Dialectics and the Diamond 03.27.07: Building Teams

Posted by Rob Rabies on 03.27.2007

Why the middle is always the road best traveled in building a baseball team.

Congratulations readers (all 9 of you) on breaking my 411 hymen. Since you all made it through the byline, I'd say that giving you my name again might be a bit redundant. With that being said, I think that it might behoove all of us to get a couple of things about me out in the open in order to nip those "you are ‘X' team's homer", or "you hate ______" emails in the bud.

I'm a diehard St. Louis Cardinals fan. I'll make no bones about it. Any pretenses of my objectivity can be dynamited, gathered up, peed on, and then scooped up and put in the garbage disposal if and when I am writing about something involving the Redbirds. This will also extend itself to discussions about the Cubs, Astros, and Don Denkinger, whose name in this column will henceforth always be followed with the epithet "may he rot in the fires of blackest hell."

I have no desire to ever discuss steroids, HGH, Preparation H, or any other controlled substance in this space. For the sake of your letters to me, let's pretend that when we discuss baseball players, we're talking about Britney Spears, Steve Howe, or Richard Pryor circa 1980. Don't assume they're not on any number of illicit substances—it's naïve. Furthermore, the only reason that you, or I, would discuss it is because it's considered a popular topic to discuss. If everyone cheats, then maybe no one does. Greenies are ‘roids are bull semen for all I care.

I'm a graduate student, which is a fancy way of saying that I'm a lazy bastard who is doing anything possible to avoid the rigors of the private sector. As Ray Stantz famously said, "They expect results." I only put this in here because it transitions to….

Dialectics. No, not the L. Ron Hubbard book. Dialectics is one of the oldest liberal arts (along with rhetoric, grammar, and porn), but it is most commonly associated with a philosopher and horrible writer, I'm sensing comparisons, named George W. Hegel. He ran for city council back in 1793 out in Oakland, you probably didn't hear about him (watch the Tupac sketch from the Lost Episodes of "Chappelle's Show" for clarification).

Back to reality—dialectics is a fairly simple process that has been made to seem overly complex by my schooling. John has an idea—we'll call it a thesis. Let's say John's thesis is that his baseball team should be constructed around 6'5" 240 pound behemoths who hit straight ball very much, rack up a lot of dingers and doubles, but don't move first to third very well, strike out like Rob Deer, hardly ever steal, but could possibly draw walks well.

Some people really like John's idea, but others aren't so keen on it. Whitey proposes a different idea. He likes players who run like Bengals from the scene of a crime, can lay down a bunt in any situation, hit the ball to the opposite field, and often take chances on the basepaths, such as trying to stretch a single into a double or a double into a triple. We'll call this the antithesis.

Well, which one is right? Those of you who are fans of teams like the Yankees, Red Sox, A's, and Tigers will have a tendency to side with John. Generally, fans who prefer National League teams will tend to side with Whitey.

The answer is neither.

The jargon of Dialectics says that the compromise between the two sides, the synthesis, is often the best solution. (For the sake of brevity and sanity, we'll forget the numerous iterations that the dialectical process involves).

"So what's your point, egghead boy?"

Good question; and it's two-fold:
1) I am not, nor will I ever be as smart as I think I am. In fact, I'm a functional idiot.
2) Neither station to station baseball, nor small-ball is an effective strategy over the long haul.

Now, let's explain why:

Station-to-station baseball is built for Sportscenter.:
It's exciting for jerk-offs like Stuart Scott (the ultimate studio gangsta') to spout off about how some juiced-up fool "got all swole" on a hanging curveball over the inner half of the plate. That's fine and wonderful for the time being, but if you want to build a winning baseball team, you'd do far better than looking for nine Jason Giambis. Baseball is a mixture of intricate strategy and brute force. Believing that one or the other will get you to the promise land is a dangerous tincture to imbibe. That's why a guy like Reggie Sanders bounces around more than Jenna Jameson. By all accounts he's a great guy, good for 25 homeruns a year, decent in the outfield, and has arms the size of Hulk Hogan. But he either pumps the ball into the ninth deck, or strikes out on a high fastball. If you're down 4, he's a great guy to wake up the crowd with a moonshot. If you're down two and need a baserunner, or have a guy on second with no outs, you might as well perform seppuku.

Station to Station baseball thrives on bad pitching:
If you were going to ask me which strategy I'd rather use against Tampa's 4th starter, I'd no doubt tell you that mashing him into "Bolivian" is the preferable path to take. But what happens when you have to face Johan Santana? Jake Peavy? Roy Oswalt? Now, I'm not saying that every guy in the lineup should step up to the plate with the intention of drag bunting, but trying to find and crush a mistake off of pitchers who don't make many and have great location is a recipe for failure of XFL magnitudes. This exacerbates itself in the postseason, when teams will face #1, 2, and 3 starters, not some guy who should be mopping up a 25-cent theater. Feasting on the Mark Redmans and Jason Marquis's of the world works in the regular season, but come October, those guys couldn't break out of the satin warm-up jacket if Kate Beckinsale was telling them to get naked and make her bark like a dog.

