Contemporary Minor League Aces

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a two-part series on contemporary minor league stars, who I defined as players with at least 4,000 career plate appearances in the high minors (the AAA and AA levels).  The two parts are here and here.

I thought it would also be fun to identify any recent pitchers who have had long and successful minor league careers.  Deciding on 1,200 career innings pitched in the high minors as a cut-off (which limits the list to starters and seems to be about the equivalent of my 4,000 plate appearances cut-off for position players), I was able to find only six contemporary pitchers who have accomplished this feat.  However, I was able to find an additional half a dozen or so pitchers who have come awfully close.

One final note before getting on with the list — for purchases of AA and AAA performance, pitching in the Mexican League counts, but pitching in other foreign leagues (Japan’s NPB, South Korea’s KBO, Taiwan, Italy, etc.) does not.  While this is somewhat arbitrary, it makes it easier to use baseball reference to find the qualifying pitchers, and what I am interested in doing is identifying American minor league stars, rather than Americans who have starred in Asia.  Without further ado:

1.  Nelson Figueroa (1,470 AAA innings pitched, 266.2 AA, 499 MLB).  Leading the list of contemporary minor league aces, Figueroa is a smallish right-hander (listed as 6’1″ and 185 lbs), who has a career minor league of 141-95, by far the most wins and best winning percentage of any recent minor leaguer I could find.  He has a career 3.70 minor league ERA with nearly three strikeouts for every walk allowed.

Nelson was originally drafted by the Mets in the 30th round of the 1995 Draft, and he was only just released in late April of this year by the Diamondbacks after getting off to a brutally bad start for the AAA Reno Aces a month shy of his 39th birthday.

Figueroa pitched in parts of nine major league seasons for six different teams mostly as a spot starter/long reliever.  While his career major league record of 20-35 is pretty bad, his career 4.55 ERA is hardly terrible.

2.  Andrew Lorraine (1,613 AAA, 7.1 AA, 175 MLB).  Once a 4th round draft pick out of Stanford, Lorraine has thrown more innings at the AAA level than any other recent pitcher.  His minor league career record was 110-89 with a 4.15 ERA.

A left-hander, Andrew pitched in parts of seven major league seasons for seven different teams and invariably got hit hard (career MLB ERA of 6.53).  He just didn’t have the stuff to have a successful major league career, but he clearly knew enough about pitching to excel at the AAA level.  His career ended in 2009 at age 36 playing in the now-defunct independent-A Golden Baseball League.

3.  Jared Fernandez (1,293.1 AAA, 504.1 AA, 108.2 MLB).  A big right-hander, Fernandez pitched more innings in the high minors than anyone else on my list.  He finished his minor league career in 2007 at age 35 with a 105-100 record and a 4.34 ERA.

Jared didn’t break through to the majors until age 29, and even though he pitched effectively for the Reds in 2002 and the Astros in 2003, he was already past age 30 both of those seasons.  Fernandez’s career ended with the Hiroshima Carp of Japan’s NPB.

4.  Chris George (1,244.1 AAA, 97.1 AA, 237.1 MLB).  The 31st overall pick in the 1998 Draft out of high school, George got numerous opportunities while in his early 20′s between 2001 and 2004 to establish himself as a starter for the Royals.  However, he didn’t have major league command, and he was also hit hard, posting a career major league 6.48 ERA with awful numbers at every pitching category.

Chris then settled in as a journeyman AAA starter.  He finished his minor league career in 2012 with an 85-87 record and a 4.70 ERA.

5.  Shane Loux (1,143.1 and counting AAA, 157.2 AA, 144 MLB).  Still pitching effectively, but unspectacularly, for the AAA Fresno Grizzlies this season at age 33, Loux is now 106-109 with a 4.46 ERA for his minor league career. He was once a second round draft pick.

Shane pitched in the majors in 2002-2003 for the Tigers, 2008-2009 for the Angels and last season for the Giants.  Last year’s performance, in which he posted a 4.97 ERA in 19 relief appearances, was probably his best at the major league level.

6.  Andy Van Hekken (740.1 AAA, 460.2 AA, 30 MLB).  A former 3rd round draft pick, Van Hekken’s only major league experience came in 2002 at the age of 22 when he went 1-3 in five starts for the Tigers.  His 3.00 ERA looked pretty good, but his other numbers suggested he wasn’t major league ready.

Andy returned to AAA and never made it back to the Show.  His career minor league record of 122-86 and 3.94 ERA look pretty good, but he never had any big years at AAA and had to use the independent-A Atlantic League several times to keep himself in professional baseball.

Andy went to South Korea to pitch in 2012, where he has established himself as one of the KBO’s top starters.  He currently has one of the five best ERAs in the young 2013 KBO season.

7.  R. A. Dickey (1,079 AAA, 108.2 AA, 1,113.1 MLB).  Undoubtedly the best pitcher on this list, Dickey’s career story is well known.  He makes this list with more than 1,000 AAA innings pitched because he has had essentially two professional pitching careers, the first as a regular pitcher and the second as a knuckleballer.

8.  Chris Michalak (1,048.2 AAA, 78 AA, 191.1 MLB).  A lefty, Michalak finished his professional career with the AAA Las Vegas 51′s in 2009 at age 38.  He finished with a minor league career record of 93-90 and a 4.14 ERA.

Michalak pitched fairly well for the Blue Jays and Rangers in 2001 and 2002, but he was already over 30 years old in 2001.

9.  Randy Keisler (1,027.1 AAA, 116 AA, 150.2 MLB).  Another lefty, Keisler has gone 99-77 with a 3.95 ERA in his minor league career.  He pitched last year in the Atlantic League at age 36.  Keisler pitched parts of six major league seasons for five different teams and almost always got hit hard, posting a career MLB ERA of 6.63 with lots of hits, home runs and walks allowed.

