An interesting question is whether the contrasting fates of baseball franchises reflect luck, smarts at selecting, smarts at coaching, or cheating?
Consider the late July trade deadline acquisitions by the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Angels of two Chicago White Sox starting pitchers: Lance Lynn and Lucas Giolito.
The Dodgers are on their way to their 11th consecutive divisional title and probably their 7th straight season with a winning percentage over .600.
In contrast, the Angels, despite having the best player of the 2010s in Mike Trout and the best player of the 2020s in Shohei Ohtani, haven’t made the playoffs since 2014. This will likely be their sixth straight year below .500.
When Trout suffered a broken bone in July, the Angels were expected to throw in the towel and trade Ohtani, who will become a free agent this winter, to a pennant contender in return for up-and-coming prospects.
But a brief hot streak persuaded the Angels ownership/management to courageously/foolishly instead trade their own prospects for veterans to make a playoff run. In response, in a doubleheader, Ohtani threw the first complete game of his career, a 111-pitch shutout, and then in the second game hit two home runs: a unique doubleheader in the history of baseball. (Although in a single game in 1971, Rick Wise pitched a no-hitter and hit two home runs.)
The Angels acquired White Sox starter Lucas Giolito, a 28-year-old making $10 million per year, while the Dodgers acquired White Sox starter Lance Lynn, a 36-year-old making $18 million per year. Giolito had a 6-6 record with a respectable 3.79 earned run average for the Sox in 2023, while Lynn had a 6-9 record with a woeful 6.47 ERA. While you wouldn’t call Giolito, who is listed at 6’6″ and 230 pounds, svelte, Lynn has looked downright fat this season:
This is an absolutely hilariously awful opinion from Lance Lynn.
— Sam Blum (@SamBlum3) June 30, 2023
Like, dude, what are you talking about?
Here's the bunt from Velazquez: https://t.co/5FjgfpN3w8 pic.twitter.com/VXhSfQdyAL
Since then, however, with the Dodgers, Lynn is 4-0 with a 2.03 ERA, while Giolito with the Angels is 1-5 with a 6.89 ERA.
In August, the Dodgers are 23-4 and the Angels are 7-18. Ohtani tore his UCL and will need a second Tommy John surgery if he is ever to pitch again. The human body, even Shohei Ohtani’s, probably isn’t cut out to throw 100 miles per hour. (Remarkably, he has stayed in the lineup as the designated hitter and continues to slug with power.)
Yesterday, the despairing Angels announced they were putting Giolito and several other players on waivers (i.e., giving them away to anybody else who wants to pay their salary) in order to cut their payroll.
Were the Dodgers just lucky to get Lynn rather than Giolito? Perhaps.
On the other hand, they no doubt were well aware that during the first four months of the season with the White Sox, Lynn and Giolito had actually pitched about exactly the same according to advanced metrics, but Lynn had been unlucky while Giolito had been lucky in terms of where their equal numbers of hard-hit pitches had wound up:
Choose Your Bearded Pitcher: Lucas Giolito or Lance Lynn?
By Bobby Mueller Posted on August 1, 2023
The Dodgers have a stadium that holds about 53,000, which they usually come close to filling, and a hardball TV contract. They lead the New York Yankees for highest revenue.
Still, if Lance and Lucas had really been pitching the same with the White Sox, why has Lance been so much better with the Dodgers than Lucas with the Angels?
Since about 2017, the Dodgers have not just been rich but smart. It’s been not uncommon for the Dodgers to pick up obscure players like Justin Turner, Max Muncy, and Chris Taylor and see them blossom at advanced ages.
For example, when Lynn arrived, they had him throw more fastballs and curves and fewer cutters and sinkers.
Warren Buffett’s Ben Graham–style investing strategy was to invest in companies that had inherent advantages but were poorly managed on the grounds that eventually somebody would get in charge who knew what he was doing. The best baseball franchises, however, appear to be targeting players in whom they’ve identified fixable flaws.
In pitcher Jim Bouton’s 1969 baseball diary Ball Four, he’s especially scornful of baseball coaches, who got hired because they were the manager’s buddies. The most successful franchises these days appear to hire as coaches a high percentage of oddball geniuses who are extremely good at diagnosing flaws and nurture cures in one specialized skill.
Finally, you can’t rule out outright cheating at why some franchises consistently do better. For example, the 2017 World Champion Houston Astros devised a simple scheme for stealing the catcher’s signs for the upcoming pitch from the bleachers and relaying them to the dugout, where a player would pound on a trashcan to signal to the hitter whether the next pitch was a fastball or off-speed.
It’s also not implausible that some of the Astros’ spectacular pitching acquisitions were not maximizing the spit rate on their pitches by failing to use stick-um on their fingers.
