Jones represented one and only one good thing for the Dodgers: the acknowledgment that the team had made a mistake with Juan Pierre. But they compounded that mistake by pushing Pierre to left and reducing Kemp and Ethier's playing time; when Jones turned into a bust (and later was injured), the kids slumped, too, making for an unfortunate series of events. Frankly, the kids should be getting the AB's unless there's some compelling reason to believe they're not as good as advertised.

Colletti signs Jones and Pierre.

404. I disagree. First of all, the Yankees' success was not necessarily the result of their approach to hitting. It could just have been vastly superior talent. You wear a pitcher out by getting a lot of hits against him too.

Second, Kent made a clearer point than Jackson is making. The problem isn't (necessarily) that young guys can't wait for their pitch. The problem is that they are getting contradictory advice (take pitches vs. swing at good pitches). As Kent said, if a pitcher throws first-pitch strikes right down the middle, that might be the best pitch you'll see, and swinging early is the same thing as swinging at a good pitch to hit.

If youth (read, inexperience) matters, I'd guess it matters in two ways. First, their pitch-recognition skills are not that well developed. This seems clearest with Kemp. It doesn't matter how patient you are - if you can't tell a strike from a ball, you're in trouble. Second, maybe (this is just speculation) young guys see strikes early, whereas vets with proven success see more nibbling.

How often does A-Rod look at 2 strikes? Rarely, I bet. I bet he swings at early strikes or else starts counts 2-0.

The confusion, as I see it, is that Jackson and others (maybe even some of the coaches and players) equate "patience" with "taking pitches, whether they're hittable or not."
Sure, any kind of pitch-taking will help to wear out the opposing pitcher (pitches is pitches for him), but if those pitches are called strikes, you're not going to have a lot of success against him starting every count 0-2.

re: the topic of working the pitch count, I think Torre's philosophy in general is the right one, but it's not a problem of age vs. youth as far as how it works or doesn't, it's more that it should be adaptable for certain players. There are two players who I don't think should have to abide by that approach; one of them, Kent, never has, and has had a pretty good career, the other, Kemp, is much better when he is allowed to hit the first pitch if it's what he's looking for. We've seen how much more erratic he looks when he's taking pitches. Other players may get resentful, "Why don't they have to do it, tooooo?" (whine) but I think it should be adaptable. Kemp needs to scrap it basically.

.246/.301 /.268 /.569 Pierre with bases empty

Joe talks roles and situations all the time. If there is anything these two should be leauge avg at is in the main roles they are suppossed to be providing to the team

So when Joe and Ned talk about the kids, although they may be right it holds no weight with me. It's all PR. It should be about the whole team

I am not sure that I understand how having our centerfield OPSing .540 for the first two months of the season did not bring the team down, are you saying that by have a decent hitting centerfield over that time that our record would not have been better? If that is indeed what you are suggesting then I strongly disagree.

2

So they acknowledged that they made a mistake with Pierre (in centerfield) and instead decided to make a bigger mistake with Pierre in leftfield. This does seem to represent anything good to me.

"My patience has to be as patient as I need to be."

The Dodgers seem no different. While no one has been a world-beater, the results are clear, Loney is out-performing Kent and Pierre in all offensive categories except SBs, while Kemp and Ethier are in most all categories. Yet Pierre and Kent are praised for their "approach," while Sweeney continues to pinch hit because, according to Torre, he keeps himself in shape and has a nice swing. I certainly don't blame the vets alone for the season, it truly has been a team effort. And I like working counts; the basic theory is correct. But thirty years after working that construction job, I still think results to count more for than how something looks.

"Tender is the Shoulder" - F Scott Fitzgerald

"The Catcher is the Guy" - Salinger and
"The Golden God" - Henry James, tied

"An American Tragedy" - Dreiser

"A Portrait of the Lineup as Young Men" - Joyce

"Lord of the Fly Outs" - Golding

"Something Wacky This Way Comes" - Bradbury

"Sometimes a Great Notion..." - Kesey

"In Search of Lost Time" - Proust

"One Hundred Games of Solitude" - Marquez

"The Black and the Blue" - Stendahl

"Bleak House" - Dickens

"Les Miserables" - Hugo

Picking up Berroa displays the weakness of Ned's in-season adjustment to problems. We replaced the worse SS in baseball with the worse SS in baseball.

