The 6-inning Start

Lead sentence from yahoo.com: Halladay threw six sharp innings in a 7-6 victory over the Washington Nationals.

Lead sentence from the Chicago Tribune: Koji Uehara solid in 6 innings

From www.azstarnet.com Jimenez pleased with scoreless 6 innings

In an article published on line by http://www.diamond-mind.com/articles/qstart.htm that goes back 1o 1992, David W. Smith wrote, "The quality start is a relatively new statistic devised by sportswriter John Lowe in an attempt to evaluate the performance of starting pitchers in terms other than the traditional values of ERA and wins and losses. A starting pitcher is credited with a quality start if he pitches at least six innings and allows three or fewer earned runs."

I cannot accept that getting two-thirds of the job done is a quality start. Follow the math and let me know if I am wrong, a pitcher starts 32 games, pitches 6 innings in each game and gives up 3 runs in each game. In giving up those 3runs, let us postulate that he walks 4, strikes out 4 and gives up five hits, one of which is home run in each game. Understand, I am making up those numbers, but they are within the realm of reason because they emulate what a line score would be if 3 runs scored – 3-5-0 – and that looks reasonable to me.

He has pitched 192 innings which is not bad, but if you define Paul Byrd and Kyle Lohse as quality, that is what they turned in last year.

His ERA is 4.50 and that is not a quality ERA. I lose interest in a pitcher when the 3.50 line is crossed.

His WHIP is an astronomical 9.00. Even if he walks no one, in a statistical world that venerates the sub 1.00 WHIP and assigns the word to quality to 1.5 and below, a WHIP that hits 5.00 is sub standard.

My definition of a quality start is 7 innings, allowing the same 3 or fewer earned runs.

 

Can a Curmudgeon Enjoy a 12-6 Win?

Opening day: Marlins vs. Nationals.

Florida fans, i.e., the reporters on the Sun-Sentinel, are in the state that other fans get to around mid-September when their team clinches a pennant or a playoff slot. Come to think of it, clinching a pennant is like dialing a phone. It used to mean something but in today's world of glutted playoff slots, it is just another way into the post-season.

Some terrific things did happen at the ballpark yesterday as the Marlins went 8-8 lifetime in opening day wins. But, it was the Nationals. They can score runs, but everyone knows they cannot stop runs. Julian Tavarez was first out of the bullpen. I am surprised he did not use a golf cart like Stan Musial did to throw out the first ball in St. Louis.

Even a curmudgeon would have been moved from the start when an air force pilot deployed in Iraq appeared live on the big screen to tell us that his son was on the mound. The kid threw out the first pitch. Of course, he did miss the plate.

I like the part where they call out the whole team from the clubhouse guys on up at the start of the season. Of course, Josh Willingham who was traded from the Marlins got close to standing ovation and he is now on the other team.

Chicago performed the National Anthem, no Susan (my favorite baseball newbie), not the Cubs or the White Sox – the band. Problem is their powerful horn section blew away the singers on a windy day.

There were 34,000 plus in the stands. Next time we see that, will be when the Yankees hit town. Problem is it was harder to park close and I did not have an empty seat on both sides of me.

Everyone is raving this morning about the Marlins first turn at bat. Emilio Bonifacio (remember that name because he will be on the all star ballot and the rookie of the year ballot) singled in his first opening day starter appearance. He promptly stole 2^nd and scored a few seconds later when Adam Dunn misjudged a fly ball tripped on his own feet (or maybe a blade of grass) and let the ball drop for a double. OH. John Baker got the RBI.

Then Hanley Ramirez came to bat and bunted the ball to move Baker to third. Cantu's ground out scored Baker and the 2-0 lead grew, faded, and grew again and so on.

What did the curmudgeon see?

Dunn never touched the ball so the rules say that it was a double. The error rule has to be expanded to include being clumsy and turning a routine fly ball into a base hit.

But the worst part of that sequence is the bunt by Ramirez. He is the #3 hitter; before the game he was given the silver slugger award (Susan. That means he was voted the best batter at his position – short stop); and he is feared for his ability to power the ball. Mets scout Bryan Lambe leaned over to me and said, "Would you have called a bunt there?" By the way, it wasn't even that good a bunt.

My guess? Marlins manager Freddie Gonzalez was showing off the new speed and small ball philosophy. But the fans cheered louder for the four home runs – including Bonifacio's inside the park sprint. For me, the inside the park home run is the most exciting play in baseball. But, did anyone else notice that Lansing Milledge fell down chasing the ball and had he not – nothing to cheer about.

Bottom line. Curmudgeons can have fun at the ballpark.

Detour into the Economics of the Mortgage Market Part I

Spring training is over, the 25 man rosters are set and opening day looms. For me, it will be Monday and a not sold out Dolphins (a football team) Stadium. So, let's turn our attention to the other hippo in the room – the housing market and its real estate lending companion, the mortgage.

