The Sunday Funnies

Zach Greinke has earned a reputation as a baseball savant, a guy who sees things that others miss and exploits that knowledge.

So when he approached his struggling young teammate in Kansas City, Alex Gordon, and asked the slumping rookie to accompany him to the video room, Gordon figured that Greinke had spotted something, a flaw in Gordon's swing that he could fix and turn his season around.

Greinke turned on the monitor and played -- a clip of Greinke hitting a home run. Greinke watched the video admiringly, then turned to Gordon.

"Do more of that," Greinkke instructed.

It could be worse (and it is)

Zack Greinke hasn't matched his career marks with Arizona,
but he's been a lot better than the rest of the staff.

OK, Twins fans: What team has the worst ERA in the majors this year?

Nope, it's not Minnesota. The Twins have an ugly ERA, to be sure: 5.19 entering Sunday's games. But the Arizona Diamondbacks entered Sunday with a 5.24 ERA, which is as unsightly as their charcoal road unis.

That's astounding, considering that:

• Arizona plays most of its games without a designated hitter and
• the Diamondbacks made two really expensive moves last winter to import quality starting pitchers, signing Zach Greinke and trading for Shelby Miller.

Greinke, long one of my favorites, has a 4.54 ERA (and a 12-5 record), but he's only made 23 starts, having missed more than a month with an oblique injury. Miller has been a disaster (2-11, 6.89 ERA).

It's a cautionary tale for whoever lands the top baseball job with the Twins. Greinke was the top free agent pitcher on the market last winter, and Miller is a highly regarded young pitcher who made the All-Star team in 2015. These were the kind of moves that I suspect a lot of Twins fans want the new boss to make, and they absolutely blew up in the faces of Tony LaRussa and Dave Stewart.

The aces are falling

Adam Wainwright shut down the Pirates to clinch the
Division series for St. Louis, but he couldn't beat the
Dodgers in Game Three of the NLCS.

Aces ruled in the four Division Series. In the two League Championship Series, not so much.

There have been nine games played so far (five in the NLCS, four in the ALCS), which means there have been 18 starts. Six of those starts have been made by pitchers who have won Cy Young Awards (Zach Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, Jake Peavy, Justin Verlander) or who are about to (Max Scherzer). Peavy, whose Cy dates to 2007, isn't what he once was, but even if we leave him out there's Adam Wainwright, who hasn't won the award but has had three seasons in which he could have. None of those starts have been against each other.

Greinke, Kershaw, Scherzer, Verlander, Wainwright. An impressive set of pitchers there. And their teams have gone 1-5 in their starts. The Dodgers got a win out of Greinke's start Wednesday. If you want to include Peavy, the teams are 1-6 with the big gun arms. If you want to include Jon Lester, the best of the Red Sox rotation — a fine pitcher but not quite on the level of the five names who led this paragraph — the teams are 1-7.

It isn't that the aces have pitched poorly. Verlander and Scherzer allowed just one run each, but the Tigers got shut out in Verlander's start and their bullpen imploded in Scherzer's. Kershaw (one run allowed) and Wainwright (two runs) were shut out in their starts, as was Lester (one run).

It's just been two series dominated not by the established aces but by the lesser names. Greinke got the win in his second time around; we'll see if that holds for the other stars as they begin to repeat the rotation cycle.

Pic of the Week

Zach Greinke of the Milwaukee Brewers in a start
against the Cincinnati Reds

Another photo chosen for a photographic effect. The ball appears to be past the blurred out hitter — the AP didn't even bother to identify him — but it is really still on its way to the plate.

Zach Greinke to the Brewers

Sunday's big trade — 2009 AL Cy Young winner Zach Greinke, shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt and cash to the Milwaukee Brewers for four young players — looks to me to be an excellent deal for the Kansas City Royals.

Zach Greinke's career record against
the Twins is an unimpressive
 3-8, 4.90.

The Royals got, in Jake Odorizzi and Jeremy Jeffress, a pair of right-handed pitchers who Baseball America's forthcoming Prospect Handbook will rank as Milwaukee's  No. 1 and No. 3 prospects. In Alcides Escobar, K.C. landed the young shortstop who pushed J.J. Hardy out of Milwaukee, and Lorenzo Cain is a promising center fielder.

