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Saturday, June 14, 2008
Cliff Lee v CC: This is a very good article.
http://baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=7660
Not very complicated or stats oriented, but the points are well taken and it is written very well, as is usually the case with Joe. I think that it is premium content, but I am not sure. If you can’t read it, basically Joe Sheehan of BP talks about how everyone was asking, “What is wrong with C.C.?” after his disastrous first 4 starts of the season, and everyone was touting Cliff Lee as the next, albeit in mid-career, Sandy Koufax. Yet since April 25th (of course that date is cherry picked), Sabathia has pitched much better than Lee, and in fact, both pitchers have pitched close to their career norms since then.
His point in the article is that “we” make too much of short term performance and we don’t give enough credence to the fact that changes in actual talent tend to happen gradually. He says something like, “It is not likely that all of a sudden Lee became a better pitcher than C.C.”
Now, the funny or ironic thing about this article and about Joe’s tenor (he sort of apologizes for being on the, “What’s wrong with C.C., and Lee is now a great pitcher” bandwagon) is that by next year, both Joe and everyone else who is shaking their heads in agreement as they read this article, will have forgotten this whole concept of, “short term performance does not a good or bad player make,” or something like that, and we will be once again reading about who is pitching hurt, or who is distracted by impending FA, or who has suddenly turned the corner, is now in the best shape of their life, has recovered from all their injuries, is playing relaxed and focused, etc., etc., etc.
Just for the record, and of course trying to be right or wrong about a particular projection is silly, but since April 25, which may have been around the time that I wrote that Lee was still an average or slightly below average pitcher, despite his early season ungodly performance, and got excoriated by people like Rob Neyer (actually he was justified, because I was unfair to him), he has posted an OPS against of .772 and the league average OPS in the AL this year so far is .736.
Speaking of Neyer, I don’t give him enough credit for his body of work, which is fantastic (his work that is). And of all the people I can think of in sports journalism or sabermetrics, I don’t think there is anyone who is more humble about his opinions or is more intellectually honest. And I hope I can bogart a ticket from him to his talk (with Bill James) at the Boston Museum of Science next Thursday. 
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