ALL-STAR GAME ISSUE
Cepeda Blast Ends East Drought
Cy Young Parade Highlights 12th Classic
BROOKLYN (July 4) - Orlando Cepeda delivered a 437-foot home run into the cheap seats in Frank Thomas Memorial Stadium in the first inning tonight, giving the home East Division All-Stars three runs that would hold up for a 3-2 win.  The win ended a four-game losing streak for the Orientals, giving them their first All-Star victory of the 1970s.  Chicago Colts Bill Singer, one of the heroes of the World Series-winning Colts last year, started shaky and got worse.  The 29-year-old Cy Young winner, who has 18, 19, and 20 wins in the last three seasons, let nerves get to him, as he allowed a single, and wild pitch, and a walk before serving up the three-run dong to Cepeda.  Cha Cha became the first reigning home run champ to homer in an All-Star Game, and took game MVP honors.

The West, winners of the last four All-Star Game, got a run back in the top of the second when Ken Henderson scored on a Dave Parker sac fly, and halved the lead to 3-2 in the seventh on Parker's RBI groundout.  But after Gary Thommason walked, Detroit's Ken Holtzman and Boston closer Wayne Twitchell retired six batters in a row to nail down the victory.

One of the highlights of the game was the parade of Cy Young (and Cy-caliber) pitchers who entered the fray in the fifth and sixth innings.  Johnny Podres, Bob Moose, Don Wilson, and Fritz Peterson all pitched back to back.  The three Cy Young winners and Wilson, who has led the Monuments to two World Series crowns, put on a pitching clinic, retiring 11 batters in a row, before Jorge Orta broke it up with a single off Peterson.  Podres struck out two (Bando and Thomasson), Wilson struck out two (Carew and Henderson), and Moose battled Cepeda and ended up striking him out.

The All-Star Game will return to Arroyo Seco Stadium in Pasadena, Calif., home of the Los Angeles Outlaws.  The game will again be on July 4.  L.A. hosted the second All-Star Game in 1964, which was won by the East 8-3 in a game with a record five home runs.

Assaying L.A.
by Glen Reed
Everybody gets that building a winning team is hard and all about making tradeoffs: pitching or hitting? speed or defense? contact and walks or power? strikeout pitchers or control pitchers? You only have so many chips to spend, so you pick your poison and go with it. Once you decide on what strategy to employ, the type of team you aim to build, then your success or failure basically comes down to your execution on that plan and the vagaries of player development, injuries, and variability in performance over time. Now the beauty of having managed teams in both divisions is that I have kept an eye on many different teams, including L.A., my rival throughout my time in ATL. For this reason, I have put more than a little thought into the Outlaw franchise, and thought it might be interesting to throw up some ideas around what's the matter with L.A.

First, the caveats. It feels a little weird talking about what's "wrong" with a team that has posted 10 winning seasons out of the last 12, tallying a World Series appearance in that time, and is eight games over .500 at the halfway point. Those are the sorts of problems fake baseball managers everywhere want to have! And it's also certainly possible that the only thing  standing between L.A. and more World Series appearances is geography--for many seasons now the West has been the best division in the circuit, featuring four different division winners in that 12 year span, including two different versions of a Colts dynasty team.  And note that those four don't include San Francisco, which has been a better-than-average pitching team since about the late 1960s. That's living in the high-rent district, jack! And it's hard to always keep up with the Joneses.

But having said all that, there's still room for discussion. Clearly, GM Peter Vays thinks his team has a problem. And for two seasons in a row now I have called L.A. the best team in the West, but of course, L.A. failed to make the playoffs last year and the Bandits are underperforming lofty expectations again this season. Why? Let's start with what's to like about the Outlaws. They're basically my type of team--the classic Earl Weaver two-walks-and-a-dong-offense with strong starting pitching and a talented closer, forget about the rest of the pen. Of course, good starters allow you to save money and chips on the middle relievers--you're not going to use those guys anyway because most nights your SPs are going to deliver the game direct to your closer.

But it should be obvious that your closer better be bad ass under this sort of arrangement. Turns out Pedro Borbon is, in fact, insanely talented, but his performance has been diabolical given his ratings--the dude has eight losses at the halfway point and has converted just 2/3 of his save opportunities. This alone goes a long way toward explaining the team's underperformance (Pythagorean and otherwise) to date. The rest of the bullpen is actually pretty good, certainly no worse than average. Paradoxically, though, this actually hurts your Pythagorean math--most teams have MRs that will get pounded now and again, inflating your runs allowed in games you were probably going to lose anyway (the reason your MR is in there is that your SP has been knocked out of the game, or was pinch hit for because you were behind). But having good MRs means you don't get as many of those sorts of blowouts, suppressing your runs allowed, which helps your Pythagorean, though not necessarily your actual, record. 

