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.