I am very much an admirer of Zach Greinke, but that's a lot of talent Milwaukee surrendered for two years of him. Joe Posnanski doesn't like the deal for Kansas City, but I think the Royals might have gotten more out of this forced trade than anybody else has gotten in recent similar deals (Santana, Sabathia, Lee twice, Halladay).

The word was that Kansas City wasn't going to consider trading Greinke within the AL Central. That would have ruled the Twins out anyway. But I doubt that the Twins had the pieces to match this deal.

Kyle Gibson is more advanced than Odorizzi, and either Ben Revere or Aaron Hicks would have fit well as a Cain replacement. Jeffress is a power arm, the type the Twins have lacked — and he is one more positive test for a recreational drug from a lifetime suspension, which makes him at least somewhat dicey an acquisition. He figures to step directly into the Kansas City bullpen.

But the shortstop — that piece of the puzzle just isn't available in the Twins system. Escobar's stock fell some with his rookie season, in which he hit just .235/.288/.326, but he just turned 24, has excellent defensive tools and a lot of "upside."

A roughly comparable package from the Twins would have been Gibson, Hicks, Carlos Gutierrez and Alexi Casilla or Trevor Plouffe. Even if the Twins would have been willing to surrender that much, and even leaving the division rival aspect out of the equation, I think the Milwaukee package is superior anyway.

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Two more points about this deal:

(1) Betancourt's inclusion in the deal is interesting because he has been regarded in the sabermetric community as, if not the worst regular player in the majors, one of the "strongest" candidates for that status. That the Royals wanted a young shortstop in a Greinke deal was no secret.

Did the Royals insist that the Brewers take Betancourt as part of the trade, or did the Brewers insist on getting a body to fill the hole being vacated by Escobar? I suspect it was both, and that the cash involved in the trade is a year of Betancourt's salary.

(2) Prince Fielder is part of why the Brewers were willing to give up so much. He's eligible for free agency after 2011; his agent is Scott Boras, and that implies that he's unlikely to re-sign wth the Brewers;  the trade market for Fielder has been slim to nonexistent.

So the Brewers are going for it now. They earlier traded another prospect, Brett Lawrie, for Shaun Marcum, a good if sometimes injured starter. This gives them a projected rotation headed by Greinke, Yovani Gallardo, Marcum and Randy Wolf. That foursome may not match the big fours in Philadelphia or San Francisco for hype or past achievement, but it's pretty darn good.

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Poll stuff: Forty-one people participated in last week's poll, which asked which of four bullpen candidates would pitch in the most games for the Twins in 2011.

Scott Diamond had the most votes, 13 (32 percent); Pat Neshek, who led most of the week, had 12 (29 percent); Jim Hoey had eight (20 percent); Anthony Slama had six (15 percent) and two (4 percent) said they'll be tied at zero.

New poll up.

He shouldn't have printed that

It's generally amusing, and seldom informative, to see what pearls of "wisdom" the metro papers' sports gossip columnists, Sid Hartman and Charley Walters, come up with to fill their allotted space.

Here's a Walters marvel I encountered Sunday (under the heading "Don't Print That") while reading the Pioneer Press during breakfast in a Wisconsin hotel:

Maybe the Twins could include shortstop J.J. Hardy in a deal for Kansas City Royals starter Zack Greinke.

Yeah, and maybe the Kansas City front office is brain dead.

As I noted here last week, if the Royals move Greinke, it  won't be for established major leaguers. Hardy might be eligible for free agency before Greinke is. 

If Walters (or his editors) had a sense of reality, they would have done with that sentence what the header advised.

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Poll stuff: We had 55 votes on the Twins double-play combo.

Thirty-four respondents (61 percent) think the Twins will have Hardy and Tsuyoshi Nishioka in their middle infield this coming season; 18 (32 percent) think it will be Alexi Casilla and Nishioka; one thinks it will be Hardy and Casilla; two think it will be an unnamed combo; and nobody was cynical enough to pick the "Punto will be involved" option.

New poll up.

The philosophy of trading within your division

Supposedly the Kansas City Royals have indicated that they won't trade Zach Greinke within the AL Central.

