started righting I dunno, about 2000 to 5000 words a day on the Internet quickly. Now I don't give a #### as long as my point comes across. If my slip on "irregardless" didn't allow you to fully grasp the point of my post I could care less.
#### of.
Why is it so hard to understand that 'Moneyball' is being used as shorthand for 'the ideas and philosophies brought forth as new and different in the book Moneyball'? Yes, at it's core Moneyball was about finding market inefficiencies and looking places no one else is looking and other abstract, unmeasurable ideas. No one writing these articles is talking about that because 1) it's abstract and unmeasurable and 2) the idea of finding market inefficiencies is not exactly new in the business world. Having minor leaguers on a walk quota is new and different and worth talking about even if it doesn't seem to have worked and is being discarded.
Interesting... so Billy Beane actually sought to make his organization has braindead and inefficient as the corporate white collar world!
To me - a program that sets floors like this is indicative of an organization that needs serious management reorg... Hard and fast rules are not good things. On one hand, I guess I can applaud the specificity of this "rule" -- in the corporate world, it would be turned into something "We seek to optimize scoring through increasing our scoring chances as measured by reaching base-i-tude and maximize shareholder value".
It seems to me, though, rather than a "walk X times" -- you're much, much better served having a middle management team that buys into the philosophy. That doesn't mean you can't make 'soft rules' - which mean discussions with the player and middle manager if 'quotas' aren't met - but it's silly to make it such a hard and fast rule.
I believe it's a bastardization of "err regardless" - regardless of error... FWIW, I'm no grammar nazi - but it is one that I do tend to correct.
The only position player the A's have developed in the past five years - really, since Nick Swisher - who took a lot of walks was Daric Barton. So I wouldn't call this policy a rousing success.
The interesting thing though is that few if any retained those gains beyond a year or two. Can't think of anybody who held the gains in the long run, though an awful lot of people improved quite a bit in the short term.
Some players have a specific, correctable weakness. Correcting them often means a big leap forward (Clemente learned to lay off a particular pitch, Barry Bonds learned to turn on inside pitches for instance) but it's rare to see a major change in hitting style work.
I'd like to think they'd know the difference between a ball and a strike by the time they get to the minors, but I'm not convinced they do. For some, a bad pitch is "anything but a fastball"; for others, "anything I can pull".
I can see how this is a bad policy to have even if not a hard and fast rule, but I don't think it was ever really was enforced.
There are lots of examples of Oakland minor leaguers getting promoted without walking in 10% of their PA. In fact, all 4 of the eventual major leaguers (Ethier, Cruz, Quintanilla, and Perry) on that 2004 Modesto team were under 10%, and three of them were promoted to AA midseason. That Modesto team also had the fewest Ks in the CAL that year--not the most, as the opposing manager in the article claimed.
All the more reason why a walk quota is just a bad, bad idea... The better route is to make sure all your instructors buy into the idea of high OBP/working counts. Rather than sticks, I'd have used carrots if you want to dangle something in front of players -- top prospects who've already pocketed big bonuses are going to do what they want to do anyway (and you're probably better off honing specific mechanical skills than changing their approaches anyway). However, rather than "no promotions unless you walk X times" - how about $100 bonuses if you increase your walk rate or somesuch.
I'm a fervent believer in high OBP -- but this just seems a like a completely asinine way to go about 'teaching' it... and frankly, you really do have to wonder if it's played a role in some of the more spectacular A's offensive flameouts the last 5-6-7 years.
As I recall - and it's been a while since I've read it - most of the OBP-focused efforts described in the book were on the player-acquisition front (draft, free agency, and trades), not training "hackers" you already have to take more pitches. Even if you view the term "Moneyball" exclusively as a focus on OBP, the headline is staggeringly wrong. OBP is now featured on the stat line during many baseball broadcasts, and it's clearly much more central to the front-office deliberations of most teams. Moneyball, in that sense, is the new normal. It couldn't be any further from "on its last legs."
True, this word isn't a grammatical error. And sure, "irregardless" is a word. So are "ain't" and "alright." But in what some may consider more "learned" circles, all tend to be considered non-standard or dialectical. For sure, one wouldn't want to put these on one's resume or in a scholarly article.
It shouldn't exist - or at least it shouldn't be used as it is - because adding the prefix ir- to the front of "regardless" makes it mean "not regardless." Just like "irrefutable" means "not refutable."
Just like "inflammable" means "not flammable"!
the list is a little light on middle infielders, but i think that's a pretty solid core of hitters for an organization to have in their developmental system.
Disagree completely. You tell what a bad pitch is because you get better at seeing pitches in general. You learn where they end up based on launch angles, spin, and release and then you develop a sense for were it ends up. That skill is accomplished by seeing pitches, the number of pitches a player sees in the minors dwarfs the number he sees in high school, so I would argue that a player's discipline is heavily influenced by his minor league experience.
edit: I'm not saying the player consciously thinks "it started there so it'll end up there", just that after a player sees a certain pitch enough times he 'intuits' its final location.
ZOMG, calm down. My comments was lighthearted. Your first reaction shouldn't be hate. I'm the last person on Earth to be a grammer nut on BTF. See....see what I did there?
A little less anger would help.
Ooh, a BTF Gallagher thread. I better get my tarp out.
This is hilarious.
Actually, inflammable is the older usage. From the Latin inflammare, 1605. Flammable dates from 1813.
I only hope for the players' sake Hayes wasn't teaching baserunning.
Intentionally so, at least by my reading. The 'care less' didn't tip you of?
So the "lesson" seems to have stuck pretty well and doesn't seem to have hurt him as a hitter.
