Your last line really made me laugh, Bob, and I suspect a lot of us can relate to this.

The next time adulthood wants to be the killjoy, you can concede that we are grown ups and put the invented numbers in a spreadsheet instead of writing them down, then continue on creating the back story in your mind.

Definitely hits way too close to home. When I play baseball sim games like Baseball Mogul, Diamond Mind and OOTP I’m constantly crafting narratives, whether I’m using real players or fake ones. I’ve gotten my teams in financial trouble because I signed overage players to sub-optimal deals just to keep them in good graces with the “fans” and because I felt they “deserved” to play their career with one team. And these are bits and bytes, not real people! Same thing with in-game decisions – I’ve put off pinch hitting for a player winding down his career in key late… Read more »

Thanks Bob. This one’s a lot easier to swallow than last year -we just got outplayed by a better team. We’ve gotta consider building the roster for October from Day 1 – for one or two more seasons, the Central is going to be a division winnable by 84 games or so. DH Ramirez or Lindor more often, give them rest days, do anything to keep them from burning out. Kluber doesn’t need as heavy a workload.

I was a Coover fan, Josh, and I read it maybe fifty years ago. A terrific fever dream of old time baseball culture. I thought of it often when writing about 19th c. ball earlier this year, especially whenever the issue of players drinking too much came up.

Not to go all literary, but the novel is an allegory that draws a parallel between the main character, J. Henry Waugh, and the Christian god. The young pitcher killed by a line drive, Damon Rutherford, has Christlike characteristics, and his tragically predestined death results in various phenomena, the chief being that Waugh, alias God to the world he has created in his mind, goes even more crazy than he already was and, as I recall, turns things very dark in the end in his madness. My question always has been this: since Coover himself is a kind of uber-deity… Read more »

No offense taken, Josh: I was just foolin’ around. The more I recall the book (and I’ve now poked around online to refresh my memory, which nsb’s comment did as well, I see more than ever how germane your connection was. There’s a nice New York Times article on the book, written on the occasion of its reissue a few years ago — perhaps those here who haven’t read the book will be tempted by it. I may be recalling the plot wrong, but it seems to me that after the beanball incident that nsb notes, which was generated by… Read more »

A good comp for Snell in 2018 might be Pedro Martinez 2002 and 2003 with the Saux. Less than 200 innings, high W-L%, few CG, high ERA+,….. not a great number of starts, either. IIRC, he may have even been making starts with 5 days rest. Nobody was suspect of Martinez’ accomplishments because he was already established as one of the top 2-3 pitchers in baseball. Maybe this is just Snell’s breakout season and he’ll do more of the same for several years to come? After all, it’s not like the workload is going to hurt him…

Mike L:
FWIW, in 2002-2003, Pedro started 60, completed 5, pitched a mere 386 innings (6.43/Start) and went an average of 17-4 with a 206 ERA+…..that 6.43/Start wouldn’t be as much of a stretch for Snell (2018 – 5.83/Start – uggghhh). Pedro had a superior resume prior (obviously) but, if they’re going to baby Snell for the next few years, he might be able to duplicate this past season

I think Mike’s comparison of Snell to a platoon player is worth thinking about. I had been thinking of “very long reliever,” a sort of starter version of Ryan Yarbrough, the way Cash used him this year. But platooning captures more of what’s going on, especially if we broaden the concept from simple lefty/righty considerations and consider the idea more broadly as role playing. For position players, the most profoundly “platoony” manager ever was actually Gil Hodges. If we look at the 1969 Mets, only two hitters were qualifiers. Cash had four, but not one of them was a solid… Read more »

Off on a tangent due to your remark about platooning: Just recently I got interested in the strange career of Fred Lynn, who burst on the scene at age 23 by winning the ROY and MVP for the Red Sox in 1975. An excellent fielder, he seemed destined—in a sort of slightly older, pre-Mike Trout way—to have a HOF career lying before him. Well, the next three seasons he had some injuries but put up decent to very good numbers, then came his career year in which he swept the league in BA, OBP, SLG, and OPS+. Finished only 4th… Read more »

Kind of makes you wonder about Yaz—if free agency had carried him away from Fenway in his prime, where his career might have gone. Dickey, being a catcher, was easy to platoon, I’d guess. Mize, the other HOFer here, seems to have had far less trouble after WWII than before. Learned to hit the curve, maybe. At any rate he had many big seasons, not just a couple. Norm Cash may be the closest comp to Lynn.

The interesting thing to me about the “opener” (well, one interesting thing – I suspect there are dozens) is that it’s a strategy that we know is sub-optimal. Every manager in baseball history starts the game with the best possible outcome being their pitcher throwing a complete game shutout. Doesn’t matter if it’s 27 strikeouts or 27 line drives to deep center field – no manager has ever thought “You know, I’d prefer to juggle 5 or 6 bullpen guys to get this win instead of just letting my starter finish the game.” It’s a strategy born of necessity –… Read more »

Doom: You’re definitely correct on that second part – when the ‘opener’ was just something that people were batting around at rotisserie league drafts and SABR conventions, the analytical rationale was both the amount of scoring that happens in the 1st inning (because, as you said, we know the 1-2-3 hitters are going to bat) and the certainty of knowing who your pitcher will be facing, which allows you to try and work a platoon split or certain pitcher vs batter match-ups. I also stacked the deck a bit with my example – if your opener gave up 3 runs,… Read more »

Is there a way to search for all pitchers season stats through their first 5 innings of work?
Or first 75 pitches?

Would be interesting to see how Snell measures up that way,

You could also do each of the first 5 innings one at a time and sum up the results in an Excel spreadsheet.