The Phillies are Winning, But….
May 15, 2009
Well, the Phils are winning so far this season, and they are scoring more runs than they’ve allowed, and by quite a bit, and they are close to the division lead, after a bit of a slow start, but their Staff ERA is close to six, 5.72, and their best two pitchers of last year, Brad Lidge, and Cole Hamels, are both nursing injuries.
Cole Hamels, their staff ace, at last, is back, pitching no-hitter stuff recently against the Braves through four innings, and allowing only two runs on a weakly hit seeing eye single to right with two out and two on, and having another fine outing against the Dodgers.
I wrote here recently that I thought Lidge and Hamels should have the month off, or at least shouldn’t be overused in April, but Charlie Manuel insisted on using both early and often, and both had injuries that effectively gave them April off.
Now both are better, though Lidge still doesn’t seem right yet.
It might be the time to inject JA Happ into the starting rotation from time to time and occasionally play around with Blanton and Park depending on whether the team is facing a right-handed or left-handed team in the rotation, keep Lidge on the DL, use Madsen to close, use some other bullpen guys in setup roles to see what they have (better now than never) and bring up a couple of studs from the farm and see what they have.
Your team is averaging like seven runs a game. I think the kids will figure out a way to pitch well enough to win.
I suppose this is as good a time as any to point out that Raul Ibanez has made everyone forget Pat Burrell faster than anyone though humanly possible.
This again demonstrates the illusion of home parks. Ibanez has been hitting 20-30 homers a year in Seattle, a pitchers’ park. Coming to Citizens Bank Park, a hitter’s park it would be expected that his homer run rate would increase about 30% at home, and doggone it if he doesn’t have seven homers in April, which works out to a 42 homer pace for the year.
That’s about what I would have predicted. It also goes to show how much Pat Burrell’s statistics were padded by the park—I’m certain he won’t have the same numbers in Tampa Bay he had here, though he will walk a lot.
Also, Ibanez is a better HITTER than Burrell, in the sense that he hits for a far higher average and hits more doubles, singles and triples—he’s a latin American player and a contact hitter as opposed to Burrell, who waits deep on counts and misses the ball a whopping lot and fails to put it into play.
The two players could not be more different in their styles. Ibanez will not walk as much, but he’s off to a .340 hitting pace, and even if he hits his usual .290, his OBA will be as high as Burrell’s; if he hits 40 homers, 40 doubles and a mess of singles, his slugging average may be very high indeed. His new nickname, “Raul I-BOMB-NEZ” says it all.
Utley is off to his usual great start; Victory-no (yes) is doing very well; Howard is pounding the ball; Pedro Feliz is hitting and playing great third base; and Jayson Werth thinks he’s Albert Pujols. Even the bench players are hitting. J Ro is finally catching the flame.
Jayson Werth stealing 2d, 3d and home the other day was amazing.
The other interesting thing about the Phillies, is that even the national press and commentators are starting to talk about the Phillies “character,” and to compare the Mets unfavorably to the Phillies–in that the Mets don’t have “character,” that the Mets make mental mistakes, the Mets can’t come back late in ballgames, the Mets throw in the towel, the Mets make a lot of unprofessional errors, and so forth.
I find this interesting. I’ve thought for a long time the Mets had a lot of overpaid veterans who didn’t care about winning or losing, but no one was willing to say for the longest time that the emperor had no clothes; now suddenly, everyone is seeing the fact that the Phillies are winning with youth and enthusiasm and hustle, and not with established talent (although Howard Utley and Hamels are certainly talented) but that the Phillies also exemplify a certain STYLE of play–as in Werth stealing home–that the Mets just don’t have.
The Phillies are fun to watch because of this, win or lose, they’re never out of a ballgame. They never give up even down to the last out.
On the plus side as to pitching, Jamie Moyer is getting some good games in finally, Joe Blanton has been uneven but has pitched some good ball, Myers is finding his stride, and the bullpen continues to be very good except for occasional lapses (such as when it was 95 degrees the other night, no one was going to keep the ball in the park that night). Even Chan Ho Park has done better.
A note here: Chris Coste did not do a good job handling the pitching staff in April. It’s obvious the pitchers like Carlos Ruiz behind the plate much better. Also, Coste can’t hit anymore.
It’s time to look for a better backup catcher, one with both defensive and offensive skills, but if one had to choose, at least a backup catcher who can call a game.
The Chris Coste story was nice for a couple of seasons, but the fact is that Coste’s limitations contributed in part to the staff’s high ERA in April. It’s obvious that blanton, park and even hamels like ruiz back there, and are not comfortable with coste calling the game.
Right now, the phils are winning on hitting and scoring runs. Their pattern looks more like 2007 than 2008, but they won a division title slugging their way to the top that year.
So they can win a title this way. To win another world championship will require some pitching. It may be that they need to rest Hamels and Lidge, and maybe look for another starter at the trade deadline.
Art Kyriazis
Philly/South Jersey
Home of the world champion Philadelphia Phillies
REPLY TO BLOG BY PROF. KARLAN ON BRIAN LEITER’S BLOG
April 10, 2009
I read with interest the following post by Prof. Pamela Karlan to Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports Blog at
http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2006/04/high_gpas_at_to.html:
April 19, 2006
High Undergraduate GPAs at Top Law Schools: What Do They Mean and What Are Their Consequences for Legal Education?
Pamela Karlan, a distinguished expert on voting rights and civil procedure at Stanford Law School, writes:
I read, with both interest and a fair amount of distress, the 75th percentile LSAT rankings. The distress came from seeing the staggering 75th percentile GPAs.
These could reflect at least three states of the world, two of them unfortunate. First, and most optimistically, the 40 schools on your list could all be admitting kids with amazing undergraduate academic achievements. (A 3.96 means, for example a student with 34A’s and 2 B+’s as an undergraduate; a 3.85 could mean half A’s and half A-’s.)
