[THIS POSTING ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON ESPN HERE ON 4/30/11; excluding the picture here]

This past weekend, I visited baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. This was not my first time there, but it was my first trip with my two sons, now ages 11 and 8. I was curious to see the Hall in a different way, through the eyes of my children.

I left thinking about the official name of the building – the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. I left realizing that the official name of the building – the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum – has a very big word in the middle of it that most people seem to ignore: “and“. Mostly I write about the building from a distance, and when I do, I focus on the first part of the building’s name, about who should be admitted into the Hall and who should not. But when I am present inside of the building, the museum part of the building takes over. I certainly enjoy the plaques but for me, the real interest lies in reliving the moments that first drew me to the game and then those that have kept me wrapped in its clutches since.

I paused at the museum’s display of the hate mail (see picture to the right; click to enlarge) directed at Jackie Robinson and was left slackjawed. The violence expressed in these letters is a part of our history, a tragic part, but a part that needs to be remembered. These were not proud moments for America or for baseball. However, we need to see and remember the good and the bad.

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The first part of my Hall of Fame pictures series featured the scouting reports from two all time greats, before we knew them. The second part was some of the Yankees stuff.  This part, part three, will highlight some of the best players of the 1970′s/’80′s. Leading off, the great Rollie Fingers (as with all of these, click to enlarge to full size):

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Brien asked an important question Thursday: What did the Yankees get for Jeter’s contract? This is a complicated subject, but I have a very simple answer: ground balls. Lots. Of. Ground balls. Since 2005, Derek Jeter is second in the majors in ground ball percentage among all players with at least 2,000 plate appearances.

Simply put, ground balls are bad for offense. This is the entire theory behind being a ground ball pitcher. As common sense tells us, if the ball is on the ground, it can’t go out of the park. More modern sabermetric sense confirms this traditional wisdom. The concept of xFIP – a metric that judges pitchers only on strikeouts, walks, and flyball percentage – implicitly includes the notion that ground balls are good for pitchers and bad for hitters. This is because ground ball percentage is inversely proportional to flyball percentage, a major component of xFIP. However, ground balls aren’t all bad news for offense; they actually have a much higher batting average on balls in play than flyballs. This helps players who hit lots of grounders to have higher BABIP’s than those who don’t. Perennial batting title contenders like Ichiro! and Joe Mauer have traditionally hit lots of grounders. Problems arise when a player starts hitting ground balls in situations where they used to hit linedrives. This seems to be exactly what is occurring with Jeter; his 2010 and 2011 seasons have brought career highs in ground ball percentage and career lows in linedrive percentage.

In this post I will assess the potential causes for this ground ball spike.

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Last night, I shared two of my favorite pictures from my HOF trip.  Tonite, some more, but Yankees-centric…

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After a couple nights of low-scoring games, the Yankees’ offense finally broke through Thursday night, in a game that had its fair share of strange plays and big hits.  At the end of the night, the Yankees took a commanding 12-3 victory and managed to split the series against the White Sox after dropping the first two games.

The game did not start well for the Yankees, as Eduardo Nunez bobbled a routine grounder by Brent Lillibridge. Alexei Ramirez lined a single to left, moving to second as Brett Gardner tried to throw out Lillibridge at third, and the White Sox had two on and no outs to start the game.  A grounder to third Carlos Quentin resulted in Alex Rodriguez getting the runner at the plate for the first out of the game, and CC Sabathia battled back and got the next two hitters to fly out, ending the inning without allowing a run.

The Yankees got on the board in the bottom of the third.  Gardner worked a one out walk and moved to second on a wild pitch.  Nunez walked and they pulled off a double steal. Curtis Granderson followed with another walk and the Yankees had the bases loaded.  Nick Swisher walked, for Edwin Jackson’s fourth straight walk and the Yankees first run of the game.  A sac fly by Robinson Cano pushed Nunez across the plate and New York had a 2-0 lead after three, despite still not having a hit.

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There’s two things I hope the Steinbrenner brothers learned this off-season. First, Brian Cashman knows a lot more about baseball than Randy Levine does. Secondly, professional sports is a business, and sometimes it can be a very cold, hard, business. Introducing sentimentality into your decision making process for no reason is a recipe for disaster, and that’s why they jobbed themselves by giving Derek Jeter $51 million over the next three years with a player option for a fourth.