Zach Greinke may be
more valuable to a future K.C.
contender as trade bait now.

This is a fairly common line of thought, that you don't trade within your division because you don't want to strengthen your rivals.

One can argue against that, of course: If you're trading well, you're also strengthening yourself. But risk management is part of running a team. And it probably would be easier on the fan base if Greinke weren't pitching three or five times a season against the Royals.

But here's the deal for Kansas City: They ain't contending in 2011. They have a very highly esteemed farm system, brimming with blue-chip prospects -- but the likes of Eric Hosmer, Mike Montgomery, Mike Moustakas, Danny Duffy and Wil Myers are expected to begin settling in to the majors in 2012.

And that's Greinke's problem. That's the last year of his contract. So he's looking at, at a minimum, a couple more years of pitching in front of a lineup that can't help him.

The Royals are, as a result, shopping the 2009 Cy Young winner around. It should be obvious that they're NOT going to trade him for established major leaguers like Delmon Young or Kevin Slowey. They want to add to that burst of talent scheduled for 2012-14.

And in that sense, it is silly, even stupid, to mark 14 percent of the teams as automatically out of bounds in such a trade. The Twins or Tigers may not make the best offer for the ace (it makes no sense for Cleveland to bid, and the White Sox have largely stripped their farm system), but if the Royals are serious about contending in the middle part of this decade, they owe it to themselves to find out.

Daydreaming about Zach Greinke

Zach Greinke:
The Twins are ruining
his season stats

Zach Greinke is having a "bad season." The defending Cy Young Award winner isn't going to retain that title; he's now 8-12 with an ERA of 3.91, which is more than 1.5 runs worse than last year.

The Twins have stuck him with four of those losses and a good portion of that ERA. (When he's not facing the Twins, his ERA this season is 3.36, which is still more than a run worse than last season but really isn't bad at all,)

The strikeout rate is down, but still well above average. (He whiffed 9.5 men per nine innings last season, a bit less than 7.3 per nine this year). He walks roughly one man for every four strikeouts. He still looks to me like an elite pitcher.

He's also a bit of a frustrated one, because the Royals have been bad for years and he's getting tired of waiting for reinforcements.

Prospect gurus drool over the Kansas City farm system; years of drafting early have resulted in a growing stockpile of talent. Unfortunately, almost all of it is in Double A or lower, and the Royals didn't even bring any of it up for a September look-see.

So here's Greinke, from the above link, speaking about a month ago on the outlook:

“Every system has something.The biggest problem is I have two more years on my contract. Are those guys supposed to make it up by the beginning of next year? Very rarely do guys come straight into the big leagues and make an impact, especially hitters. Just look at the top prospects in baseball. Delmon Young was one five years ago, and he’s finally starting to play well.  ... So the problem (with the Royals’ prospects) is that it’s not like as soon as they get here that it’s going to be instant (success). Maybe by 2014. There’s no reason for me to get real excited about it, because the chance of more than one of them making a major impact by the time my contract is up is pretty slim.”

The Royals don't have to do anything about this; as Greinke said, he has two more years on his contract, and maybe the Royals really can turn things around by then.

But they have, at the moment, a star who has apparently soured on his surroundings -- and, what's more, a star whose well-documented emotional/mental health issues may make him of limited interest to the big-market, high-pressure franchises.

If I'm Bill Smith, checking with Kansas City on Greinke's availability is on my wintertime list of things to do.

Tale of two pitchers

Identify these 2010 stat lines:

Pitcher A: 128.2 IP, 4.06 ERA, 1.236 WHIP, 41 BB, 97 K

Pitcher B: 137 IP, 4.01 ERA, 1.182 WHIP, 28 BB, 120K

It's fairly close, but Pitcher B appears to be having the better season, right?

Pitcher A is Matt Garza (photo above), who threw a no-hitter Monday night. Not just a no-hitter — a 27-batter no-hitter. One man reached, on a walk, and he was erased on a double play. Yeah, the Tigers are missing some key players, but it was a marvelous game from a talented young arm.

Pitcher B is Zach Greinke, last year's Cy Young winner, who got embarrassed Monday night by the Twins (eight runs in four innings); Greinke's ERA rose 42 points in that outing, from 3.59 to 4.01.