The Odgen Raptors are 0-8.

What do you mean?

Moving on, I really enjoyed Slimers' piece on NedCo's wheeling and dealing. Hopefully the heat continues to be turned up.

"Most fans probably have you pegged as a GM who hasn't done a very good job of bringing in talent," I suggest, and he disagrees.
"I don't know if that's fact or fiction," he says. "That's your opinion."

http://tinyurl.com/5flyku

One can only hope that the front office recognizes that this happens any time you execute an idea and that it's not always the result of a bad idea.

Who was it that said a battle plan never survives the first engagement?

I also wonder if there was a little bit too much hope that this team was set to break through, especially after watching what the Rockies and Snakes did last year. And if some thought those two teams would regress rather than improve.

I'm ok with Vasgersian, but Karros is grating, a very unpleasant and inharmonious presence. I could do without his combative voice bouncing around my living room on otherwise peaceful Sunday afternoons. No matter how trivial the subject that comes up, he feels the need to take either a hard-pro or hard-con stance on it. Take a pill dude.

His partner will make a light, go-with-the-flow type comment, and this Karros pyranha gets all Judge Judy on him.

Maybe I'm biased, as he's one of these conversational type-A's that I can't bleeding stand.

Plus he shares with John Madden the maddening habit of starting sentences with the wholy unnecessary phrase, "as I was saying earlier." Just talk man. We know you're going to touch on themes you mentioned before, it's called conversation.

He does offer more strategy talk than your average announcer though, which is good.

"[Torre's] had the right philosophy of trying to get his hitters to force a lot of pitches - yet continues to blame the kids publicly for not implementing the approach,..."

I have seen some comments recently where Torre indicates that he still needs to figure out how to present his message, but it would sure go a long way (with me at least) if he would step up and publicly take some blame for the current W-L record. It can be couched speculatively and doesn't even have to be completely true, but doesn't a good manager try to take pressure off those he manages in attempt to allow them to perform? How about, "these young players have had to deal with two different major-league coaching staffs in two or three seasons and the transition cost probably doesn't help in their development process, yada, yada, yada"?

Or take a look at a Colletti quote from the Simers column that Jon linked:

" "Some of those are minor league deals and I had nothing to do with them," Colletti protests when I mention his trading track record, and while I find it odd the Dodgers' GM doesn't have final approval of all deals, he adds, "The player development people made five or six of those." "

Again, I would like to see Ned and the front office publicly accept responsibility and stop deflecting. Isn't Colletti better off simply replying with something like "our front office (whether it was him directly or his staff) is responsible for all the player transactions, some work, some don't, and we'll take the credit and blame accordingly. We try to learn from the ones that don't work, but the most important thing is to field the best team we can, etc. etc." (BTW, is this more fuel for the front office factions fire?)

How about the veterans stepping up and acknowledging their own underperformance? Has Jeff Kent been quoted saying that he realizes he's been slumping and that that can place additional burdens on the offense, but that he is continually working hard to perform? Wouldn't that be leadership? Or is he only quoted on how the kids are still learning to hit and approach batting?

OK, sorry if that comes off whiny or if I'm totally off-base, but I sure feel like there's a lot of finger-pointing with the Dodgers these days and less taking responsibility.

The PR Machine™ is in full spin mode.

http://mikesciosciastragicillness.com/2008/06/25/prizefight-simers-vs-colletti/

Easy enough to check on B-Ref:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/bsplit.cgi?n1=rodrial01&year=2008

119 plate appearances in which he gets to a two-strike count, nearly half of his 244 plate appearances for the season. Over his career, that's 4,237 of 8,726, roughly in line with his career numbers.

Jones was not just bad, he was real bad. His back foot sliding back with every swing and most swings missing the ball by a foot. Yet, Jones was in the lineup while the younger players were hearing all this stuff about patience and having a plan and situational hitting.