I have been, from to time, critical of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So it is fair to discuss this further. After all, spring training have wound down but the economy is still wound up.

My biggest question, the one I keep trying to focus on is that since the US government has taken over both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac why there isn't more discussion of merging them. In other words, what economic justification exists for the maintenance of a duopoly?

Both started out as government agencies and later evolved into what are known as government-sponsored entities. They have formal names – The Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. They do the same thing. Before the housing holocaust, between them they control close to 90% of the secondary market for mortgage loans. In fact, I once in a meeting at Fannie's headquarters when the topic of competition came up. I was told that they measured their market share against Freddie, and they try to maintain it at 55%. I asked what about other competitors? I was told that they were only concerned about maintaining the balance between them and Freddie because otherwise people might wonder if Freddie shouldn't be merged in with the.

I asked what would be wrong with that – this was in about 1998. I was told that it is what it is. And, the very next day my project supervisor was told to take me off the project. The reason given was that I was asking irrelevant questions and probing in the wrong areas.

Fannie Mae is the older and is a creature of the depression. It was designed by the Roosevelt administration to support a mortgage market that was being stressed by the second of the two depressions of the 1930s. The idea was similar, but different, from what is being discussed today. In the Great Depression, unlike today, the federal government did not try to monetize the bad loans. What I mean by that is that banks were permitted to fail and money went out of circulation. It was not that banks would not lend, it was that they could not lend because they had no free capital with which to lend.

Factoring into the equation, although the mortgage loan existed, retail banking as we know it did not. Most commercial banks focused on business accounts and business loans. Consumer lending was the province of mutual savings banks, the brand new savings and loan association industry, and the predecessor of today's credit unions – known as building and loan societies.

Home ownership, nevertheless, was woven into the DNA of the United States. From its inception, people strove to own land, to build homes in order to provide shelter for their families. Canada, our neighbor to the north, achieved its expansion through mercantilism. Led by the Hudson Bay Company, land was acquired by enterprises and then parceled out to the workers and farmers they needed. In the US we expanded through movements like the Free Soil Party. We opened new territories and encouraged people to strike out for the west and claim their space.

When the Great Depression hit and people had to surrender their homes, The Roosevelt Administration set a goal to restore widespread homeownership. Fannie Mae was created to put mortgage funds into circulation by buying mortgage loans from lenders who were loath to carry loans on their books for the long terms that existed for mortgages. There will be more about that later.

In 1968, the LBJ administration privatized Fannie Mae chartering it like any other bank with a few notable exceptions. Fannie Mae did not take deposits and it did not lend directly to the public. Instead, it continued to function by buying loans. To finance Fannie Mae, the charter permitted it to issue bonds, secured by the mortgages it was buying and carrying the implicit guarantee that the US government stood behind those bonds. Why did LBJ do this? He needed to relieve the pressure on the federal debt ceiling because he was financing the war in Vietnam.

Two years later, in 1970, the US government (we are now in the Nixon administration) created Freddie Mac. It was an exact duplicate of Fannie Mae. It did exactly the same thing and it was funded exactly the same way – bonds, carrying a more or less government guarantee. The reason given at the time was that economic growth had expanded home ownership and the mortgage market to such an extent that Fannie Mae would be too large if allowed to function as a single entity.

What happened next is the story of the housing market, compounded by inexplicable decisions by the management of both GSEs.

Tune in next time for Part II of this too big to fail saga.

Baseball is not a Perfect Market

OK gang, first we have to define it then we have to discuss if it matters that baseball is or is not. So, get out your economic text books and let's plunge into another chapter of thinking like an economist does.

We are going to look at this from team to team standpoint. You could argue that the team to fan enterprise is a market, and it is. It might also be possible to look at this question on a league to league basis, but today, let's stick with the market for players – a market that was created with he advent of baseball.

A perfect market is a market where there is perfect competition because of the set of conditions or assumptions. Perfect competition, while it is a theory out of classical economics, is often used in evaluating a sport – although the term more often used is competitive balance. The idea is the same, though. The concept is that all the competitors are striving to achieve the best result and that all have the same opportunity to do so.

The following assumptions describe a perfect market. Let's see how MLB holds up.

There are a large number of buyers and a large number of sellers. Major League Baseball is a private market with only a few members -only 30 teams. It is better than it was before free agency but on any given day, all 30 can be buyers or sellers or, sometimes both. So, it can be said that the buyers and sellers represent 100% of the market, but there is a limited number of players.

