Jeff Fletcher | June 30, 2009

Just a fun philosophical debate I was having with a friend today. Would you trade Tim Lincecum for Albert Pujols?

I would. There aren’t many guys I’d rather have than Tim Lincecum, but I think Pujols is one of them. (Hanley Ramirez might be the other.) Pujols is ridiculously good, Barry Bonds good. And he’s still only 29 years old. Lincecum, as great as he is, is a pitcher. Pitchers, by their nature, are less predictable than hitters. I feel better about saying Pujols will still be performing just as well in 2012 than I do about Lincecum. A lot more can go wrong with pitchers, either because of injury or just because they lose it.

What do you think?

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Jeff Fletcher | June 29, 2009

It would seem to me that the Quality Start has been around long enough that people like me wouldn’t still need to be defending its value to old-time baseball curmudgeons. Yet, I found myself wasting a solid half hour of my morning on Sunday arguing with Dave Feldman. Feldman is a pretty smart guy, one of the Bay Area’s official scorers, a stat guy for A’s television broadcasts. He knows a lot about baseball.

Which is why it’s fun for me every once in a while to tell him he’s wrong.

Feldman’s argument, like that of most traditionalists, is that the QS is BS because you can get a QS by pitching six innings and allowing three earned runs, which is a 4.50 ERA. A 4.50 ERA, he says, is hardly “quality.”

That is just plain silly. He’s using the minimum standard for the statistic and applying that to the whole thing. It’s like saying “George Bush was a bad President, so we shouldn’t have a President any more.”

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Jeff Fletcher | June 27, 2009

First of all, you may wonder why I seemed so obsessed with this Moneyball movie. I’ve wondered that myself. I think it’s because it’s the first time there’s ever been a movie made (or even proposed) about people I know and events I witnessed first-hand. Also, there’s something pretty cool about getting to see a script for a movie before it’s made.

Anyway, I’ve now read both Moneyball scripts. There is the Steven Zaillian script, dated December 2008. There is the Steven Soderbergh revision, dated June 2009, which is the one that was rejected, scuttling the whole project. We’ll just call them the Zaillian script and the Soderbergh script. Unfortunately I can’t post either one for you to read, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Besides, if you’re a little resourceful, you can probably find copies on your own.

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Jeff Fletcher | June 26, 2009

Here’s an explanation of what went wrong between the December version of the script and the one that got rejected last week.

(By the way, there were some Twitter rumors that the movie was back on again, picked up by another studio, but to the best of my Googling ability, I have been unable to find a story confirming that.)

Anyway, I read the December script, written by Steven Zaillian, when it was posted on this blog — it’s since been removed, but I made a copy — and I actually liked it. I still don’t think it would have been a huge commercial success, but it did succeed in bringing the stat geeky stuff a little more toward the mainstream to make it comprehensible. It also put in the required chick-flick appeal like showing some of Billy Beane’s relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, which I don’t think was in the book at all. The huge glaring bit of poetic license in the Zaillian’s script was he has Beane finding Paul DePodesta in Cleveland after the 2001 season, and DePodesta basically shows him all the sabermetric stuff and Beane hires him. In real life, DePodesta came in 1989(oops) 1998. I also feel pretty confident that Beane was already aware of on-base percentage (having worked for Sandy Alderson) prior to DePodesta’s arrival.

The script also makes it look like the 2002 A’s were just like the Indians from the movie Major League, a ragtag bunch of no-talents who formed the perfect team. This ignores the fact that they had Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Barry Zito, Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez, all in their prime. Then again, the book pretty much ignored that too, so in that sense it’s accurate.

If you read the blog post linked at the top, you’ll see that the screenplay that director Steven Soderburgh was more like a documentary, not nearly as dramatic or interesting.

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Jeff Fletcher | June 24, 2009

At least one version of it anyway. Probably not the final one.  Anyway, read all about it here.

(Since I know my blog readers are all serious baseball fans, and not the purient degenerates who most web sites pander to, I won’t even mention the sex scene.)

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Jeff Fletcher | June 23, 2009

At the 1989 A’s reunion, Dave Stewart said Jose Canseco was a “bad teammate.” He said the A’s bitter feelings toward Canseco started long before Canseco’s book.

A lot of the players who showed up were asked about the two big ones who didn’t — Mark McGwire and Canseco — and mostly they said missed McGwire, but understood why he and the others who couldn’t make it were absent. Not too many nice words for Canseco, though.

The amusing thing was when the A’s players came out to the third-base line during introductions. Carney Lansford, now the Giants hitting coach, was reluctant to come out and join the enemy, but Tony Phillips convinced him to come out. No harm in posing for some photos.

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Jeff Fletcher | June 22, 2009

Buster Posey is going to be promoted soon, and it might be all the way to Triple-A. That’s what GM Brian Sabean said when I talked to him this afternoon at the Coliseum for a little State of the Giants. As you’ll read in that story, Sabean also said that Madison Bumgarner looks like he may be able to skip a level. Since he’s already at Double A, that can mean only one thing: his next stop could be the majors.

Aside from those items, Sabean didn’t really give me much in terms of headline-grabbing stuff. Obviously I asked him about the chances of picking up a hitter. He waffled on that one.

“We’d love to add something to the group,” he said. “How and when that happens remains to be seen. It’s not a real interesting market.”

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