10.  Brandon Duckworth (1,014 AAA, 167 AA, 511 MLB).  Other than Nelson Figueroa and R. A. Dickey, the only pitcher on this list with a substantial major league career, Duckworth pitched eight seasons in the Show, going 23-34 with a 5.28 ERA mostly as a fifth and spot starter/long reliever.  As a minor leaguer, Brandon has a career 110-74 record with a 3.80 ERA.

Duckworth went to Japan late last season and pitched well enough in six starts to return to the Rakuten Golden Eagles this year at age 37.  After seven starts this year, he is 2-3 with a 4.30 ERA, not good enough for a highly paid foreigner in pitching-dominated NPB.

11.  Brian Cooper (877 AAA, 319.2 AA, 167.2 MLB).  A small right-hander whose professional career ended in 2006 at age 31, Cooper appeared in a total of 13 games for the 2004 and 2005 Giants.  Given that the Giants are the team I follow, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I don’t really remember Cooper.

Cooper finished his minor league career with an 87-80 record and a 4.61 ERA.  He went 15-9 for the 2003 AAA Charlotte Knights, which is a lot for AAA — none of the players higher on this list managed to win 15 games in a single year at AAA.

12.  Adam Pettyjohn (788.1 AAA, 367.1 AA, 69 MLB).  Once a second round draft pick, Pettyjohn had a career minor league record of 85-74 with a 4.23 ERA.  He went 15-6 for the 2008 AAA Louisville Bats.

Pettyjohn pitched briefly for the 2001 Detroit Tigers and the 2008 Cincinnati Reds.  His last season was 2010 for the AAA Buffalo Bisons.

13.  Derek Lee (450.2 AAA, 732.2 AA, 0 MLB).  Last and certainly least on this list, Derek Lee is the only player on this list to pitch more innings at AA than AAA.  He never pitched in the majors, which likely also prevented him from making some real money playing in Asia.  He finished his minor league career in the Mexican League in 2008 at age 33 with a final record of 81-84 and 3.61 ERA.

Lee played twelve years of professional baseball and probably never made more than $50,000 a year, if that.  He’s also unlikely to get a pension in any amount, unlike almost all the other players on this list, who had major league careers just long enough to get some kind of a pension.  Somehow, it doesn’t seem fair.

If I’ve missed any pitchers who should be included in my list, please let me know.

Contemporary Minor League Stars, Part I

Before roughly 1955, it was possible for a fine baseball player to have a long and successful professional career even without ever playing in the major leagues or playing in the Show only very briefly.  The main reasons for this were that minor league teams had a lot more independence and thus were able to maintain loyal fan bases and hold onto star players and also the fact that the number of major league teams (16 and all east of the Mississippi River) compared to the total number of minor league teams was tiny.

In those days there were three of what we would now call AAA leagues (the Pacific Coast League (“PCL”), the American Association and the International League) and four of what we would now call AA leagues (the Texas League, the Southern League, the Eastern League and the Western League), compared to two and three such leagues today. There were also far more lower minor leagues and teams than now, with teams playing in cities with populations as small as 10,000 or 20,000.

Because the number of minor league teams relative to the number of major league teams was so much greater than today, you had to be both great and lucky to have a long-term major league career.  (You also had to be white, since black players were excluded from “organized baseball” until 1946 and instead played in their own segregated leagues).

As a result, many excellent ballplayers became minor league stars.  As a general rule, the greatest minor league stars of that era fall into these categories:

(1) spitball pitchers who weren’t in the majors in 1920 and thus were not allowed to throw one of their best pitches at the major league level (Frank “Shelly” Shellenback, Rube Robinson, Paul Wachtel and Buzz Arlett are examples — they could continue to throw the spitter in the high minor leagues in which they pitched during the 1920 season thanks to grandfathering, but could not throw it in the majors);

(2) players who hit like major leaguers but didn’t play major league defense (Ike Boone and Smead Jolley are examples — Bill James once wrote that these players had their defensive failures overstated by sportswriters of the era as a way to explain why they weren’t major league stars; however, there is enough objective evidence/stats to suggest their defense was pretty bad);

(3) players who fielded like major leagues but didn’t hit enough or hit with enough power for their positions (Joe Riggert, and Jigger Statz are examples — in fairness to Statz, his most valuable skill, on base percentage, was not as highly valued in his day as it is now; however, while Statz was fast, he was not an effective base stealer at the major league level);

(4) players who were good all-around players but a shade below major league regulars — particularly in the Pacific Coast League, these players had more value to their minor league teams playing in major league-size cities than they did to major league teams (examples are Dick Gyselman, Truck Hannah and Billy Raimondi);

(5) players who had major injuries at the wrong time in their careers (Joe Hauser and Ray Perry are great examples);

(6) players who didn’t take advantage of their major league opportunities, which were fewer than today’s minor league stars get (examples are Bunny Brief (birth name Anthony Grzeszkowski), a fantastic minor league slugger who didn’t hit in any of his three significant major league trials, Nick “Tomato Face” Cullop and Spence Harris);

(7) players who developed late, i.e., after age 27 (Ollie Carnegie and Ox Eckhardt are great examples of a common type of minor league star); and

(8) players whose careers were interrupted by World War II.

In fact, a majority of the great minor league stars of this era and most of those listed above fit into more than one of the categories I’ve identified above, along with others not mentioned.  Perhaps the one all-encompassing factor for minor league stars was simply bad luck.

For example, Buzz Arlett, probably the quintessential minor league star of this era, started his career as a pitcher whose best pitch was a spitball.  He was still establishing himself as a PCL ace in 1920, the only league in which he could throw his best pitch after that season.  He converted to a full-time hitter in 1923 at age 24, and by the time he had established his bona fides as a top PCL slugger, he was no longer young.