Second, the GPA’s could reflect rampant grade inflation at undergraduate institutions. Leave aside the abstract debate over whether the current generation of students is so much abler than its predecessors that good students should never see a grade below A- or B+. Most law schools have mandatory means or curves, and I’m aware of none where that mean is over around 3.4. (Even at the schools that don’t have official means, I would guess the actual mean is no higher than that.) Thus, virtually all law students will have lower, substantially lower, GPA’s in law school than they had in college. (E.g., at my own institution, 25% of the students had GPAs equivalent to what the number 1 student in the normal graduating class is likely to have.) This drop has a number of unfortunate consequences. Many of us are familiar with a huge demoralization effect the day first-semester grades come out and people who’ve been told all their lives that they are “A’s” at everything that’s measured hear for the first time that they’re “B’s.” They give up, and simply float through the remaining five semesters. Many have a self-protective defensive reaction: if the law doesn’t love them, then they distance themselves from it. In addition, at law schools where there are course-selection strategies that allow students to manipulate their GPA’s, students are then drawn not to taking what’s good or useful for them, but rather what’s most likely to boost their GPAs back toward the range they’ve internalized as normal. The high UGPAs mean that many of our students have never really learned to bounce back from academic disappointment (the “C” I got my first semester of college is one of the best things that ever happened to me) and like learning to ride a bicycle, it’s harder to learn that the older you get.
Third, to get those astronomical UGPA’s, students necessarily had to be either (a) extraordinary across the board for their entire undergraduate career (the student who bombs the first year of college because she wasn’t yet ready for the work or who was planning to be a physicist before he realized he didn’t have the mathematical ability can’t get one of these sky-high GPAs) or (b) strategic and risk-averse, taking only the kinds of courses in which they’d get A’s, from the time they were 17 or 18 years old. I’d bet it’s more the latter than the former. One of the things I always though the U.S. had over many other advanced countries was that we didn’t expect students to specialize in only what they were good at when they were still teenagers. But in order to get a 3.9 UGPA, students really can’t take things well outside their comparative advantages. Many of us see the consequences of this in what our students do: they’re passive and non-entrepreneurial in their job choices, going to large firms not because that practice particularly attracts them, but because it seems less “risky” right out of law school than going to smaller firms or government jobs. Many of them haven’t exercised their intellectual imaginations in years. Many are in fact not particularly well educated, since the science majors took few writing courses, the humanities people took perhaps one semester of economics and flee any quantitative subject, and the social and hard scientists know no American (let alone world) history at all.
Now, of course, we’re talking here only about the 75th percentile. Perhaps we could find the students who are comfortable with risk, entrepreneurial, academically and intellectually adventurous, and resilient among the other three-quarters of the class. But even the 25th percentile at top 20 schools have staggering UGPAs. And that sets the tone for the student body.
I’m not sure, as long as US News drives so much of the world, that there’s anything to be done. But it’s frustrating if what we’re trying to do is to train imaginative, entrepreneurial, courageous, resilient lawyers with broad perspectives that one of the central criteria for admitting students undermines our chances of doing that.
(end of Prof. Karlan’s comments).
Now I actually knew Pam growing up–she was one of a circle of debaters I knew who grew up debating in connecticut (she went to Hopkins Grammar School and then to Yale) and she’s enjoyed a great deal of success as a law school academic, although she’s way too liberal for my tastes (what law school academic isn’t liberal?).
On the plus side, I don’t think she’s a communist, but if she is, i’m not down with that at all.
My father fought those jerks in the greek civil war, and they were rat bastards, the communists. I can’t believe the democrats are actually meeting with castro in cuba right now.
Anyway, here were my comments in reply to her post:
An addendum to the comment above on grade inflation and test scores.
1) it is well-known that the ETS re-normed the SATS, LSATs, GREs and MCATs at least one standard deviation approximately sixteen years ago. Consequently, our generation of the 1970s and 1980s had a mean on the SAT and other standardized tests that was one standardized deviation higher than the current generation of students–our IQ in short, averaged around 100, while theirs literally averages 85. If you pin the bell curve tail on the donkey, that makes the top 1/2 % of the current generation dumber than the top five % of the previous generation.
So the students aren’t getting smarter, they’re getting dumber. That’s what renorming the test means.
I worked teaching all of the standardized tests for more than twenty years and wrote the pilot materials for the LSAT for Princeton Review in the early 1990s.
2) Grade inflation ain’t so except in the courses where professors are giving easy grades. At colleges that are conservative like Drexel, William and Mary, Hamilton, and so forth, grades are given out fairly and with rigor. It’s at some of the humanities departments that standards have fallen, and as certain classics and history professors have noted, along with scholarship–you can hardly find an actual greek, latin or byzantine professor today in a major ivy league university. When I visited Harvard, Prof. Finley was lecturing on Ancient Athens. Today, you’re more likely to hear some humanities teacher deconstructing gender based issues in some unknown text from last week, or worse still, deconstructing something from the internet.
3) TV, the internet, cellphones and laptops have definitively made current law students stupider. They don’t know how to write, they don’t know how to read books, and their research skills are shallow and poor. Most important, they lack the skill of memorization. I used to know where every single book was in certain law libraries, just as I knew where they were in huge undergrad libraries for years. That was a lot more useful skill than Boolean searches, which are not a thorough method of seeking out facts unless you already know the subject matter at hand.
4) Westlaw and Lexis led us to the horror that is Google.
5) Google is driving the book and newspaper out of existence, leading us to a famous Asimov short story of science fiction in which (in the near future) everyone forgets how to read and do math because computers do it for us–until a nuclear war destroys the machines and we become helpless, until one day a boy re-discovers how to do math by hand, and is proclaimed a genius.
This is the orwellian place we are all headed.
In addition to the foregoing comments, I would have also pointed out that Prof. Karlan’s basic point is wrong.
She assumes that students get high grades in college, and then come to Stanford Law and get lower grades because the competition is tougher.
This is actually ass backwards. I know Pam from when she was 18 and kicking back beers at college debate tournaments, so I know she likes to pontificate without factual basis from time to time, so here are some facts;
1) except for the top ten law schools, most law school applicants don’t have a 3.90 GPA or a very high LSAT. The vast majority of law students and lawyers are trained at 2d, 3d and 4th quartile schools as rated by US News and World Report rankings, or at local state law schools. Those students make up the vast majority of the bar.
2) students who go to Stanford, Yale, Harvard law schools only rarely practice law in the “real”world. They usually become law professors, judges, politicians etc. or work for rarified law firms. It’s unusual to see these folks work with actual clients or appear in actual courtrooms. Pam is a perfect example of this. She’s spent her life in the classroom, not in the real world.
