When It’s Time For a Change

One of the concepts that I’ve been thinking about more recently is defense.

The ugly stepchild of sabermetrics family tree, defense has never liked to do out on the family outings with pitching and hitting or take part in board game night. We’ve never really been able to relate.

But with the stats available, so far the Giants are not faring well.

The team is currently 17 plays below average in the Hardball Times plus/minus ratings, good for second-worst in the National league (good lord, the Pirates are bad, at -30). That’s 17 extra outs for Giants’  pitchers.

Part of the problem is that the Giants infield has only made 61 out of zone plays, compared with a league average of 75. I still have a lot to learn about defensive metrics (one of the reasons I’m writing this) but that seems to suggest that the Giants are missing some infield range as players aren’t able to go much further than the area designated to them.

Indeed, Giants infielders rank very low in RZR, the percentage of balls in their zone turned into outs. Ray Durham and Eugenio Velez each have the lowest ratings for their inning levels (186 and 287 respectively), Jose Castillo is 12th among qualified players at third, and if Rich Aurilia qualified at first he’d be just ahead of Prince Fielder, fourth-worst in the league

The Giants shortstops have fielded better, as was to be expected for a trio of no-hit, all field players in Emanuel Burriss, Brian Bocock and Omar Vizquel. Combined they have basically been Kahil Greene, playing 530 innings with 19 OOZ plays.

In a season heralded as “Pitching and Defense to the Rescue!” the defense part has not been up to par. While the team FIP is only .03 lower than actual ERA (4.31 to 4.34) this team doesn’t have the offense to support “average” in the field. The solace of course is that a majority of the offenders may be gone next year, but this will be something to keep an eye on as Sabean rebuilds this team over the next few years.

… the highest-paid relief pitcher of all time.

Oh, Sabean. To think he got an extension AFTER signing this contract. Sigh.

Sunday Barry Zito capped off what may be the worst month of his career with the worst game of his season.

Zito allowed eight runs in three innings in a complete disaster of a game. He walked three while striking out only one, picking up -.429 WPA. The Albatross now sits 0-6 with a 7.58 and the grim spectre of 20 losses staring him straight in the face.

The reasons for Zito’s lack of effectiveness have been well documented. His fastball is sitting at around 83 mph and he’s lost velocity on all of his pitches. His K/9 rate has dropped from 8.61 in 2001 to 3.45 so far this year.

I’ve been digging through his stats – his peripherals, splits, tea leaves – trying to pick up any other causes and there are a few odd things. His batted ball rates (line dive, ground ball, fly ball and HR/FB rates) are all within his career norms. I expected his line drive rate (19.6) to have skyrocketed with lessened stuff but it’s actually lower than last year.

And that makes his .346 BABIP seem a little fluky. Zito has always had lower than expected BABIP and so far this year it’s almost .030 more than expected. He has given up 41 hits in 28.2 IP. Below is Zito’s H/9 since 2004

	H/9
2004	9.13
2005	7.29
2006	8.59
2007	8.33
2008	12.86

So Zito has been somewhat unlucky but he hasn’t been helping himself out much. Fewer strikeouts mean more balls in play and more walks mean when those unlucky hits fall it hurts that much more.

Looking through the splits it’s hard to find any situation he’s done well in. What really struck me was his stats after the count went 1-2. In 38 PA batters are hitting .316 with a sOPS+ of 211. That seems to go to his lack of an out pitch. According to Josh Kalk’s pitch fx tool Zito is still throwing his weak-ass fastball nearly half the time with two strikes.

It’s been said around that Zito needs to learn to be Jamie Moyer. He needs to spend more time with his huge hook and pitch instead of try to overpower people. If his two-strike selections are any indication he’s a long way from that.

Ah, the blessed off-day, a time of reflection and self-contemplation.

The Giants started the season a disastrous 1-6, confirming everyone pundit and casual fan’s idea of the team. There was no offense, Barry Zito looked terrible and the old guys were dropping like flys.

But we are now faced with a three-game winning streak. Damn you Giants! All this talk of winning with pitching, defense and base running and you go out and do it three times in a row?

Deadspin noticed by putting the team at the top of the MLB Closer with the headline “Giants Win Three Straight? That’s Unpossible!“

But before we get too cocky lets remember what this season has inspired already:

• Rob Neyer(subscription only) looked at just how bad the Giants could be, projecting what turned out to be an optimistic 70 wins.
• Baseball Prospectus took Bochy to task for his handling of the lineup late in the Benjie Molina walk-off game.
• And the Onion is even mocking this team with the heartwarming story “San Francisco Giants Band Together To Score Run.”
• And the No. 1 reason not to get excited about a three-game winning streak? The 100-loss 1985 Giants had a four-game streak.

Whoever said Benjie Molina isn’t the greatest cleanup hitter in all of baseball?