Indeed, when we look at the numbers, we find that about 40% of LA's games have been one-run affairs, and they're basically .500 in those games. So what's it all mean? My prognosis on the pitching/bullpen front would be for improvement commensurate with talent and ratings, which would augur well for L.A. over the second half of the season because Borborn definitely has the skills to pay the UL bills. Alternatively, if he continues to blow, then we have to consider the possibility that he's not as good in reality as his ratings suggest, or maybe he's just the latest in a long line of closers to see sustained underperformance before bouncing back in subsequent seasons to dominate (Don Gross and Ray Lamb come immediately to mind, because I endured the same thing with them myself. Even the great Hoyt Wilhelm had a nightmare season. Seems to happen way more with closers, likely because of the small number of innings they throw--no chance to even it out).

But much of the discussion about the team correctly focuses on the offense, which stands in the bottom half of the league in every metric except for home runs (5th) and walks (1st). How can the team of Henderson and Singleton and Thomasson and Santo and Winfield  and Roberts put up these sorts of stats? Let's go back to the basics. When putting together your lineup, you want league-average dudes at their position at worst, and as many above-average dudes as you can get your hands on. Now, maybe you disagree, but at least it gives us a framework to evaluate LA's offense: at catcher, D.W. Roberts is dead in the middle of the pack in OPS terms (sweet player no doubt, but catcher is very deep, imo); at 1b, you got three guys at .725 OPS, then you gotta drop down another 150 points to find Superjew. Somebody said Rose had the lowest OPS in the league at .550, which is horrible, but at second base, it's only like 100 points below average. Superjew has a .575 OPS *at a pure mashing position* and so is probably at least 225 points below average for his position. I am certain there is no other player in the league underperforming as badly. At second base, Schilling is below average in OPS terms, while Santo and Speier at third and short, respectively, are right in line for their positions. Singleton in left field is a sweet player, but because he plays at such a mashing position, his .800 OPS is actually slightly below average. Only Thomasson in center and Henderson in right put up OPS in excess of averages for their positions. So looked at in this way, is it that surprising that L.A. is in the bottom half in most offensive categories? Only two guys are outperforming their positional competition, and the rest of the guys are average at best or below (way, way below in Superjew's case).

The question is, why? It's hard to know without being able to look inside the black box and figure out all the variables and levers the game is pulling, but my guess is that the Earl Weaver-style offense is less effective in the current game and pitching-dominated era than in prior years. '50s/golden-era baseball leagues are all about hitting dongs and suppressing dongs. But when you get into the pitching dominated '70s, it's seems to me that more and more pitchers have high movement. Every year, more of those dudes come into the league, such that 4/8/8 seems standard these days. Sure, there are guys in the draft with 7 movement (or even lower) but those guys generally don't make it to the bigs, or don't fare as well (of course there are some exceptions). Instead, in a 4/8/8 world the only real vulnerability is stuff, or hits allowed. But the Earl Weaver system isn't really well suited to exploit this weakness. The typical offensive dude on L.A. (or on my teams) is 6/8/8 or some similar combination where contact is typically your worst trait. So totally speculating here, but my best guess as of now is that L.A.'s mix of attributes isn't exactly right for the given pitching climate. 6/8/8 matches exactly the average pitcher's 4/8/8 strengths, and doesn't really exploit their weaknesses. The Bandits have three guys with 8 contact rating (Winfield was just called up), four guys with a 6 contact rating (Ivie was just called up), and every other position player is at 5 or less. My sense is that this goes a long way toward explaining why the team has the worst average in the circuit, which weighs on every other offensive stat, so that even though you got a ton of walks and dongs, you still end up with poor OPS and runs scored.

Long article, likely raises more questions than it answers, and potentially says that L.A. offense has a big handicap. All that said, I *still* like the outlaws to win it because dominant starters and a super-talented closer is too strong a combination to overlook on the pitching side, and because the problems on offense are actually fairly easy to fix (first base being the easiest position to repair by far). Or maybe said differently, the starting pitching is so good, you only need modest offensive improvement to make big gains in terms of wins, *assuming* the closer does his job. Good times.