3) Pam admits to getting a C or two at Yale, and I admit to that with Harvard. Because those schools were hard, back in the day. They were not easy, there was no grade inflation and the competition was brutal in most of the classes. Plus I was a premed on the side. So my GPA in college was nothing pretty, although it was definitely higher than a B average and i was recommended for honors, had a cum laude on my thesis and a summa on my general exam.
4) When I went to law school, after working a while, I thought it was MUCH EASIER than college. To be honest, I barely cracked a book open, worked forty hours a week at law firms collecting cold hard cash, and found the work at law school to be trivial. It was in law school that i got racks of As and only a couple of Bs. It was funny how many As I got. I won Am Jur Awards and Best Paper Awards (best grade in my class) every single semester I was in law school. It became like a joke how smart I was in law school, and yet, I really wasn’t working 1/8th as hard as I did in college.
Consequently, I don’t really know what Pam is talking about, not at all. My grades were disappointing to me in college but I worked my ass off to get them; but my grades in law school were terrific, and I hardly broke a sweat.
Next, as far as training law students to be imaginative, entrepreneurial or creative, I think that’s a deeply flawed and dangerous thing to do.
The last thing I as a businessman want my lawyer to be is creative, imaginative or entrepreneurial. I want my lawyer to be a lawyer, that is, an unimaginative little nebbish who grinds out papers and hands them to my enemy at 5pm on friday afternoon, or gets deals done by smiling and being at peace and harmony with everyone in the bar.
Creativity, imagination and entrepreneurship, I’m afraid, is reserved for the Schumpeterians of the world, that is to say, the guys at Business School, and that’s why Wharton has a Center for Entrepreneurship, and why I and my colleagues at various Business Schools teach Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity at Business Schools around the North east directly, rather than teaching the stultifying subject of law. Law by its nature cannot be innovative, because it is precedential and must be followed to the letter of the law; whereas an inventor or entrepreneur is not bound by precedent and can be innovative.
I actually find Pam’s notion of what a good lawyer is to be incomprehensible. A good lawyer should be boring, ethical and should be able to repeat a statute from front to back thirty times in a row. Not creative, not innovative, not entrepreneurial, but efficient like a swiss army knife or a swiss watch. Efficiency and practice make for good lawyering. Also long hours spent learning how to write briefs exactly like everyone else writes them. The last thing you want to do in a brief is to introduce anything new, creative or innovative. Judges hate that. They just want you to follow the 8,000 appellate rules they’ve set forth for how to write the brief.
Good lawyers, then, are basically automatons. Clever and hard working automatons, but robots, essentially. In another century, they will in fact be replaced by AI possessing machines for many of their tasks, I predict. They’re already being outsourced to India for much of their robotic work such as document discovery, which was once thought to require intelligence and training. See my point?
Whereas good businessmen are creative, innovative and entrepreneurial.
5) A logic, rhetoric, oratory, philosophy background gets you through law school very easily; math and science make it trivial. All law problems are basically logic puzzles, and all law essays are basically debate/oratory speeches made in a philsophy manner of analyzing each question from both sides. This was perfectly normal to me. Undergrad teachers kept trying to make a marxist out of me, so they didn’t like my impartiality. Law professors loved it.
6) Law exams are graded without your name on the paper. No favoritism can creep into the grading. Undergrad is rife with favoritism and bias towards certain undergrads that the professors play favorites towards.
7) My friend NS who went to school with Pam at Yale thought Stanford Law was a joke after Yale undergrad; he thought it was a vacation. We used to get together frequently in Cali and hang out. He never seemed to work too hard.
8) My friend DB who went to harvard with me and then to Stanford Med thought Stanford Law was a joke after harvard undergrad and stanford med. He worked 40 hours at a top patent firm and saved all his money. Again, he had plenty of free time, he hardly worked at law school.
9) Law Schools should require all incoming students to study the following;
semester of logic, semster of intro to western philosophy
semester of oratory/rhetoric/speech
do two semesters of competitive speech/rhetoric/debate/parli
do two semesters of mock trial
spend a summer working at a law firm
spend a summer working at legal aid
spend a summer working for a judge
spend two years minimum working in business or somewhere between college and law school. The armed forces would be the best of all.
give preferential admission to army veterans, ROTC and reservists and end their anti-military culture.
sharply curtail the number of attorneys taking the bar nationally. End all state bars and apply one national bar, and only pass around 5,000 persons into it annually, and make them travel to one of three reginal centers nationally to take the exam, such as SF, CA, Chicago and New York, and only give the exam once a year.
Require proficiency in Spanish for ALL attorneys, since Spanish is required to speak to most clients on both coasts.
10) Science and business grad school were much more challenging and interesting than law school or undergrad. I would NEVER recommend to my own children to attend law school, maybe take a law class in business school, but not attend law school. The best combination out there today is the MD-MBA combined program, which I think is ideal in today’s economy.
These are some of the practical changes I would make to the legal eduction process.
I would probably close all but a handful of the existing law schools in the united states. Or, perhaps, people could obtain law degrees for reasons other than being a lawyer–for academic or scholarly purposes, as in europe, but not to be a lawyer or to make money. I’d convert a lot of the programs to MBA programs, actually.
we have way too many lawyers in this country and we need to reform the legal profession, reform tort law, and sharply regulate the profession before it drives all of the doctors, drug makers and other competent businessmen out of this country for good.
One final note, and this is about Pam’s constitutional law book, which she authored with Cass Sunstein, Mark & Rebecca Tushnet, Louis Seidman & Geoffrey Stone. This casebook has been ranked one out of five stars by nearly everyone who ranked it on Amazon dot com. I happen to be a fan of Pam, of Cass Sunstein (except for his dumping Martha Nussbaum, who I’m a bigger fan of, for that stupid Irish younger woman professor at Harvard who’s the big Obama fan) and I really am a big fan of Mark and Rebecca Tushnet–Rebecca was one of Harvard’s best debaters ever in the 1990s–and Mark is a very smart guy–but apparently brains doesn’t mean you can write a casebook as good as Larry Tribe’s.