Anybody that has ever played or coached a team knows that one great player can make all the other players better and one player that is really bad but continues to get prime playing time, makes the team worse. And the more the latter happens, the worse the team gets.

Still has some of that Simers' smugness that bugs me, but it's a very useful column. I mean, Colletti did make one good point in his own defense, that he's made a few good moves (clearly not enough) and hindsight is easier and yadda yadda, but he does come off as defensive and wrong-headed.

I wouldn't buy that as a rule in general - but the Jones example in particular argues against it. The Dodgers won 12 of his last 15 starts in center. The worse it got with Jones, the better the team performed. And it's a pretty huge stretch to say that it's Jones' fault the team wasn't winning when he wasn't playing.

Good players make a team better because they're good players, not because they're gnomes that the rest of the team can rub metaphorically.

Getting back to the patience dicussion around the Dodgers young players:

It doesnt surprise me that these guys dont have the best patience yet (excluding Martin--he's excellent)--> because the Dodgers have really emphasized making contact (not striking out), over patience and power at the minor league level. I think this had changed temporarily when DePo took over (judging by the players he drafted/acquired), but now its back to the way it always has been. The Dodgers just dont emphasize plate discipline at the minor leagues---probably resulting in players being afraid to strike out so they swing early in the count.

Loney, DeWitt, Kemp, Abreu, Hu---> never been guys that drew many walks--> but still were promoted.

Ruggiano, Denker, DeJesus, Martin, LaRoche---> How much did the Dodgers really value 4 of these 5? They like Martin---> but did White like the others?

19 - I guess I don't care about winning right now so much as I do seeing the kids get at-bats and figuring things out. I expect rough patches, as the Dodgers are going through right now.

Chuck Jones, in his wonderful autobiography Chuck Amuck, tells the story of how his drawing instructor at Chouinard (now CalArts) told his class that they all had 100,000 bad drawings in them, and it was in his pupils' best interests to get them out of their systems as soon as possible. Jones said he figured that was a good thing, because he had already produced something like 30,000 bad drawings. The same sort of thing applies to young players. It's frustrating to see the Dodgers lose, but I'd rather seem them do that and learn instead of pretending by getting veterans of dubious utility who thereby slow down this process.

I believe that those early deals involving young talent certainly came from recommedations made by his staff not from Ned drawing names from a hat as he certainly did not see much or any of their games.

Now, ultimately it is his job so I don't think he should phrase it that way but I am absolutely sure that Ng, Terry Collins, and Logan White all had say sos in those deals involving Jackson, Navarro and the like.

How has one player adapted to Jones being gone, well here are two stat lines, each representing over 100 PA:

.276/.327/.410/.737
.311 .336/.509/.845

The first line represents Matt Kemp's stats as a CF, the second as a RF. Now some of those CF stats are from games when Jones was still on the team but I am just put them out there.

Looks to me like he somehow hit a few more homers while playing RF than CF.

Does it really state anything?

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/bsplit.cgi?n1=rodrial01&year=2008

119 plate appearances in which he gets to a two-strike count, nearly half of his 244 plate appearances for the season. Over his career, that's 4,237 of 8,726, roughly in line with his career numbers.

Thanks scareduck, but that's not what I meant. That's the number of PAs in which he gets to two strikes at some point (includes 0-2, 1-2, 2-2, or 3-2). And it doesn't distinguish strikes looking and strikes swinging. My hypothesis was that it's rare for someone like A-Rod to get to an 0-2 count without swinging at either pitch. Because I'm pretty sure that 0-2 from two misses or foul balls would still strike some as "impatience" whereas 0-2 from two called strikes would be called either "patience" (if a PVL) or "poor strike zone judgment" (if younger than 26). Or bad umpiring.

That the right field battle is heating up!

"Not every bad move is a product of hindsight. Some were bad gambles from the start.
Making young players the core of the team and filling the gaps with veterans was the right idea. But the execution of that idea has had some hits, some misses and some misfortune."