Without dredging up too many details from the contentious negotiations, suffice it to say that the Yankees agreed to pay Jeter a much larger amount of money than they had to. They were always going to give him some kind of “legend premium,” but they ultimately went well above that considering the total lack of any competition in the marketplace for Jeter’s services.

Not that I want to get into yet another argument about how much Jeter “deserved” to be paid, but here’s my question; what exactly did the Yankees get in return for overpaying Jeter by such a large amount? Jeter obviously wasn’t happy about the deal, and didn’t hide that fact whatsoever. Heck, he wouldn’t even thank them by going to Orlando to do a press conference during the Winter Meetings, instead demanding everyone come to him in Tampa (insert “imagine if A-Rod did that” meme here). It sure didn’t save them any drama during the negotiations. As far as I can see, the only thing they got is an overcommitment they didn’t have to make to an aging icon who simply isn’t playing very well these days.

This isn’t a statement on Jeter or his career by any means. He’s a Hall of Famer and certainly had every right to try to get as much money as he could. But he also had basically no leverage whatsoever in the negotiations. Hopefully they’ve learned their lesson about giving big contracts based primarily on sentiment or intangibles.

The Yankees have a choice to make this weekend. Kevin Millwood is eligible to opt-out of his minor league contract on May 1 if he isn’t called up to the big leagues, meaning that the Yankees may have to call him up before Sunday or risk losing him to free agency. Earlier in the week is almost seemed like a given he would get a chance to replace Ivan Nova in the rotation if only to see what he could do, but Nova may have saved himself with a fine outing Monday night.

For my part, I’m not particularly interested in having anything to do with Millwood.

Millwood has only made two minor league starts so far, so we don’t have a lot to go on, but the results so far are less than encouraging, to put it mildly. Yes, the fact that Millwood has allowed just two runs and eight hits in 14 innings through those two starts is encouraging on the face of it, but he’s also walked five of the 53 batters he’s faced while striking out just six. That’s a K/9 of 3.90 and a K/BB of 1.20 if you’re keeping score at home. For a long-time major leaguer facing minor league prospects in April, that’s not an encouraging sign. Add in scouting reports saying that his fastball is sitting at around 85 MPH, and I simply don’t have any faith in Millwood’s ability to get outs at the big league level.

When Bartolo Colon was signed this offseason, he wasn’t expected to be, well, anything. Luminaries such as Sergio Mitre and Mark Prior seemed to be above him on the depth chart. Clearly, he’s been much more than the Yankees could have hoped for, 2-1 thus far, with 26 strikeouts in 26 innings against only 6 walks and 2 HR.

But we’ve been through this before. It’s not uncommon in small samples to see pitchers outperform their expectations– it is uncommon for their fan bases to temper expectations. Just as you’ll find written at the bottom of any mutual fund track record, past performance is not indicative of future results. And so when I see outsized (heh) returns from a pitcher expected to be crappy, I start digging. For once, this has led to good news.

Bartolo Colon’s results this year are, for the most part, legit and repeatable. First off, he’s not benefiting from a ridiculously low batting average on balls in play–his mark of .300 is right around league average, and is actually 8 points above his career average. He is benefiting from a bit of luck on timing of hits–his LOB% is a bit too high at 77% (league average is 72%, and his career is average is 73%). That essentially means that he’s giving up hits when there aren’t men on base, or the hits he’s giving up aren’t allowing runners to score at the rate they typically do, either against him, or against the broader MLB. He’s allowed 30 baserunners so far this season–this means that by his historical rate he’d have allowed either one or two more batters to score. He’s also benefiting from a  low HR/FB rate (8%)–that is probably unsustainable, especially pitching in Yankee Stadium. But it’s not out of the question low. The reversion upwards will occur, but it won’t be severe.

And this is all backed up by his ERA/FIP/xFIP line. To clarify, FIP is a fielding independent form of ERA, and xFIP is the same fielding independent version of ERA adjusted for his expected HR/FB rate. While it’s not the only indicator, it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to check for unsustainable performance–if the numbers are off by a wide (heh) margin, then the results are probably not repeatable. Bartolo Colon’s line this year? 2.77/2.84/2.97. That’s as close to spot on as you’ll find.

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The Yankees got some mildly encouraging news on the Phil Hughes front yesterday:

Here’s Joe Girardi explaining the Phil Hughes situation.