Here’s a sample comment from Amazon dot com;
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible Casebook, December 13, 2008
By kiki (Baltimore, MD) – See all my reviews
It’s a casebook, so it’s not supposed to be great reading, but this one is by far the worst casebook I’ve ever had. The only thing a casebook needs to do to achieve mediocrity is contain cases. This doesn’t, not really. It gives you the cliff’s notes of important cases. One sentence blurbs about others. And pages and pages of rambling, aimless, academic debate. It may be a good book for Con Law professors and others who have already read all of the cases discussed. For someone trying to learn con law, it is useless. It is also organized very poorly. Any class organized around this book is doomed from the start. If your professor uses this book, take another class. If you can’t take another class, buy the Chemerinsky treatise and rely on that instead. Professors: DO NOT USE THIS BOOK.
the website address is above, if you want to check out the remarks and the book yourself. Perhaps there will be a revised edition. I realize that Pam writes and talks a lot. As I said, part of her strength, and her weakness, is that she talks and writes too much, and perhaps she spreads herself a little thin.
When I was a litigator, I litigated civil rights matters in the trenches, and won them. It’s not as hard as it seems. You need to have a firm grasp of the history of the United States from 1776 through about 1900 to understand the reconstruction and civil war era, in order to make some sense of what the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments mean.
I actually think Justice Scalia had some pertinent remarks on US v. Cruikshank in the recent gun rights case. He noted that the US Supreme Court in that 1874 case took the right of bearing arms away from african american militia men under the second amendment, because of white supremacist views which were going on at the time. the dispute was that armed militias of african americans and republicans were fighting ku klux klansmen in Mississippi and elsewhere in the south, and the african american plaintiffs claimed a second amendment right to bear arms as a militia.
The US Supreme Court said no, that’s only a federal right against the federal government, not against the states, ignoring incorporation under the 14th amendment.
Scalia basically says now that Cruikshank was wrong, and that african americans had the right to arm themselves as a militia in 1874 and defend themselves against the Klan in the 1870s.
I think that’s an interesting point of view. Of course, an armchair liberal like Karlan would never consider that Scalia would have anything interesting to say.
But here at the Sophist, we think there are two sides to every question.
–art kyriazis
philly/nj home of the world champion phillies
–art kyriazis
RANDOM NOTES ON THE PHILLIES AS THEY START THEIR SEASON
April 5, 2009
The Phillies begin their World Championship Title Defense tonite, hosting the Atlanta Braves.
First, I have to get ride of one of my pet peeves, and this is the often quoted statistic that the Braves won 14 division titles in a row from 1991 through 2005.
A plain look at the statistics laid out on baseball-reference dot com shows that this isn’t so.
First of all, from 1991-1993, the Braves were IN A DIFFERENT DIVISION, the N.L. West, and the league was split into two divisions, not three. The Braves did win the N.L. West in 1991 and 1992, but they tied in 1993, and were forced to a one game playoff with the San Francisco Giants (incredibly, both the Giants and the Braves won 103 games in the regular season that year); it was only by winning the one game playoff that they earned the NL West Division title. That has to have an asterisk, right?
Next, in 1994, the strike year, Atlanta was switched to the NL East–where they finished SECOND to the Montreal Expos. The Expos won the NL East in 1994, no one else did.
That would mean, by all reckoning, that Atlanta would have to have started a new streak in 1995–and from 1995-2005, they did, in fact, win eleven straight NL East Division titles–a prodigious accomplishment by any stretch of the imagination–but not the fourteen straight titles that sports commentators often ascribe to them.
That dog won’t hunt.
Incidentally, last year, Atlanta lost 90 games and finished twenty games behind the NL East champion Phillies. Hopefully they will prove once again this year to be cannon fodder for the Phils powerful bats and potent pitching arms.
Some random notes on the Phillies as they start their season:
1) Chan Ho Park was named the fifth starter ahead of J.A. Happ. I’ve already reviewed this in a prior blog and stated that Happ should be starting. Happ is a 26 year old 6 foot six lefty who strikes out a lot of ballplayers, while Park is a righty with age-related decline issues whose ERA outside of Dodger Stadium is more than 5.00 career. Happ’s minor league stats are impressive, and his starts last year for the Phils were good, as were his spring numbers. This is just a mistake by the Phils, much like when they blocked Ryan Howard with Jim Thome.
2) I predict that Happ will eventually replace Park in the starting rotation, and that Happ will develop into a superior starting pitcher in this league.
3) Having said that, either Park or Happ is CLEARLY an upgrade from Adam Eaton or Kyle Kendrick.
4) Cole Hamels might be on the shelf for a while. I’d rest Hamels and start Park AND Happ during April. It’s April, why risk injuring your meal ticket in Hamels? Let the man have a month off. He pitched an extra month last year, and might have to do it again this year. It’s not like you need him in April, is it?
5) The Phils released Geoff Jenkins, in a puzzling move, since they still owe him $8 million salary. But they also kept Matt Stairs, who is 41 and can only play first base, and Miguel Cairo, who is about a thousand years old, and can only play second base, and can’t hit anymore. Why keep those two old fuddy-duddies, and release Jenkins, who is a legit ballplayer? This is a truly imponderable move.
6) The Phils should have kept Jenkins, and released Stairs. Jenkins can play left or right fields, he can pinch run, and he can pinch hit, plus he’s already on the payroll, and he’s a power hitter. Stairs can’t field, and Cairo can’t hit, so Jenkins is a more useful bench player than either of them. Jenkins had key hits in the postseason off the bench. He’s shown he can be useful off the bench.
7) Jayson Werth is injury prone, and the Phils will need a corner outfielder to spell him. That guy had to have been Jenkins.
8) Eric Bruntlett can spell anyone in the infield, and Dobbs can spell anyone in the outfield or third base or second base. Why keep Cairo? Cairo hasn’t had a hot hitting streak since the pyramids were built, and his fielding range is about as narrow as the Nile at that point where you can step across it. I don’t think Cairo has hit a home run since Moses led the chosen people out of Egypt right after the Passover miracle and the slaughter of the first born of Egypt. The last time Cairo took an extra base, they were filming the Ten Commandments. I’m not saying Miguel Cairo is old, but I’m pretty sure he and Edward G. Robinson used to make gangster films together in the 1930s. Miguel Cairo is so old, he has a card in my oldest Strat-O-Matic baseball game that was just cards and dice from back in the 1970s. Miguel Cairo is so old, that even his wife has forgotten how many years he shaves off his real age whenever he crosses the border and lies about his birthday to immigration officials. I’m not saying the man is old, but Miguel Cairo is the guy who recruited Roberto Clemente to play baseball. It’s not that Miguel Cairo is old, but Cairo once played minor league ball with Fidel Castro in 1950s pre-Communist Cuba. I’m not calling the man old, but Julio Franco, who retired last year at age 50, calls Miguel Cairo “Uncle Mike” out of respect for his elders.