While there is some blame to be put upon the front office for some of its decisions, and possible lapses in judgment when analyzing the risk/reward factor in certain players, I was excited about the team that had been put together at the beginning of the season, and thought we would be serious contenders..

while this echoes what many have already said, the unfortunate injuries have really been tough for this team, but I still hold out hope that we can win this division.

Now, whose fault is that? "Not Striking Out" is SO overrated.

Again, all I am doing is putting out the numbers, if you are going to use numbers to illustrate points you agree with than you should be able to use them to indicate that there might be something else going on.

Of course, maybe numbers don't mean anything, evaluation should be based solely on observation.

The argument that giving Jones 133 at-bats poisoned the younger players - I just can't even fathom it. Jones hurt the team because he wasn't hitting. It wasn't because other players looked at him and said, "If he can be bad, then why can't I?"

It's certainly your right to believe that, but it's not convincing.

Some of your best points, I think, are about Torre, and I wonder why he still continues to mostly get a free pass from pretty much the entire world outside of DT. Colletti is no saint, but Torre is about as average a manager as I've seen so far this year.

If Kent and Pierre have had the best approach to hitting I shudder to think how bad they would be doing if they took approaches like Loney. Evidently Joe is more interested in the approach then in the result.

I agree. This season is turning out exactly as I'd hoped. My fingers are crossed that Ned won't mess up a very good thing. I don't care if they're one game out on July 30th, don't trade for that veteran bopper, Ned, unless it's straight across for Juan Pierre.

What this whole, Zen-like take-pitches-but-swing-at-your-pitch discussion reminds me of is the Wes Parker interview on KABC about six weeks ago. In some ways he sounded like an old veteran fart, opining that the problem is, the team isn't hitting in the clutch. But asked why, he said it's because the young players don't yet know what the pitchers will do in these situations because they haven't seen them enough. That's where veteranyness is an inarguable advantage.

But it's not available to the Dodgers at a price we can afford. We don't have anybody who's really good, healthy, and in their prime right now. Kent might have superior pitch expectation and recognition skills, but he's too old now to take complete advantage of them. Furcal obviously does, but it's not doing us any good at the moment. Jones, who knows? Our only choice is to wait it out, let the young guys build up their experience a pitch at a time, and hope they stay healthy and Ned doesn't panic, so they can all peak together in a year or three.

Or as Bill Paxton once said, "Game over man."

Now I tend to take Simers with a ton of salt because he would easily lay into the players too, it just right now, Ned is a targert du jor.

My first problem is Ned's comments about how players are adjusting to the coaching staff's instruction. If Mike Easler, Larry Bowa or Joe Torre want to fill up a column with their critiques, fine, that's their jobs and the players are being paid so they should be able to take criticism public or private. But I don't think it is something for the GM to talk about since I don't believe it is his hitting philosophy or his organizational philosophy that is being taught here.

Two, between Simers' shots about the player acquisitions, I have stated positions on most of those and I won't go into them now but Ned should just stand up, tell Simers that he felt those were the moves he felt would improve the club and regardless on whose recommendations he listened to and considered when making these deals, the good, the bad and the ugly falls to him. If he does that, hey, that is all I ask for.

And three, certainly no one points out more than me, the fact that the organization has held on the majority of their prospects over the last 2 1/2 years, what I don't need to hear now is someone telling me that he is willing to live out some sort of Shakespere tragedy for the betterment of the club.

Right, but you are not stating why you think there is a descrepancy in the numbers.

Are you suggesting that Kemp hits better with Druw in the lineup, Kemp hits better playing in RF rather than CF, or is it as simple scheduling---meaning the Dodgers have faced better pitching since Druw has been out of the lineup as opposed to being in the lineup?

Furcal 34 runs in 134 AB over 32 games
Pierre 29 runs in 254 AB over 68 games

While I remain nuetral on whether Jones hurt the team more than he helped the team, I can say without a doubt that having Furcal/Jones in there over Pierre/Berroa-Maza-Hu is the significant impact of the slumping Dodgers. And, as I mentioned earlier, Jones, for the most part, was playing while Furcal was, and that is the point to be made for what the record is when Jones has started.

