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While I think watching small ball is really entertaining, it doesn’t win in today’s game. The overall talent level has increased in the game and if small ball still worked, there would be clubs doing it today. Unfortunately a team hitting home runs will be much better at racking up wins throughout the regular season than a small ball team. Now small ball can work in close games to up the odds of winning a single game, it just doesn’t hold up over a whole season any more.
I think that is a fair comment. Small ball as a strategy in certain game situations, primarily tied or 1 run differential in the late innings, and even that depends on the personnel who are at bat and on base at the time. I thought in that extra inning game on Saturday, having Noot attempt a bunt with the sacks full and no outs was reasonable because he has good speed, and has not hit at all. And in addition, sometimes trying the bunt gets a guy going as it forces you to follow the ball to the bat. It can get your eye-hand coordination intact.
But still overall, you want guys that get on base and guys that drive them in.
How do you know that?
What stats are there?
Who is doing it?
I am not saying it will work btw, but saying it doesn’t work seems to come up all the time but where is the proof?
It takes committing to it, and staying the course
It DID work in the 80’s and at times in the 90’s and the game is not all that different really.
IMO The economics of the game influenced the play more than the game actually changing.
If we paid the small ball players more, there would be more of them. Just because not many players play that way or that teams play differently doesnt mean it inherently doesnt work
AVG was a great stat for MOST of the history of baseball
My point is NOT that it will work, but if you want to “same the system” so you dont have to compete just with your checkbook, then identifying things that are undervalued i think is a worthy endeavor
The rules are in the favor of this:
– SB are a gamble so people dont do it (bigger bases, only throw over twice now…seems built for a comeback)
– high AVG is hard to achieve and find when combined with power so they forgo the AVG part (but with the no shift any more why not?)but if you dont just “steal bases”, you get the BEST base stealers, the guys who are not as much of gamble to get it more that they WONT get the steal, then that is different
and you dont target the .250 hitters, you target .300, for everyone (and only compromise where needed), then that “small ball” can work because it isnt just one or two guys on your team that an get that second hit in the inning but the hole lineup, it no longer is a gamble to get 2 hits an inning it is an expectation
~.300 hitters get one hit a game in 9 innings (3 ABs) that means everyone gets a second AB, which means that the top 3 get a 3rd AB (which means the4 hitter gets a 4th as well), that’s 13 hits in a game. That is far too many hits to not score runs, even if singles, and if you are adding speed (those singles are doubles and those singles RBIs) it only ratchets up
No one plays these ways because, well, no one plays this way. So that is why i would look TO those ways, they may be rare, but that is exactly why it might work.
Still….while i am in favor of this style i recognize it wont happen, what i am trying to do is SOMETHING…because what we have been doing is not working.
The strategy for MLB seems to be 1 of 2 things. OVERSPEND to stay relevant. or to be really bad and HOPE you can hit on some high prospects enough years in a row that they all come up quick and CHEAP, and you bank on the cheapness of their contracts to compete.
The Cardinals did the rare other THIRD option, which was getting VERY LUCKY with several low draft prospects that ended up being HOFers, that could provide cheap high level players to combine with their middling veteran lineups that were constructed at the expense of the farm system by JOcketty to get as much bang for their Mark McGwire bump they got in the late 90’s
Waiting for another Pujols is hardly a way to be relevant and win. We keep trying to force those expectations on every prospect to justify this gameplan as relevance. It just isnt. We got REALLY lucky and didnt waste those years by shooting for a highly rated farm system.
If we want to find a new way to win, that isn’t spending money, tanking, or just getting lucky, then we should change the WAY we play.
And with a style that the fans can ENJOY and remember, can possibly create goodwill to the inevitable failures in the process along the way.
Anyways, sorry, i am just yelling in to the void in my own way
Well Jager, I just watched the division leader small ball the Cubs to a loss. I can’t remember how many single then SB, back to backs they had. It was four or five. Small ball does work for some.
Obviously the situation dictates the approach. When a solitary run is a matter of survival, I’d term a sac-bunt, hit and run, or squeeze play as baseball as opposed to small ball.
Edit…With the silly new rules in extras, I’d sac-bunt every time.
@thejager, the game is constantly evolving. You say the game is the same as it was in the 80s, but it isn’t even the same as it was 10 years ago. You can go look at most stats going back the decades a steady trend of change such as HR rate and K rate. In anything that involves competition, the competitors have to continually adapt to the ever changing environment to out compete. If you aren’t willing to change, then you will lose. It isn’t that hitters don’t want to hit 300, but MLB pitchers throw so much harder with more spin today for pitches that are very difficult to hit. Defenses are much smarter too with shifts (although shifts were heavily ran back in older baseball as well and to success).
Sometimes innovation can be cyclic as the shift was really popular a while back. It just is a constant game of cat and mouse between hitters and pitchers. A decade+ ago, the down and away sinker was the best pitch in baseball as hitters swings were tailored to hit mid and upper pitches. Hitters adapted and started optimizing their swing paths to hit the low pitch much better. Look at Contreras and how he consistently smashes the low pitch for a HR now. Now the go to location for a pitcher is up to target that hole in the average hitters swing. We will probably see it change again in the coming years as well.
