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Billy, holy wow.
Holy crap, Billy, did you see that?

The elfin sprite that
stole my hat,
I see now how he floated
away from me
so fast:

he was possessed of an afro puff,
Billy,
and was he Crispy!

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I’m feeling nostalgic, maybe prematurely, about 2012. This could have something to do with the fact that the world is ending in December, but regardless, these days I find myself paging desultorily through the year-end stats, looking for rhyme or reason, mostly. And also for therapy following another soul-flattening Braves playoff collapse, but that’s another story.

So here is something I noticed. It’s about Mike Trout, who was good this year, as you may have heard. How good? Well, offensively, about 75% better than league average, if you’re down with wRC+. That’s good, and in fact, it made him the best offensive player in baseball (not to be confused with the most offensive player in baseball, which is Delmon Young). But last year, Jose Bautista was 81% better than league average. Also, Ryan Braun was 78% better, and Miguel Cabrera was 77% better. The year before that, Josh Hamilton was 76% better, and the year before that, Albert Pujols was 82% better. In fact, you have to go back to 1999, the year that Barry Bonds blew an elbow and missed two months, to find a league leader who stood out less from his league than Trout did from his. Before that, you have to go all the way back to 1988.

Maybe you’d prefer to break it down a little further, since Trout got his offensive value in a few different ways. By stealing bases, for example. As it happens, his 49 SB’s was the second-lowest league-leading total since 1963. Purely as a hitter, according to Baseball-Reference’s park-adjusted OPS+, Trout was 71% better than league average; Buster Posey edged him out at 72%. Posey’s mark is the lowest league-leading OPS+ in 24 years. Care for more traditional stats? Posey’s league-leading average of .336 was the second-lowest since 1990; Joe Mauer’s OBP of .416 was the lowest since 1984; Cabrera’s SLG of .606 was the lowest since 1991. And Trout’s WPA of 5.32 (again, tops among qualifying hitters) was the lowest in 60 years! The last guy to lead the league in WPA with a number smaller than 5.32 was Jackie Robinson!

OK, so it wasn’t a great year for batsmen. We know we’re in a pitcher’s era. Plus, 2012 was just fluky. Look at the Hall of Fame-caliber hitters around the league: most of them — Pujols, Rodriguez, Bautista, Ortiz, Ichiro, Votto, Kemp, Gonzalez, Berkman (and to a lesser extent Fielder and Hamilton) — endured disappointment thanks to injury, slump, and/or adjustment to a new league. That left plenty of room for upstarts like Trout, Posey, and Andrew McCutchen to crowd the leaderboards. You say coincidence; I smell a rat. I wasn’t born yesterday. Anyway, that first page of the Fangraphs 2012 batting board has the least celebrity wattage of any I can remember. The pitching board, on the other hand —

Well, never mind. 2012 was kind of fluky for pitchers too. Several stars — Halladay, Lincecum, Santana — had really disappointing seasons. A bunch of others — Greinke, Hernandez, Lee, Sabathia, Weaver, Johnson — had good seasons, but certainly not their best. Justin Verlander had a very good season: according to FIP-, he was the best pitcher in baseball, 30% better than average. But that doesn’t sound that impressive, really. How far back do you have to go to find a less impressive league leader? Holy crap, 1976.

Pick just about any skill in baseball, and in 2012 there just wasn’t anyone who was all that outstanding at it. Anytime anything good happened, odds are that someone unlikely was responsible. Look at some of the guys we’ve been talking about this year. Kris Medlen. Melky Cabrera. Jim Johnson. Philip Humber. Homer Bailey. Aaron Hill. Chris Davis. R.A. Dickey. Ben Sheets. Josh Reddick. Lance Lynn. Chase Headley. If someone had told you in March that that set of dudes would be getting this kind of ink, you’d have laughed in their face and then located the nearest exit.

If I were (God forbid) inclined to the Grand Narrative, I might say that 2012 was the Year of the Everyman. Or the Year of Thwarted Expectations. I’m not going to say that. But here’s another factoid, because I’m not tired yet. Of the top 20 hitters (by WAR) in baseball this year, only five of them were in the top 20 last year. That’s tied for the highest year-to-year turnover rate ever. I checked. (And only one of those five, Miguel Cabrera, was also on the list in 2010.)

So what’s going on? Is 2012 just a blip, or is our current star-starved state the beginning of a new world order? Are the days of Bonds and Pedro behind us? Along with the days of wine and roses?

I don’t know, but in the spirit of a Mayan codex, I offer these graphs, which I’m quite sure offer a clue of some sort. They represent, respectively, the standard deviation of all qualifying hitters’ wOBAs for each year, and the standard deviation of all qualifying pitchers’ FIPs for each year. But what do they mean? Discuss. Discuss!

This is real, from Mets.com:

Each [All-Star ticket] strip includes one ticket to each All-Star Week event at the ballpark, two MLB All-Star FanFest tickets and one Official All-Star Game program. All-Star Week begins with the FanFest at Javits Center from July 12-16. Taco Bell All-Star Sunday is July 14 and features the SiriusXM All-Star Futures Game and the Taco Bell All-Star Legends & Celebrity Softball Game. All-Star batting practice and the Home Run Derby highlight Gatorade All-Star Workout Day on July 15, and then the granddaddy of all megastar gatherings returns with the 84th All-Star Game on July 16.

