In all of 2009, no one hit the six-game mark in one-run no-decisions. Surprisingly, this year the Mets aren’t leading the league in these one-run no-decisions – the Cubs are, led by Randy Wells and his impressive 4, along with Ted Lilly with 3.

Francisco Rodriguez also picked up his third Vulture Win of the year last night. A vulture win is the combination of a blown save and a win in the same game. Usually, that happens when a hometown closer blows the save in the top of the 9th and his teammates score in the bottom for the win. Frankie blew the save in the bottom of the 9th last night, but they left him in to pitch the bottom of the 10th and he held on (despite Phil Cuzzi’s hissyfit and some questionable umpiring going in both directions). Tyler Clippard leads the league in vulture wins this year with four.

Since 1961, there have been 431 home runs (although the Play Index only lists games starting at 1970, so that may or may not be accurate). Four pitchers have hit home runs in their first games, including Yankee pitching coach Dave Eiland in 1992 and Rockies pitcher Jason Jennings. Like Johan, Jennings pitched a complete game shutout for the win that night.

The all-time leader in home runs by a pitcher in the first 87 games (how’s that for esoteric?) is Yovani Gallardo, who’s in his fourth season pitching for the Brewers. He’s hit seven of them, and as of July 4 he’s only hit in 71 games. He’s got a lot of time to pick up the pace and possibly hit the triple-digit mark when he gets back from the disabled list some time after July 20.

Though Gary said it, that pinged my “Stuff Keith Hernandez Says” meter, and I trotted off to Baseball-Reference.com to look it up. Since 1973, six other pitchers who debuted in relief have two hit batsman. Were any of them as bad as Sborz?

We don’t have to go back too far to find someone who was. In 2002, Justin Miller of the Blue Jays made his debut against the Devil Rays and hit Chris Gomez, then Jason Tyner. Miller deserves special recognition – after that beautiful start, he held on to pitch 2 2/3 and got the win!

Honorable mention goes to Mitch Stetter of the Brewers. In a 2007 game against the Pirates, Stetter debuted in the last inning of a 12-2 blowout. He was on the winning side, though it ended up 12-3. Stetter hit Jack Wilson. He threw a wild pitch in the process of walking Nyjer Morgan, then iced the cake by plunking Nate McLouth. That was followed up with a groundout that scored Wilson and a merciful game-ending double play.

Last year, there were 51 leadoff home runs over roughly 6 months (early April through the first week of October), which puts uniformly distributed homers at  8.5 per month (so McLouth’s #19 on June 19 was about 2.25 behind pace). So far, with eleven over 2.5 months, that puts us on pace for 26.4, or, to be generous, about 30 leadoff home runs.

The change probably isn’t indicative of anything other than chance, but in 2008 #24 of 52 came on June 20, and in 2007 they were already up to 28 of 59 by June 19. Over the past few years there’s been a slowing of leadoff home runs which may be due to chance or may be due to some other factor. Who knows? It’s way too small a sample to say anything about.

That pinged my “Stuff Keith Hernandez says” meter, and so I decided to crunch some numbers and see if that’s true. I interpreted Keith’s statement as implying that the number of designated hitters should be increasing, since managers are moving away from an everyday DH and toward spreading the DH assignments around a bit more. The crunching also needs to account for interleague play, which should obviously increase the number of DHes. So, after controlling for interleague play, does DH use show an increasing trend with time?

To set up the regression, I modified an existing data set I had to include a variable for the number of people with at least one at-bat as a designated hitter (culled from baseball-reference.com/play-index). B-R.com didn’t have a listing for 1973, so I noted that 1974 had 106 DHs and 1975 had 107 and made an educated guess (that would be consistent with Keith’s statement) that 1973 had 105. Then, I added a binary variable Inter which took value 1 if there was interleague play that year and value 0 otherwise. Finally, I created time variables DHt (starts at 1 in 1973 and increases with each year), Intert (starts at 1 in 1997 and increases with each year), and squares of both of the time variables. My dependent variable is the number of players with at least one at-bat as a designated hitter (DHes) divided by the number of teams playing with the DH rule (DHTms). Finally, armed with this dataset, I pushed the numbers through R and came out with this result:

Some caveats are in order. First of all, according to a Breusch-Pagan test, the error terms are absolutely heteroskedastic (that is, they’re correlated to something that I haven’t accounted for in my data). Second, I have an R[sup]2[/sup] of .9884, meaning that this data explains almost 99% of the variance in the number of designated hitters used. That’s a lot of explanatory value, and usually means you’re doing a regression that looks like “Right shoes = B0 + B1 Price + B2 Left shoes + error term” – that is, one where you’re missing some obvious highly correlated term. I’m not sure what that term might be, though. Also, there isn’t really enough data from interleague play to run robust time series analysis on it.

However, we can make some statements. First of all, interleague play adds about 43 designated hitters, or about 2.68 per National League team although that probably varies by the number of series played. Second, DHes per team decreased until they hit a minimum in 1989 and then began increasing again in terms of time series. What do you know? Keith might have been right after all.

The complete table is here.

