A lot’s been written about the recent fracas between Jonathan Papelbon and Bryce Harper, which ended with Papelbon grabbing Harper’s neck and getting suspended for the rest of the season. I don’t have much to add, but did want to post links to a couple of articles that add some perspective:
- “Harper leads the Nationals in extra-base taken rate at 57.1 percent and is tied for 16th in the majors, minimum 400 plate appearances, according to baseball-reference.com and research by MLB Network’s Marc Adelberg. In other words, any talk about Harper’s lack of hustle is misplaced; no player on his team takes extra bases at a higher rate.” What you need to know about Bryce Harper’s baserunning by Ken Rosenthal, Just a Bit Outside – FoxSports.com.
- “It’s a four-step process: outcome, disgust, realization that they need to make a token effort, token effort. Some players do it more than others and Harper’s disgust lasts two beats longer than normal… So that’s the unwritten rule, then. Start jogging earlier. Don’t stand for a second and then jog. Make that token effort immediately. If that distinction seems silly to you, that’s because it is… That’s the secret, though: This isn’t about jogging to first. It’s about Bryce Harper being better at baseball than everyone else. It’s about Harper being talented from the very beginning of the play.” The unwritten rules of Jonathan Papelbon attacking Bryce Harper for not hustling by Grant Brisbee, SB Nation.
Regarding Papelbon, I never liked him before the trade and was worried about the attitude that he might bring to the Nationals, but initially I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. The last week has worn out my patience, and he’s now one of the few players in Nats’ history that I simply can’t root for. (I think the last player in that category may have been Elijah Dukes.) I’m now hoping that the Nats trade him this winter, though I have to admit that if both Papelbon and Drew Storen are traded, as they probably should be, the bullpen will need a major rebuild. We’ll talk about that more after the season.
Also, I think this incident seals Matt Williams’ fate—I now think he’ll almost certainly be fired, and should be.
Over the last month as the Nats have collapsed, there have been repeated calls for Matt Williams to be fired. The staff of the Washington Post has come to his defense, with Tom Boswell arguing (albeit tepidly) that you can’t prove that Williams is a lousy manager, with Barry Svrluga arguing that Williams could improve if he followed Ned Yost’s example, and with Chelsea Janes reporting that Bryce Harper loves Williams as a manager.
How do we evaluate a manager? And how does Williams measure up?
I see five major areas in which we can try to evaluate managers:
1. In-game strategy: Does he follow strategies that have been demonstrated to lead to a higher probability of success?
We’re talking about questions that can be answered using probability and statistics such as the following:
- Should Anthony Rendon be asked to bunt in the bottom of the ninth with the Nats trailing by one, a runner on first, no outs, and a 3–1 count?
- Should the closer be asked to pitch in tie games on road?
- In a close game, should you let the pitcher bat if you’re likely to lift him in the next inning at the first sign of trouble?
- Should you ask Michael A. Taylor to hit in the leadoff spot in 28 starts?
Using research such as Inside the Book, we can work out the best strategies and determine how making suboptimal choices affects the probability of winning. Fans who are sabermetrically oriented (sometimes including myself) love to criticize managers for making poor decisions. Certainly, we’d hope that managers would understand probabilities and strategies well enough to avoid common mistakes, though unfortunately this is not the case for most managers. Williams has come in for more than his share of criticism for his in-game decisions.
The problem with this line of analysis is that once you plug in the numbers, you find that managers’ in-game decisions simply don’t make that much difference. For example, with his .284 on-base percentage, Taylor is a terrible choice as a lead-off hitter. But if you plug in the numbers, batting Taylor lead-off instead of seventh or eighth lowers the team’s probability of winning a game by just a fraction of one percent. Even the most egregious errors affect the probability of winning by perhaps 5, or at most, 10 percent. If you tried adding up the impact on wins of all of Williams’ strategic mistakes, I’d guess that they turn out to be less than one game. And most managers make at least some similar errors, so relative to the average manager, there’s really not going to be much to go on. You could easily argue that a manager’s other good attributes outweigh the occasional strategic blunder.
2. Decisions about playing time: Do his line-up decisions give the team its best chance to win?
Here, I think we’re getting choices that potentially have a bigger impact on the team’s success or failure. For example, we’re talking about these kind of questions:
- Should Drew Storen have been asked to come in to face Yoenis Cespedes again the night after his meltdown began with a double given up to Cespedes?
- Should Casey Janssen have been asked to pitch the bottom of the ninth of a tie game against the Cardinals the night after he gave up 4 runs on 4 hits and a walk against the same team?
