Bill Parker

In the offseason, an unstoppable force collided with an immovable object as sabermetric whipping boy Dayton Moore of the Royals and sabermetric whipping boy Brian Sabean of the Giants completed a trade, sending Melky Cabrera to the Giants and Jonathan Sanchez to the Royals. The general feeling at the time seemed to be that Moore had done well for himself, for once, by getting something out of what appeared to be a fluky-good year by Cabrera, while Sabean had been duped yet again.

Flash forward to May 15, and Sanchez has a 6.75 ERA, while walking nearly a batter per inning and averaging just over four innings pitched per start. Cabrera, meanwhile, has thus far bested his own surprisingly strong 2011 performance, and currently sits at .338/.386/.490 (150 OPS+) and is on pace to wind up with about 6.5 rWAR. Melky’s been so impressive, in fact, that yesterday, Sabean discussed the possibility of signing him to an extension during the season.

It’s easy to see where Sabean is coming from. Melky’s still just 27 (an infant, by Sabean’s standards), and is set to become a free agent for the first time after this season. With Pablo Sandoval out of the lineup, Cabrera has been far and away the Giants’ best hitter. Also, Sabean let Carlos Beltran walk at the end of last year, and has seen him ink a better-than-team-friendly deal with the Cardinals and spend the first 35 games of 2012 as probably the NL’s best hitter (non-Matt Kemp division). Locking up Beltran’s good, younger replacement might be a popular move with the fans right now.

But: prior to 2011, Cabrera spent five full seasons as a below-average hitter, and he was young and all, but he’d shown the opposite of improvement, posting the following rWARs from age 21 through 25: 2.7, 1.3, 0.2, 0.9, (-0.5). By the end of 2010, Cabrera looked like a guy who, come 2013, would probably sign one or two one-year, quite possibly minor-league deals and then fade away. How comfortable can we be that he’s really significantly improved, and isn’t just having a fluky year-plus-a-month-or-so? Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhat lost in all the attention given to the Hamels/Harper craziness from the weekend was that on Saturday night, we saw a new record: when Jamie Moyer accused Chipper Jones of stealing signs amidst the Braves’ big comeback against Moyer and the Rockies, it was the oldest combined age between two active players (89 years and roughly 180 days) in the entire proud history of baseball’s pissing contests.

I mean, it probably was. Don’t you think? Has to be.

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You may have heard: Albert Pujols has been bad so far this season. Really bad.  With an 0-for-4 on Sunday, Pujols is now hitting .216/.266/.295 in his 94 PA, with seven doubles (tied for ninth in the AL), but just four unintentional walks, and, most bizarrely, no homers.

It’s early. But it’s also about 15% of the way into the season, so it’s not that early; Barry Bonds started off terribly in his historic 2001, hitting .103/.188/.241 in his first seven games, but while it took a while for his batting average to come around, by the end of game 22 he sported a .363 OBP and .747 SLG.

And Pujols has been walking about half as often as what had been his custom and striking out a lot more often, and (relatedly, of course) he appears to have expanded his strike zone. He’s also facing mostly new pitchers, which can’t help, and is sporting what would be a career-best line drive rate, so, like I said, it’s early. But it’s…not not discouraging.

So to reintroduce some hope, I decided to find some seasons by other truly great hitters that started off comparably to Pujols’ 2012, but that ended as great seasons. And I noticed something: that doesn’t happen often. Ted Williams really never started a season badly until his second-to-last (which also ended badly), for instance, nor did peak Babe Ruth or Jimmie Foxx.

You won’t find a truly legendary season, like Bonds’ 2001, that started out anything like Pujols’ 2012 through as many games. But you will, occasionally, find a season that starts this way and turns into a great one. Here are the six best examples I could find, roughly in order of their applicability to Pujols:

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What I was going to tell you today was that it was time for a few teams to really mix things up with their approach to pitching staffs. It’s not my idea, originally, but it’s been a while since I’ve heard anything about it, and I was going to tell you that for some teams, its time had come: get away from the five-man rotation, and from the idea of “starting pitchers” altogether.

We know that even the best starters tend to get worse with each time through the batting order — that fatigue is a gradual effect, not a binary, suddenly-happens-at-100-pitches sort of thing — and that pitchers, essentially all of them, fare much better in efficiency terms as relievers asked to go one inning than as starters relied upon for six-plus.

We know that the “win,” the pitcher’s stat, is almost perfectly useless, almost as bad as the save, which itself is a little better than the hold, and that managing a game based on those numbers is just ridiculously backward thinking. So why not toss all that old-fashioned nonsense aside and endeavor to use the entire staff when it’s at its best (that is, when it’s fresh)?

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