Earl Weaver and Batting Lineups: Weaver on Strategy

Previously on the Camden Depot Book Club, I remarked on a few items that Weaver addressed in his second chapter of the book, Weaver on Strategy.  That chapter addressed his thoughts on various aspects of offensive play.  This entry will address the next chapter.

Chapter 2 - The Lineup
Pushing the Right Buttons

A Perfect Order
Earl Weaver was a bit of a master clock maker.  He saw his role in setting his team up before each game and then letting them go.  A significant part of his determination of who to set out on the field came from his understanding of various metrics.  The following is his idea of who should slot in where in the line up:

Leadoff - "someone with a high on-base percentage...70 walks and a high batting average"
Second and Third - "have as many guys on base as possible when the number four hitter comes to bat"
Fourth - has enough power "to do some damage with men on base"
Fifth - "should have some power...so opposition cannot pitch around the number four hitter"

And he derides the use of the second hitter being a high contact bunt or hit-and-run player.  The concept of the first five players and how not to use a second hitter is actually very forward thinking.  It reemerged with the Oakland A's teams from the 2000s and has progressively made its way through a significant portion of Major League Baseball.

However, as much of a visionary Weaver was with the lineup, even the good people of Baltimore forget his lessons.  Last year with Nick Markakis going down, much was to be argued about the proper lineup order.  J.J. Hardy and his sub-300 OBP batting second 150 times last year.  That has to be one of the most anti-Weaverian displays last year.  Hardy is an old school perspective on second batters.

As interesting aside, I do not think I ever printed this before as I cannot seem to find it, but I once ran a regression on batting lineups of all 30 teams over a ten year period expanding from OBP and SLG value to include an improvised speed score based on Speed Score.  What I found amazing by the regression analysis was that speed came out as a negative trait for a lead off hitter.  This does not make intuitive sense at first look.  However, thinking more about it, the reason why speed was considered a hindrance according to the regression analysis was because managers tended to use speedy players at the top of the lineup while largely ignoring how well they actually get on base.  Speed is excellent, but not when the other tools overwhelm the utility of speed.

Numerical Narcosis
I think numbers can be a wonderful thing.  Ideas and concept sometimes become so elegant and lucid in their place when events are measured in the right ways.  It is what brought chemistry out of alchemy and advanced medicine away from barbers.  To understand how something works, why something works, it can be quite empowering.  However, it can lead one to overlook where current processes do not measure things as well as they measure other things.  I call this numerical narcosis or, more simply, being drunk on numbers.

Such perspectives run rampant in baseball circles where a little knowledge can make someone dangerous.  The Verducci Effect has evaporated into nothingness and likely will be forgotten in time.  That hypothesis came forward by squinting hard and seeing patterns where there really were none or at least none that could be so easily pinned to a change in innings.  Likewise, number crunching amateur players has eroded from the meager footholds that they held in Oakland and Toronto.  Psychological evaluations petered out in Baltimore.  Everyone looks for an in, everyone wants to believe that they can explain and measures things, which can lead to ignoring times where the approach fails.

This brings me back to Earl Weaver and his focus on a player's record against a pitcher.  He goes over sitting down and looking at a sheet of paper that yields information that ranges on 2 to 35 plate appearances with most below 20.  Somehow he thinks this is sufficient data to make decisions on who should play over general handedness data.  I would suggest that having one or two seasons of data points on handedness would be a much better predictor of future success than a few seasons of numbers against specific pitchers.  Although pitcher have some degree of unique value, the sheer difference in volume between the two datasets will likely leave handedness more useful than performance against specific pitchers.

The Extra 3% Lineup
On average, a team send a batter up to the plate 34 times in a game.  An idea Earl Weaver had was to sometimes write in outfielder Royle Stillman or first baseman Tom Chism at shortstop when the Orioles were the visitors.  After the top half of the inning, Mark Belanger would then come in and play the rest of the game.  This happened in 1978 and 1979 when Belanger hit 36 and 48 OPS+.  Weaver would only do this in September after the roster increased in size for fear that during the regular season a pinch hitter would be needed.

Last year, Robert Andino played in 127 games.  Let us assume that he started 60 of those on the road.  Just how many runs would replacing Andino with a bench player for that first at bat earn the Orioles?  If Steve Pearce and his 92 wRC+ batted leadoff in place of Robert Andino and his 61 wRC+ for those 60 at bats, the Orioles would have gained 2.3 runs over those 60 plate appearances.  That is roughly a quarter of a win.  If such a situation was carried out over 81 road games, that would be worth maybe a third of a win.  Trade in Steve Pearce for Nick Markakis and you would see a gain of about three quarters of a win for those 81 games.