9) Jenkins, Bruntlett and Cairo were the obvious ones to keep. Cairo’s career stats are mind-numbingly awful. Jenkins by contrast is a career power hitter. Bruntlett can field and has good sped while Dobbs is a good hitter. Stairs can’t field, he’s a dh basically and should go to the AL where he belongs.
10) The Phils made no effort to sign Garry Sheffield, but on the bright side, he signed with the Mets. I’m about 90% sure at this stage of his career, stuck on 499 homers, Sheffield only wants to get into the Hall of Fame, and is only about Sheffield, not the team, so I think the Mets have bought into a problem there. Sheffield will demand playing time to pad his stats, and even if he’s hitting .220, which is what he hit last year with Detroit, he will demand more playing time. Plus he’s another over the hill superstar, which the Mets seem to collect boatloads of.
11) Having said all this, I still think the Phils will make a good run and repeat as NL East champs and go on to win the world series yet again, for all the reasons I set forth in my earlier blog on this.
–art kyriazis philly/south jersey
home of the world champion phillies
CURT SCHLLING RETIRES
March 25, 2009
On Monday of this week, Curt Schilling, he of the bloody sock, the hero of the 2004 World Series that finally cured the curse of the Red Sox forever, and the last active playing member of the great 1993 Phillies team that nearly beat a powerhouse Toronto Blue Jays team in an awesome world series matchup, finally retired, joining Lenny “Nails” Dykstra, Darren Arthur Daulton, John “Krukster” Kruk and other legends of the 1993 Phillies in retirement.
Of course, Schilling was an integral member of numerous world series teams, as was Daulton (1997 Marlins) and Dykstra (1986 Mets). Collectively, all of these guys were winners, with a capital W. They lived to win, and winning was all they knew how to do.
Here I have to point out that as I am a Phillies fan, I have always had a very soft spot in my heart for Curt Schilling. From 1992, when he first emerged as a terrific power pitcher, to 2000, when he was erroneously and mistakenly traded from the Phils to Arizona (instead of their locking him up for another multi year deal), he was 1) the ace of the staff 2) the voice of the Phillies, frequently appearing on local sports radio, sometimes daily and 3) the best starting pitcher I’ve ever seen here since Steve Carlton.
But the main thing I loved about Schilling is, he hated to lose, and he loved to win. He pitched complete ballgames, nine innings, and he pitched to strike out the side. He was old school, he had old fashioned ideas, he was in every way a throwback to pitchers and players from like fifty years ago. In that sense, he was completely and totally refreshing.
From 1997-2000 the Phillies organization had a core of Curt Schilling, Bobby Abreu and Steve Rolen. Had they simply and properly built around that core, the Phillies could have built a division winner, or at least a wild card team. Schilling was an ace of the staff, Abreu was in the prime of his career, a .400 OBA man with a .500 slugging percentage, and Rolen was earning 30 win shares a year routinely with his glove and his bat. In those years, Rolen was slugging .500 or more easily, hitting tons of doubles and homers.
Where the team was weak in those days was up the middle—they didn’t stock themselves at short, second, catcher and centerfield properly (except maybe for Mike Lieberthal, but he was no Darren Daulton). And everyone knows a championship club needs to be strong up the middle. Kevin Stocker, who had played well in 1993, began to fade. Mickey Morandini, who was terrific in 1993, also began to fade as the decade wore on. Milt Thompson wasn’t around anymore and Lenny Dykstra was gone by 1997. Darren Daulton was also gone by 1997. If they had Dykstra and Daulton, and a healthry Morandini and Stocker, the 1997 Phillies would have been contenders—but the story was different.
By 97-99, they were playing guys like Marlon Anderson and Alex Arias up the middle. It wasn’t the same. Doug Glanville could field and run, but he never drew a walk.
The Phillies didn’t make immediate efforts to replace Daulton or Dykstra with great talent, nor did they replace Stocker or Morandini with great talent. They did waste a lot of money on bad free agents (see below) but we’ll get to that.
Behind Schilling were non-entities pitching—they did not put together a staff anywhere close to what they had in 1993, with Tommy Greene, Schilling, Danny Jackson, Terry Mulholland et al. and Mitch Williams as the closer. In 1994 Williams’ arm was blown and he was traded, but he never pitched again. Mulholland was traded, a bad trade since he pitched ten more years or more in the bigs. Jackson was never the same again and Tommy Greene’s arm was blown, he never had another year like 1993.
Because the Phillies did not make the effort to replace the great 1993 players with new and great players, eventually both Schilling and Rolen wanted out of Philadelphia. This was not good news for the Phillies GM and Phillies management, because Schilling and Rolen were the kind of players you built a team around.
A starting ace, and a gold glove third baseman who hits 30 homers and 35 doubles a year with 30 win shares a year, those are the two players you want to start a team with. You don’t want to lose those two guys.
The fundamental mistake of the Phils as they turned the corner on the new century was to let Curt Schilling go, even more of a mistake than letting Scott Rolen go, though both were mistakes. Curt Schilling won three world series with Arizona and Boston after he left (2001, 2004, and 2006) while Scott Rolen won one with St. Louis and got to another. Instead of realizing what they had, they wasted money on bad players instead.
You can’t help but wonder, what if the Phils had held on to these guys, and they had been around while the Phils developed Jimmy Rollins, Pat Burrell, Chase Utley, signed Jim Thome, etc. You have to think some of those 86 win seasons would have been 92 or 95 win seasons.
After Schilling was gone, the Phillies went on an endless search for the next big ace. They traded Johnny Estrada, a great catching prospect, for Kevin Millwood. In fairness, Millwood had a great 2003 season, throwing a no-hitter, throwing a lot of innings and having a great adjusted ERA. But the next season he sort of blew up, and wasn’t the same again, and the Phils let him go in free agency.
