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hsews · 6 years

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Last year, the 102-win Cleveland Indians were one of the great teams of the modern era: Their starting pitchers had the American League’s lowest ERA, their offense scored more runs per game than all but two AL teams, and their defense was, by Defensive Runs Saved, the AL’s third best.

This year, the club is fine. The Indians are playing at an 86-win pace, which is just good enough to feel safe in one of the worst divisions in recent memory. But it’s nothing like last year’s juggernaut, despite very good starting pitching (second-best ERA in the American League), a very good offense (more runs per game than all but three AL teams) and a very good defense (the AL’s third best by DRS).

But their bullpen! Collectively, Cleveland’s relievers have the game’s highest ERA. By sOPS+, they have the seventh-worst bullpen since 1988. It’s enough to make you wonder why Cleveland’s front office traded away all the relievers over the winter and replaced them with much worse relievers, but, of course, they didn’t do any such thing:

Free agency cost the Indians two key members of last year’s bullpen: Joe Smith, who was acquired on July 31 and made the postseason roster, and Bryan Shaw, who led the club in appearances. Clearly, Cleveland is reeling from the losses of those two reliable veter — whoops-a-daisy, Smith’s ERA for Houston is 5.49, and Shaw’s in Colorado is 7.09. A few other guys pitched scattered innings last year, and a few others have pitched this year, but the bulk of relief work was or has been handled by the names we just listed.

So let’s just recap: Cleveland had one of the best bullpens ever last season. The Indians brought most of it back. They have one of the worst bullpens ever this season. We have identified what might be the cruelest part of the modern game.

There’s a case that sports generally are tilting more toward high-variance strategies. The fly ball, for instance, is a high-variance offensive weapon: Fly balls that stay in the yard are more likely than any other ball to be turned into an out, but fly balls that clear the wall are the most valuable act in the sport. The margin between the two can be impossibly thin over the course of a single game. Two teams might play identically, but one could outscore the other by six on a couple of big flies alone. In basketball, 3-pointers are a high-variance strategy, as is a pass-heavy offense in football. The analytics support these strategies, but when they fail, as they inevitably will at times, a good team looks temporarily awful.

Major league baseball teams have, by turning more and more innings over to bullpens, collectively adopted a high-variance strategy that can make a good team look bad not for a game or a week but for a season. It’s almost certainly wise to lean heavily on relievers, the better of whom are generally more dominant in their one-inning bursts than (even superior) starters are over seven or eight innings. Relievers can be matched up against batters so the team on defense has the platoon advantage more often. Relievers can be saved until the most perilous moments so the best pitchers’ finite pitches aren’t wasted in six-run games. It’s good strategy, which is why it’s what the game has been moving toward since, oh, 1950? Maybe earlier.

This year, relievers will set a record for innings pitched — a record broken at least a dozen times in the past 30 years and a record that’ll probably be broken a dozen times more:

Bryan Shaw made 79 appearances to lead the Cleveland pitching staff in 2017. The Indians lost Shaw and reliever Joe Smith to free agency but retained most of their bullpen heading into this season. Ken Blaze/USA TODAY Sports

It isn’t impossible to win with an ineffective bullpen, but it’s probably less possible than it used to be, when starters bore more of the burden and when clubs needed only a couple of relief aces to handle the late-and-close, high-leverage assignments.

But the tradeoff to this sound strategy is that relievers, well, almost two-thirds of the closers lose their jobs over the course of a single season, so you can imagine what it’s like further down the assembly line. Relievers are like slices of buttered bread constantly falling off tables, and it’s anybody’s guess whether they’ll land with the butter side up. When they do, you’re in the playoffs. When they don’t, for whatever reason — small-sample flukes, a few weeks of wildness, an unexpected injury, an expected injury, age-related velocity declines, loss of feel for one pitch or the fact that if they’re relievers they maybe weren’t that good to begin with — you’ve got a carpet covered in butter at the worst possible time.

There are 750 active major leaguers on any given day, and roughly 730 of them are relief pitchers (give or take). It’s impossible to keep track of them all — but here are a few worth rooting for and why.

You didn’t hear his name at all during the ALDS. And that’s exactly the point: Cleveland didn’t put a pitcher with the lowest career ERA as an Indian in the live ball era on its roster. And then lost to the Yankees.

