Tom Scoccatag:www.tomscocca.com,2008-02-01://12010-06-18T18:38:04ZMovable Type Personal 4.1Markakis Defends Terry Crowley, Makes Case for Firing Terry Crowleytag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1952010-06-18T18:11:27Z2010-06-18T18:38:04ZTom
an interview grappling with the question of how a club that looked solidly mediocre and due for improvement on paper has become the worst team of 2010 and potentially the worst team of modern times:
"You need guys in there who have a plan, who have a clue and who know how to execute that plan and get on base. We don't need every guy in this lineup trying to hit home runs. We're paid to get on base and figure out how to score and drive in runs. You look at the Yankees. They have guys who can hit home runs, but everybody in that lineup can get on base."
Markakis said the team's offensive woes shouldn't be attributed to longtime hitting coach Terry Crowley, who is known for advocating an aggressive approach at the plate.
Crowley "has 110 percent nothing to do with the way we are going about our business at the plate or on the field right now," Markakis said. "You can have anybody come here, and you still are going to have a couple of guys who are not going to change their approach and fix it. It's worthless. You can point your fingers here and there, but it is what it is. You're in the big leagues. You have to change your approach on your own. This is the best of the best, and if you go up there clueless, you're going to come back [to the dugout] clueless. It's that simple.
This is nice and diplomatic, but the Orioles are a stain on baseball, and Markakis' defense of the hitting coach makes no sense. Bless Terry Crowley for his years of service to the club as a player and coach, but he needs to have been fired weeks ago. The team is full of players, and especially young players, who are doing everything wrong at the plate, and are getting worse.
Yes, the players are at fault. But if Terry Crowley is not also at fault, then what is Terry Crowley's job, as hitting coach?
The Orioles are awful hitters. No one wants a baseball team to hit the way the Orioles hit. Suppose Markakis is right, and Crowley "has nothing to do with the way we are going about our business at the plate." That would mean Crowley is completely useless. ]]>
Not Good Enough: The Dave Trembley Eratag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1942010-06-05T03:55:00Z2010-06-05T04:10:00ZTom
It was not Dave Trembley's fault that the Orioles are a lousy team this year. They are a lousy team because they have a lousy collection of players. A little over a week ago, this finally sank in, when they fielded the following lineup:
Corey Patterson, LF, .267
Julio Lugo, 2B, .229
Ty Wigginton, 1B, .281
Miguel Tejada, 3B, .260
Matt Wieters, C, .261
Adam Jones, CF, .259
Garrett Atkins, DH, .220
Lou Montanez, RF, .146
Cesar Izturis, SS, .226
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Five players in that lineup ended the night with on-base percentages below .300. Three players had slugging percentages below .250. (The designated hitter was slugging .305.)
Because baseball is a funny game, the Orioles actually scored 5 runs that night. But the pitchers coughed up 5 runs in the eighth inning, and they lost 7 to 5.
So it is true that Dave Trembley never got any real talent to work with. He took a beating with teams that were supposed to be terrible, after the front office had cleared things away for a long-term rebuilding process. Then, this year, he took a beating with a team that was supposed to have been improved, but wasn't. The winning percentage says he was the second-worst manager in Orioles history, which is almost certainly unfair--not next to guys like Phil Regan and Ray Miller, who butchered potentially decent teams.
What he was was a good company man for a bad company. The Orioles are three years into what they are pretending is an investment cycle, another one, in which they have been trading "present-day value" for "future value." Case by case, this is a reasonable thing to do. I was appalled when the Orioles got rid of Erik Bedard, but they knew more about his shoulder than the Mariners or I did, and they got multiple players back for him. Then they flipped George Sherrill, the overrated three-out closer they got in the deal, for even more players. The franchise is stronger for that.
The difference between baseball talent and investment assets, though, is that baseball talent gets cashed in, whether you want it or not, 162 times a year. The games count. The Orioles lost 99 games in 2009, games that were every bit as real as the games they will play in 2011, when they were hoping the young players would be all grown up and ready to play. They were losers.
It would have been possible to have made a better team last season, with no harm done to the future. Old pitchers like Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez were sitting around, waiting to be signed to short-term, moderate-priced deals. They would not have blocked any of the budding pitching talent from reaching the majors in 2011 or 2012. Front-office boss Andy MacPhail decided to build a rotation out of junk-heap pitchers instead, inviting a few dozen failures to spring training in the hopes that enough of them might turn into successes. They all stayed failures, leaving the Orioles with the worst pitching staff in baseball.