- Was Max Scherzer overused in June and July when he went 8+ innings 5 times in 6 starts?
- Was Storen overused in August before the game in which he gave up a grand slam to Carlos Gonzalez?
- When Jayson Werth and Rendon came off the DL, were they rushed back into the lineup too quickly, leading to slumps?
- Should Ryan Zimmerman have been given more rest while he was battling with plantar fasciitis?
These are important decisions. Getting them wrong could easily cost the team several losses. A problem in evaluating a manager on these decisions, however, is that we can’t really know what would have happened had a different decision been made. The questions I’ve selected indicate some of the decisions that I think Williams may have gotten wrong, but there’s really no way to prove that things would have gone better with a different decision.
3. Communicating with players: Do players understand what their role is and what’s expected of them?
Now we’re getting into the gray area where I, and most fans, have only a vague idea of what’s going on between a manager and his players. I’m convinced, however, that communicating with players is one of the key skills for a successful manager.
Although I admit I don’t know much about Williams’ communications skills, I do notice a couple of troubling signals. For example, when Tanner Roark was sent down to Potomac in late August to be stretched out as a starter, he reported, “I was kinda shocked by it.” That reaction suggests that Williams and Mike Rizzo weren’t communicating their plans and expectations for Roark. Similarly, Storen apparently wasn’t prepared for the Jonathan Papelbon trade.
So while I’ll admit I don’t know much about Williams’ communication style with his players, I do worry somewhat about it.
4. Communicating with the media and fans: How well does he serve in his role as spokesman for the team?
Although managers aren’t hired or fired for their ability to communicate with the media or the fans, the fact of the matter is that the manager is usually the most visible spokesman for the team. Williams speaks to the media in both pre-game and post-game interviews and does other events such as a weekly radio interview. These interviews won’t win or lose games, but they presumably help the team in establishing and building up its fan base.
I judge Williams to be merely adequate in communicating with media and fans. He comes across as honest and straight-forward, but he also comes across as rigid and humorless, especially in comparison with his immediate predecessor, Davey Johnson. When the National media started picking on Williams last month, he seemed to provide them with an ample supply of seemingly rigid, thoughtless quotes that could be ridiculed.
Again, I wouldn’t fire a manager solely, or even mainly, because of lack of communication skills with fans, but I don’t think Williams is helping his case in this department.
5. Everything else: How is he as a clubhouse leader, manager of coaching staff, supervisor of batting and fielding practices, enforcer of player discipline, etc?
Here’s the big unknown for us as fans—all this other stuff is obviously extremely important to the team’s success, but unless you have a close friend who’s a player or coach, most of us have no insight into what a manager is like in these areas.
Ultimately, I think the decision whether to fire a manager is usually made by the owner, rather than by the general manager. Although owners know more about the internal working of a team than the average fan, the fact is that they are somewhat outsiders—they rely on their general manager or other team executives for most of their information. And because GMs are not disinterested parties, I’d guess that most owners feel like they can’t have complete trust in what their GMs or other executives tell them.
With imperfect information on managerial performance, I think owners make the same decision that stockholders and investors make—if the team/enterprise succeeds, the manager is rewarded and kept, but if it fails or disappoints, the manager will be fired. At least that strategy enforces incentives on the manager—he knows that if he doesn’t get his team to succeed, he risks losing his job. Although Boswell is right that we can’t prove that Williams is a bad manager, I also agree with the general wisdom that managers of disappointing teams should expect to be fired. Because we can’t directly measure the impact of a manager, judging them based on the performance of the team is the best we can do.
After game 3 of the Mets series, my opinions are the same as those of Harper at Nationals Baseball: “Fire Matt Williams,“ and “Today, for me, the season is over.”
But I’ll also add a third thought—let’s trade Drew Storen right now.
I should say that I like Storen. He’s always seemed to me to be a smart guy who enjoys his bullpen role and wants to be an excellent closer. He’s got good stuff, and when things a clicking well (as they were during the first half of this season) he can be one of the better relievers in baseball. But the last five weeks have just been brutal, and combined with his earlier mishaps in the 2012 and 2014 playoffs and the bitterness over the Jonathan Papelbon trade, I just can’t see him returning to Washington next year for his final season before free agency. I think there’s at least a 90% chance the team will trade him. There are simply too many fans who don’t want to see him pitching here next year.
So if we’re going to trade him anyway, why not do it right now? September trades are rare, for the simple reason that teams can’t use any player acquired after the end of August in the post-season. But teams are still permitted to make trades in September, and I’ll argue that trading him right now would be the best move, both for the Nationals and for Storen.