Well, Furcal + Me not necessarily > than Pierre + Berroa, but maybe it is.

That was brilliant. Made my day.

How about just winning more games, so we can all relax and take a break from worrying and analyzing for awhile. Could you be dears and do that for us? Thank you so much!

sincerely,
Underdog

Ryan (LA, CA): Where on the moron sclae (1-10) would Frank McCourt rate if he lets Logan White leave to be the GM somewhere else while Ned Colletti stays on in LA?

Jim Callis: (2:02 PM ET ) That would be a disastrous decision. Still can't believe the Astros hired Ed Wade over White, reportedly because Wade's experience would allow them to contend quicker.

I'm at the airport!

74-88 as the Dodgers succumb to a wave of injuries to the pitching staff and infielders.

And Milton Bradley has yet to come close to playing a full season.

If he somehow doesn't sign, we will have the 15(a) pick in the 2009 draft.

If my prediction comes true, I'm changing my name to Cassandra.

Bob, where are you going again? The Sabr convention in Toronto?

Ethan Martin is somewhat on hold at the moment. Logan White is in the Dominican, although it could get done while he is gone.

The Dodgers are pretty hard-core when it comes the slot money, and slot money in this case is $1.73 million. They aren't going to go above it, and I think once the player and his agent advisor realize that, the deal will get done. The kid isn't going to turn down that kind of money.

More obvious examples are seen in statements like, "Chipper Jones is a special player because he is a switch hitter. Only X switch hitters have hit more homers than Chipper has," or "Curt Schilling belongs in the hall of fame. Only X righthanders have more wins than he has over the last 20 years."

I can picture the discussion when Tim Wakefield retires: "He's a hall of famer. He was the most dominant knuckleballer of his generation."

Certainly there is room to consider a hitter's approach (e.g., a coach trying to help the hitter improve) or a pitcher's handedness (figuring out the best matchup), etc, but it does not really fit when trying to figure out how well a player performed.

That's the nice thing about art, however: there's no accounting for taste.

BTW, Ratt, it was at Rolling Hills HS that I was subjected to this. Not that that matters one way or the other - just thought I'd give a shout out to your neighborhood.

Seattle, where people left angry criticisms directed at me on the Grilddle because they didn't like Sean Forman's research.

Query: Toronto. Is it a better location than Cleveland? My mother would say unequivocally yes.

Ben Sheets (MIL - P)
News: Sheets said on Tuesday that he intends to test the free agent market after this season and it would be really hard for Milwaukee to sign him to a contract before then, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

approach is a better indicator of future performance than past performance.

A guy can rely on some combination of talent and luck for only so long before the bottom falls out. Conversely, a player relying on "approach", which I understand to mean mechanics and strategy, will likely be better long term. This is especially true when the right approach is combined with a high level of talent.

The likely explanation is that Kemp's hitting with Jones is simply coincidence. It's not like it was a large enouh sample size to be valuable, anyway. I'm surprised to see you making this argument.

I was wondering if we had 9 guys all at 100 for a player average (whatever it is called); would that be a good thing?

Understood.

What are the player averages for our current players?

Not that many over 100 if I remember.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/LAD/2008.shtml

The starting rotation has worked out pretty well. Behind our 5 starters are (in order) Park, Stults, and Kuo. That's not bad.

Part of the GM's job is to plan for contingencies in case things go wrong. Lots of things have gone wrong in the infield. On the whole, Colletti craves depth - in my opinion, he's better than Depodesta was in this regard. I can't fault Colletti too much for not coming up with a good plan D on the fly. Berroa is a replacement-level stopgap until Furcal gets back. Kent should have a better backup available too, but again, as someone pointed out above, the Abreu injury really cut short some options.
I agree that Colletti needs to say that he's ultimately responsible for all the front office decisions though, regardless. To do otherwise really alienates the people you need to help you do your job.

IF the Times hired Jon and IF he were allowed to do that voodoo that he do so well and IF he were joined by, oh, I don't know... Bobby T and Robby M, THEN I would absolutely pay to have a print copy on my door, daily.