This past offseason, MacPhail seemed to be doing something a little different. He picked up Kevin Millwood and Miguel Tejada--adequate veterans to fill gaping holes, the kind of additions that should be a baseball executive's minimum professional responsibility. I almost began to suspect MacPhail had tanked 2009 on purpose, so that by adding a few practical pieces, he would get a bounce in the standings in 2010, whether the young talent was truly improving or not. (Signing a player as obviously broken-down and useless as Garrett Atkins, on the other hand, suggested MacPhail might simply have an honest addiction to investing in penny stocks.) The team was so sure things would be better, it introduced a surcharge on day-of-game tickets, to squeeze extra money out of fans who might notice the sudden success and make an impulse trip to the ballpark.
Then Brian Roberts got hurt. This is where the future-value model of baseball goes most wrong. All the while the Orioles organization was trudging toward some distant promised tomorrow, Roberts was out on the field playing baseball, in the here and now. He hit 50 doubles, 54, 56--all in seasons that management treated as write-offs. By the time the Orioles had rounded up a catcher, an outfield, and corner infielders to keep Roberts company, the wear and tear had caught up with him. Now the games were supposed to be for real, and he couldn't go.
Everything counts, all the time. The job the Orioles originally gave Dave Trembley to do--keep one end of the dugout bench warm, and watch a team built to lose go through the motions--was an insult to baseball. And Trembley was not good enough to make up for it.
That is, Dave Trembley's Orioles couldn't help but look like they were going through the motions. They were sloppy. They were unfocused. They tailed off into losing spells that lasted for weeks.
If you dug into more esoteric numbers than wins and losses, looking for a sign that your eyes were fooling you, nothing good ever turned up. The Orioles were bad at preventing unearned runs. They were bad at turning their own hits into runs, bad at getting from first to third, bad at keeping the other team from taking the extra base--bad at every little thing that might have made a difference in a game.
Did that make Trembley a bad baseball manager? Heaven only knows. He might be fundamentally a decent manager. Maybe he's a bad one. Maybe he's mediocre. The only thing he was able to prove was that he was not a great one.
A great manager, at some point, would have wrung a pleasant surprise or two out of his roster. At no time did Trembley's Orioles overachieve, or show any hint of being more than the sum of their parts. He did not noticeably hide anyone's weaknesses or showcase anyone's special strengths; he showed no knack for getting his hot-and-cold-running hitters into the lineup for their hot spells or out of it for their cold ones. He did not stymie other teams' rallies with a cleverly chosen pitching change. Given bad players, he got bad results.
With him gone, at least, the bad players are the front office's direct responsibility. Dave Trembley was probably not the problem, but he wasn't a solution, either. Finding a solution is Andy MacPhail's job. ]]>
Three Statements From a Not-Quite-Three-Year-Oldtag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1932010-05-25T13:55:42Z2010-05-25T14:08:31ZTom
2. "Woodpeckers don't peck on the Dongzhimen. Because woodpeckers peck on wood."
3. "When I was little, I ate a glass table in Silver Spring."
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Blogging About Blogging: The "Scocca" Blogtag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1922010-05-22T01:15:28Z2010-05-22T01:39:32ZTom
another Web log. This new one is called "Scocca," and it is published by Slate. It will be a more professional version of this, meaning probably not as many child pictures or rants about marginal roster moves by the Orioles. Meaning probably more of those here!
Now here is a picture of some pretty flowers.]]>
The First Twenty-One Names on the Orioles Roster, as Typed by a Small Child tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1912010-05-16T03:35:22Z2010-05-16T04:04:18ZTom
BRION ROBERTS
[* Matt Wieters switched from jersey No. 15 to 32--so, logically the old No. 32 must have switched to 15.]]]>
Jing-Jin Intercity Railway, May 8tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1902010-05-16T03:18:04Z2010-05-16T03:32:43ZTom
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Maybe Corey Patterson Is Awesometag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1892010-05-14T01:02:18Z2010-05-14T01:16:54ZTom
look dumb about Corey Patterson and be happy than look smart and stay mad:
The victory wasn't assured until Patterson unleashed a throw from left field that nailed Josh Wilson at the plate for the final out. Wilson tried to score from second on Ichiro Suzuki's single.
