Wednesday, October 06, 2004
News Of The Day - 10/6/04
Trammell will stay through '06 season - Detroit News 10/6
While I'm not wild about Tram's tendency to play National League ball -- he was 3rd in the AL calling for sac hits, with 50, for instance -- I think Tram made really good strides this year. The team was more patient at the plate (518 BB 6th/AL vs. 2003's 443 BB 12th/AL), and there was noticeable improvement on the mound in striking out hitters (995 vs. 764), doing a better job to keep the ball out of play, and cutting down on the free passes (530 vs. 557).
One thing I noticed about Tram is that he's good at maximizing his team's hitting strengths and minimizing the weaknesses -- that is, he did a good job giving more plate appearances to his top producers. Doing a quick table using BP's VORPr as the metric for comparison, Trammell gave 77.6% of his non-pitcher plate appearances to his top 10 VORPr players -- in other words, his best producers on a PA-by-PA basis. This was good for 8th among MLB teams in 2004. While this ad hoc ranking does not correlate greatly to overall ranking in runs scored -- VORPr ranking is relative among a team's members and not among the league in general, and some teams naturally have more good run producers than others -- it does show that Trammell was not bent on throwing away plate appearances on healthy offensive sinkholes like Eric Munson, like so many managers do (think Art Howe and Tony Pena).
(It also didn't hurt that two poor contributors, Alex Sanchez and Fernando Vina, collected most of their paychecks propped on the couch taking painkillers.)
While I'm not wild about Tram's tendency to play National League ball -- he was 3rd in the AL calling for sac hits, with 50, for instance -- I think Tram made really good strides this year. The team was more patient at the plate (518 BB 6th/AL vs. 2003's 443 BB 12th/AL), and there was noticeable improvement on the mound in striking out hitters (995 vs. 764), doing a better job to keep the ball out of play, and cutting down on the free passes (530 vs. 557).
One thing I noticed about Tram is that he's good at maximizing his team's hitting strengths and minimizing the weaknesses -- that is, he did a good job giving more plate appearances to his top producers. Doing a quick table using BP's VORPr as the metric for comparison, Trammell gave 77.6% of his non-pitcher plate appearances to his top 10 VORPr players -- in other words, his best producers on a PA-by-PA basis. This was good for 8th among MLB teams in 2004. While this ad hoc ranking does not correlate greatly to overall ranking in runs scored -- VORPr ranking is relative among a team's members and not among the league in general, and some teams naturally have more good run producers than others -- it does show that Trammell was not bent on throwing away plate appearances on healthy offensive sinkholes like Eric Munson, like so many managers do (think Art Howe and Tony Pena).
(It also didn't hurt that two poor contributors, Alex Sanchez and Fernando Vina, collected most of their paychecks propped on the couch taking painkillers.)