Needless to say, I could understand doing this in situations where a player must sit, such as when Matt Wieters needs a day off.  If you have a player as poor at hitting as Andino in the lineup then, sure, as long as it does not mess with Andino's head too much...let Wieters lead off.  However, I assume these situations are few and far between.  They probably really frustrate the players, too.

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Next Chapter:
Pitching - The Game Within the Game

Weaver on Strategy - Offense (Camden Depot Book Club)

Previously on the Camden Depot Book Club, I remarked on a few items that Weaver addressed in his first chapter of the book, Weaver on Strategy.  That chapter addressed his thoughts on Spring Training and contained a great many more thoughts than those I addressed.  This entry will address the next chapter.

Chapter 2 - The Offense
Praise be the Three Run Homer!

Home Run Offenses
During Weaver's continuous 15 year tenure, his teams were largely built upon scoring runs through home runs.  He was risk averse when it came to putting base runners in difficult positions and he deplored the bunt.  As Weaver wrote:

I've got nothing against the bunt--in its place.  But most of the time that place is the bottom of a long forgotten closet.

He then goes on length about the value of the home run versus the value of a contact hitter:

The power of the home run is so elementary that I fail to comprehend why people try to outsmart this game in other ways.  If I were to play a singles hitter in right field or left field or at third base, he'd have to hit well over .300 and get on base often to be as valuable as a twenty five homer man.

I do think Weaver overstates things here in him selling how great home runs are.  For one, offensive profiles for corner outfield and third base bats are not exactly equivalent.  Ignoring that, the statement is pretty profound in noting that he is equating a plus power hitter with a guy who not only makes successful contact, but also gets on via walks.

He then takes a little swipe at the industry perception of Charlie Lau:

As a hitting coach, Charlie Lau is known for producing .300 hitters, and he has turned out a lot of them.  But when Charlie was with a team that hit a lot of homers, they won.  When he was with a singles hitting club, they lost.

Suffice to say, Weaver was not a Juan Pierre kind of guy.  Lau is actually a pretty interesting guy.  He was a massive failure of a hitter (a below .200 hitter with no power), but bounced around due to his catching.  Upon being dealt to Baltimore in 1961, he completely re-engineered his batting stance.  He exaggerated the spread between his feet and lowered his bat in order to make more contact.  When he found was that with a higher contact rate, he hit more singles and would sometimes find himself in hitters' counts to exploit.  After he retired in 1967, he moved over to the Royals and made his name through George Brett and the Royals' athlete first movement by working on having their players focus on contact.  I imagine Weaver's comments are primarily directed to the 1977 and 1980 Royals' squads who won 102 and 97 games, respectively, with a good number of home runs to boot.

However, Weaver's words made me want to see how those words compared to the reality of the team that Baltimore constructed during his tenure.  To do that, for each year I determined the average percent of runs scored via home run.  Then I compared Baltimore's percentage to the league average.  What I wound up with was a number similar to OPS+.  For instance, a 124 value would mean that the team scored 24% more of its runs via home runs than the average team.  A 94 value would mean that the team scored 6% less via home runs than the average team.  A 100 value would be league average if the above inference was not clear.



As you can see above, only two of Weaver's 15 squads were below average in terms of how important home runs were to the team scoring runs.  It is also interesting to note that Memorial Stadium during these years tended to lean toward benefiting pitchers by being a slightly difficult place to hit a home run.  That is pretty remarkable.

Although Buck Showalter only has a shade over two years as Orioles manager under his belt, his offenses have also reflected the same tendencies as Weaver's.  In 2011, the Orioles ranked second in the AL by scoring 42% of their runs through the long ball.  Last year, that number increased to 47%.  We will see how much the Orioles will miss Mark Reynolds' power production as he has contributed 15% of the Orioles' home runs over the past two seasons (60 out of 405).

Weaver As Innovator
I mentioned velocity in the last post on Weaver on Strategy.  In that post, I noted how there was expressed wonder and amazement at Sammy Stewart throwing a 92 mile per hour fastball.  Nowadays, that sort of amazement would go for someone who throws in the upper 90s.  Heat at 92 these days needs to be well commanded with a solid secondary pitch to be of great use in the pen.  In this chapter, Weaver goes a bit more into radar guns and velocity:

The Orioles were the first team in the majors to makes extensive use of the radar gun, and I love it. It's another tool that gives a manager information.  It took me six years to convince the front office that we should have the guns in our minor league system.