Further, his team, the Oakland Oaks, rightfully recognized Arlett as their franchise player and wouldn’t sell him to a major league team for less than $100,000, too high a price for a hitter his age.  When the Oaks’ price finally came down, Arlett was past 30 and had put on weight, which negatively impacted his outfield defense.  Despite a great year at the plate for the 1931 Phillies in his only major league season at age 32, this Phillies team sucked eggs, and Arlett spent almost all of his remaining professional career in Baltimore and Minneapolis, big cities with major league caliber fan bases and ballparks taylor-made for left-handed sluggers like Arlett.

Since about 1978, the Society for Advanced Baseball Research (“SABR”) has done a great job of educating today’s baseball fandom of the great minor league stars who played in this bygone era.  The purpose of this article, notwithstanding my long introduction, is to identify the minor league stars, if any, playing today.

I decided that in order to qualify as a contemporary minor league star, a player had to have at least 4,000 career minor league plate appearances in AA and AAA ball, based on the premise that you can’t have been a minor league star unless you spent a long time playing in the high minors.  Bear in mind, that given the shorter playing schedules of even the top minor league teams today, it takes nearly eight full seasons at the AA and AAA levels to meet this requirement.

[A couple of notes here: organized baseball (and thus baseball-reference.com) treat the Mexican summer league as a AAA league (the quality of play is probably closer to AA ball) but do not consider Japan's NPB (a true 4-A league) and South Korea's KBO (probably between AAA and AA in terms of level of play) as AA or AAA leagues.  I have followed the OB/baseball-reference definition since I'm interested in identifying American minor league stars, neither NPB or KBO is really a "minor league" regardless of the level of play (the countries' top players play in these leagues and are not readily available to MLB the way the best Mexican League players are), and it makes it much simpler to calculate who qualifies.]

At first, I thought that there would not be a lot of players meeting this requirement, because a number of the most well-known 4-A players since 2000 don’t qualify — specifically, Dan Johnson, Dallas McPherson, Tag Bozied, Brad Eldred and Joe Borchard don’t have enough plate appearances to qualify.  I also figured that there wouldn’t be a lot of player in today’s professional game who could play for years and years at a high level without substantial major league careers cutting into their high-minors playing time.

Turns out I was wrong.  There are a great number of contemporary players who qualify as minor league stars under my definition.  In no particular order, the following are the contemporary minor league stars I was able to find.

1.  Jack Cust (3758 AAA plate appearances, 568 AA, and 2581 MLB).  Cust is clearly the best of the contemporary minor league stars, and he has had a significant major league career.  Even so, he spent years and years in the high minors before the money-ball Oakland A’s decided his OPS was too high ignore, no matter how low his batting average or how many times he struck out, and he’s now back in the high minors since his major league run ended in 2011. Cust’s career minor league OPS of .936 and major league OPS of .813 are far and away the best of any contemporary minor league batting star.

The player Cust reminds me most of in baseball history is Ripper Collins.  Collins was a slugging 1Bman for great Cardinals and Cubs teams from 1931 through 1938, playing for three pennant winners and two World Champions and leading the NL with 35 HRs and 128 RBIs in 1934.  Ripper was a great minor league star before and after his long major league career.

Collins slugged 135 HRs in the Show and 193 HRs in the minors.  Cust has hit 105 in the Show and 225 in the minors.  Collins hit for a much higher average, but Cust has a slightly higher on-base percentage at the major league level.

This type of player was much more common in the pre-1955 era than today, in part because major league careers were more precarious than today (one bad year and the team often decided to give someone else a shot, sending the veteran back to the minors for good) and also because it was easier to accumulate plate appearances in the high minors which had schedules as long or longer than the major league schedule.  See Dale Alexander, Smead Jolley, Jack Bentley and Joe Hauser as examples.

2.  Mike Hessman (4530 and counting AAA plate appearances, 1008 AA, 250 MLB).  Mike Hessman is a great minor league slugger who has been identified as the real life “Crash” Davis because he is the active minor league home run leader by a wide margin.  Hessman has hit 369 minor league home runs (plus six in Japan and 14 in the Show) in his professional career, which likely places him in the bottom of the top ten all-time (I haven’t been able to find any information on the top Mexican League sluggers other than Hector Espino, who at 484 career HRs, is the all-time minor league HR leader).

However, Hessman has also struck out a whopping 2,168 times in his professional career.  His chronic inability to make contact has limited him to a career minor league batting average and OPS of .230 and .773 (.188 and .694 in the Show).  His ability to slug the long ball has kept him around in the high minors for years, but he’s clearly not a major league player unless a bunch of guys on the parent club get hurt.

Stay tuned for part two of this series.

Karma Catching Up to Frank McCourt and Other Notes

The never ending saga of the Frank/Jamie McCourt divorce has entered a new phase.  Jamie is seeking to re-open the former couple’s marital property settlement agreement and obtain an additional $770 million on top of the $131 million she received previously.  All I can say is that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving ex-husband.

Frank McCourt is a sack.  According to wikipedia, McCourt financed his 2004 purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers mostly with debt which he repaid in part by raising ticket and concession prices every year he owned the team.  He paid himself and his now ex-wife enormous salaries out of the Dodgers’ enormous revenue streams, but largely avoided paying taxes by structuring these payments as “loans.”

During his tenure, McCourt effectively ran the team into the ground, so much so that the team filed for bankruptcy protection in 2011, despite being one of the top three or four teams in MLB in terms of revenue streams.  MLB was able to force McCourt to sell the team, but McCourt then sold the team for $2 billion, more than 4.5 times what he had paid for the team only eight years before.

Frank McCourt is an insatiably greedy scumbag who married a woman after his own heart.  When the marriage failed (surprise, surprise!), she went after his ill-gotten gains with the determination of a hungry lion after an old and sickly wildebeest.  In my book, that’s karma.

As a San Francisco Giants fan, I normally wouldn’t shed a lot of tears over terrible things happening to the Dodgers.  As a baseball fan, however, it bothered me to see a storied franchise being raped by an “entrepeneur” who wasn’t content to take the typically obscene profits major league owners make in the course of buying and selling top franchises, but had to milk the situation for still more.