The granddaddy of all megastar gatherings, eh? And can they fit any more sponsor names into this paragraph? I hate the All-Star Game.

Billy.
Someone photoshopped that helmet in
someone scribbled your name
someone who once liked your good face
now gags
when they see it.

That’s how it goes.
How did it go last night?

I thought to myself, of my last poem
to you,
that there could have been more magic
that I could have insisted
more: my A’s hat was magically
given to me by a man named Billy
on the street with a wink
and a ruddy cheek
and glasses
and a still okay head
of hair — but I didn’t —
I am so unaware of the process of poems
of magic, of bees, leaves.

Thought to myself that this time, I’ve gotta
do the magic right, so here:

Tonight, there’ll be an elfin sprite
(the same Joe West has seen)
trying to steal the Tigers’ tails
whipping them all around.
He’ll be wearing my hat, the sprite,
which he stole from me
on the same street that you gave it,

Billy.
But I did not chase him, Billy,
I let him walk away. If the A’s win
tonight, he can keep it; if they lose
he can keep it, too.

Sitting here at primanti bros. about to crush a Pitts-burgher cheese steak for you. Thank you fans, for all your support. #thisonesforyou

— Travis Snider (@Lunchboxhero45) October 3, 2012

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For Sale: Tiny, Dancing Ichiro

– Great for parties

– Housetrained (tiny toilet not included)

– May need to put towel over cage to get him to sleep

– A tiny, national treasure

– Eats Powerbars and cigarettes

Will accept all reasonable offers.

Billy! — I say it with my Rosie Perez voice
like you are Woody Harrelson, but
you are not Woody Harrelson, let’s face it —
you are too much a lover
of soccer —
Billy, who should laud you
when your shit doesn’t work — for real
it’s like your shit is a time release fertilizer
that ends in October —
when you’re shit.

You’re not shit. I love you.
I hate you.
I love you.

I love that it is boring to you,
this game of bases and balls, this
menagerie of melancholy and silly
torture, this spectacle from which you hide
cinematically
on your exercise bicycle or
secretly behind your PB smoothie
(that’s right, I know you love them) —
I love your growing preference for piebald
balls.

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This San Francisco Chronicle article discusses the A’s refusing to remove the tarps from the upper deck stadium seats, even for the playoffs, leaving 20,878 of O.co Coliseum’s 55,945 seats covered and unable to be sold.

From the article:

Longtime sports marketer Paul Siri of Redwood City, a former executive with IMG, said he’d never seen an owner say “no” to the chance to sell more tickets, hot dogs, beer, T-shirts and other merchandise at a high-profile game that’s sure to sell out.

The move makes sense only if Wolff is trying to convince Major League Baseball he can’t build a successful team in Oakland, Siri said.

“Looking at this from his point of view, this is the worst thing that could happen,” Siri said. “His team wins, media exposure increases, the stadium sells out, and suddenly he loses his leverage to move. It kills his argument. … I don’t blame the fans for being upset.”

Not from the article:

In further attempts to keep fans away, and convince MLB that the A’s must move, Wolff has refused to make any attempts to capture the thousands of bees that have found a home in O.co Coliseum. Wolff denies releasing the bees into the stadium in the first place, and emphatically denies spending a long September night covering all stadium armrests with honey, produced locally (in San Jose).

Or it may just be that the two people they found to quote in the article are the only two people who think anyone will buy the extra tickets. This thread at Baseball Think Factory makes the point that there likely is no demand for the seats anyway.

(But how much could they get for the tarps on eBay?)

As you may have gathered from my previous post, I had pretty well narrowed down my imaginary ballot for American League MVP to two players. I hadn’t seen either of them play much, but everyone kept talking about them, so I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Sure, the choices were kind of uninspiring. The one guy, from what I understand, just comes up with the bases loaded all the time, grounds into a zillion double plays and every so often drives dudes in by accident. The other guy, from what I understand, can’t do any normal things very well and is kind of miserable to watch, but for whatever reason the numbers add up to make him look like a freaking superhero. Still, I figured I’d have to suck it up and vote for one of the other. And because I am a reasonable man, I decided to base my vote on which one had the best highlights mix.

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Tom Tango posted his request for fans’ scouting reports of player fielding back on September 11th. I looked at the results today for the first time, given that there was a reminder to FanGraphs readers to do ratings today.

It’s sorta involved: “For any player that you’ve seen play in at least 10 games in 2012, I want you to judge his performance in 7 specific fielding categories.” (Emphasis mine.) This favors the fan who attends over ten live games a year, as Tango also advises,

“If you don’t have an opinion on a particular characteristic of that player, then go on to the next characteristic for that player. This applies especially for you TV watchers, and [sic] you can’t tell how well Peter Bourjos can read the ball off the bat.”

In other words, you need to be a serious fan to qualify, though it’s really just an honor system. That said, it takes a serious enough fan to read FanGraphs, or to visit Tango’s site, and especially to sit down and do this, however incompletely. (I’m not going to participate even though I went to at least a dozen Brewers games this season — I’m a very observant fan, but I tend to watch the pitcher and catcher very closely to the exclusion of noticing defensive alignments, first steps by the fielders, etc.)

I am, however, interested in the results — not the how the fans rate the players, necessarily, though I will look at those results, too, after the project ends. No, right now I’m far more interested in which teams have been most thoroughly addressed by the fans.

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