In contrast, Swisher has had 297 3-0 counts and has swung at just 10 of them. 6 for 10, 1 double, 2 HR, no SF. 131 balls (36 IBB), 156 strikes. (Swisher has about 1000 more PA than Ethier.)
There are lots of examples of Oakland minor leaguers getting promoted without walking in 10% of their PA. In fact, all 4 of the eventual major leaguers (Ethier, Cruz, Quintanilla, and Perry) on that 2004 Modesto team were under 10%, and three of them were promoted to AA midseason. That Modesto team also had the fewest Ks in the CAL that year--not the most, as the opposing manager in the article claimed.
Shhh, let's not confuse this argument with facts.
Well, I agree in the general but ... since 1990, using less than 1 per 12 turns up Braun and Kemp along with good to very good hitters like Cano, Pence, Hart, ARam (esp if you ignore his early years), Ichiro, Soriano, Beltre. Also HoFers Gwynn and Puckett and HoVGers JuanGone and Nomar. Anyway, 26 guys since 1990 with 3000+ PA and a 110 OPS+. Move it to 14 PA per walk and you get only 14 players, losing Vlad.
I would guess that there might be nobody in that list other than Vlad and maybe the high BA guys who wouldn't have benefited from more patience.
10%: I'm not claiming that it was a deal breaker for them, but that it was considered evidence that you might not be ready to move up. As I understood it at the time.
Perhaps Hayes was just a convenient target, that era's Phillies equivalent of Horace Clarke on the post-dynasty Yankees; he wasn't a bad ballplayer, just one who could be frustrating to watch.
Sure. But you get the general point.
All told he gave them 25 WAR in 9 seasons which is nothing to sneeze at. Franco put up 30 WAR for 2 teams over those same 9 seasons but only 12 for Cleveland (man he went nuts his first 3 years in Texas). All in all, it ended up being a fairly even trade.
The Phils in the early 80s had Franco, Sandberg and Samuel as middle infielders in their system. They packaged Franco for Hayes, threw in Sandberg for DeJesus, and kept Samuel (later trading him for Dykstra and McDowell, but by then the 80s were over). Oops.
Maybe things have changed recently, but I have "known" for decades that 1 walk per 10 AB (11PA) is the average over all of baseball. Power hitters, in general, take more, which makes sense, but 1 for 10 is average, and has been for at least 50 years, unless something has changed recently. I don't mean, of course, that this is the EXACT percentage every year, but it's been close every year for decades. -Brock Hanke
Also, these guys are in the minors. Without running the numbers, I would guess a lot of batters' walk rates go down once they hit the majors because the pitchers are better. You "want" a walk rate of what, at least 7-8% in the majors? If you're walking 7-8% in the minors you very likely won't be doing it in MLB - and then your chances of being an impact batter become increasingly lower.
Franco for Hayes was a perfectly reasonable trade. Philadelphia made way too much about "five for one". The other players in the deal:
Jay Baller: Never actually pitched for Cleveland. Middle reliever with a career 77 ERA+.
Manny Trillo: 32 year old 2B coming off a 76 OPS+ season. Played half a season in Cleveland, then traded. Would have been a free agent after 1983 anyway. Had an 81 OPS+ for the rest of his career as a useful utility infielder. By moving Trillo, 1983 Phillies were able to upgrade at 2B by signing Joe Morgan, who was still really good and helped them to the World Series.
George Vukovich: 27 year old OF, played 3 years with Cleveland. He was really good in 1984, below replacement level in 1983 and 1985.
Jerry Willard: A 23 year old catcher, looked pretty good in 1985-86 (lefty hitting platoon catcher with league average bat) but did nothing after that. Willard is the one guy besides Franco that had upside here. He could have made the trade look really bad. In 1982 (age 22) he hit 292/382/463 at Reading. Two years earlier Ryne Sandberg had hit 310/403/469 playing there at age 20. Sandberg was a bit better and most importantly, 2 years younger. On another thread recently people are talking about how the Phillies shouldn't be faulted for not seeing Sandberg develop. If that's true then they certainly can't be faulted for making Willard a throw in.
Now you can't project a guy into the Hall of Fame based on that. But if I saw a guy like that today I know for sure I wouldn't trade him for the middle of career Ivan DeJesus.
They didn't. The trade was Bowa for DeJesus; Sandberg was a throw-in. I recall a quote from later in the 80s, after Sandberg, Franco and Samuel had established themselves, where a top Phils exec rationalized that, of course they knew they'd all be good, but they could only keep one as their regular 2B, and they picked Samuel.
I have found the best relationship between walk% and 'goodness of hitter' is something close to
Real Goodness of Eye = raw walk% - isolated power squared
(best regression fit done over thousands of hitters)
This shows that Babe Ruth's huge walk totals were mostly from the fear factor, and Max Bishop was the king of drawing walks.
The ever-lovable Pete Rose called Hayes "5 for 1", exasperating the situation. Some teammate.
OK, tfbg9, I'm stumped.
it's easy if you think with a potty mouth
He actually suggested, in spring training, that the Phils issue Hayes 541 as a uniform number.
A lot of BB% is based on contact percentage; guys who swing and miss more often go deeper into counts and draw more walks.
For example, Hideki Matsui and Jack Cust had pretty similar swing tendencies: Cust swung at 17.2% of pitches outside the zone and 64.9% of pitches inside the zone, while Matsui was at 17.7% and 63.2%. But Cust walked a ton more than Matsui because his contact% was so much lower (67% for Cust, 85% for Matsui). While Cust's mighty swing and miss on a 3-1 pitch still leaves him in position to take a walk, Matsui makes contact and ends the at bat. I don't think that means Cust had the better eye.
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