The most interesting fact  to me was that only one third of the games were won by left-handed pitchers (Feliciano twice, Eric O’Flaherty, Randy Flores, and John Parrish). That doesn’t quite make sense because LHPs are more likely to come in for one batter than RHPs. (So far, 189 right-handers have games with one batter faced, compared with 198 lefties). That indicates that wins aren’t distributed uniformly across appearances.

Also interesting is the efficiency shown by Jorge Sosa in the Marlins’ May 31 game against the Brewers. He threw one pitch to pitcher Chris Narveson, who was doubled up along with catcher George Kottaras. Sosa ended up credited with 2/3 of an inning pitched and the win.

Second, Mike Pelfrey threw what would otherwise have been a complete game, and a respectable one at that – 9.0 IP, 5 H, 1 R (earned), 0 BB, 6 K, and 103 pitches for a Game Score of 79. Mike, however, was criminally unsupported and the game ended up going into extra innings. Elmer Dessens ended up taking the win for the Mets with 1/3 of an inning pitched because he happened to be the pitcher of record when the third interesting thing happened. (Pelf went 0-3 at the plate and Jerry Manuel double-switched Alex Cora in after the 9th.)

In the bottom of the 11th, Ike Davis (who was 0-4 at the time) hit a solo walk-off homer. It was only the third walk-off home run for the Mets this year, and the first that wasn’t hit by a catcher. Interestingly, Matt Kemp of the Dodgers did the same thing last week – 1 for 5, with the only hit being a walk-off extra-innings home run.

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On Friday, Luis Castillo committed an error in the bottom of the 9th inning with a one-run lead, two men on base, and two men out. The error was such that had Castillo made the play cleanly, the game would have ended with Francisco Rodriguez notching a save; however, Castillo’s error was directly responsible for two unearned runs scoring, giving Frankie a loss instead of a save.

The question: How much money does Castillo owe Rodriguez? I have a pretty good estimate.

Let’s assume, as usual, that clubs base their contract offers on the results the players create, that teams negotiate by placing roughly the same emphasis on the same statistics, and that the market for baseball players is competitive. It is then the case that when a player is a free agent, his stats will dictate the amount of money he’s offered in his next contract, and therefore we can model (using linear regression) the weight placed on each statistic. In this case, a linear regression model could tell us exactly how much money one save is worth come contract time.

Obviously, this is a complicated procedure, and it would take a lot of work to account for all possible variables, so to simplify matters, I did the following:

• Using Baseball-Reference.com‘s Play Index, I found all pitchers seven or more years into their careers (to avoid the inefficiencies of arbitration and rookies being locked into negotiating with their own teams and receiving the league minimum salary) who were free agents at the end of the 2007 season (the last free agency season available on Baseball Reference) and who pitched in relief in at least 80% of their appearances. There were 92.
• I threw out pitchers who did not play in 2008, to avoid distorting the salary output.
• I found the pitchers’ 2008 salaries and created a data file.
• Using that data, I ran a linear regression in R with these results.

First, the objections: there are obviously a number of vagaries in the data. We can’t, for example, easily account for popularity or clubhouse leadership, which are important factors in salary negotiations. This model has an R-squared statistic of .4174, meaning it explains 41% of the variation in salaries – not a huge number. The sample of pitchers is small, and it doesn’t account for people who might have had high reserve prices and refused to sign with any team despite having stats that would have helped solidify the model.

However, the SV (saves) statistic is highly statistically significant, and UR (unearned runs) is significant at the 90% level. Thus, we can estimate that if Frankie were to negotiate tomorrow for his contract, the figure that he was offered would be one save less and two unearned runs more than he would have been had Castillo not committed his error.

Since a save is worth $111,727, and an unearned run conceded is worth -$311,517, that would mean that Rodrigues would lose $[111727+2*(311517)] = $734,761 if he were to negotiate his contract tomorrow. Of course, he isn’t – he won’t negotiate until the end of the 2011 season. Thus, we have to discount twice.

Assuming a 20% interest rate, 734716*.8*.8 = 470,218.24 or about $470,000. (We’ll assume that teams discount the prior years’ performance and focus mainly on the immediately preceding year. 20% is a fairly high level of discounting, meaning that Frankie would be able to make up for lost stats by performing well next year and the year after.) Thus, Luis Castillo may have imposed a $470,000 externality on Francisco Rodriguez’ next contract negotiation.

If I were Luis, I’d offer him a steak dinner instead.

Luis Castillo
commits minor league error;
externality.

Sheffield had a Batting Average, On-Base Percentage, Slugging Percentage and On-Base Plus Slugging of .225/.326/.400/.725 in 2008; Bonds was last active in 2007 and hit .276/.480/.565/1.045 (with the .480 OBP leading the National League). Clearly, something’s wrong. Collusion?

What’s wrong, in my estimation, is still that Bonds represents a negative externality on his team’s production, reputation, and revenue; Sheffield, meanwhile, is less of a threat to ticket sales. Despite being unpopular and saying bizarre things, Sheffield has not yet to my knowledge irritated fans to the extent that Bonds has, nor is he quite the clubhouse menace Bonds is said to be.

Of course, time will tell whether Sheffield produces $400,000 worth of runs for the ailing Mets.