I’d rather see the Dodgers fail the old fashioned way: poor baseball decisions like bad trades and overpaying already expensive free agents who don’t end up performing as the team hoped.

Meanwhile, in today’s baseball action, I see that Andy Pettitte won again and is now 3-0.  If he is really and truly off Vitamin S for good, it’s great to see a soon-to-be 41 year old continuing to flummox major league hitters.

It will be interesting to see how Hall of Fame voters treat Pettitte however many years from now.  On the one hand, his numbers are clearly Hall of Fame worthy: he’s almost certain to finish with more than 250 career wins, a terrific winning percentage and an excellent post-season record for numerous World Champions.  On the other hand, he’s an admitted steroids/PEDs abuser.

However, he copped to his PED use a lot faster than most of his fellow cheats, told a pretty good story about why he did it (trying to recover quickly from an injury to help his team, blah, blah, blah), and even fingered another reputed and more significant steroids cheat, all-time great Roger Clemens.  That might buy Pettitte some sympathy from Hall of Fame voters — Americans, as a group, love to see the mighty cut down to size, but we’re awfully forgiving when said mighties abjectly admit their mistakes and ask for forgiveness — it has a lot to do with our Puritan (read broadly) heritage.

Meanwhile, Roy Halladay and the Phillies beat the Cardinals today 8-2 in a game called on account of rain after six and half innings.  I wonder if umpires are more likely to shorten games on account of rain when the game is a blow out?

My guess is yes, umpires do.  They are human, and I can’t imagine that they don’t take into account the score and the inning when deciding if it’s rained long enough to call the game.  If the game was 3-2 after six and a half, I suspect the umpires would have waited longer to try to get more of the game into the record books.

Has anyone done any research on this question?  If not, it would make an interesting research topic for the SABRly minded.

Meanwhile, I have no idea whether the Pirates will contend this year, but at least they’re trying.  Right now, the Bucs’ decisions to take on A. J. Burnett’s (albeit at a steep discount) and Wandy Rodriguez’s salaries last year looks brilliant.  Today Rodriguez completely shut down the Braves, the hottest team in baseball; and Burnett has a 2.63 ERA and leads the NL in strikeouts.

Mike Cervenak Slugging It Out in Taiwan

I recently learned that one of my favorite 4-A players (and former San Francisco Giants prospect) Mike Cervenak is playing in Taiwan this year for the 7-Eleven Lions of the Chinese Professional Baseball League (“CPBL”).

I wrote a post about Mike Cervenak three years ago in which I bemoaned the fact that he never got a significant shot at playing in the majors despite being a fine high minors hitter for roughly a decade.  Not much has changed in the last three seasons.

After a cup of coffee with the Phillies in 2008 (Mike went 2 for 13, which doesn’t prove much of anything), Cervenak hasn’t played in the major leagues again.  He had a poor season (.249 batting average, .638 OPS) with the Buffalo Bisons of the AAA International League in 2010 and a much better season (.298 BA, .828 OPS) for the New Orleans Zephyrs in the AAA Pacific Coast League.

Back with the Zephyrs last year at age 35, Mike had a terrific season, batting .340 with a .912 OPS in 101 games split between 1B, 3B, LF and DH.  His batting average was fifth best in the hit-happy PCL and his OPS was 10th best.  He now has more than 6,500 minor league plate appearances, 90% of which are at the AA and AAA levels, with a career batting average of .297 and OPS of .811.

However, Mike’s fine 2013 performance didn’t get him even a second cup of coffee from the Miami Marlins, and this year there was apparently little interest in having him return to the PCL for anyone, almost certainly because of his age.

I haven’t been able to find anything on how Mike is performing for the Lions in the young 2013 season.  However, Taiwan is likely the last stop on his professional baseball career, at least as a player.  He’s too old to return to a AAA job in the U.S., and the logical step up from Taiwan to South Korea’s KBO is unlikely to happen, since KBO generally only sign American pitchers and not position players.

There’s always the independent-A Atlantic League, but it’s pretty hard for a player Cervenak’s age to live on a salary of $3,000 a month for a six month season.  Given the extent of his professional experience, Mike may well get hired on a bench coach or hitting instructor somewhere when his playing career ends.

In other CPBL news, Manny Ramirez hit his first home run for the EDA Rhinos.  He golfed a low pitch to straightaway center field, and the ball traveled over the wall just to the right of the 400 foot sign.  It was also the 7,000 home run in CPBL history.

In part due to the Manny Ramirez signing (the CPBL is currently a four team league, so Manny plays in literally half of the league’s games), the CPBL set a new attendance record with more than 215,000 fans attending the league’s first 21 games of the 2013 season.  The league record for average attendance in a season was set way back in 1992 (the League began operations in 1989) with 6,878 fans attending each game.

However, last year, thanks to numerous gambling and game fixing scandals, CPBL attendance was at an all-time low with an average of only 2,433 fans per game.  That’s considerably lower than the Atlantic League, which has average over 4,000 fans per game over the last four seasons.  Even so, the CPBL is planning to add a fifth team in the next year.

What Are the Chances Johan Santana Makes the Hall of Fame?

At this moment, probably not good.  Johan Santana had shoulder surgery today and, according to espn.com, will miss the entire season for the second time in three years.  He is vowing to pitch again in the major leagues, but whether he actually does remains to be seen.

Santana’s claim to be a Hall of Famer rests on the fact that he was indisputably the best pitcher in major league baseball for the five year period from 2004 through 2008.  During that span he led his league in wins, ERA, innings pitched or strike outs eight times, won two Cy Young Awards and could have, with a little more luck, won four Cy Young Awards.  Santana was clearly a better pitcher than Bartolo Colon in 2005, and there was very little daylight between his and Tim Lincecum‘s numbers in 2008.

However, Santana’s career wins total is presently 139, and that’s awfully few for a Hall of Fame candidate.