In general, I think people by nature have a tendency to want to watch sports the way they were in what I will call their “Golden Decade”. Many of the posters on this site were young men and women during the 80s and came to know and love the game in the style it was played then. You also had the Cardinals being an above average team then and many fans associating Whiteyball with a winning formula. I do not fault anyone for this as nostalgia is a very strong emotion and completely understand people wanting to see the game played in that way. But the reality is that sports are always changing and that style at the current time isn’t competitive as others have gamed the game to find more efficient strategies of winning. This isn’t isolated to MLB either. Look at the NFL and NBA and how drastically they have changed in the last decades.
My thoughts on what the team is doing wrong is probably the inverse of what many here feel. Many seem to state the team has gotten too involved with advanced analytics, but everything I have read about the team seems to indicate they are always a few years behind the game in analytics. Look at our pitching staff and how we have targeted contact oriented pitchers. Mo finally came out and said we are changing to go to a more K% focused strategy, but we are what 6+ years behind the rest of MLB on that? I believe other teams are using thew new trackman data and other advanced data quicker and more efficiently that the Cardinals to scout the Cards and find our hitters weaknesses and to target them. We don’t appear to be keeping up with understanding that data ourselves and helping our hitters to adjust.
Regarding the pitching style, I myself have only recently started to come across to the more K% approach. In 2021, I very much wanted the Cards to draft McGreevy as he was a control artist. I remember reading experts thoughts and seeing they thought it was a very Cardinals pick but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. In hindsight, unless McGreevy adds velocity or changes his pitch mix up significantly, he will not be anything more than a up down #5 type starter with maybe some good years looking like a #4. If you look at the teams that are consistently developing great pitching like Milwaukee and Seattle, they are very analytics focused and are targeting pitchers with great stuff and trying to teach them to pitch. It is much easier to teach someone to throw strikes than it is to teach someone to have big stuff that fools hitters. Cleveland is a contrarian there though and is taking guys with some stuff and control and getting them to throw harder.
There are certainly times you should take the control artist if they are overvalued for where you can draft them, but if you want to develop stars, you need guys with big stuff and tools. It is a risk/reward spectrum and Stl has very much favored the safe bet side but with a lower ceiling. Good organizations like Milwaukee and the Dodgers are doing a good job of mixing high ceiling type players with more sure bets and then doing a great job of developing them.
A specific area I really think the Cards need to improve is in the international FA market. Stl tends to take the quantity over quality approach and it quite obviously isn’t paying off well. Cleveland, Texas, New York Y, Milwaukee are swinging for the fences with IAFA and getting great players on their roster from it. It also doesn’t help we got rid of a DSL team in what I assume was a cost reduction effort. I could understand that a little more if we took the quality over quantity approach, but we are doing quantity and with that quantity we need more roster spots to have those players get experience and to develop.
Regarding analytics, I do think MLB could very much use a different perspective than the Ivy league grad running the orgs. Every one of those guys have the same background and likely have the same thought patterns. Analytics are very useful, but having people learn them in an atypical manner with their own philosophy and mindset is how the Cards can try to find a new market inefficiency. Who knows, it could be targeting fast players to get more SB given the rule changes, but only time will tell where the game goes next.
My guess is that the game is heading away from the wholesome and old fashioned sort of family themed entertainment that we’ve grown accustomed to. There’s a team moving to Las Vegas. Legalized wagering is being encouraged by the braintrust of MLB and beer sales at ballparks are augmented by every sort of fancy mixed drink imaginable. The Cardinals are even offering two upcoming promotional games entitled, “Adult Mystery Cardinals Rope Hat” and “Adult Mystery Nickname Jersey”…It’s quickly becoming more of an an adult themed type of entertainment attraction and it’s my guess that it won’t be too long before anyone under the age of 21 won’t be allowed admission to a ballgame…
I don’t think it’s all analytics….i think they have had too many holes in their lineup for about 5 years now…and they are always short on starting pitching….that is personnel decisions.
Couple that with a manager that seems to need a lot more game experience and you have a bad team or the current Cardinals
There isn’t anything magic about swing and miss pitchers. Nobody just discovered anything. All the orgs stampeded over to all or nothing hitters, and the way to counter that is with swing and miss pitchers. So once everyone is fully loaded up on swing and miss, then the way to get some offense will be contact hitters. So everyone will develop contact hitters, and the the way to get them out will be pitchability control artists. And around it goes. What it all comes down to is everyone wants to follow the herd, but you don’t get ahead following the herd, so it just goes round and round and there is nothing worse than being behind the curve.
Albert, great post. Being behind the curve doesn’t mean going back to the era of the cigar chompers. It means finding new ways to innovate and get ahead. Change isn’t always easy to do or for some to accept.
I agree. Great post Albert. Now we just need someone with drive and creativity to innovate that next change.
There was a time when the mantra “speed never slumps” was spoken quite a bit. These days it is “strikeouts are acceptable given the propensity to hit the long ball.”
Maybe a little more balance towards speed will evolve in the future. Also I wonder if it will be more common to see two-way players in the future.