The quantity of goods bought by any individual transactor is so small relative to the total quantity traded that individual trades leave the market unaffected. Because of the effort of Scott Bores and others in his profession, to constantly stretch the limits, a single free agent deals can affect the market, at least for the super stars. However, the arbitration process is heavily dependent on creating valuations based on statistics and so below the top handful, no other individual transaction will move the needle.

The units of goods sold by different sellers are the same and the product is homogeneous. The unit of goods is one: one player. We could be here all day on the question of whether all players are same, but we know they are not. And, player values change based on team needs. Just today, the usually stingy Marlins went over their per-player limit to obtain Ross Gload who is a Kansas City cast office. He had no value to the Royals, but the Marlins were without a left hander on their bench. Even the players union recognizes that some players are worth more than others. The union agreement sanctions a top 17% who are eligible for arbitration one year earlier than the rest, for example.

There is perfect information. In other words, all buyers and sellers have complete information on the prices being asked and offered in other parts of the market. This is a condition that agents disrupt. They dissemble, exaggerate and otherwise make false information known so as to gain a bargaining advantage. As my old statistics professor used to say, "Figures don't lie, but liars figure."

All decisions are rational. Two words: George $teinbrenner.

There is perfect freedom of entry to and exit from the market. MLB scores well on this attribute. A team can be a buyer (Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers) or a seller (Pirates, Marlins) or an intermittent entrant (Braves) or a sideline sitter. And, a team can move from one category to another at the beginning, the middle, or the end of any season.

Fellow students, the player pool that is controlled by Major League Baseball is not a perfect market and cannot be until there is a salary cap, a minimum payroll, and open free agent auctions.

So for the foreseeable future, fans in some cities will squirm in their seats from year to year; fans in some cities will ride roller coasters; and The Great Rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox will continue to destroy the concept of competitive balance.

Winners and Losers

Spring training camps will be closing up this week. The last spring game I will see will be Wednesday when the Marlins and Orioles pack it up in Fort Lauderdale. Of course, for the Marlins the trip home is a white knuckle ride down I-95 while the Orioles have a relatively peaceful flight back north to Crab Cake Corners. I really do not think of Baltimore as Crab Cake Corners, but every once in a while I get in the mood to write like a sports writer and use cliché nicknames.

The rule when I wrote sports for the Daily Pennsylvanian was to never use the same word twice to describe something. The headline "Natators Triumph over Middies 39-26" can be translated to mean that Penn's swimming team defeated the Naval Academy's team by 13 points. Similarly, "Cagers Get by Cantabs" meant that Penn's basketball team beat Harvard. I am not making this up, but it is a digression.

The news this weekend had to do mainly with competitions among players (batsmen and hurlers) for key assignments. Two that interested me were the Yankees (Bronx Bombers) naming Brett Gardner to be their starting center fielder and Kevin Gregg winning the closer job on the Cubs (Wrigleymen). Some of my friends think that Jordan Zimmerman being named to the back of the rotation slot with the Washington Nationals (Nats) is a big deal, but I do not. You have to feel sorry for a kid whose big break is to participate in a projected 100-loss pitching rotation.

Thinking about Gardner and Gregg, I got to thinking about the losers – Melky Cabrera and Felix Marmol, respectively.

They Yankees announced that Cabrera will go north as the fourth outfielder. Joe Girardi, was spoke highly of him, pointing out that he is only 24 years old, he is a switch hitter and he can play all three positions. He is also out of options. To me that can mean that he might well be making his contribution elsewhere by June. There are some big gaps in the bullpen and what if Alex does not come back as scheduled? Do you see Cody Ransome as the answer at third base?

The Gregg win over Marmol is a puzzler to me. Gregg is a career 4.00 ERA guy. He is a decent closer who turned in 29 saves for the Marlins last year, before being closed down on August 30^th with a bum knee. He also had 38 BBs against 57 Ks. Personally, I like closers whose K:BB ratio is north of two. He does not give up home runs easily but his H/9 ratio is greater than nine. You really want a closer who shuts them down.

Marmol looks more like a closer. His ERA lifetime is below Gregg's and last year he turned in a sub-1.0 WHIP. His BB to K ratio is a very healthy 5.0 and his H/9 is well below one per inning, 3.7 last year. The only thing I can think of is the woeful performance of the Dominicans in the WBC. Being away from camp may hve hurt him although being away from Pinella may have helped.

Marmol, like Cabrera will be OK. He could be a bargaining chip in a trade negotiation, but he is more likely to stay in Chicago. He was given the set up job and with Gregg's age and medical history, he might well end up closing when the Northsiders meet the Gotham nine in the World Series this year.

Old Business: I wrote the case for no #1s in the Final Four at the start of the tournament and I was half right. Hey, if I could make 50% of my shots from behind the arc, I would be an NBA all star. Besides, BHO picked North Carolina when he did his bracket and who overturns a presidential directive these days.