The next big ace was Eric Milton. The phils traded Carlos Silva for him. Eric Milton arrived to much fanfare, and proceeded to lead the NL in homers allowed the next two seasons. To say he was awful understates the situation. He just never adjusted to the new park.
The next big ace was Freddy Garcia. We all know about him. He never even pitched. He was hurt and didn’t pitch at all.
There were so many other horrible pitchers the Phils brought in. I can’t name them all. Jon Lieber, Adam Eaton, etc.
Meanwhile, the Phillies actually got some players for Rolen and Schilling, which were basically, Placido Polanco and Vincente Padilla. Polanco played second until Utley came up, and then Polanco was out of a job. The Phils shipped him to Detroit for Ugueth Urbina, but should have kept him to play third but at the time they had David Bell playing third.
Padilla for a while had a couple of good seasons with the Phils, but eventually they shipped him to Texas. Padilla has been pretty awful for Texas, his innings pitched are still high, but so is his ERA. He’s not really been a great pitcher, just an innings eater.
Polanco has been a starter in Detroit and it seems to me the Phils should have held onto Polanco. He was a good righthanded hitter, could play the corner outfield positions, as well as 3d and 2d, and was a good RH pinch-hitters bat off the bench. I’d have kept him. While he doesn’t walk much, he has a high batting average, had above average speed, and hits a lot of doubles and triples, and occasional homers. And he’s great in the clubhouse.
The lack of an ace in the Phillies starting staff from 2001-2007 is what kept them from winning a world series. During six of those years, Curt Schilling could have been that ace and put them over the top in any given year.
Having an ace in Cole Hamels in 2008 is one of the keys to the Phillies having won a world series and a world championship in 2008. Cole Hamels was finally the guy the Phils had been searching for since 2000, when they let Curt Schilling go for a guy named Vincent Padilla.
Bill James, in the Bill James Gold Mine 2008, at p. 2007, has an illuminating article on this subject, called “If I Had a Hamel.” He basically examines each of the Phils seasons from 1986-2007, and notes who was the Phils most dominating pitcher in each of those years. In 1992, 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000, Curt Schilling was the best pitcher on the Phils’ staff, and then he was gone. Then in 2007, Cole Hamels was the best. Writes James in his article: “I have a friend who is a Phillies fan. He is optimistic about the 2008 season because, he says, we finally have an ace. We haven’t had an ace of the staff since we traded Schilling. He is referring of course to Cole Hamels….Cole Hamels Season Score [in 2007] was 233, which was the highest by a Phillies pitcher since 1998. Schilling was at 327 in 1997, 271 in 1998.” Id. at p. 207.
James also points out how silly it was for the Phils to move Brett Myers from starter to closer in 2007, and that bringing him back to starter would be a good move for 2008. Id. at p. 2007.
So there you have it—the two key moves that put the phils over the top—Cole Hamels as a staff ace, and Brett Myers back as a starter. Add to that Brad Lidge as a top shelf closer, and you have two legs of the Phils formula for world champion success in 2008.
I think it would have been nice for Curt Schilling to retire as a Phillie, myself.
Curt Schilling by the numbers: Curt Schilling was an awesome pitcher. He led the National League in strikeouts in 1997 and 1998, striking out more than 300 batters each of those years, 319 Ks in 1997 (in 254.1 innings pitched) and 300 Ks in 1998 (in 268.2 innings pitched). Schilling was a horse—he finished more games and completed more games than any modern pitcher, by far. Of 436 games he started in his career, he completed 83—19% of his games started, he COMPLETED.
Think about that—Curt Schilling, CAREER STAT, completed about 20% of every game he started. No relievers, no help, just nine innings and finish the game.
That’s as old school as you can get. Schilling was a reversion to a pitcher of the first half of the 20th century. He was more like Robin Roberts or Bob Feller, guys who finished what they started. The bloody sock tells it all.
He led the NL in complete games FOUR times—in 1996, with 8 complete games, in 1998, with 15 complete games (of 35 started), in 2000 with 8 complete games, and in 2001 with 6 complete games. He led the NL twice in innings pitched, in 1998 with 268 and 2/3, and in 2001 with 256 2/3, and led the NL those same years in pitches thrown to batters with 1089 in 1998 and 1021 in 2001.
Schilling led the NL in wins with 22 in 2001, and led the AL in wins with 21 in 2004. His adjusted ERC of 1.86 (ERA 2.35) was the lowest in the NL in 1992.
Schilling’s post-season record is insane. In 133.1 innings pitched, he struck out 139, walked only 30, gave up no intentional walks, yielded only 12 homers, 3 hit batsmen, 115 hits, 41 runs and 36 earned runs for an ERA of 2.43 (ERC adjusted of 2.79). In 19 games he started in the post season, he had 4 complete games, a 21% completion ratio. His won loss record of 11-2 in those 19 games he started is legendary.
I attended Schilling’s 2-0 complete game shutout of the Toronto Blue Jays in 1993, World Series game Five, at Veterans Stadium Philadelphia. The Phillies had lost a slugfest the night before, blowing a four or five game lead in extra innings when Mitch Williams couldn’t hold the lead, and were down 3-1 in games. The game was do or die. They had to win.
Schilling did nothing less than twirl a masterpiece. He may have given up a hit, or maybe two or four hits, but the whole thing took well under two hours, and it was a masterpiece of pitching efficiency, mastery, control and power. The Blue Jays, who had scored something like 15 runs the night before, could hardly get their bats on the ball against Schilling, the master of the baseball.
I have rarely, if ever, seen a pitching performance like that one, in my life, let alone in post-season play. I had a great seat, my wife’s company at the time had some corporate seats along the 3rd base line, and I had a terrific view of the action. The game was like watching Koufax, Gibson, Carlton, the greats.
At this point I suppose I can point out that Curt Schilling is an obvious Hall of Fame selection. I know that Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine are both 300 game winners, but their post-season stats are awful. Only John Smoltz has post-season stats like Schillings, and he gave up four seasons to be a closer, or he would be closer to 250 wins than the 215 he had now.