Greinke has made three starts against the Twins this season. He's 0-3 with a 10.29 ERA in 14 innings against Minnesota. Against everybody else, he's 6-7, 3.29 — not Cy Young stats, but quality work for a bad team.

Another good sign

I love watching Zach Greinke pitch.

There's the talent — his fastball reaches the upper 90s. There's the intelligence — he talks about pitching, about what he's trying to do out there, about what hitters are trying to do against him, on a different level than almost anybody else. And there's the backstory of his emotional crisis.

In some ways, he reminds me of Pedro Martinez. In Pedro's heyday, back around the turn of the century, the Boston Red Sox were the best team in baseball — if Pedro was pitching. On the other 80 percent of game days, the Yankees were the best.

The Royals are a weaker team than the late '90s-early '00s Red Sox. Greinke don't make them the best team in baseball on his days. But this is true: If it's Greinke's turn to pitch, Kansas City becomes a difficult team to beat.

Which is why it was impressive Friday to see the Twins dismantle last year's Cy Young winner.

The consensus both both sides seems to be that it was Greinke failing than the Twins succeeding, but the Twins didn't allow him to get them out outside the strike zone, and their patience at the plate helped get him out of the game after five innings.

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I said above that Greinke talks about pitching on a different level. Here's an example, lifted from Joe Christensen's gamer in the Star Tribune:

"Every batter you face is 100 percent focused that at-bat and they don't really give any at-bats away. Whenever they get on base or the game gets close, they elevate their game, where a lot of teams, they change their approach. The Twins get even more focused on it."

He said something along the same lines last September too, after a game in which Delmon Young doubled going to the opposite field in an at-bat in which Greinke expected him to try to pull the ball.

Old Cy and new stats

The lede to the Associated Press story Thursday on Tim Lincecum's second straight Cy Young Award:

Talk about a freak — Tim Lincecum needed just 15 wins to bag another NL Cy Young Award. Yup, throw out those old baseball cards. Wins and losses don't mean much anymore when it comes time for voters to pick baseball's best pitchers. It's all about WHIP, FIP, BABIP and other lines of alphabet soup.

For the uninitiated — I'm sure there are some out there — WHIP is Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched (a staple of fantasy baseball for years, but Dick-n-Bert treat it on Twins broadcasts as if it were a completely novel concept); FIP is Fielding Independent Pitching, which attempts to remove the quality of the defense behind the pitcher from the stats; and BABIP is Batting Average on Balls in Play, which is normally stable from pitcher to pitcher. A markedly low BABIP is regarded by statheads as a sign of abnormal luck.

From the New York Times article on Zack Greinke's Cy Young win:

(Teammate Brian) Bannister introduced Greinke to FIP, or Fielding Independent Pitching, the statistic Greinke named Tuesday as his favorite. It is a formula that measures how well a pitcher performed, regardless of his fielders. According to fangraphs.com, Greinke had the best FIP in the majors. “That’s pretty much how I pitch, to try to keep my FIP as low as possible,” Greinke said.

This strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. Throw strikes and keep the ball in the park, and your stats — whether they be traditional ones, such as ERA and strikeouts, or the sabermetric darlings, such as FIP and BABIP — will take care of themselves. All those numbers have the same purpose— to measure effectiveness. They're just doing it in different ways.

Bannister is a smart cookie. He understood why the stats suggested that his 3.87 ERA in 2007 overstated his effectiveness – and he didn't take it as a personal attack. It remains to be seen if his understanding of how the stats predict future struggles can help him avoid those problems; so far, the evidence is that they don't.

Greinke (and Lincecum), on the other hand, are both smart and talented. They would be the best pitchers in their leagues if nobody had ever heard of BABIP.

They just might not be recognized as such.

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Greinke won his award with 16 wins; Lincecum with 15. These are historically low numbers for Cy Young winners.

Bill James has been hammering for decades at this theme: The Won-Loss stat in a given season is overrated. His analysis, repeated and echoed over the years, appears to have taken root.

I suspect that the tipping point may have been the 2005 AL Cy Young vote.

Bartolo Colon of Anaheim had a 21-8 record, but his ERA was 3.48 and he had just 157 strikeouts in 222 innings.