The (relatively) recent pitcher whom Santana most closely resembles among the All-Time Greats is Sandy Koufax.  Koufax finished his career with a record of 165-87 (.655 winning percentage), not a whole lot different from Santana’s 139-78 (.641 winning percentage).  Both were left-handed strike out pitchers with excellent command.

Koufax was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1972, his first year of eligibility.  The problem for Santana, of course, is that Koufax’s last five seasons were clearly better than Santana’s best five.  Koufax led the league in wins, winning percentage, ERA, IP and Ks 13 times his last five seasons.  Using the newer metric, wins above replacement, which should take into account the facts Koufax’s days were a much better time to be a pitcher than Santana’s and the Dodgers of Koufax’s era were better than Santana’s Twins/Mets, Koufax’s last five lead Santana’s best five 40.8 t0 35.4 according to baseball reference’s formula and an even larger 43.3 to 31.6 using fangraphs’ formula.

The Dodgers won three pennants and two World Series in Koufax’s last five seasons, and Koufax also threw four no-hitters (compared to one for Santana) and a perfect game in his career and set what was at the time the single season strike out record and is still only one behind the all-time record.

Something else that will hurt Santana’s future Hall of Fame chances is that unlike Koufax, who walked away from the game at his peak, we’ve had to watch Santana battle arm problems for the last four years, which has made it easier for people to forget just how good Santana was when he was at the top of his game.

In my mind, the biggest knock on Santana as an all-time great is that he was never a pitcher who finished what he started.  In his career, he has thrown only 15 complete games.  In comparison, Koufax completed 27 games in each of his last two seasons.

The game has changed a lot, of course, since Koufax’s day, and it’s highly unlikely that any major league pitcher will ever again complete as many as 27 games over the course of two consecutive major league seasons, let alone one.  Even so, Santana hasn’t completed a lot of games even by the standards of the current era.  Santana is tied with the much younger Matt Cain for 14th place among active pitchers and is miles behind Roy Halladay (66) and CC Sabathia (35) the active leaders.

Although complete games are much rarer than they once were, they are still awfully important since bullpen fatigue is a much bigger problem now than it was in the days when starters regularly finished games and the last couple of guys in the bullpen didn’t pitch a whole lot.  Aside from the fact that Roy Halladay’s wins total is much higher than Santana’s, his record of throwing complete games is going to make him a much more attractive candidate to Hall of Fame voters even if Halladay doesn’t do anything more in his career.

A number of Hall of Fame starting pitchers failed to win 200 games in their major league careers: Dizzy Dean (150-83; famously hurt his arm while pitching with a broken toe he suffered in the 1937 All Star Game), Addie Joss (160-97; he died two days after his 31st birthday of tubercular meningitis), Lefty Gomez (189-102; pitched on six Yankees’ teams that won the World Series), Dazzy Vance (197-140; established himself as a major league pitcher at age 31), Rube Waddell (193-143; led the AL in Ks six years in a row between 1902 and 1907), Big Ed Walsh (195-126; the last pitcher to win 40 games or throw 450+ innings in a season) and Happy Jack Chesbro (198-132; his 41 wins in 1904 is the most by any pitcher since the mound was moved back to 60 feet six inches in 1893).

What I take from this list is that Johan Santana will need to come back and match Dizzy Dean’s 150 career wins to have  a serious shot at making the Hall of Fame.

Ruth Ann Steinhagen Passes

It was reported today that the woman who famously shot Phillies’ 1Bman Eddie Waitkus on June 14, 1949, inspiring Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel The Natural, which was later turned into the even more well known 1984 movie starring Robert Redford, has died.  Her name was Ruth Ann Steinhagen.

Waitkus had had an eventful life before he met Steinhagen.  His professional baseball career started in 1938 at age 19, when he was nicknamed “the natural” because of his abilities.  He reached the major leagues in 1941 but then lost four years of this career to the Second World, where he saw heavy fighting in the Philippines and was awarded with four Bronze Stars.

Waitkus returned to baseball in 1946 at age 26 and quickly became a star for the Chicago Cubs, being named to the NL All Star team in 1948.  Waitkus was bright, fluent in four languages in addition to English (Lithuanian, German, Polish and French), and outgoing, and he quickly became a media darling in Chicago.

As a result, Waitkus had many female fans, including Steinhagen, who was still a teenager.  She turned her bedroom in her parents’ house into a shrine for Waitkus, sleeping with a photo of Waitkus under her pillow and even setting an empty place at the family dinner table for him.

Obsessive compulsive disorder and stalking were unknown in 1948, and Steinhagen’s family apparently didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, or at least did not seek treatment for Ruth Ann.

What apparently set her over the edge was Waitkus’ trade (along with Hank Borowy, the pitcher whose acquisition from the Yankees in mid-1945 brought the Cubs their last pennant, for pitchers Monk Dubiel and Dutch Leonard) after the 1948 season.  The trade was almost certainly unpopular with Cubs fans, not least of whom was Steinhagen.  Apparently, she somehow blamed Waitkus for deserting her.

When Waitkus returned to Chicago to play for the Phillies against the Cubs in June of 1949, Steinhagen, who was now 19, rented a room in the same hotel and sent a cryptic note to Waitkus inviting him to her room to discuss something important.  He went to her room, possibly expecting a little action from a young Baseball Annie.  Instead, when he came into the room and sat down, she pulled a rifle out of the closet and shot him in the chest.

As he lay bleeding on the floor, she knelt down beside him and held his hand on her lap until someone roused by the gunshot came to her room.  Steinhagen was deemed insane by a court and spent three years in a mental institution.

The bullet just missed Waitkus’ heart, and he nearly died on the operating table before it was successfully removed.  He missed the rest of the 1949 season, but he was nevertheless again selected to the National League All-Star team that year.  By 1950, he had recovered fully physically, and in one of the best seasons of his major league career, he helped lead the Whiz Kids to their famous 1950 pennant.