Let’s talk now about wins and losses. Except for the 1993 Phillies, the rest of the Phillies teams that Schilling played for—1992, and 1994-2000—had losing records. Nonetheless, Schilling racked up winning or .500 records for all of those teams;
1992 14-11 Team 70-92
1994 hurt 2-8 Team 54-61
1995 hurt 7-5 Team 69-75
1996 hurt 9-10 Team 67-95
1997 17-11 Team 68-94
1998 15-14 Team 75-87
1999 15-6 Team 77-85
2000 6-6 Team 65-97
Total Schilling 85-71 percentage 85/156 = .549
Total Team 545-676 percentage 545/1221 = .446
Schilling was more than 100 percentage points higher than his teams in all of the losing seasons from 1992-2000 on the Phils—he had a .549 winning percentage, while the Phils had a .446 winning percentage.
Schilling was 14 games OVER .500, whie the Phillies were 131 games BELOW .500—Schilling was 145 games better than his team. That’s a whopping lot better than his team.
So Schilling, even with three seasons where he was hurt, and for a ballteam that was hundreds of games below .500, managed a total record of 85-71, fourteen games ABOVE .500, during the eight years he was with Philly. 145 games better than his team, 100 percentage points better than his team.
As if he was dragging a dead body and a lot of 45 pound plates around, and still managing to win ballgames.
Now let’s add in 1993, when he was 16-7 for a team that went 97-65 total, a .599 percentage. For that team, Schilling went 16-7, which is a .693 percentage. FOR THE 1993 TEAM, A WINNER, A PENNANT WINNER THAT ALMOST WON THE WORLD SERIES, SCHILLING STILL DID A HUNDRED PERCENTAGE POINTS BETTER THAN THE PHILLIES WINNING PERCENTAGE. The team was 32 games over .500, Schilling was nine games over .500.
Now, the final totals:
Schilling: Career with Phils: 101-78. Percentage: 101/179 = .564 winning percentage
Phils: Career with Schilling: 642-741. Percentage: 646/1383 = .464 winning percentage
Schilling is 100 points above philly’s winning percentage, .564 to .464, for a nine year run. Philly was 100 games below .500; Schilling was 23 games above .500.
That’s Schilling’s total for Philly. He won a hundred games in 8 years, for mainly lousy clubs. And led the league in strikeouts twice, in complete games three times, in games started twice, in innings pitched once, etc.
Schilling did all this dragging around a lousy team that was, except for the magnificent 1993 team, mainly a bad team that finished in the second division. Several of these teams lost as many as 94, 95 and 97 games (1996, 1997, 2000). They were dreadful, horrible, awful teams, and yet Schilling went out and led the league in strikeouts in 1997.
Also, that Gregg Jeffries, a free agent bust, was paid $5.5 million in 1997, while Schilling, clearly the most valuable Phillie on any day of the week, earned only $3.5 million in 1997. Schilling was correct to gripe about his salary.
In 1998, Curt Schilling got a raise to $4.7 million, but Gregg Jefferies got $6 million after a horrible year in 1997, and some turkey named Mark Portugal got $2.4 million to pitch, putting up some dreadful numbers for the Phils.
Scott Rolen was paid $150,000 in 1997 and $750,000 in 1998 after posting two outstanding years. Ridiculous.
In 1999, they raised Schilling to $5 ¼ million per year, but handed Ron Gant, who was past his prime, $6 million, and Gant had an average year in left field, while Bobby Abreu had a terrific year as a newbie in right field. Rolen meantime finally got raised to a million dollars, while having another monster year; Rico Brogna, who was awful was getting more than three million dollars a year.
There is no sense to what the phillies were doing with their payroll at this time. They should have committed to their best players, period. They kept wasting money on washed up veterans and on players who were having bad seasons instead of committing their payroll to Schilling, Abreu and Rolen.
Lieberthal, it could be argued, was a decent player, at catcher, but he shouldn’t have been getting $2 ¼ million, more than twice as much as Rolen, because Rolen was more valuable than Lieberthal. It didn’t make sense.
Some guy named Jeff Brantley got paid $2.8 million in 1999. He appeared in 10 games in 1999 and some more games in 2000, but he was entirely ineffective and washed up. A total waste of money. Brantley was out of baseball after 2001.
The Phils paid Chad Ogea about $1.7 million to be a starter in 1999. Ogea posted less than league average numbers in 1999. He was 6-12 with a 5.63 ERA. It’s almost certain that the Phillies could have brought someone up from the farm to be that bad for a rookie salary.
I could keep going on like this, but I think you get the point. The Phillies of the late 1990s were blowing money out the wazoo on bad, awful, over the hill, gassed, done, horrible players.
And then when Schilling & Rolen wanted free-agent money commensurate with their skills in 2000, the Phillies front office became hard asses? After giving Greg Jefferies and Ron Gant $6 million each? $12 millin to Ron Gant and Greg Jefferies and you won’t give $10 million a year to Scott Rolen and Curt Schilling for life?????
Are you kidding me????
No wonder the Phillies have only two world titles in 120 plus years. On the bright side, the Phillies learned from these mistakes and have been doing somewhat better in recent years in terms of front office management, although I don’t agree with all of their moves.
Let’s get back to the legend that is Curt Schilling.
Who can forget Schilling putting a towel over his head when Mitch Williams was pitching during the NLCS and the World Series?
If the Phillies had been able to close Toronto out in games four and six of that world series when they had had leads, Philly would have won the world series in 1993. Schilling did everything he could to win that series.
Curt Schilling went to Arizona, and dragged an expansion team of nobodies to world series glory. He made Randy Johnson, who everyone thought was too wild to be a great pitcher, into a world champion.
Then Schilling went to Boston, and promptly reversed the Curse of the Bambino, and brought a world championship to the Red Sox, something no one, and I mean no one, thought possible.
It was a magical accomplishment.
And just to put a flourish on it, Boston repeated in 2006, Mr. Schilling again assisting.
Finally, we have to point out, Curt Schilling never juiced.
Curt Schilling was a colorful, articulate and intelligent baseball player, and one of the most masterful men of the mound I have ever had the privilege to watch.
I’ve always missed him since he left the Phils. It was always my fervent hope that someday he might return for a final farewell tour year or two with the Phils, but apparently it is not to be. I think Schilling, no matter how he was throwing, would have been a terrific starter for the Phils this season and would have drawn fans.