Two home runs, including a walk-off shot in the 11th, means he now owns a .600 SLG. Never mind that he hasn’t drawn a walk and his OBP sits below .300 and that he’s never slugged above .467 in a season. Benjie is a cleanup hitter and we shall all believe.

Without MLB.tv (or more specifically the disposable income to purchase MLB.tv this year) I took up the expatriate view of the game: Constantly refreshing Yahoo and FanGraphs to see how everything played out.

My favorite part of the game in a strictly observational sense was Brian Giles’ sac-fly in the ninth. Notice how Tony Clark’s single absolutely killed the Giants chances of winning, putting them below 50 percent for the first time since the second inning.

But when Giles’ got the run in by giving up the out it decreased the expected runs for the remainder of the inning to .55, meaning it wasn’t likely anymore they would get the winning run in. And with the Giants being at home the win probabilty swung in their favor again.

Eugenio Velez did a great job with a single and a stolen base in the 10th, increasing the win probabilty from 64 percent to more than 80, though the double play wiped that out.

Overall Giant pitchers came through when they needed to, lowering the expected runs in seven of the top-10 highest leverage situations. Unfortunately two of those times (the sac-fly and Kahlil Greene’s FC RBI in the sixth) scored runs. And while it’s good that Tim Lincecum and Brian Wilson got out of those situations with only one run apiece it’s still never good to get to that point.

Of course the hero of the game was Molina, who came through with .404 WPA.

Previously in the series:

Brian Sabean: The Trade Record, Part I. Brian Sabean Trade Record Part II: The Failures.

Today is the last post looking at Sabean’s trade record. With the best and worst trades out of the way I wanted to look a little deeper at the trends that have appeared, at least dealing with talent at the major league level. As I have in the other parts I’m using Dave Studeman’s win shares database, restrosheet transactions files and the Lahman database to pull out win shares numbers for Sabean’s trades.

Early on Sabean developed a reputation as a great negotiator. As I found, four of his five most successful trades came by 1998. In that time he picked up players such as Jeff Kent, J.T. Snow and Robb Nen. These players, along with the ever-present Barry Bonds, would help lead the Giants to the World Series in 2002.

But more recently that shine has faded. Highlighted by the deal that sent Joe Nathan, Boof Bonser and Francisco Liriano to the Twins for A.J. Pierzynski, Sabean has yet to recreate his early successes. It may be that he is a little gun-shy since the Pierzynski deal. Since then he’s really only had two deals that brought a starter over, those being for Randy Winn and Shea Hillenbrand (Unless of course you count Steve Finley. I’d rather not count Steve Finley). One of those turned out great but was tainted by an extension paying for a career year and the other, well, the other will be showing up in a future “Failures” post. Here’s the list of all players Sabean has traded for since 2004:

Leo	 Estrella
Wayne	 Franklin
Ricky	 Ledee
Dave	 Burba
LaTroy	 Hawkins
Doug	 DeVore
Randy	 Winn
Dusty	 Bergman
Steve	 Kline
Steve	 Finley
Vinnie	 Chulk
Shea	 Hillenbrand
Mike	 Stanton
Travis	 Blackley
Randy	 Messeng
Rajai	 Davis

Not exactly a distinguished group. But of course what you get is dependent on what you give, and the Giants haven’t had a lot of tradeable assets recently. Though much of that lies at the feet of Sabean’s free agency and draft policies, which we’ll start digging into next week. The fact is that for whatever reason the Giants haven’t been getting much production from their trades recently, at least at the major league level. Take a look at the win shares generated by year from players Sabean has traded for:

Year	WS
1997	97
1998	97
1999	99
2000	139
2001	103
2002	136
2003	87
2004	77
2005	37
2006	52
2007	31

The number starts out high because of the Kent and Snow trades and peaks between 2000 and 2002. In the World Series year 15 players that had been acquired by trade made contributions, including the starting center fielder (Kenny Lofton), the closer (Nen), two starting pitchers (Jason Schmidt and Livan Hernandez) and 3/4 of the infield (Kent, Snow and David Bell).

Last year only five players Sabean acquired by trade earned win shares and only one, Winn, was a starter.

So what’s this all tell us? Sabean has gone from the crazy dealer who sent Matt Williams to Cleveland to the guy who tried to get by with Shea Hillenbrand. From someone who will take chances to find starters such as J.T. Snow to someone who basically deals for backup outfielders, middle relievers and to move bloated contracts. Nothing in his record in the last five years shows he has the ability he came into the game with or that he’s willing to take chances to improve the team through trade. Whether that means the game has passed him by or that years of poor talent-management has left the cupboard bare is hard to tell, though betting on both is probably the right answer.

With his new contract Sabean has two years to prove he still has the ability to be a major league general manager and trading will be a major part of that. There are rumors out now that the team is active shopping all of its veterans and has kicked the tires on young first basemen such as Scott Thorman and Dan Johnson. I’m not ready to give up on Seabean’s ability to get a good deal, but he’s running out of time to reverse a very poor record.