Yes, Weaver was a great innovator always looking to improve himself, to improve his understanding of the game.  This really is the main idea behind Weaver and his success.  Never resting, always striving.  I think the current manager who really puts this sort of perspective out there is Joe Maddon with the Tampa Bay Rays.  I am sure other managers embrace advancement as well, but Maddon celebrates it quite vocally just like Weaver did.

Velocity
In his discussion on using radar guns, he mentioned using one on his own pitchers:

When a pitcher is throwing at 88 miles per hour most of the game and then goes to the mound in the eighth inning and is at 84 miles per hour, it is a good bet he is tiring.

What, again, impresses upon me here is that my assumption of 88 miles per hour being used as an example is that this is considered typical velocity.  In 2012, 90 pitchers qualified for ERA.  Of those 90, only 14 (16%) threw an average velocity below 88.5 mph.  That includes knuckleballer R.A. Dickey.  Again, this only shows that the game has changed a great deal from the 1970s.

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Next time on the Camden Depot Book Club:

Weaver on Strategy
Chapter 3
The Lineup: Pushing the Right Buttons

Earl Weaver, a Book Club, and Spring Training

I was too young to remember Earl Weaver, but I am old enough to remember Earl Weaver.  I think he is someone who is everyone for he can be anyone to anybody.  He can be viewed as the old school, kick-dirt-on-the-ump manager who simply knew how to win as he never had a losing season during his initial 15 year run with the club.  To those who are traditional stat hounds, then he is the guy who said you win with pitching, fielding, and home runs.  To the more modern stat hounds, he is the guy who hated the bunt, hated the stolen base, loved base runners (and the walk!), great defense, and good pitching.  He is all of these things, which makes him a legend and well deserving of that statue in Camden Yards for what he gave to the Baltimore Orioles, their fans, and baseball, in general.  In one man, you have a throw back and you have the proto-sabremetrician.  Those two perspectives often war with each other in their relationship with baseball, but both have Weaver as their baseball god because he fits with their dogma.

The first thing that pops up in my head is not who he was, but a graph.  It is a simple graph and ten years after initially making it...I still am unsure what it means.  This is the graph:



The initial takeaway from this graph is that it appears that Weaver's teams underperformed during the first half of his run with the Orioles while overperforming during the second half of his tenure.  It may well be this is just coincidence.  I don't know.  However, it does fit into his phrase that was turned into a book:

It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.

That is something that I think we should all take to heart.  The basic point that it is likely impossible to know everything, so be sure to challenge yourself continually in order to become better.  It applies to all walks of life, but this is a baseball blog and I will focus on that.  You can see it in the sabremetric world where over the past ten years there is a stronger embracing of the qualitative data that scouting provides.  You can see it in the traditional world as the industry slowly sees how valuable new metrics are.  Simply, we all strive to be better and we can be better as we keep an open mind and honestly try to learn how to use new tools.  As soon as one become a fundamentalist to one school of baseball thought, so much gets lost and so many arguments become exercises in creating and obliterating straw men.

A while back, I decided that what Camden Depot needed was a book club and I selected a number of excellent books.  After several attempted tries to bring it up to life with a good following failed, it was left on the dust bin, but now it seems fitting that I will start it off with one of Weaver's books.  The format with simply be blog posts instead of the initial podcasts.  I will not be providing summaries of the chapters, but on specific things that pique my interest.

Weaver on Strategy

Chapter 1 - Spring Training
It may be boring, but it works.

Continuity
Weaver focuses on one aspect on Spring Training that he thought was consequential: players learning his style.  Much is ballyhooed about the Oriole Way.  If you have been a long time reader of the site, I am a bit dismissive of the Oriole Way as many teams during that time and slightly before viewed their systems as harmonious from top to bottom.  This is not to say that the Oriole Way was not important, but that it likely was no better than the Dodger Way or the Reds Way.  I think what really comes forward is that integrating a team is so much simpler when the manager does not need to treat players in an incredibly unique fashion.  Drills in the big league camp would not be dissimilar to ones being carried out in rookie ball.  That level of familiarity reduces teaching time on this of minor consequence and increases time for evaluation of a player.  It also may improve evaluation of a player because a player is paying more attention to the play as opposed to a new way to perform that play.

He also makes a point using defensive wunderkind Mark Belanger as an example.  He mentions how sometimes people confuse the execution of fundamentals with talent.  Belanger was well endowed with both, but the point is made that if someone was perfect in their fundamentals at short they would still need the talent of Belanger to equal his ability.  That is, you cannot teach anyone into being Mark Belanger.  A player needs to have the ability to be made into Bellanger.  Without that ability, coaching and managing cannot make up the difference.  So, yes, continuity in instruction is important, but it means little without talent.  Both are essential in creating and maintaining a successful franchise.