Station to station baseball puts no stress on the defense:
How well did the Detroit pitching staff hold up last year under the threat of hit and runs and bunting? They folded quicker than Planet Hollywood and looked uglier than Sly Stallone in the process of doing it. Teams who utilize the hit and run, base-stealing, and/or the suicide squeeze, put the stress on the defense and the pitcher. Unless your second baseman is Chuck Knoblauch, you're far more likely to make a costly throwing error trying to gun the ball to first to get out Jose Reyes than you are lobbing it to get out Frank Thomas.

Jack Nicklaus used to have a great strategy for winning majors—let the other guys lose it. If you hang around and apply enough pressure, eventually they'll buckle. If you're facing a team like the Reds, who made 128 errors last year, why wouldn't you let them shoot themselves in the foot? If I'm the manager, I don't care who pulls the trigger as long as the bullet ends up in the other guy.

Now, I'm sure that extended harangue against maulball probably has many of you believing that I'm a fan of the mid 1980's, when people laid more bunts on down the lines than Keith Hernandez snorted lines—but must I remind you….dialectics. Here are some of the many reasons why small ball doesn't work by itself:

Don't call it a comeback:
There comes a time when you need to launch a javelin into the stands. If you're down by three in the ninth, bunting yourself on isn't going to work, stealing is effective only in eliminating the double play, and a sac fly is going to get your sac an L. It's hard to precipitate large comebacks through a series of slap hits and flares. Without a genuine homerun threat, a 3 run deficit necessitates between 4-6 hits, walks, and/or errors. That same deficit requires only two baserunners and one proverbial swing of the bat if you have a guy who can deliver the yardie when needed.

One bad AB ruins an inning:
We'll go back to Reggie Sanders as the example du jour. If you rely extensively on small ball, one guy who doesn't do his job of advancing the runner is disastrous for your plans. Reggie could write a dissertation on how to not get the runner over. Whether it was a strikeout, GIDP, pop up, or foul out, The Biggest Arms in the League couldn't get a guy from second to third if he hooked a winch up to the sonofabitch and towed him over there. This has a domino effect of killing the morale of your club, particularly when you are sacrificing outs as small ball often calls for. Shortening the game can shorten your chances for a rally, particularly when you have a guy who shrinks from the occasion.

It's not just bad at bats either. Having a player get caught stealing can really take the wind out of your sails. It's also extremely distracting for many players to have a teammate running in the background while they are trying to pick up the spin on a pitch and time their swing accordingly. Furthermore, batters need to "protect" the runner during their attempt, which often means swinging at a bad pitch in order to obstruct (but never "interfere" of course) with the catcher.

So let's take a look at a thesis and antithesis to help drive this point home:

The 2006 Red Sox will represent our thesis. They had one baserunning threat, Coco Crisp, and he missed 57 games. Crisp had 22 steals, no one else on the team had more than six. Friggin' six steals. They were last in the league in steals and sixth in runs despite being first in walks and second in on base percentage. They were constantly on base, but they couldn't drive home their baserunners unless they were launching balls over The Monstah'. They were 12th in hits, last in triples, and 12th in batting average. Sixth in runs is also a fairly tepid stat, especially given the fact that they are playing in one of the most hitter friendly parks in the AL and have two of the best 8 hitters in baseball in Manny and David Ortiz. Boston only had one way of scoring runs, the long ball, and that caught up to them over the course of the season, as they couldn't overcome their pitching deficiencies in part due to the one-dimensional nature of their offense.

The antithesis will be the Twins. The Twinkies played in a hitter-friendly park as well, but finished 8th out of 14 teams in runs despite being 1st in hits and batting average, 6th in steals, 5th in on-base percentage, and had the fewest strikeouts of any team. Unfortunately, they were next to last in the league in homeruns and 11th in doubles. They could get on base, they obviously had several guys who could hit, but outside of Justin Morneau and Torii Hunter (who had a career year), they lacked a consistent power threat.

Both teams were too reliant on either slap-hitting and dinking, or the homerun. Although the Twins made the playoffs, they were a miserable failure against the A's.

Now, what is a team that combines a decent average, slugging, and team speed?

The New York Mets.

The Mets finished third in the NL in runs, 4th in homeruns, third in doubles, first in steals, and third in slugging. The Mets were able to mix in power and speed throughout their lineup, and many of their players had both (Beltran and Reyes). Unlike Boston, which only really had stationary maulers, they were able to balance out the statuesque Carlos Delgado with guys like David Wright. Of an admittedly biased selection, they most successful of all those mentioned. If not for an untimely rash of injuries (as loathe as I am to admit this) to their pitching staff, they would most likely be the World Series Champs, but them's the breaks.

So the next time you find yourself cursing your team's GM, or praising the acquisition of a Jim Thome-like lead-assed slugger, remember that in the long run you are far better off building a team with a balance of slap hitters, base stealers and Pedro Cerranos. In the words of Ron Jaworski, it's all about balance, and in the words of me, it's about achieving synthesis through the dialectical process, which may be the most douchebagy statement ever written by someone not named Skip Bayless.