The shooting was a huge and lurid media sensation of its day, and Waitkus did not contest Steinhagen’s release from the nut house in 1952, perhaps to avoid the media circus another court case would have created.

Waitkus played in the majors until 1955.  However, he suffered post-traumatic stress from the shooting (and quite possibly his long WWII service) which affected his later career and his marriage.  He ultimately died in 1972 at the relatively young age of 53 due to esophageal cancer.

Meanwhile, after release Steinhagen was successfully able to fade into obscurity.  She apparently spent much of later life living with her sister in Chicago only a few miles from where she shot Waitkus and spent as much as 35 years performing office work.  In fact, her decent into obscurity was so complete that she actually died in late December of last year, and her death is only now being reported.

The Greatest Baseball Mascot Ever

The Chicago Cubs are thinking about adding a mascot in order to make the team more “kid-friendly” in connection with the team’s five-year $300 million plan to renovate Wrigley Field.  The Cubbies are currently one of only four major league teams (the others are the Angels, Dodgers and Yankees, according to wikipedia — at least three teams have multiple mascots, not counting costumed idiots who run 7th inning stretch races — the Reds apparently lead the majors with four different mascots) without a mascot.

It’s a crying shame.  Mascots are a blight on the game, at least in the mind of this hard-core baseball fan.  When I shell out the bucks to see a major league baseball game, I come to see the action on the field, not to watch some costumed jack-ass parade around in the stands.  Mascots have always struck me as bush league entertainment which no major league team should dignify.

At least the Giants’ current mascot Lou Seal (some one dressed up in a fluffy seal costume at AT&T Park) largely stays out of the stands and instead rides around in a golf cart on the outfield and foul territory grass firing souvenir T-shirts and the like into the stands using an air cannon during the half innings.  At least a few lucky fans get something out of this silliness.

It could be a lot worse.  I went to a Phillies’ game at the Vet in 1991, and I can’t tell you how irritating I found the Phanatic.  Granted, we had paid for upper deck seats and then in the second or third inning talked our way into the lower deck box seats with a facile lie about how we joining our family but had lost our ticket stubs (we were college age at the time and I still locked like a high school student).  Now that ticket prices are really high, you can’t get away with that stuff anymore.

Even so, once in the lower deck, the Phanatic briefly blocked my view of the game in progress more than once with his “antics.”  Each time, I naturally enough shouted out, “Get the f@#$ out of the way — I’m trying to watch major league baseball!”  Even then I had a rapier-like wit…

It pains me to acknowledge that in three years of this blog, I have never once mentioned the greatest of all major league mascots by a wide margin — the San Francisco Giants’ Crazy Crab.

The Crazy Crab lasted only one season — 1984 — but he was worth his weight in, well, dungeness crab meat.  He would come out during the 7th inning stretch to his theme song, “Love That Crazy Crab” and the fans would go wild.  Everyone in the stadium would boo for the duration of the time that the Crazy Crab was on the field and probably half (including me once I saw others doing it) would try to throw garbage at the Crab or at least onto the field.

You have to understand that in 1984 the Giants were terrible (they finished 66-96, the worst record in MLB), and they played in a horrible stadium (Candlestick Park was one of the first 1960′s era multi-use poured concrete stadia — they hadn’t ironed out the kinks of what was a bad idea to begin with: the fans were miles away from the foul lines in order to make space for football games, and the winds at Candlestick Point which picked up around 3:00 p.m. and continued throughout the night were brutally cold).  After Opening Day that year, only serious baseball fans came out to watch the Giants and their opponents play, and we had little use for the Crazy Crab.

Even so, as someone who turned 16 that summer, I loved the Crazy Crab if only because it was so much fun to hate something that intently.  It was the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to the “Two-Minute Hate” described in George Orwell’s 1984, except that the animosity towards the Crazy Crab was probably more sincere.  I have little doubt that if the 11,000 or so of those of us in attendance had had the opportunity to physically confront the Crazy Crab en masse, we’d have torn the poor SOB inside the crab suit to shreds.

The Giants’ website at the link above says that the Crazy Crab was always intended to be an “anti-mascot.”  I don’t remember it that way.  At first, the Giants’ organization seemed serious about the Crazy Crab as a mascot and only started playing up the Crazy Crab as a joke once the fans responded with utter ridicule.

I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle’s sports pages religiously in those days, and I don’t recall any claim that the Crab was presented as anything but legitimate at the outset.  Again, you have to remember that 1984 was the acme of the initial mascot craze.  The San Diego Chicken was introduced in 1977, was a huge hit, the Phillie Phanatic was introduced in 1978, was a huge hit, and then every team had to have a mascot.  The Giants were one of the last hold-outs, but they had to try something since the product they were putting on the field most seasons in the early 1980′s was poor.

At any rate, the Crazy Crab made the fans completely unruly, and the players on the field started getting into the act.  According to the Giants’ website, the poor SOB inside the crab suit was eventually tackled by a San Diego Padres player and later sued the Giants for an allegedly resulting back injury.  I guess that’s why the team generally keeps Lou Seal inside the golf cart today.

My Heart Bleeds for Mike Trout

With Spring Training still in the early stages, there isn’t much substantive, or at least particularly interesting, news about MLB today.  For example, the second story on both espn.com and sportsillustrated.com is Yankees’ general manager Brian Cashman breaking his leg while sky-diving — he isn’t dead or even mentally incapacitated, so who really cares?

For this reason, I suspect, there has been considerable discussion about the fact that the Angels renewed Mike Trout‘s contract for 2013 for $510,000, only $20,000 above the league minimum, in spite of the phenomenal rookie year Trout had.

Fangraphs’ Dave Cameron wrote an article about the Trout contract and the MLB salary scale in general, which contains some good points, as Cameron’s stuff usually does, but which left me feeling a need to comment.

Cameron says that Trout’s second year contract is the norm under the system in place, as set forth by the collective bargaining agreement (“CBA”) between the players’ union and the owners, and that this system is good for competitive balance because it helps the low revenue teams compete.