In ESPN The Magazine’s MLB Preview issue, Sam Miller reveals how one ace reliever in Cleveland will, once and for all, allow us to move past one of baseball’s most persistent wastes.

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Cleveland’s collapse-by-committee is an extreme example, but this sort of thing is happening constantly. From one year to the next, a team’s bullpen performance fluctuates so much that some years there appears to be no carryover at all. When a team does make big moves, the results often seem almost random: The Rockies spent nine figures building a “super bullpen” last winter, but their bullpen’s Win Probability Added has actually plummeted, from third in the league last year to 15th this year. Or the reverse: The A’s sold off their two best relievers at last year’s trade deadline, yet their atrocious 2017 bullpen has morphed into baseball’s third best this season.

Of course, teams will change players, and players will change career trajectories, no matter the position or role. But we can measure the variance.

From one year to the next, team defense — as measured by Ultimate Zone Rating — has shown a correlation of about .44 since 2013. (In statistics, a correlation of 1 means a perfect correlation, and a correlation of 0 means no more relationship than randomness.) From one year to the next, team offense has shown a correlation of .41. Teams’ starting pitchers — as measured by sOPS+ for each team’s starters — have shown a year-to-year correlation of .55.

Bullpen quality is much more fluid. The correlation from year to year, by bullpen sOPS+, has been just .30. I’m not sure that’s the best stat to measure bullpen quality, given that it includes the mop-up men working meaningless innings. So if we look at the year-to-year correlations by bullpen Win Probability Added — which puts much more emphasis on the key pitchers who are called in when the game is on the line — the correlation drops to .20.

A correlation of .3 or .2 is certainly not randomness — the past is some guide to future — but it suggests that a team’s architects can do everything right and still end up with a dud or do nothing at all and end up with an ace staff.

In the past year, the Cleveland Indians’ bullpen has gone from one of the league’s best to the seventh worst since 1988 by sOPS+. Frank Jansky/Icon Sportswire

Consider, once again, the Cleveland bullpen. The club started with six returning relievers, all of them with recent history of fabulous success and none of them notably old. (Miller and Otero are the oldest at 33.) What happened to these half-dozen?

Cody Allen: The difference between last year and this year is about three runs. He has basically walked one extra batter and allowed one extra home run, which, by strict accounting purposes, has turned him from one of the game’s best closers to a below-average one.

Andrew Miller: He was awesome all April — a 0.00 ERA, and batters hit .162/.279/.216 against him — before he went on the 10-day disabled list with a hamstring strain. When he came back, he was wild, and over the course of six appearances — 25 batters faced — he was hit for a .368/.520/.842 line. Then he went back on the disabled list with knee inflammation.

Call us crazy, but we have three not-so-modest proposals for revolutionizing baseball.

Part I: What if every team made the playoffs?

Part II: What if players got paid on commission?

Part III: What if teams could bid for more home games?

Tyler Olson: A lefty whose job is to get lefties, he unexpectedly dominated lefties and righties last year and didn’t allow a run in 30 appearances. He has again dominated lefties this year! Meanwhile, righties are hitting .344/.432/.656 against him.

Dan Otero: A veteran sinkerballer who never strikes many guys out, Otero’s walk and strikeout rates this year are consistent with his career averages. But he has allowed as many extra-base hits as he did all of last season, and he has been hit especially hard with runners in scoring position. He has allowed 33 baserunners, and 18 of them have scored.

Nick Goody: He was pitching great until he abruptly got hit hard in four straight games, after which he went on the disabled list. Now he’s on the 60-day DL. There’s no timetable for his return.

Zach McAllister: There’s a pretty good case to be made that he’s throwing well: He’s throwing harder than last year, throwing way more strikes than last year and throwing more “edge” strikes on the black of the strike zone. He added a sinker and improved his ground ball rate. But there’s also this: He has already allowed six homers (after allowing eight all of last season), and batters are hitting .395/.415/.816 with men on base, more than double the OPS he has allowed with the bases empty.

We started with one story — Cleveland has a hot-mess bullpen, and that’s why they’re no longer an elite team — but ended up with a bunch. There are a couple of guys who look worse only because of, literally, one or two balls that landed a few feet over instead of a few feet shy of the wall. There’s a serious injury, and there’s a less serious injury, each of which has disturbed Cleveland’s plans in its own way. There’s one pitcher, McAllister, who looks like a really strong bet to dominate in the second half. And there’s one, Goody, who probably wasn’t as good as we might have believed in the first place. All in all, it’s … still a pretty good bullpen.