Off Season Programs
He was apparently also big into off season programs.  It is actually quite interesting to read how advanced he was for his time.  He certainly has a habit of throwing in numbers and percentages that do not mean anything other than placeholder specifics to support his point of view, but he tends to generally get the overall message down.  A player who stays in shape will be better prepared to perform.  That way, a player can maximize his time in Spring Training to show off what he can do so that he makes the team or, if his place is secure, work on a pitch or two as Jim Palmer did.

Weaver also makes a point about how 35 years old is very old for an infielder and that as time moves on you begin to not be able to make up that lost athleticism.  This jumped out at me because it was a lucid acknowledgement of player aging, which would not be ground breaking in the early 80s.  However, teams would often (and still do) pick up broken players from free agency with great hope that they we rekindle the performances of many seasons past.  This too jumped out at me as our opening day second baseman is 35 year old Brian Roberts who has been greatly limited in workouts over the past several seasons.  The points working against Roberts likely are the reason why the team is hoarding marginal second basemen in the likes of Ryan Flaherty, Alexi Casilla, and Yamaico Navarro.

Pitcher Velocity
By this time, speed guns were common in many organizations and the Orioles used them.  They were actually one of the first clubs to use technology.  You could say they were a mix of the Tampa Bay Rays and New York Yankees.  They had decent money behind the team (their bonus baby signings before the institution of Free Agency greatly sped up the team's ability to compete) and used emerging ideas and technology to give themselves extra chances for success (e.g., speed guns, psychological evaluations).  Anyway, my point being about pitcher velocity is that I assume that Weaver would be a great judge of pitcher velocity and makes this statement stand out:

With the kind of pitching we had in 1979, we didn't believe a young pitcher like Sammy Stewart would break in, but the man was throwing 92 miles per hour, and those guys are few and far between.

There is a post that appeared on Camden Depot in 2011, there were 73 relievers who threw on average 93 miles per hour and above that year.  There were 18 starters who averaged 93 and above.  In other words, 92 miles per hour is considered unimpressive these days while it stood out in the late 70s.  That should give you some pause when you think about making an argument about how talent is watered down these days and the game is not as competitive.  Go back in time and the play in the 1970s is probably more comparable to what AAA is these days.  Things have changed.

Specialization
A major part of Spring Training for Weaver was that it was a time where he would try to envision the best way to construct his 25 man roster.  He would see how his players performed and determine how he could fit them all together.  Here is an excerpt:

You need someone for each job that needs to be done when the time arises.  In spring training, I'll look for a guy who can pinchhit, a guy who can pitch middle relief, maybe a player who can go out to the outfield for late-inning defense.  When I was looking at Gary Roenicke, a  right handed hitter, to play left field, I wanted someone else to be there in case Gary didn't hit.  In this instance, we had John Lowenstein, a left handed hitter.  Lowenstein is worth his weight in gold: he can play all three outfield positions and some third base, he hits for power, and he knows his job.  He's always ready when you need him, and he's a perfect player for anyone's bench.

Lowenstein is really the dream for many a writer who longs for the strategy and implementation of platoons.  He is what you wished Wilson Betemit to be.  Lowenstein was Betemit, but with a sufficient glove.  He was not a great fielder, but he was not as dreadful as Betemit is.  Perhaps the best comparison for Lowenstein these days would be Seth Smith.  Both can stand at all outfield positions and have heavy platoon splits that favor themselves against righties.

This brings up something else which is how difficult it is to actually employ platoons and to give too much consideration to having one tool bench players.  As batters got better, pitching became more specialized to handle the increase in offensive capability (you cannot sleep through the last third of a lineup any more as almost every guy on a team can launch a minorly misplaced ball into a courtyard).  Greater specialization meant an increase in bullpens, which swallowed up spots on the bench.  Now, with what freedom remains after guaranteed free agent contracts is applied primarily with middle relievers.  It used to be common that every team had a surprise rookie traveling north from Spring Training to play a position in the field.  That is a rarity these days and big news when it happens.  As such, only a few teams really excel with using splits and those teams are, surprise, sabremetrically influenced teams: Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays.

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Be sure to grab yourself a copy of the book.  I will be covering the rest of the chapters in the weeks to come.  There are some interesting tidbits beyond what I discussed.

Next Chapter: The Offense: Praise Be the Three Run Homer!