As it stands now, my best information on my favorite team is right here.

In other words, Jon... that was a damn good post.

Missing a hell of a soccer game people.

The only difference between these two regarding depth is that Colletti had the advantage of taking over at the exact moment when the fruits of a bounteous farm system were about ready for the majors. Both GMs kept some AAAA players around for depth. It's just that DePo's depth guys, like Grabowski, Edwards, and Robles, actually ended up being needed for extended playing time, while Colletti's guys, like Tiffee and Lindsey have been able to cool their heels in Las Vegas while unexpected lineup holes are filled by young players like DeWitt, Ethier, and Kershaw.

Colletti's teams have been deeper than DePo's but it's solely a function of opportunity.

68 Don't get too greedy, underdog. We did have that little one-game win streak a couple days back. How soon you forget . . .

It seems obvious that some hitters with terrible approaches can do very well based on athleticism and instincts, but that these hitters will not (cough, Nomar) enjoy long-term success.

127 Tee-hee. But two lightning strikes knocked out the feed, in addition to the crazy game itself. Memorable stuff.

Ah well.

Back to work now.

Can say this about baseball and football, too. Sometimes a team was outplayed but still manages to eke out a win. But it doesn't happen frequently.

The reason I lay a lot of the blame on torre is his prefrence for vets no matter how they seem to preform and puts all the blame on the kids. Ethier completely outplayed JP in ST and started the year out hitting very well. Then for some inane reason he got pulled in favor of the weak armed Pierre. There's also the fact that, before Kent's seeming June resurgence, he was left in the 3 or 4 hole and would either SO, GIDP, FO or GO. Then too there's the Sweeny black hole that continues to plauge the ph role.

I do agree that patience is a good thing but at the same time if you get a pitch early in the count that's hittable you should hit it rather than let it go by if that's the 'approach' that Easler and/or Bowa are pushing its idiotic. Especialy when you consider that last year the kids weren't hitting well until Bill Mueller (sp?) took over as hitting coach then everything seemed to click and they took off. So either bring Mueller back at least part time and see if he can't get them back to where they were last year if he does show Easler the door.

One thing about the Simers column is that it aptly illustrates the two main problems with the Colletti-era Dodgers.

1. They refuse to acknowledge -- and often refuse to repair -- even the most obvious mistakes.

"You're looking in hindsight, so your vision is perfect," says Colletti, who apparently works with blinders on, the only logical explanation for some of these deals. "Who has come back to haunt us?"

A better question, I said, "is who did you acquire who really improved the team?"

"Ethier helped us," he says. "Maddux helped us, Lugo gave us some support, Anderson certainly helped us in September of '06, and Hendrickson pitched. You do have to have players who pitch and play in the games."
- - - - -

First of all, when you're asked what good deals you've made and the third one that comes to mind is Julio Lugo, that's bad. What's worse is that Colletti insists that the trade helped the team. This is a guy who was allowed to bat 164 times and posted a 41 OPS+. This is a guy whose acquisition was an unmitigated disaster.

This is a guy who was almost completely redundant in terms of the Dodgers' needs: He started two games at his natural position of shortstop, 13 at his secondary position of second base, and every other game he played was at a position where he was in over his head offense-wise (3B, LF, RF).

Even allowing for the fact that Colletti was being harassed by a buffoon of a columnist, the fact that he could make such a quote is pretty damning of his qualifications to be a general manager. It indicates that either (1) He is clueless beyond the pale where player evaluation is concerned, or (2) He resolutely refuses to acknowledge even the most egregious and obvious mistakes.

You could say that he's trying to avoid becoming a Ricciardi, trying to avoid running down a player in public. But he's the one who brought up the subject of Lugo. He could have simply said nothing. He has no reason to want to placate Lugo. This is not a player who's under contract to the Dodgers, or who conceivably could be in the future. This is a guy who is in the process of playing his way out of the majors, and whose defining moment in the major leagues was the time he smashed his wife's head into the hood of her car. The point is, there's no reason for Colletti to avoid the truth just to spare Lugo's feelings.