And again, I say, the Phils should honor him, retire his number, and do him homage. He was one of the greatest of great Phils pitchers.
We will not soon see his like again.
–art kyriazis philly/south jersey
home of the world champion phillies
THE EAGLES FAMILY OF COACHES IN THE NFL
January 5, 2009
The clash between Eagles head coach Andy Reid and his former assistant coach (and now Minnesota Head Coach) and good friend Brad Childress in the playoffs yesterday highlights a new trend in the NFL—the Philadelphia Eagles family of coaches in the NFL. First, there are the Buddy Ryan assistant coaches—Jon Gruden, formerly of Oakland (where he went to the Super Bowl) and now of Tampa Bay (where he also went to the Super Bowl, and narrowly missed the playoffs this year) and Jeff Fischer of Tennessee, the NFL’s longest tenured coach, who is the AFC’s top seeded team this year, a regular playoff contender, and a former Super Bowl coach and AFC champion. Former Eagles head coach and Buddy Ryan assistant coach Ray Rhodes continues to work as an assistant coach in the league. Buddy Ryan’s two sons now are assistant coaches in the league. Second, there are the ex-Eagles—such as Herm Edwards of Kansas City, and former head coach Dick Vermeil, who used to coach at St. Louis, and won a Super Bowl there. Ex-Eagle John Bunting was a college head coach at North Carolina. And then you have the Andy Reid connections–Harbaugh at Baltimore, who used to coach special teams with the Eagles, and all the connections of Reid through Green Bay as well as Philly like Childress at Minnesota and Holmgren in Seattle.
There are probably many more connections to the Eagles that could be found, but it certainly is illuminating how many coaches and assistant coaches in the NFL (and in the college ranks) now have philly ties. And we used to think this was a college hoops town with a lot of college and pro hoops coaches everywhere. Who knew we were a spawning ground for college coaches. Guess it’s a spawning ground of football coaches as well for the NFL.
–art kyriazis philly/south jersey
home of the world champion phillies
Happy New Year 2009
Goodbye to Pat Burrell Hello to Raul Ibanez
December 23, 2008
The Phillies have decided not to negotiate with free agent leftfielder and careeer phillie Pat Burrell and instead to sign Raul Ibanez, late of the Seattle Mariners, to a three year deal.
First, in order to make sense of this move, one has to recognize that Chase Utley is seriously hurt, recovering from surgery, and the first thing the phillies need to do is replace Chase Utley for at least the first half of 2009.
RAUL IBANEZ IS NOT REPLACING PAT BURRELL AT THE START, HE’S REPLACING CHASE UTLEY.
Once you recognize this fact, the Raul Ibanez signing makes incredible sense, because what the Phillies need is not a right handed but a lefthanded slugger in the lineup to backup Ryan Howard or go in front of Ryan Howard.
Without Utley in the lineup, and projecting lets’ say Eric Bruntlett at 2b for two months, the Phils may look like this;
lf – Raul Ibanez lh
cf – Shane Victorino sh
rf – Jayson Werth rh
3b – Pedro Feliz rh
ss – Jimmy Rollins sh
2b – Eric Bruntlett rh
1b – Ryan Howard lh
c – Carlos Ruiz rh
now if you examine this lineup, and assume that Chase Utley will not be back from surgery for at least two months of 2009, you will quickly see that the only lefthanded bats in the lineup are Ibanez and Howard, and that everyone else is a righy or a switch hitter.
Manuel might need also to spell Pedro Feliz if his back acts up, and may have to put Dobbs at 3d, which would actually add a needed left handed bat in the lineup.
Either way, the lineup is not overly lefthanded at this juncture. Bruntlett would bat 8th, Ruiz 7th, and the rest of the lineup would be probably as usual.
As for Burrell, who is departing, in nine seasons his line has been .257/.367/.485 with an ops+ of 119, hitting in a very favorable home park. Burrell hits poorly for average, but gets about 100 walks a year, doesn’t hit into many double plays, but strikes out a lot. He’s a classic station to station player who hits 30 homers a year, but otherwise either walks, strikes out or doubles. He hits few singles and rarely puts the ball into play otherwise.
Ibanez is a pretty different kind of hitter. A cuban, and therefore a classic latin american ballplayer, Ibanez does put the ball into play. His line after 13 seasons is .286/.346/.472 with an ops+ of 113. Over 162 games, he has averaged 21 homers, 4 triples and 32 doubles, 160 hits, 81 runs scored, 93 RBI, 52 walks and 92 strikeouts, with 11 GIDP. Notice that he gets to the approximately same slugging average as burrell and same ops+ as burrell, but does it by hitting more doubles and more singles, and having a higher batting average, a slightly lower on base average, but not much lower, and does this all in one of the worst hitting parks in baseball, Seattle. We can safely assume Ibanez will improve in Philly’s CBP. Again, Ibanez has averaged 265 total bases per 265 games, while Burrell has averaged 273.
This is so close, that it’s a wash offensively. But defensively, Burrell is a clear liability. While Ibanez is not a terrific outfielder, he’s better than Burrell, and Ibanez while not a motorman on the bases, will not have to be pulled for pinchrunners every time in late game situations.
Pat Burrell was a fantastic, great offensive machine for the phillies while he was here. He was a better player than JD Drew in my opinion. He was the player who was here from the dog days of 1999 to the championship of 2008. He was loyal and he was a company guy.
I for one will miss him
But at this stage of his career, pat burrell is so clearly an american league DH that he needs to switch leagues and become one. He’s ideally suited for Fenway and the green monster, and if the red sox were smart, they’d pick burrell up. He’d hit 40 homers up there easily, 30 at home and 10 on the road. And another 40 doubles off the wall. Never in the history of baseball has there been a player so obviously suited to play dh for the Boston Red Sox.
And he’d be a lot cheaper than Mark Teixeira, who is NOT ideally suited for Boston at all.
The washington nationals could do a lot worse than sign Burrell to play left field. He’d fill a big hole at cleanup hitter and they have so many young fleet outfielders to defensively caddy for him, they could play him 7 innings until they had a lead. Most importantly, Burrell can hit in their new ballpark.
These are just two places burrell could go. I think he’s got a lot in the tank.
–art kyriazis, philly/south jersey
home of the world champion phillies