Who would want Storen? I think we can rule out the National League—the five playoff teams are pretty much set, so none of them are going to trade a prospect for a relief pitcher that they can’t use in the post-season.
The American League, however, is a different story. There are still tight races in two divisions—with the Blue Jays and Yankees contending in the East and the Astros and Rangers in the West. For the wild card race we can add two more teams that still have a shot, the Twins and the Angels. So there are six teams contesting for four playoff slots (with the Royals a sure thing for the fifth slot). Furthermore, only one of those six teams, the Yankees, has a good bullpen. For the other five teams, Storen could be a big help for shoring up their bullpen for the last three weeks of the season, and there are few other relievers still available. So if Mike Rizzo decides to shop Storen around, he should find some potential buyers.
I think this actually may be the time when Storen’s value will be the highest. His salary, at $5.7 million this year, is already getting up there, and next year, in his final year of arbitration, he’ll be due another increase. At those prices, teams this winter will find his salary cost to be similar to good free agent relievers, so I don’t expect them to be willing to give up a good prospect for a reliever with his salary. But by dealing him now and adding the value he could bring over the next three weeks in a tight pennant race, a contending team could be induced to part with a decent prospect. If we’re going to trade him this winter anyway, I think we get the best deal by shopping him right away.
It would also be best for Storen. Starting fresh with a new team in a new league is his best shot at getting past whatever psychological impediments have been hampering him with the Nationals. If he stays in Washington, he’s going to be booed at home games for the rest of this season. And although he won’t regain his closer role immediately with a new team, if things work out well perhaps a new team will consider moving him to the closer role next season. With the Nats committed to Papelbon, there’s very little chance of him returning to closing while in Washington.
So, Rizzo, get on the phone and let’s make a deal.
Tonight’s disastrous game in which the Nats gave up a 7 to 1 lead in the seventh inning to lose 8 to 7 was their worst collective meltdown in a must-win game since Game 5 of the 2012 NLDS, when they also blew a 6-run lead. At the center of it, as he was in Game 5, was Drew Storen, showing his all-too-familiar deer-in-the-headlights expression as he let a 4-run lead slip to 1-run on a Cespedes double, followed by a walk, a wild pitch, and then two more walks to score the tying run. Then Jonathan Papelbon, called on to pitch two innings with the score tied, surrendered an 8th-inning home run to pinch hitter Nieuwenhuis, giving the Mets their margin of victory.
Before I finish talking about the bullpen, though, I’d also like to point my finger at the other complicitous parties in this fiasco—Mike Rizzo and Matt Williams.
Rizzo shares the blame because it’s been obvious since before the season began that the bullpen would be a weakness—indeed, perhaps the team’s most critical weakness—yet he’s done very little to address that weakness. The loss of Rafael Soriano to free agency, of Tyler Clippard and Jerry Blevins to trades, and of Craig Stammen to injury left a bullpen that had only been mediocre in 2014 severely decimated. The attempt to patch it with Casey Janssen, Blake Treinen, Tanner Roark, and Felipe Rivero was less than successful. At the trade deadline, he failed to bring back Clippard, instead letting him go to the rival Mets, and his acquisition of Papelbon might have undermined the previously successful Storen. More ambitious possible acquisitions, such as Chapman or Kimbrel, were not pursued.
Regarding Williams, all I can say is that an overwhelming sense of dread came over me when, after Storen had given up his first walk, F.P. Santangelo noted that this inning was up to Storen. No one was warming up in the Nats bullpen. Why not?!! With September call-ups, the bullpen was filled with fresh arms. After that first walk, Storen was missing the zone wildly and wasn’t getting any of his pitches where he wanted them. In a critical one-run game, you can’t let him walk two men to load the bases—the second walk on five pitches, which included a wild pitch—and then ask him to face another batter. Bring in someone else—A.J. Cole or Doug Fister or Matt Grace or Rafael Martin or Sammy Solis—somebody who will throw strikes. Storen walked in the tying run on four stinking pitches, none of them close.
Although the Nats’ bullpen hasn’t been good in recent seasons, it’s always been a pen that could be counted on to throw strikes and not give up walks. In 2013 the Nats’ bullpen had the third-best walk rate in the NL, in 2014 the second best, and in the first half of 2015 they again had the second-best walk rate in the league. So it was disconcerting to see that in tonight’s disastrous 7th inning, the six runs scored on only three hits, but six walks! The first pitch to 10 of the 12 Mets batters was a ball, and six of them got ahead 2–0, while four got ahead 3–0. It’s just really hard to pitch well if you’re never ahead in the count. I don’t know exactly what went wrong, but Treinen, Rivero, and Storen seemed to all have a collective case of bad nerves that was making them miss their locations.