“One of the tests they did with Phil showed — and we’re not saying he has it and we’re not saying he doesn’t — a real low-level risk of thoracic outlet syndrome, which is basically a circulatory problem… We’re sending him to a specialist in St. Louis to either rule it out or rule that he does have it.”

According to WebMD, TOS “is a condition presenting with arm complaints of pain, numbness, tingling and weakness. The cause is pressure in the neck against the nerves and blood vessels that go to the arm.” So that certainly sounds like something that could be afflicting Hughes this season.

And when I say this is encouraging, obviously I don’t mean it’s a good thing Hughes may have TOS. But it’s obviously better to know what’s wrong with him, or at least have an idea, than not, and any issue that doesn’t involve a structural issue with Hughes’ arm would be a welcome development for everyone, I would think (assuming he doesn’t have a life-threatening problem or something, of course).

As for treatment, The Mayo Clinic says the most common treatment for TOS is rehab, but that surgery may also be necessary.

In my article last week, I discussed the fallacies that exist behind the concept of pitching to contact.  A couple of days later, IIATMS newcomer, the Sporting Hippeaux, used swing rates to explain why pitchers like Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee were able to not only survive, but also excel despite their average to below average contact rates.  While it’s an incredibly compelling argument, I couldn’t help but wonder if the two pitchers he chose were merely outliers rather than the norm.  Surely, his hypothesis makes logical sense, but frequently what seems logical isn’t always logical in practice.  As a result, I decided to dig a little deeper.

Just to get us started, I’m first going to take a look at the top and bottom ten pitchers in Swing %.  In order to keep things consistent, I’ll use the same sample covering the 2006 to 2010 seasons, using only pitchers that pitched at least 700 innings.  Also, I’ll use the chart the same stats as before, but instead of tracking xFIP, I’ll instead track fWAR.*

* A hat tip to the Sporting Hippeaux for pointing out my glaring omission last week.  Somewhere @SI_JonHymen is smiling at my use of the phrase “hat tip.”

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The Yankees found themselves with their first losing streak of the season, but were able to cut it short on Wednesday.  A big homerun in the first inning combined with another stellar outing by Bartolo Colon gave the Yankees a 3-1 victory over the White Sox and a chance to split the series on Thursday.

Colon came out firing in the first inning, striking out Juan Pierre to start things off.  A two out double by Carlos Quentin did little, as Colon came back and struck out Paul Konerko looking.  The pitch, which crossed the plate just about Kornerko’s knees was a nice 92 mph fastball, but Ozzie Guillen disagreed, coming out of the dugout and furiously arguing with the umpire before being tossed and made to spend the game tweeting from the clubhouse.

Derek Jeter led off the bottom of the first by working a walk off White Sox hurler, Mark Buehrle. Nick Swisher and Mark Teixeira each struck out, but Alex Rodriguez knocked a single to right and there were runners on first and third for Robinson Cano.  The Yankees’ second baseman drove a fastball over the wall in right and the Yankees held an early 3-0 lead.

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Over the next few days, I’ll pepper the site with a few of my favorite pictures from my Hall of Fame visit this past weekend. Two of my favorites are first.

These two were not part of an exhibit; they were giant blown-up versions of what were probably index card sized documents. They floored me although most people ran by them as they were in a corridor between other exhibits.

“Not interested in pro ball until he graduates“. How often do you hear that these days?

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There’s an interesting paradox to losses like the Yankees have suffered the past two games. In some ways, they’re the most meaningless losses of all. A good offense suddenly can’t score runs, has some bad BABIP luck, and gets victimized by unbelievably good defense at crucial moments. Those games are going to happen over the course of 162 games, we all know it, and we’ve all been through it before. In some ways you just shake it off and wait for the next day.

But in other ways those are the losses that hurt the most, because it just doesn’t feel like a loss. The Yankees put the winning run on base in the 9th after Derek Jeter got a hit and Ivan Nova pitched a very good game into the 7th inning. Alex Rodriguez and Robinson Cano both smoked line drives that should have tied/won the game, if not for two of the most unbelievable catches you’ll likely see all season long coming on back-to-back plays.

I don’t have anything profound to say about the meaning of it all or anything, I just find the tension between the two facts amusing. Baseball is indeed a cruel mistress, and yet we keep coming back.