The Sunday Funnies

Baltimore outfielder Al Bumbry was in a slump, and mentioned to manager Earl Weaver that he was going to a chapel service.

Replied Weaver: "Take your bat with you."

Earl Weaver and pitchers strikeouts

Earl Weaver during the 1979 World
Series. 

Frequent readers know I believe in the predictive power of two pitchers stats: strikeout-to-walk ratio and strikeouts per nine innings.

Pitchers who are subpar in either of those markers might be successful for a year or two, but they are extremely poor bets to maintain that success. There are certainly commenters on this blog who dispute that; to be blunt, they don't know what they're talking about.

And having said that, Earl Weaver — whose historical reputation is based in large part on his ability to get big seasons from his starting pitchers — always had below-average strikeout pitchers.

Before I talk about the specific numbers for Weaver's moundsmen, I should note the drastic difference between his era and today. In 1979 — when Weaver won his fourth and final American League pennant — AL pitchers averaged 3.3 walks and 4.5 strikeouts per nine innings (that last the lowest K rate since 1955). That's a K/BB ratio of 1.36, which was also worse than a typical season, but not markedly out of line ( it was 1.39 in 1978, 1.44 in 1980).

In 2012 — no doubt because teams are increasingly focused on pitchers who can miss bats — the K/9 rate was 7.4 — a full half-strikeout higher than in any previous season. The past seven seasons have have the seven highest strikeout rates in AL history. And the walk rate is at historically low (post-deadball era) levels as well, 3.0 BB/9. The combination leads to a 2.45 K/BB ratio, the highest in league history.

(A recently as a decade ago it was safe to assume that a pitcher who struck out twice as many as he walked was going to be successful. Today he's well behind the field.)

But even accounting for the lower strikeout rates of the period, Weaver's pitchers didn't strike guys out. Weaver had 20-game winners almost every season, but he never had a pitcher rack up 200 strikeouts in a season. Even the great Jim Palmer, who had eight 20-win seasons and four times topped 300 innings, never fanned 200. Palmer's K rate for his career was a relatively mediocre 5.0 — and that's above the norm for Weaver's staffs. (Mike Cuellar, who averaged 18 wins in seven seasons pitching for Weaver, was at 4.5 K/9 in that period. Dave McNally, who also averaged 18 wins a year for Weaver, was at 4.4.)

As Chris Jaffe notes in this fine Hardball Times piece on Weaver, only the Royals and Brewers struck out fewer opponents in 1969-82, the core of Weaver's career.

How did he get away with it? Defense. Jaffe points to some defensive metrics that suggest the 1973 Orioles were the greatest defensive team ever, and the '69 Birds were the next best. Regardless of how accurate the metric is, Weaver certainly put a premium on glove work — men like Mark Belanger and Rich Dauer lasted a long time with him despite a lack of offensive production.

It's also worth noting that the low strikeout rates of the Orioles didn't stand out as much then as they would now. Combine those same strikeout rates with less than stellar defense in today's era, and you get the 2012 Twins pitching staff.

The Earl of Baltimore

Earl Weaver  and umpire Steve Palermo give each other
a piece of their minds in 1979.

Earl Weaver was one of the great managers ever. But you probably already knew that.

I was intrigued during the past weekend by the reaction to the news Saturday of his death. Weaver was eulogized not only by old-school writers such as Pat Reusse but by a generation of bloggers who hadn't picked up on baseball (or perhaps even been born) when Weaver left the Orioles dugout for the last time in 1986.

(For me, Weaver was always there; I started paying attention to baseball in 1969, which was Weaver's first season as Baltimore manager.)

The belligerent bantam's philosophies on how to run a game were expounded in the book "Weaver on Strategy," co-written by Terry Pluto. They were given mathematical support by Bill James in his seminal series of "Baseball Abstracts" in the 1980s.

And thus Weaver is viewed, with some justification, as a precursor to the sabermetrically-oriented skippers of today.

Many of Weaver's ideas about offense have indeed taken root as conventional wisdom. No manager today employs the stolen base, the hit-and-run or the sacrifice bunt to the degree that some of Weaver's contemporaries did in the 1970s. His precept -- If you play for one run, that's all you'll get -- is pretty much universally accepted. His appreciation for the walk as an offensive weapon is no longer unique.

On the other hand, baseball has rejected the Weaver approach to handling a pitching staff. Weaver was an outspoken advocate of the four-man rotation (It's easier to find four starters than five; the starts you give your fifth-best pitcher come from the four who are better than him). Nobody uses the four-man rotation now; most managers won't even use their off days to maximize their ace's starts.

Weaver's side appears to have lost that argument. And it also appears to have lost the platooning argument as well. Today's 12- and 13-men pitching staffs have pushed platoons to the endangered list; not only is it difficult for a manager to fit a platoon on a roster when more than half the roster is pitchers, but the ability of opposing managers to attack platoons with waves of relief pitchers tends to remove the advantage.

Weaver at least once said something along of the lines of "Seven pitchers are too many, and 11 are not enough." What he meant was: If his staff was doing well, all he needed were four starters and a pair of relievers, but if the rotation provides a string of short starts, the bullpen is bound to be overworked.

Today's managers lean to the "11 aren't enough" side of the equation. Weaver never went with just seven pitchers, but he sure wasn't carrying 11 pitchers, much less 12 or 13.

There's another aspect to Weaver's managerial approach that deserves comment, but I'll tackle that in a future post.

The Sunday Funnies

Earl Weaver, who managed the Baltimore Orioles for a sterling 14-plus years in the formative days of my baseball fanhood, died Friday night. He was 82.

I expect to write a longer post about the Earl of Baltimore and how his influence is still felt in baseball some 25 years after he left the dugout, but today's joke day.

Pat Kelly (who began his career with the Twins) was one of Weaver's platoon outfielders in the late 1970s. He had also become an evangelistic Christian and started a clubhouse chapel while with the Orioles. Weaver was not impressed.

"Don't you want to walk with the Lord?" Kelly asked his often profane skipper.

"I'd rather you walked with the (bleeping) bases loaded," Weaver replied.