Cameron puts this system at the feet of “the union,” which is only half true.  It takes two to bargain a CBA, and inexperienced players’ salaries are low because the owners have fought like hell to keep them low.

In fact, the reason inexperienced players’ salaries are low is because the owners have a strong argument to keep them low: the fact that most major league players need a long minor league apprenticeship before they are ready to play in the majors.

Minor league systems are almost always big money losers for the parent teams, even if a few minor league franchises are profitable (the old Louisville Redbirds spring to mind — the Bats have done well too playing in a smaller stadium).  As such, major teams have successfully argued that teams should be able to keep player salaries low for the first few years to recoup their investments.

Cameron notes that other unionized sports have adopted similar pay scales to MLB.  Well, there are reasons for that.  The Baseball Players’ Association was the first real union in professional sports; as such, its CBAs constituted a starting place for negotiations in other professional sports.

Hockey, like MLB, has an extensive minor league system.  The NBA does not, and salaries for second and third year players are much higher than in baseball.  The NFL has the weakest players’ union, plus the fact that because of all the injuries, many marginal players have short NFL careers — both explain why inexperienced players (with the extremely notable exception of high draft picks) have low salaries in the NFL.

Further, the idea that low early career salaries are “unfair” to rookie stars like Mike Trout doesn’t withstand a lot of scrutiny.  Most of the best and most valuable players have careers long enough to reach arbitration and then free agency, at which point they get paid and then some.  Most of the players who don’t last long enough to reach arbitration or free agency either aren’t that good or get hurt before they reach their full potential.  [Don't suggest Mark Prior, who blew out his arm before he could get the big arbitation/free agent bucks -- he signed a record-setting contract as an amateur draftee out of college.]

There are exceptions, of course, but really not that many when you consider the whole of major league playerdom.  Cameron writes, “I sympathize with players in Trout’s situation. If his career goes the way of Grady Sizemore, he may never land the massive paycheck that his talent is worth.”  This comment only proves the point that Trout will eventually get paid unless he suffers an extremely severe and extremely rare injury.

Despite all the injuries, Grady Sizemore has been paid $26.37 million over the last five seasons, according to baseball reference.  This means that, unless there has been or is in the future some serious profligacy, neither Grady nor his immediate descendants will ever go to bed hungry.

All this being said, the Angels really did renew Mike Trout’s contract for too little.  The Angels apparently didn’t want to disrupt their “salary scale” for young players, which is why they gave Trout only a $20,000 raise.  As if the Angels had a young player like Mike Trout come along every year or three.

What the Angels need to be thinking about is how they are going to keep Trout around when he becomes a free agent five years from now.  If they low-ball Trout now, he’s going to want market rates, which the Angels can well afford to pay and have indeed paid as recently as Albert Pujols and C. J. Wilson.  Or even worse, Trout will want to test the free agent market to see what’s really out there for him.

By way of comparison, the Giants are relatively generous with their franchise players.  After Buster Posey won the 2010 rookie of the year award (and the World Series), the Giants bumped his 2011 salary to $575,000, still well within the pre-arbitration “salary range”, but more than most teams would give a second year player.  The Giants recognized that Posey was worth it and that it would help the team in contract negotiations in later years.

When Posey eventually reaches free agency, he is going to remember that the Giants have always been generous with him.  Don’t think this isn’t important — Posey is from Georgia and played his college ball in North Florida, and there are a lot of wealthy East Coast teams that could pay him top dollar while allowing him to play his home games closer to home region.

Meanwhile, the Angels saved $50,000 or $75,000 they don’t really need.  When Trout, who is a South Jersey boy, approaches free agency, he’s going to be lot more receptive to the kinds of offers the Yankees, Mets and Phillies can make him because the Angels low-balled him today.

It’s no knock on Buster Posey to say that Mike Trout is worth as much or more to the Angels in 2013 than Posey was to the Giants in 2011.  Trout is that young and that good.

The Best and Worst Hitters’ Parks in MLB 2013

Last summer I discovered that espn.com provides stats for what it calls “park factor”, which for purposes of this post means the ratio between the number of runs scored at a ballpark in any given season divided by the number of runs scored by said ballpark’s occupant (and its opponents) in away games that same season.  I wrote a post last June which evaluates each park’s park factor for the five years ending with the 2011 season.

As we approach the 2013 season (and the 2012 stats have long been in), it seems like a good time to update my earlier post incorporating the 2012 season.  Without further ado, here are the average park factors for all major league ballparks over the last six season (or less for the five ball parks that have opened more recently).

1.  Coors Field (Rockies) 1.301

2.  The Ballpark at Arlington (Rangers) 1.148

3.  Chase Field (Diamondbacks) 1.134

4.  Fenway Park (Red Sox) 1.131

5.  U.S. Cellular Field (White Sox) 1.111

6.  Wrigley Field (Cubs) 1.086

7.  Camden Yards (Orioles) 1.080

8.  New Yankee Stadium (2009-2012) 1.066 [Old Yankee Stadium, 2004-2008, 1.002]

9.  Great American Ball Park (Reds) 1.057.

10.  Comerica Park (Tigers) 1.044.

11.  Kauffman Stadium (Royals) 1.018

12.  Rogers Center (Blue Jays) 1.010

12.  Miller Park (Brewers) 1.010

14.  Citizens Bank Ballpark (Phillies) 1.008

15.  Marlins Park (2012) 1.005  [Sun Life Stadium, 2007-2011, 1.038]

16.  Nationals Park (2008-2012) 0.998 [RFK Stadium, 2005-2007, 0.892]

17.  Minute Maid Park (Astros) 0.986

18.  Target Field (Twins, 2010-2012) 0.983 [Mall of America Field (the Metrodome), 2005-2009, 0.966]

19.  Turner Field (Braves) 0.978

20.  Progressive Field (Indians) 0.960

21.  Angels Stadium 0.939

22.  PNC Park (Pirates) 0.936

22.  Busch Stadium (Cardinals) 0.936

24.  Oakland Coliseum (A’s) 0.919

25.  AT&T Park (Giants) 0.917

26.  Dodger Stadium 0.915

27.  Citi Field (Mets, 2009-2012) 0.904 [Shea Stadium, 2004-2008, 0.886]

28.  Tropicana Field (Rays) 0.889

29.  Safeco Field (Mariners) 0.864

30.  Petco Park (Padres) 0.808

The rankings didn’t change much from last year.  Among last year’s ten best hitters’ parks, U.S. Cellular Park, where the White Sox play, was apparently a great place to hit in 2012, moving it up two slots.  New Yankee Stadium was apparently not a great place to hit, moving it down two slots. Coors Field improved on its status as far and away the best hitters’ park in MLB.