Johan Santana of the Twins was just 16-7 — with a 2.81 ERA and 238 Ks in 233 innings.

Colon won the Cy Young. Santana was third (behind Mariano Rivera) — and all through 2006, there was an obvious sense among baseball writers that they blew that vote. Yes, Colon had more wins, but Santana was better, and they knew it.

This year, there were obvious alternatives to Lincecum and Greinke. NL voters could have gone for Adam Wainwright (19-8, 2.63 in 233 innings) or his St. Louis teammate, Chris Carpenter (17-4, 2.24 in 192 innings).

With the 2005 mindset, Wainwright would have won.

In the AL, alternatives would have been Felix Hernandez (19-5, 2.49), or even Justin Verlander (19-9, 3.45) or CC Sabathia (19-8, 3.37).

Again, the 2005 mindset, valuing victories over all else, would have gone for King Felix. Which would certainly have been a better choice than Colon was in 2005.

But Greinke was better. The right guys won.

The final weekend

The Twins obviously have no margin for error. They also have no good option to start tonight, and they face Zach Grienke on Saturday.

Apparently Jeff Manship (right) starts tonight, Manship and a cast of thousands. I figured after Liriano's disaster last Sunday that Manship would get the call, but ... I suspect he can become a useful major league starter someday, but that day is not here.

As I understand it, the matchups for the final series:

Friday

Kansas City at Minnesota: DiNardo (0-2, 7.52) vs. Manship (0-1, 5.81). Wow, a matchup that might favor Manship.

Chicago at Detroit: Peavy (2-0, 2.25) vs. Jackson (13-8, 3.38). Peavy's numbers are AL only. Jackson's August ERA was 4.45; his September ERA, 5.08. He's shot way past his career high in innings, and things are falling apart for him.

Saturday

Kansas City at Minnesota: Greinke (16-8, 2.06) vs. Blackburn (11-11, 4.08). Greinke is the unanimous pick for AL Cy Young in the poll. Blackburn will be working on three days rest for the first time in his brief career. He's 1 1/3 innings short of 200.

Chicago at Detroit: Garcia (2-4, 4.78) vs. Figaro (2-1, 5.74). The Tigers are holding back Rick Porcello after the 20-year-old threw 111 pitches against the Twins. Garcia's stats don't look like much, but he's impressed the Sox enough that he's penciled into their 2010 rotation.

Sunday

Kansas City at Minnesota: Hochevar (7-12, 6.24) vs. Duensing (5-2, 3.69). Hochevar is either brilliant or awful. Duensing is coming off the worst start of his brief career. It's possible the Twins would use Carl Pavano on three days rest instead if this game means something.

Chicago at Detroit: Danks (13-10, 3.69) vs Verlander (18-9, 3.45). The Tigers really don't want Verlander pitching Sunday. They'd rather save him to open against the Yankees.

Here's the Detroit Free Press' take on the matchups on the Tigers end of things. I think Michael Cuddyer's right on the Sox pitchers — these are the best the Twins could hope for.

The odds are definitely against the Twins, but these matchups suggest it's not impossible.

Greinke and the tyranny of the win column

The old-school argument against Zach Greinke's Cy Young candidacy can be summed up in one sentence:

Sixteen wins from a starting pitcher isn't enough to win.

Not when there's a CC Sabathia hurtling to 20 wins.

Sabathia is a fine pitcher having a fine season. He's doing essentially what he always does, and he does it well. His durability is without peer in the current generation of starting pitchers. If anybody deserves the salary he's getting, he does.

He's not having as good a season as Greinke.

Sabathia's current W-L record (19-7) works out to a .730 winning percentage. That's 89 points above team — which is impressive enough.

Greinke's 16-8 record (.667) comes for a .410 team. That's 257 points above team. Or about three times Sabathia's margin.

And then there's this: The Royals —a bad team to begin with — are, in a sense, even worse with Greinke pitching.

Of the 36 AL pitchers with at least 140 innings, none —zero — have as few runs scored for them as Greinke does. Teammate Brian Bannister, for example, gets 5.9 runs of support per game; Greinke gets 4.8, more than one run less.

Grienke has had eight no-decisions this season. In four of them, he allowed either zero or one run. Twice he gave up two runs, twice three. He has had five starts all year in which he allowed four or more runs; he 0-5 in those starts, He has, in short, zero cheap wins.

