#AskSpector: Can anyone match Pete Carroll's strategic blunder?

Jesse Spector

•
#AskSpector: Can anyone match Pete Carroll's strategic blunder? image

Welcome to the latest edition of the #AskSpector Tweetbag, where everything's made up and the points don't matter. Wait, no, that's "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" There aren't even any points here. This is where you ask questions about baseball or anything else, and get answers about baseball or anything else. How do you ask a question? Go on Twitter and use the #AskSpector hashtag.

OK, let's get started.

Hang on, that's still "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" Dang it, let's get to the questions.

 

 

Would starting Tom Seaver in Game 6, on three days' rest, with a 3-2 lead in the 1973 World Series, count for this? The Mets only scored two runs against Ken Holtzman and the A's bullpen in Game 7, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered anyway. The 1980 Olympics were a round-robin, so USA-USSR was not a full-on championship game, but the Soviets pulling goalie Vladislav Tretiak in favor of Vladimir Myshkin after one period has to be up there. The reason we look at these things, though, is that they were monumental failures. There still were opportunities for those decisions, and for Pete Carroll's, to work out. If Russell Wilson throws the winning touchdown pass instead of an interception, Carroll is lauded for thinking outside the box when everyone thought the Seahawks would give the ball to Marshawn Lynch, and it's Bill Belichick who gets the criticism for not calling timeout and letting the Seahawks take 20-plus seconds off the clock. Also, not a championship-deciding game, but Brad Ausmus bringing Joba Chamberlain and Joakim Soria into Game 2 in Baltimore, less than 24 hours after each had fallen apart in Game 1? That was as ludicrous a managerial decision as I can remember.

 

 

I will note that you asked for the worst play in baseball, not the worst call. So, here, from June 21 of last year, is a three-run wild pitch thrown by the Rockies' Christian Friedrich.

If that's not your thing, and you would prefer one individual completely botching things, I present to you Ruben Rivera.

 

 

No, they're going to give it a whirl with Didi Gregorius, in part because whatever it costs to get Tulowitzki, the Yankees don't have it, prospect-wise.

 

 

Shields has every right to take as long as he wants to find a deal. It's possible that he had offers earlier in the winter that are better than what he will wind up getting. If so, he and his agent misplayed the market. It happens. I'm not going to sweat it too much, because I think Shields saw what happened last year with some of the players who let contract stuff drag out into spring training or later, and he'll wind up with a team in time to report to camp with everyone else.

 

 

Part of what makes Glass so intriguing is that he's bad, but never struggles to find a job with an NHL team. He also has those occasional moments where he appears not to be useless. I think the baseball equivalent to that is Greg Dobbs, who has managed -- with no defensive prowess at any position -- to play parts of 11 seasons while putting up a .692 career OPS and a career WAR figure of minus-3.6. Dobbs has a reputation as a decent pinch- hitter because he has 10 career pinch-hit homers and went 22-for-62 as a pinch-hitter in 2008. For his career, his line as a pinch-hitter is .243/.300/.380, which is terrible.

 

 

I would think that if he remains with the Angels for the rest of his career, Weaver will be welcome as a spring training instructor, at the very least, for as long as he would like to do so. I would not support the idea of keeping someone as a roster player simply for mentorship purposes on a team that regularly has World Series aspirations.

 

 

Oh my goodness. That is a rough combination. The Blue Jays have the best current team out of those three, but I still think their failure to address pitching problems, bullpen depth in particular, keeps them out of the playoffs in 2015. With the second wild card, and young pitchers who are maturing, I would not be surprised to see Toronto at least grab a wild card sometime in the next couple of years. The Oilers and Raiders aren't just bad, they're horribly-run franchises. I think one of your teams probably will make the playoffs by the end of the decade, but I might start following an NBA team just to experience some joy. Just don't pick the Knicks.

 

 

We've got two Hall of Famers, Jesse Burkett and Jesse Haines, plus All-Stars Jesse Barfield, Jesse Crain, and Jesse Orosco. We've got a couple more active pitchers, Jesse Chavez and Jesse Hahn. There have been several more players in major league history with my first name, but as I sought to assemble an all-Jesse team, I found that there have been way more pitchers with the name than position players, to a seemingly ridiculous extent. After Jesse Burkett and Jesse Barfield, the best position-playing Jesse was Jesse Gonder, a catcher whose best season was with the 1964 Mets. The all-Jesse infield is a disaster. Given my own experience in high school, that's about right. I was a terrible third baseman, a terrible first baseman, perhaps the worst outfielder who ever lived, and then finally found the position for me, catching, where quick movement doesn't matter and having a decent enough arm to get the ball down to second base is a real strength. My arm was not so good as to get actual batters out as a pitcher. Anyway, the quest to compile an all-Jesse team from MLB history winds up as a bust.

 

 

Of fame? Oh, I don't think you have to worry about that.

 

 

 

 

This is not really a question, nor is it something that I agree with. Yes, if a runner on a play that would be defensive indifference falls down and gets tagged out, it would be a caught stealing. When is the last time you saw that happen, though? Defensive indifference is a pretty rare thing on its own -- it's only going to happen in blowouts. There is no reason to penalize the catcher statistically for something that is very much the manager's decision, not guarding against the steal. A catcher for a particularly good team that blows out its opponents all the time would have his defensive numbers downgraded simply as a result of his playing for a particularly good team that blows out its opponents all the time. This serves no purpose. Intentional walks do count against a pitcher, but they also get their own category. If a pitcher has an uncharacteristically high walk rate, you can look and see if a disproportionate number of walks were intentional. For instance, Tim Hudson's highest walk rate in the last eight seasons was 2.9 per nine innings with the 2010 Braves. He issued eight intentional walks that year. We can look at that and have a better understanding of what happened -- Hudson still issued those walks, but we can look deeper. Folding defensive indifference into steal numbers would not be helpful to understanding performance, it would be a detriment.

 

 

I've written about the A's a lot over the course of the winter, and I think they are going to be competitive this year. It's not a full rebuild, it's a very much on-the-fly kind of thing that only a highly aggressive general manager like Billy Beane can pull off. The A's will have the same outfield that they did last year, but an all-new infield. Josh Donaldson may be gone, but with Nick Punto and Eric Sogard both replaced as starters, by Marcus Semien and Ben Zobrist, Oakland has a more even distribution of talent through the infield. That could be beneficial. The question is going to be what happens in the rotation, when A.J. Griffin and Jarrod Parker can come back to join Sonny Gray and Scott Kazmir, and how fast some of the young pitchers acquired in trades this winter develop -- there are going to be opportunities. I'm not counting out the A's in 2015.

 

 

I'm guessing this is about my assertion that [external-article-link original_href="http://www.sportingnews.com/mlb/story/2015-02-02/when- do-pitchers-and-catchers-report-2015-spring-training-report-dates-for-all-teamsit doesn't matter when pitchers and catchers report. I respond that, on the contrary, I love America, and America deserves to count down to when we really get to see baseball, not a 90-second clip on the local news of bunch of guys in t-shirts and shorts doing stretching exercise and maybe playing catch.

 

Jesse Spector