Mickey Mantle’s dad taught him to switch-hit because he felt the future in the major leagues would be filled with guys that hit from both sides. Has not really gone that way.
Professional sports tend to evolve towards specialization, which would mean we won’t see two-way players become more common, nor more switch-hitters.
Someone tell Kyle Gibson to quit throwing quality starts (5 in 7 starts). He doesn’t throw hard enough (FB velo 91.3) and his K/9 is too low (6.8).
Why would an organization want all of their pitchers to pitch a certain way? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have some high K pitchers and some control artists to keep the opposition off balance? Why not have both? Why does there have to be an organization wide “formula”? The formula should be to know how to get outs without running up a high pitch count or blowing your arm out. Each pitcher goes about that a little differently depending on their strengths.
Same with offense. The good teams have a combination of high OBP guys paired with high SLG guys. Currently we have neither.
Following up to some comments with my thoughts.
I don’t think it’s all analytics….i think they have had too many holes in their lineup for about 5 years now…and they are always short on starting pitching….that is personnel decisions
Analytics drive personnel decisions and good organizations are using analytics to build quality rosters. Analytics also go into the day to day gameplans as teams can use the new data to understand hitter and pitcher matchups better than ever before.
Someone tell Kyle Gibson to quit throwing quality starts (5 in 7 starts). He doesn’t throw hard enough (FB velo 91.3) and his K/9 is too low (6.8
I certainly hope I am wrong, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that Gibson will end the season with a 4.75+ ERA. Respectable with good innings, but not nearly as good as he is doing now. Every metric indicates he has been getting lucky in batted ball data and he will regress to his prior years ERA in the 4.5 to 5.5 range. He is pitching to a little better defense this year than last with BAL, but he also is missing less bats, getting hitters to chase less, and walking more.
Why would an organization want all of their pitchers to pitch a certain way? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have some high K pitchers and some control artists to keep the opposition off balance? Why not have both? Why does there have to be an organization wide “formula”? The formula should be to know how to get outs without running up a high pitch count or blowing your arm out. Each pitcher goes about that a little differently depending on their strengths.
I agree with this in general. You don’t want everyone to pitch the same way or hit the same as varying looks is good. The problem with the Cardinals pitching philosophy and organization the last few years is we have been too much on the control artist, GB pitcher side even though those pitchers are losing effectiveness as the game evolves year to year. Mikolas is an example of this as he was great a couple of years ago, but now he gets hit hard consistently as the league is much better at hitting that type of pitcher. The Cards are certainly behind the 8 ball in terms of pitching standards though and need a philosophy change to out compete hitters still.
What it all comes down to is everyone wants to follow the herd, but you don’t get ahead following the herd, so it just goes round and round and there is nothing worse than being behind the curve.
The Cards are certainly behind the curve, but I don’t think the solution to that is to stay behind in analytics and hope you find yourself in a good spot. More information will beat less information and if you aren’t keeping up with the latest in analytics or making developments there yourself, others will be much quicker to adapt and out compete you. Now hopefully the Cards can use advanced analytics to find a new style of pitching focused on control artists that are GB machines, but that will look different in many ways than it did in the past whether it is pitch mix, location, sequencing, etc and analytics can hopefully help them find that niche.
In general, I think the trackman data has really helped orgs that are quick to adapt out compete other teams as the sheer amount of data and the quality of it is rapidly changing the game. The next wave of rapid changes will likely be from biomechanics analysis (although I bet some teams are well into this already) and we will see the game change again. Let’s hope for the average fan there are more Logan Webb or this year’s Ranger Suarez type pitchers in that future as it is simply more enjoyable to watch a pitcher go 7+ innings dominating than a bunch of random RP throwing 100+.
Here is a great article about Imangaga and how he is succeeding without great velocity. It is still very analytics driven and the Cubs have been working with him to take advantage of the data. He also throws a splitter which as I have noted recently is one of the best pitches in baseball at the moment.
https://www.mlb.com/news/shota-imanaga-surprisingly-dominant-fastball
Well don’t bring signs to the ballgame declaring people should be fired. People are getting kicked out of games for bringing signs, no matter how big or small.
This article speculates on possible ways to “jump start” the Cardinals, right now. Included is to insert Mason Winn at the top of the batting order. And to replace Goldschmidt with Burleson at 1B. I’m just the messenger. https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/mlb/3-internal-fixes-that-could-get-the-st-louis-cardinals-lineup-going/ar-BB1lYK2h?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=e0412e4442074ec799943c720736dcf1&ei=4
Why did you skip over / omit recommendation #2 in the article: give Carpenter more PAs at DH (over Burleson and Gorman)?
As for the 1B suggestion, the recommendation is to replace a good fielding 1B currently sporting a 67 OPS+ (but a considerably better track record) with a bad fielding 1B with an 81 OPS+ (entirely in-line with his track record)?
Compelling.
RBK, please support your statement that Burleson is “a bad fielding 1B”. I heard a draft analyst indicate that Burleson was pretty good at 1B, defensively.
Sure, just as soon as you provide support for all of your unsubstantiated “because-I-said-so” posts. It’s a two-way street, why is the burden of proof always on everyone except you?
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