Patterson, who also homered, was in the midst of a postgame television interview when he received a shaving cream pie to the face from teammate Will Ohman.
Nice touch that the pie was flung by Will Ohman, who has given up 8 hits and 7 walks in 11 innings, with an ERA of 0.00. Does Corey Patterson win games? Corey Patterson just won this one. Welcome back to the majors, Corey Patterson!
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Orioles Demote Struggling Reimold, Replace Him With Outright Failuretag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1882010-05-13T04:06:41Z2010-05-13T08:36:45ZTom
Another answer is that they demoted Nolan Reimold to Triple-A, brought up Corey Patterson, and installed Patterson in the leadoff spot:
Signed as a minor league free agent on April 21, Patterson was batting .368 in 14 games with the Tides.
He was immediately placed at the top of the lineup in Wednesday's game against the Seattle Mariners. With Roberts out, the Orioles tried Adam Jones and Julio Lugo at the leadoff spot and experienced little success.
[...]
Replacing Reimold, who was batting .205, with Patterson served as an indication that Baltimore wasn't going to stand pat while owning the worst record in baseball.
"I hope it is a twofold purpose here," manager Dave Trembley said. "We need to get somebody that can spark our offense. I am not putting it all on Corey, but he has been a leadoff guy in the past. He was playing very well at Triple-A. Nolan wasn't playing well here. It's unfortunate that these things happen, but they do happen."
Now, Nolan Reimold has not played particularly well. He is coming back from Achilles tendon surgery, and it may help him if he goes to recuperate somewhere other than in the major-league lineup. "Trembley said it was obvious that Reimold had lost his confidence, both at the plate and in the field," the news story reports.
Funny thing, confidence. Reimold may look uncomfortable at the plate, but 1 out of 9 times he steps up to hit, he draws a walk: 11 walks in 96 plate appearances this year. Actually, the rate works out to a walk every 8.7 plate appearances--exactly as often as Reimold walked last year, when he was a Rookie of the Year candidate.
That walk rate means that Reimold has a .302 on-base percentage. And that is to say, this year, hobbled by surgical aftereffects and batting without confidence, Nolan Reimold was so awful, his on-base percentage through 29 games was TWELVE POINTS HIGHER THAN COREY PATTERSON'S CAREER ON-BASE PERCENTAGE.
Uh-oh. Am I shouting? Corey Patterson, in 10 years in the majors, has reached base 29 percent of the time. And Dave Trembley is hoping that will solve the problem of the leadoff slot. Patterson will "spark the offense," except for the 71 percent of the time he will turn around and go sit back down on the bench, because he made an out, because Corey Patterson is the exact opposite of what a baseball team needs from its leadoff hitter.
Some of the things that have made the Orioles the worst team in the majors are genuine baseball mysteries. How can a starting pitcher be as good as Kevin Millwood has been without ever winning a game? How and why, in the course of 12 months, has Adam Jones deteriorated from the next Eric Davis to the next Jeffrey Hammonds to his current condition, in which he looks a lot like the next Corey Patterson?
But other parts of this season's debacle are easy to explain. The Orioles have decent pitching, but can't score runs. To fix this, they are going to put Corey Patterson at the top of the batting order. This is the kind of decision that the people who make decisions for the Orioles make, when they make decisions. Other teams make other kinds of decisions. ]]>
Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area, May 7tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1872010-05-08T09:04:24Z2010-05-08T09:08:51ZTom]]>
Jing-Jin Expressway, May 7tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1852010-05-08T08:52:14Z2010-05-08T09:03:12ZTom
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Outer Chongwenmen Ave., May 6tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1842010-05-08T08:47:19Z2010-05-08T08:52:02ZTom]]>
Outer Dongzhimen, May 5tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1832010-05-08T08:32:25Z2010-05-08T08:47:04ZTom
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The Beijing Skyline: A Brief Survey of Recent Architectural Historytag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1822010-05-05T13:27:07Z2010-05-05T13:31:28ZTom]]>
Dongzhimen, May 5tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1812010-05-05T10:30:40Z2010-05-05T13:14:32ZTom]]>
Dongzhimen, May 4tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1802010-05-05T10:23:14Z2010-05-05T10:30:25ZTom]]>
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