Sabathia? He's had a couple of cheap wins, giving up four runs in six-plus innings for a W once, five runs in seven for another.

Really these two are the Cy Young argument. Felix Hernandez is, like Greinke, racking up better stats than Sabathia, but whatever argument one makes for King Felix, Greinke trumps.

It's the old-school guys who value wins over all else versus the new wave. The old-school argument prevailed in 2005, when Bartolo Colon (2-8, 3.48) won the award over Johan Santana (16-7, 2.87); there seems to be a general consensus since then that the electorate blew it.

Sabathia's season is better than Colon's but Greinke's is better than Santana's.

This year, I think, the writers will get it right. Greinke will win.

Win first, football later

Tragic number update: Seven. The Twins won Saturday, and so did the Tigers, who bounced back from a 5-0 White Sox lead to win 12-5 and set Ozzie Guillen off again when he found his team watching college football games on TV afterwards:

"[Do] they think the season's over for them? Yes. If they think the season's over for me, no. And I'm going to make it clear. It's a bunch of [bleeps] out there watching football games like a piece of [bleep] with no pride the way they [bleep] play, and that's embarrassing."

And a few more choice sentences, the upshot of which may be: If the White Sox players want to watch NFL games in peace after their game with the Tigers today, they'd better win.

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The Twins haven't faced Zach Greinke this season. That changes today. The presumptive AL Cy Young winner is to finish his season with two starts against Minnesota.

I suspect that, if the Twins are to win the division title, they will need to find a way to win at least one of the the Greinke games.

Detroit has faced Greinke five times and won two of those five games — despite the fact that Greinke's ERA against the Tigers is 1.00.

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Poll results: Some blog readers believe.

We had 21 votes in this week's poll. Ten (47 percent) said the Twins will win the AL Central; nine (42 percent) said the Tigers; two (9 percent) said it doesn't matter 'cause the Yankees will win the first round easily.

The new poll is actually multiple polls —MVPs, Cy Young, Rookies of the Year. The Monday print column will be on Joe Mauer and the AL MVP race. I hope to blog in the coming week on the other awards, but I suspect a flu bug is about to grab me by the respiratory tract, so we'll see how energetic I am.

Grienke, Lombo and Delmon Young

Tragic number update: Stuck on 13, with the Twins and Tigers set to begin today a three-game series in the Metrodome.

Detroit lost Thursday 9-2 to Kansas City. There's no shame in getting shut down by Zack Greinke (left) — he's only the best pitcher in the league this year — but the Tigers got shelled twice in this series by a pathetically weak lineup.

A colleague pointed out to me today that Grienke has yet to face the Twins. Of course, the Twins have two series left against Kansas City. Meanwhile, Detroit's faced him five times (and the White Sox and Indians also five times each).

Hardly seems fair, does it?

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The latest issue of Baseball America reports that second baseman Steve Lombardozzi had a big year for the Hagerstown Suns, the Low A affiliate of the Washington Nationals.

No, not the Steve Lombardozzi who played second base for the 1987 Twins. Not the Steve Lombardozzi who hit ,344 in the postseason that year, including .412 in the World Series. Not the Steve Lombardozzi who lost his starting job the next year and complained so much about it that Dan Gladden punched him out.

It's his son, known to Baseball Reference.com as Stephen.

It is to be hoped the younger Lombo (above) proves a better hitter than his dad. The elder Lombadozzi's stats make Nick Punto look good.

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You may know that the Twins have two player who were the first overall pick in baseball's amateur draft — Joe Mauer (2001) and Delmon Young (2003).

Baseball America annually picks a minor league player of the year — as described by executive editor Jim Callis, it's "essentially the elite prospect who had the best season." This year's winner is Jason Hayward of the Braves organization.

The Twins have three of them on their roster: Mauer (2003), Young (2005) and Jon Rauch, the recently-added middle reliever, who won the award in 2000 when he was seen as a rising ace in the White Sox system. It obviously didn't happen for the big guy.

For that matter, it hasn't happened for Young either. That Young won that award two years before the Twins traded for him underlines the high regard the scouting world had for his talent at the time.