The Marlins’ new park, which looked like a great place to hit in late June of last year, turned out to be only a little better than average for the full season — we’ll have to see how it plays over the next few seasons.

The Royals’ Kauffman Stadium moved up two slots, and the Phillies’ Citizens’ Bank Park fell two slots.  The Astros’ Minute Maid Park also fell two slots.  The Twins’ Target Field was a hitters’ park for the first time in its three year history, jumping it up four slots.  The Pirates and Giants and their respective opponents scored a lot more runs on the road in 2012, causing both PNC Park and AT&T Park to drop three slots.

With another year in the books, the Mets’ Citi Field is developing into as much of a pitchers’ park as the old Shea Stadium.  San Diego’s Petco Park remains the worst place to ply one’s trade as a major league hitter, but Seattle’s Safeco Field narrowed the gap considerably.

Dodgers Sign Zack Greinke and Hyun-Jin Ryu

The Dodgers have now reportedly reached agreement with free agent RHP Zack Greinke for six years and $147 million also reached agreement with Korean star LHP Hyun-Jin Ryu for six years and $36 million.

Greinke’s contract amount is almost exactly in line with the recent contract extensions for Matt Cain (five years, $112.5 million) and Cole Hamels (six years, $144 million) and CC Sabathia’s free agent contract four years ago (seven years, $161 million).  Perhaps, Greinke as a free agent could have gotten more, but with the Yankees apparently not in on the bidding, he didn’t break new ground.  Needless to say, Greinke is set for life unless he is incredibly improvident with his finances in the future.

I have to give credit to Scott Boras on Ryu’s reported contract.  Given the amount of the Dodgers’ winning posting bid (a little over $25.7 million), a contract in the range of $26 million to $30 million was almost fore-ordained, based on previous signings of posted players, such as Diasuke Matsuzaka and Yu Darvish.  I personally thought $30 million for five seasons would be about right.

Instead, Boras not only got a sixth year guaranteed for a total contract price of $36 million, he also worked in a player option to void the contract after five seasons in case Ryu turns out to be as good (and stays healthy) as the Dodgers hope he will be.

These “Boras options” are just fantastic for the elite players who receive them.  Sabathia’s allowed him and Boras to turn the seven year $161 million contract into an eight year $191 contract, and Alex Rodriguez’s allowed him and Boras to turn a ten year $252 million contract into a 17 year (!?!) $460 million, when (surprise, surprise) superstars Sabathia and Rodriguez played well through age 31.  That’s an awful lot of compensation for two players who have exactly one World Series ring between them.

I’m a bit surprised the Dodgers didn’t drive a harder bargain once they had already successfully reached agreement with Greinke.  If Ryu had refused to sign for, say, five years and $30 million, the Dodgers would have gotten back every penny of their $25.7 million posting fee from the Hanwa Eagles.

Meanwhile, Ryu’s fall-back options were incredibly meager.  He could return to play for the Hanwa Eagles in 2013 and earned $500,000 or $600,000.  [The top paid player in Korea's KBO makes a little over $700,000, and he has a lot more experience in KBO, not mention playing for years in Japan's NPB.]  Ryu would have to risk hurting his arm playing for relative peanuts, and next off-season he’d be a year older.  In other words, there won’t be any future $25.7 million posting fees for Ryu.

Even if Hanwa were willing to sell Ryu to one of the wealthiest three Japanese NPB teams, the largest contract Ryu would likely receive is roughly two years and $9.5 million, the contract Dae Ho Lee received last off-season as a free agent, and that doesn’t even take into account whatever monies the NPB team would have to pay Hanwa to negotiate with Ryu in the first place.

In other words, Ryu and Boras had no leverage and still got, at a minimum $6 million more than they had a right to expect.  At the end of the day, I suspect Boras is simply smarter than many of the MLB executives with whom he negotiates.  That, and/or Boras is exceptionally good at seeing the future trends in MLB.

Ned Colletti could have put the facts set forth two and three paragraphs above to Boras and said five years and $30 million or six years and $36 million “take it or leave it.”  Ryu (but not Boras) would have been a fool to leave it.

However, what we know now, after the Greinke and Ryu signings, is that the Dodgers under their new ownership intend to be the next George Steinbrenner (Steinbrenners still own the Yankees, but they’re not George) of MLB.  The Dodgers’ new ownership realizes that playing in the second biggest market in MLB, they need to start winning to maximize their revenue and maximize the team’s value.

The Dodgers haven’t won or even been to the World Series since 1988.  That’s simply too long for a team with the potential revenue streams of the Los Angeles Dodgers.  Current Dodger ownership apparently realizes they need to get back to the post-season fast, they need to stay there, and no matter how much money they spend of free agents, foreign players and trades (the Red Sox massive salary dump/Dodgers’ massive salary assumption), it’s likely to be less than the increase in revenue if the Dodgers start winning again.

As a final note, there are going to be some bargains available on at least two of Ted Lilly, Chris Capuano and Aaron Harang.  The Dodgers have too many starters under contract now, and, as a result, they don’t have a lot of leverage.  The one I’d want, taking salaries into account, is Chris Capuano.