One could reasonably argue that the Lugo trade benefited the Dodgers not because of Lugo himself, but because of the draft picks they reaped when he departed. I myself would make this argument, actually. But Colletti specifically avoids this interpretation, and given the indifference he's shown toward the draft with both the Dodgers and Giants, it's not plausible that Withrow and Adkins were the reasons he made the trade, or the reasons he thinks it's successful.

On to the next problem raised by the Simers column....

2. The Dodgers' player evaluation is so incompetent that they have shown a near-complete inability to distinguish the players who help them win from those who don't.

If you give the Dodgers a choice between two baseball players, a good one and a bad one, there's at least a 50/50 chance they'll pick the bad one.

Moreover, the things management says publicly are often provably false, even comically false. The main failing of the Dodgers' beat writers, who I think generally do a good job, is their complete refusal to question the hokum the Dodgers spew forth. Even when the Dodgers say something about player performance that's provably false, the writers will unquestioningly regurgitate it as fact. Perhaps this is because they are in awe of Torre, or afraid of incurring his wrath. But then again, it was the same way under Grady Little.

"Torre says he likes the approach Juan Pierre and Jeff Kent take, and Russell Martin does well at times, but the rest of the Dodgers' lineup is too impatient and swings at too many bad pitches."

Perhaps Torre is engaging in motivational psychology here that's specifically directed toward Matt Kemp, in which case you can ignore the following. But if we take the statement at face value, it's hard to believe a person who's been around baseball for 50 years could actually believe it's true. Perhaps it's simply a case of being too close to the situation -- not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Here are the players on the current roster, ranked by pitches per plate appearance (50 or more ABs):

1. Andre Ethier
2. Russell Martin
3. Delwyn Young
4. James Loney
5. Blake DeWitt
6. Mark Sweeney
7. Juan Pierre
8. Matt Kemp
9. Jeff Kent

So the five most disciplined hitters on the team are young players. Moreover, the guys whose approach Torre goes out of his way to praise are two of the worst three hitters on the team in terms of plate discipline. Torre's comment, with all due respect to his experience, is completely, laughably false. It shows either (a) a complete disregard for whether the things he says are actually true, or (b) a fundamental inability to analyze the game of baseball. Neither option reflects well on him.

This inability to accurately evaluate players is the main thing that's plagued the Dodgers under Torre. I'm not saying this would be a great team if Torre had deployed his players in a manner that made sense. But it would be somewhat better, and I think it's reasonable of fans to expect the team to field the best lineup at its disposal.

Instead, Torre seems to have picked his favorites and not wavered from those favorites, even when the player is a washed-up relic hitting .100.

We're less than halfway through the season, but Torre and Colletti have already, at various points during the year, made the following misallocations of playing time:

Sweeney over Young
Proctor over Kuo
Proctor over Wade
Loaiza over Kuo
Pierre over Kemp
Pierre over Ethier
Pierre over Young
Bennett over LaRoche
Maza over Hu
Maza over Young/DeWitt
Tiffee over LaRoche
Garciaparra over LaRoche
Garciaparra over DeWitt

It's hard to win when you don't know who your best players are.

The key is to find someone high on the "right approach" metric as well as high on the "talent" metric. I picture these as two sort of bell curves that intersect at some point, being the ideal and many points near it being acceptable.

Do you think anyone even approaches Ned or Joe after saying something totally off mark like that? I mean do you think they ever find out when they say something completely off base?

Send it special delivery to Mr. McCourt, as all of the others would probably try to hide it from him, if they bothered to take the time to read it!

:)

Pretty scummy.

There'd be a few people wanting to call up John Lindsay, a few Tiffee Marchers and Chowderers, and me, calling for Jason Repko. Or we could work a trade for a guy somewhere.

i guess i'm a little geeked after watching national treasure 2 a couple nights ago lol

I had such a crush on Ally Sheedy when that movie came out. Her and Jennifer Jason Leigh. I guess I like the cute and slightly crazy actresses.

Dibs on JJL, though.

Caution: Not your typical DT content.