The Nats are now in a really deep hole, and if they are swept tomorrow, their post-season hopes will effectively be extinguished.
For the last two weeks, I’ve posted estimates of how many games the Nats will need to win the rest of the way in order to beat the Mets.
This week, the teams are playing first of two head-to-head series which will have a significant impact on the outcome. So this time, I’ve decided to tweak my calculations to show how the team’s performance in these head-to-head match ups will affect the performance needed in their non-head-to-head games.
My starting point, as it was in my earlier two posts, is to make my calculations conditional on the Mets doing as well as expected in their remaining games. I’m looking at two statistics sites, Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus. Fortunately, they agree almost exactly on the Mets expected performance (though Fangraphs is more optimistic than BP about the Nats). Both sites expect the Mets to win on average (based on repeated simulations) about 89.5 games.
This time I’m going to split out the non-head-to-head games. Both teams (as of Saturday September 5th) have 28 games left to play. With 6 head-to-head games, that leaves 22 non-head-to-head games. The reasonable assumption is that these simulations are assuming that the Nats and Mets split their 6 head-to-head games, which means that they expect the Mets to win 12.5 of their remaining 22 non-head-to-head games.
So, rounding up and assuming that the Mets go 13–9 in their remaining non-head-to-head games, I calculate the following based on how the Nats do in the head-to-head match ups:
- If they split the head-to-head 3 games each, then the Nats would need to go 19–3 in their remaining non-head-to-head games. That’s pretty unlikely, so the Nats need to do better than split the head-to-head. (The other possible way to win would be if the Mets collapsed and did much more poorly than expected, but given their easy schedule, that’s a slim hope.)
- If the Nats win 4 of 6 in the head-to-head games, then they would need to go 17–5 in non-head-to-head games to beat the Mets. That’s still tough, but certainly more plausible than going 19–3. Winning 4 of the head-to-head match ups seems like the minimum acceptable goal for the Nats.
- If the Nats win 5 of 6, then they would need to go 15–7 in their non-head-to-head games. That’s roughly equivalent to winning two-thirds of their remaining games, and with a relatively easy schedule, that seems feasible.
- If the Nats sweep all 6 head-to-head games, then they’d need to go 13–9 in their non-head-to-head games. Sweeping the head-to-head games would clearly be the best route to try to guarantee a division championship.
So we see how critical this week’s series against the Mets will be. If the Nats fail to win at least two, they will find themselves on the periphery of the race, with little chance of contending. If they go 2–1, they’ll stay in the race, but still at fairly long odds. If they manage to sweet the series, they’ll vault directly into a tight race for the division championship. They need to go for the sweep!
In the Washington Post’s “Fancy Stats” column, Neil Greenberg wrote, “the Nats find themselves 6 1/2 games behind the Mets… taking [Bryce] Harper out of the MVP conversation.” He then analyzed several other candidates (basing his analysis on FanGraphs’ wins above replacement) and concluded that Clayton Kershaw, last year’s NL MVP, was the most viable candidate.
Now, ordinarily I try to avoid paying attention to the MVP and other awards until the last couple of weeks of the season. With 20% of the season remaining, it’s likely that some of the candidates will go into a slump or that other players will experience hot streaks and emerge as viable candidates. But in this case, Greenberg’s analysis was just so faulty that I’m going to break my own rule and write about the MVP race, based on the current statistics.
Greenberg’s biggest mistake was to place too much emphasis on the tendency of voters to avoid voting for players on non-playoff teams while ignoring their tendency to avoid voting for pitchers. While Greenberg noted that only 6 of 41 MVPs since 1994 have come from non-playoff teams,* he failed to mention that only 2 have been pitchers (Kershaw and Verlander).
*(Note: he should have said 6 of 40 MVPs since 1995, since no playoffs were held in 1994. The 6 from non-playoff teams were Walker 1997, Bonds 2001 and 2004, ARod 2003, Howard 2006, and Pujols 2008.)
He also used the version of fWAR that is based on fielding independent pitching (FIP), whereas actual voters tend to pay more attention to ERA. If he’d used the version of WAR based on runs allowed, Zack Greinke would be well ahead of Kershaw.
