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Jeff Fletcher | August 31, 2010
The voting starts Wednesday at 7 am PT for the Ford C. Frick award for baseball broadcasting. You can vote at the Hall of Fame’s Facebook page. The top three vote-getters from the fan balloting go onto the final 10-name ballot, which will be considered by a special committee in December.
By the way, what does it say that Facebook now has a part in the Hall of Fame selection process?
Jeff Fletcher | August 30, 2010
I do a regular little deal on SNY.tv whenever the Giants or A’s play the Yankees or Mets. It’s a little breakdown of the local teams for those New Yorkers. Anyway, here’s my little bit on the A’s today.
Also, I’ll be on Chronicle Live tonight. I am scheduled to do a little hit from AT&T Park between 5 and 5:15.
Jeff Fletcher | August 26, 2010
My earlier discussion of Trevor Cahill’s Cy Young candidacy, and a related tweet, sparked a debate with one of my followers, which led me to this well-timed, excellent piece by Dave Cameron of FanGraphs.
(Ironic, if you recall a little spat between me and Cameron, or more specifically, between me and Cameron’s followers, from last year. Anyway, now I work at FanHouse and FanGraphs is one of our partners, so we’re all friends.)
Back to the point, I have often argued that FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) got too much play when it came to Cy Young discussion. It was my reasoning for suggesting that Chris Carpenter deserved the Cy Young over Tim Lincecum last year, and I got into it a little more this year. Well, Trevor Cahill is shaping up to be this year’s Carpenter, a guy who gets a lot of outs, but gets no respect from the sabermetric community because he’s not racking up enough strikeouts. They say he’s just lucky.
Jeff Fletcher | August 26, 2010
This is going to be the sixth year, if memory serves, that I have a Cy Young vote. I admit that I didn’t always do the best job of voting. In fact, I voted for Barry Zito in 2002 when I should have voted for Pedro Martinez. Zito had more wins, but Pedro was better in every other way.
Anyway, now I feel like I’ve come to a good place where I have a handle on what I’m doing. I believe, as I’ve written several times before, that the Cy Young is not the Best Pitcher, and it’s not the Most Valuable Pitcher. It’s the Pitcher Who Pitched the Best. The two best ways to measure how effective a pitcher was, in my opinion, are his ERA and his opponents on-base percentage. After all, the job of a pitcher, when you boil it down to its essence, is to get outs and prevent runs.
Jeff Fletcher | August 25, 2010
A little more multimedia. For the past month or so, we’ve done a weekly show, the MLB Hour, and it’s getting better every week. I urge you to watch the whole episode, and to come back to watch it every week, but if you are just interested in me and the Giants-related stuff, about 9 minutes in, I file a report on Pat Burrell. That’s followed by a little discussion of the woes of Tim Lincecum. After that I get into a little chat about my story on young pitchers on contenders whose workloads bear watching (like Madison Bumgarner).
Anyway, here’s the show.
Jeff Fletcher | August 21, 2010
Rays manager Joe Maddon just raved about how good the A’s young starters are in his pregame media session. I could just transcribe the whole thing, but I’m being lazy, so I’m just posting the audio so you can hear it yourself.
When he says “this guy tonight,” he’s talking about Brett Anderson.
Jeff Fletcher | August 20, 2010
You may recall a few weeks ago I figured that the A’s will have about $20 million to spend on additional players for next year’s roster. Well, as I was watching BP before today’s game against the Rays, I pointed to Carlos Pena and told a few of my media colleagues that I think Pena is near the top of the list of guys who might end up getting some of that cash next year.
I think Pena makes sense because he’s a legit power hitter, but he’s probably just a little on the downside of his career and he also plays a position where there are a lot of other, better players, out there. That means that he’s probably not going to be getting offers from the big-money teams. I’ll bet the A’s could get him for 3 years, $36 million. Something like that.
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