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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Sunday, March 05, 2023Blue Jays to add José Bautista to Level of Excellence ahead of Aug. 12 game vs. Cubs
RoyalsRetro (AG#1F)
Posted: March 05, 2023 at 08:27 PM | 33 comment(s)
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1. Hombre BrotaniBautista with Toronto: 1235 games, .253/.372/.506, 288 HRs, 136 OPS+
The man loves his poutine.
The original Bautista trade to Toronto during the waiver trade period in 2008 was fairly unpopular with the sabermetrically-inclined Jays fans at the time.
There was a very vocal contingent of Jays fans calling for Bautista to be non-tendered heading into 2009 since they didn't feel he was worth 2.4 million on a Jays team not going anywhere with budget constraints.
That's a little unfair to Kent. He was a useful, productive player in his mid 20's. Well below the star he would become, but not completely useless like the other 2.
The same arguments were made in Pittsburgh as to why Bautista had to go, no matter the return. That he could hit lefties pretty well and fake it at four positions didn't enter into it - a bad team just shouldn't spend $2.4 million on a bench player.
Did they unretire it or just stop promoting the fact it's retired? They didn't have anyone wearing 12 last year.
I hate the Jays' practice whereby only Hall of Famers get their numbers retired, which leaves you with 5-year Jay Alomar having his number retired but the franchise's best player, who spent all but 15 minutes of his career in Toronto, not getting the same treatment.
Talk about a terrific career. Murphy played a dozen years in the big leagues. He came up with the As, won six Gold Gloves, took a bunch of pitches so Rickey could steal a bunch of bases, and helped finance MC Hammer's debut album. He played a year in Japan after his MLB career ended. He got into coaching after that, and got a chance with the new franchise in Arizona. Promoted to the big league staff in 1998 as a hitting instructor and coach, and got a ring with the 2001 championship team. He moves on to Toronto, then to Texas when the Rangers were winning division titles.
That's a pretty fantastic baseball life.
That "comment" comes out of a simplification of a 39 page article in the 1987 Abstract. It is at heart a probabilistic argument and those always get simplified by those retelling them.
Hell, in the article he has a chart that explicitly says a 27 year old rookie has about a 2% chance of dramatic future development and around a 10% of some improvement. (a 25 year old rookie is at 7 and 30)
Chart is on the top right of page 58 in the Abstract.
Is his chart now dated? Possibly (even likely since there's better access to the underlying data and better methods available). It may be that there's now greater incentive to stay in the game because the payoff is so high. And it may just be that we tend to remember the dramatic exceptions. I haven't done a more recent study on aging and I'm not aware of one either. I suspect people like Szym and Clay Davenport have the tools but haven't actually written it up. They're more interested in making better year to year forecasts and know that there are huge error bars moving to two years.
And then there's the intro to the Ken Phelps All-Star Team which was very dismissive of Henry Cotto (and by extension other toolsy players who've never hit). Specifically "If Henry Cotto is a major-league ballplayer, I'm an airplane". And it does include the bit, "They always figure that if you can run and throw they'll teach you to hit. Of course they can't teach anybody to hit, but they always think they can, so they keep trying.
And it the summary section to the article on rookies I was talking about he wrote:
The known facts are these:
1) Most major league players reach the majors at the age of 22 or older (63% of the players in his study were 23 or older) [...]
2) The great majority of major stars reach the majors at 22 or younger (Again worth noting that he's talking major stars) [...]
3) This means that, sampling older and younger rookies, the percentage of those destined to become major stars must be dramatically higher at the earlier ages.
4) The performance of younger rookies is not dramatically better (in fact, it isn't better at all)
I ain't no logic professor, but that seems to mean that:
5) If the performance of a 21 year-old and a 23 year-old is just the same, the 21 year old has a dramatically better chance to become a major star.
And he may have made a throwaway comment in one of the player rating books (again I don't recall any such) but those books were contractual obligations focused on player ratings (which he never really liked to do) and at that point he wasn't working with the same rigor or passion and wasn't getting much editing either. Still worth reading but there's more hot takes than rigorous analysis.
In the Abstract, James calls Matty "the Dom DiMaggio of the Alou brothers" and begins as you remember: he wasn't going to displace the Giants incumbent CF in the 60s, so he was stuck in the minors for years. And there he had to fight for PT, as the Giants were so rich in talent development, and sometimes had to resort to creative solutions to get a bat in the lineup, like having Orlando Cepeda play OF. Abstract: "...Matty couldn't get enough at bats to stay sharp, completely lost his rhythm, and demanded to be traded. On December 1, 1965, Alou was traded to the Pirates."
James says the Bucs were managed by Harry "The Hat" Walker "who today would be described as a 'hitting guru.' Harry worked with Alou, getting him to use a heavier bat and chop down on the ball, rather than using a light bat and uppercutting as do most modern hitters." Alou hit .231 in the majors in 1965, then won the NL batting title in 1966 hitting .342, and followed that with seasons of .338, .332, .331
Harry's idea "was to get his players to stop using these damned little bats and trying to pull everything...and he gave interviews about how he turned around Matty's career until everybody was pretty much sick of hearing about it."
edit: Sorry, I guess I'm quoting from the "New Abstract - The Classic, Completely Revised"
After moving to Toronto in 2008, he hit .214/.237/.411 in 21 G (with 3 HR) in August/September.
In 2009, From the start of the season through September 3, he hit .216/.345/.301 in 289 PAs with 3 HR.
He was given the day off on September 4, after going hitless in 5 consecutive games.
From September 5 through the end of the year, he hit .280/.360/.660 in 115 PAs with 10 HRs. Followed of course by the monster 2010/2011 seasons and a string of very good (and another great) season after that.
I remember reading somewhere that he did some very specific work on his swing on that off day, whether alone or with the help of a coach, but clearly something very suddenly clicked. I don't know if there's another instance of a player becoming so good, so extremely suddenly.
That's the thing I found the most remarkable about his turnaround. You could pinpoint a September day when things suddenly clicked.
This one weird trick...
I don't have a source but that's pretty close to how I remember it.
He would regularly hit absolute screamers down the left field line. If you were sitting down there it was very much worth your while to pay attention.
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