Here’s a link to the FanGraphs chart showing the leaders based on a 50/50 weighting of FIP and runs allowed. Right now (August 29), the leaders are:
- Bryce Harper 7.5
- Zack Greinke 6.6
- Paul Goldschmidt 6.2
- Clayton Kershaw 6.2
- Joey Votto 5.9
- A.J. Pollock 5.5
- Andrew McCutchen 5.3
- Jake Arrieta 5.3
- Anthony Rizzo 4.8
- Buster Posey 4.8
In a recent article, Joe Posnanski made an interesting observation about WAR statistics and the MVP contest. He noted that since WAR statistics have been widely available (roughly the last 7 years), the leaders in WAR haven’t been any more likely to win the MVP than they were in the past. They’ve always won about half the MVP awards. What’s changed, according Posnanski, is that the availability of WAR has driven out the quirky winners, who somehow built an MVP argument despite not playing that well overall. He notes that “Since 2008, which is just about when WAR and similar complex statistics started to become mainstream, every single MVP has finished Top 5 in WAR.”
In other words, before WAR became available someone like Kendrys Morales might have made his way into the MVP discussion because of his RBIs (89, currently 3rd in the AL) while playing for a division-leading team, even though his WAR (1.6) and other statistics (.287/.355/.464) are not MVP quality. Posnanski observes that the availability of WAR has driven those types of candidates out of the discussion. Consequently, I’m going to limit my discussion of the NL race to the 10 players listed above.
Based on their current statistics, several players can easily be excluded. Goldschmidt and Votto don’t play for playoff-bound teams and their batting statistics are clearly comparable—and inferior—to Harper’s. It would be really hard to vote for either of them ahead of Bryce. Similarly, Pollock also plays for a non-playoff team and his case is too closely tied to advanced fielding statistics, about which many voters remain skeptical.
Three pitchers—Greinke, Kershaw, and Arrieta—have a case. I note, however, that the only two pitchers who have won the MVP in the last 20 years have each dominated their league, so having three viable pitching candidates probably works against them all. I’ll also note that the “Tango Tiger Cy Young Points,” which are tracked on baseballmusings.com, are a better guide than WAR to voters’ evaluation of pitchers. In addition to runs allowed, strikeouts, and walks, the formula includes factors like wins, losses, and shutouts, which are not included in either of the FanGraphs pitching WAR formulas. Greinke has a lead over the other two pitchers in Cy Young Points and will probably also receive some MVP support, though I doubt it will be enough to overcome the bias against giving the MVP to a pitcher.
McCutchen and Rizzo will also get some support, and if the Giants manage to make the playoffs, I can see Posey drawing quite a bit of support. But at this point, basically none of the playoff-bound candidates appear to have an especially compelling case.
Turning to Bryce, while the Nats’ poor performance definitely hurts his case, I still think he’s a pretty strong MVP candidate. He fits the profile of past non-playoff bound MVP winners—great hitters who are pretty clearly the best hitter in the league. In the absence of a compelling rival, I’d still consider him at this point to be the leader in the MVP race. He won’t get unanimous support—some voters simply refuse to vote for a player on a non-playoff bound team—but if the vote were held today, I tend to think he’s the likely winner. Of course, there’s a lot of baseball left to play over the next 5 weeks, so we’ll take another look at the race later.
Last week I provided some calculations on how many games the Nats need to win to beat the Mets. Since that post went up, the Nats have done pretty well, winning the last 2 games against the Diamondbacks and taking 2 of 3 against the Padres, before falling to the Marlins last night. Going 4–2 is close to the 29–12 pace that I suggested that they would need.
The problem is that the Mets did even better, going 6–1, so the Nats fell 1.5 games further behind, making it even harder for them to catch up. As I said, my calculations were based on the Mets doing as expected, and if they stay super-hot it will basically be impossible for the Nats to catch up.
So let’s suppose the Mets revert to “expected” performance. Both FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus now expect the Mets to end the season with 90 wins. For the Nats to win 91, they would now need to go 27–8 the rest of the way. While not impossible, it’s clearly improbable. What that means is that in addition to needing to play exceptionally well, the Nats now need to count on a Mets collapse.
The Nats could help the Mets collapse, of course, if can sweep the 6 remaining head-to-head games (or at least take 5 of them). Collapses are actually not that uncommon – at least 28 teams have failed to make the playoffs after having odds of 90% or better. (That list includes both the 2007 and 2008 Mets!)
So the Nats shouldn’t be written off yet, but to come back they really need to continue to step up their performance (especially the starting pitching) and they need to start getting luckier in their timing and in close games. (Since the most recent Mets series began on July 31, the Nats have gone 1–5 in one run games.)
Nats Noodles 