THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Also fascinating to me, is that he labels his “best game” as this one: http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/KCA/KCA200008240.shtml

...wherein he gave up 6 runs against a pretty bad Royals team.  It was the most runs he gave up that year - the year in which I believe he had the best park/era-adjusted ERA ever (ERA+ of 285 I think, or ERA- of 35).

Really great interview though… you can definitely catch a little bit of narcissism in there, but I think he’s also very honest and very insightful.

Also interesting is that he was only meant to go 1 inning in the Cleveland game.

The 3 moments I most remember about Pedro in Boston are certainly: the 1999 All-Star game, the Cleveland game, and the Grady Little game.  And it appears that in all three of them, he was essentially “defying orders” (I remember the radar gun hitting 97/98 in the AS game, which in the moment was very surprising to me as he was usually topping out at 95 or maybe 96).

One of them worked out very well (Cleveland), one of them was good and bad (many people think he accelerated the destruction of his shoulder in the AS game), and one of them was awful.

And I am absolutely biased by the outcomes when I reflect on each of those instances.  Process-wise, it was just a guy defying orders to prove himself, in each of them.

A little bit of this kind of thing has been making the rounds in Pittsburgh, after Mike Tomlin left Ben Roethlisberger in the San Francisco blowout o a bad ankle because “Ben said he wanted to play.”

That’s what the coach/manager is for. Who wants a player who says he doesn’t want to play? “Wants to play” and “thinks he should play” are two different things. Players egos and sensitivities often cloud the latter. It’s up to the manager to be the adult.

Sure, Pedro thought he could get those guys. Pedro thought he could get everybody; that’s a big part of why he was so great. Fox showed a stat right before it all blew up that showed he was losing it, and how badly. It’s up to the manager and pitching coach to keep tabs on that. Pedro’s job is to get the guy he’s facing.

It would take extraordinary circumstances for a player to take himself out.

I remember playing in a company softball game.  A truly meaningless game.  But, I had a huge headache.  After every half-inning, I would stand under some shading, and I would only come out when it was my turn at bat, or we had to go back on the field.  Every time, I would run back to the shade, because the sun was killing me.  I said nothing to no one.

I mean, who really cares, right?  A company softball game.  I should have just sat it out, or taken an extra inning off, or something.  But no, that never entered my mind.

At the end of the game, I had nothing left.  Literally, because I crawled over to the trash can and puked my guts out.

It was stupid and crazy on my part.  And if we had a manager, I’d have told him I’m not coming out.

The manager is there for the team, not the player.  It’s his job to make sure that he has the best players he can out there.  He cannot ask the player how he feels.  The player cannot disassociate himself long enough for clear thinking.

This shouldn’t be that great of a revelation.  This is the same guy who’s attitude towards Ruth (and the curse to be fair) was that he would drill him in the ass should he ever face him.

Regarding the Royals game.  Pedro faced the entire lineup in the first.  4 guys in the second and only 3 in every inning until he was pulled for the start of the 9th. He also managed a positive WPA for the game.  Not bad for giving up 6 runs.

I think the next time that someone whines that “stats guys” don’t actually like baseball someone should just link to Tango’s comment above.

Roberto Duran is a Hall of Fame boxer and multiple world champ.

He’s remembered most for saying “No Mas” in a fight he was losing and being ‘clowned’ by a fighter that was better that night.

What player wants to be known as the guy that takes himself out in a “slap some dirt on it” society that makes legends out of guys that do something well when they’re not at their best?

Terrible memories that.  I watched the game from my hotel in HK and called my old man screaming “why is Pedro still in the game” before Posada tied it up.

The reasons for removing Pedro were many. The Yankees always seemed to get to Pedro the 3rd-4th time around.  Also, Pedro had a tendency to go bad after 90 pitches in 2003, as this was not the same Pedro as the pre-2001 version before he hurt his arm.  Last but not least, the Red Sox bullpen of Timlin, Embree and Williamson had been great in the playoffs, so it’s not like Little had no options.

Just glad my room on the 30th floor had locked windows.

If it were only a matter of the proper division of labor (no disagreement on that, of course), it would be a lot simpler.  Because it’s worse.  Any ballplayer whose response is other than the one Pedro said he’d always give gets labeled as a crybaby or worse.  So any manager worth his salt will know he’s not going to get any useful information by asking.  Until very recently, we were still using “he told me he was fine” for concussions.

I can forgive Grady (not that I was a Red Sox fan) for leaving Pedro in, in general.

This:

Then, Grady asked me to get Nick Johnson out, because [left-handed reliever Alan] Embree could not get him out whatsoever.

is unforgivable (making a decision based on matchups and small samples)…

The especially egregious thing in this case to me is that Pedro believed he was coming out and then had to go back in.  That mental edge is so thin that it could have been worn clean away by that belief.  Once I was playing in a tennis tournament against a much higher-ranked player, but I was up a break and serving for the first set at 5-4.  I went up for a lob and landed awkwardly and fell to the ground.  I wasn’t really hurt, but it wore away that edge and I didn’t win another game.  This situation has an immense amount in common with the 2003 ALCS.

Re Tango/4: A friend of mine, who has an endowed chair at a major American university, recently injured his neck playing softball.  His doctor told him that he needed surgery and risked paralysis if he fell again.  Still, he suited up for his next softball game and was on his way out the door when his wife realized where he was going.  She had to physically attack him to keep him from going.  For most athletes (or “athletes") that’s just how it is.

An interesting contrast in all this discussion is Clemens telling McNamara that he was out of gas in ‘86.

Nick Johnson career vs. Alan Embree: 3 for 7, no walks, no strikouts, no XBH.

3 singles, 4 outs on balls in play. That’s it.

MGL10: I didn’t read that as having anything to do with “matchups”, at least in the Elias “loves to face” sense.  Rather, I presume the Red Sox had a strategy for getting Nick Johnson out, and Little thought that Alan Embree couldn’t execute it sufficiently to put him in against him in the late innings of an elimination game.  If your team strategy is “set him up with fastballs up and in because he doesn’t like to swing at them with less than two strikes”, and the manager and pitching coach have concluded that Embree can’t command the fastball up and in, but instead had a tendency to give it too much of the plate, you try not to have him pitch in that situation.  Grady Little, after all, had his job on the line when he was making those decisions; it’s pretty easy nine years later to decide his choice was wrong, but that doesn’t mean some of his other choices weren’t potentially more wrong.

C’mon, no one is doing anything retroactive.

First off, stop talking about how he wasn’t good after 90 pitches or 105 pitches.  Please.  That’s lazy number manipulation, where the sample size won’t support you either way.  Don’t go down that road.

The ONLY thing that matters is that how Pedro feels.  If he’s told that he was going to be shutdown, and THEN told to keep pitching, that’s insane management.

The manager is supposed to treat him like a human being, not an automaton.  That’s why you have a human manager.  It’s a huge failure of a manager to handle Pedro as he did.

Btw, not much new here.  See this link:  http://www.soxspacenews.com/article/748
The book referred to, where he apparently recounted the whole Wallace thing and the whole trainer thing, was published in 2007.