Or maybe it’s a bad one. Cleveland has as many walk-off losses this season as the team had all of last season. The Indians have begun the seventh inning tied 10 times, and they’re 1-9 in those games. Last year, when they were trailing after five innings, they went 10-37. This year, they’re 1-19.

It’s never easy to tell until they make it easy on us all and actually play. It’s a cruel joke to play on the team’s front office, which has to figure out in advance which half-dozen coin flips to bet on. But there’s something fun and pure about it, too: It’s a part of the game that exists mostly outside of the front office’s control. The onus is on the players, rather than some romantic vision we might have of omniscient general managers using their terabytes of data to make baseball predictable. The team that’s good is the one that does better — simple, nerve-racking, surprising and, occasionally, devastating.

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xicanafemmefatale · 7 years

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Tulum in recent years has become one the hottest destinations – Everyone is launching new design collections, inspiring projects and now culinary wonders!

Noma´s pop-up restaurant in Tulum is a product of mastermind Chef Rene Redzepi whose vision of cooking seasonal and simple food blended almost effortlessly with modern techniques catapults his diners into to a juxtaposition of explosive flavors.

The restaurant is outdoors, tucked inside the beauty of the tropical tree canopy of palm trees on a cleared edge of jungle behind La Zebra hotel—and offers a never-before-seen menu featuring hyper-local ingredients. Cooking is done over open fire, ingredients are meticulously sourced from throughout the peninsula and specialties brought in from the rest of the country. A real sense of imagination and team spirit is present throughout. Noma Tulum´s team breathes an eagerness to learn and try other ways of looking at food. Without a doubt a great moment of cultures clashing and merging.

The hottest restaurant on the planet wastes no time making you feel like one of the luckiest diners in the universe. Champagne is poured the second you’re seated and the first few minutes are a blur of color and discovery (Pigs shiny with coconut fat! Ice cream that sets the tongue on fire!) as a sea of people introduce you to dishes you are sure to be talking about well after the restaurant goes dark here, as planned, after a mere seven weeks.

“Setting up a restaurant in the jungle is one of our more challenging tasks,” says restaurant manager James Spreadbury, whose colleagues sport shorts behind their aprons.

Spreadbury is one of 145 employees, family members and guests of Noma in Copenhagen, hailed for four years as the “Best Restaurant in the World” and on hiatus since the end of last year, when the restaurant at the fore of the new Nordic trend closed for the second time in its history. The first was in 2015, when the team flew to Tokyo for a five-week pop-up. Success in Japan led the next year to Noma Sydney, which is where planning began for a seven-week run (April 12 through May 28) here in Mexico.

Such is the reputation of Noma and its chef, Rene Redzepi, that tickets for all the $600-per-person dinners sold out in two hours.

Back to the blur.

“Pinuela and tamarind,” says a server, setting down cactus fruit that remains crisp despite boiling and gets its pow! from tamarind paste, mezcal drops and cilantro flowers. “It’s not bitter or poisonous. It just feels like a lot of seeds.” The dish is quickly followed by a ceviche featuring a queen clam from the Sea of Cortez, its maritime freshness flattered by powdered local lime leaves, and salbutes, sheer, deep-fried tortilla cups filled with dried tomato concasse and eaten with our hands. The fine crunch comes not just from the shell, but also from crickets from Oaxaca and grasshoppers roasted in garlic. Two young men ferrying a suckling pig, a mahogany prize splayed on palm fronds, sidle up to the table to let us preview a future course.

Redzepi, who spent five months researching the region, is also enchanted by what he calls “spice,” in particular capsicum, or chile peppers, native to the Americas. Having coached the world on fermentation and foraging, he and his kitchen crew now refer to heat as “the sixth flavor,” after sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (a Japanese-coined word used to describe a pronounced meaty taste). Diners first encounter heat in a visually arresting bowl of cool masa broth floating “flowers of the moment.” It takes a few seconds, but droplets of habanero oil on the surface of the broth make themselves felt, loud and clear. (Can we talk? The bouquet appeals more to the eyes than the tongue.) The last course, chocolate sorbet served in pasilla peppers that have been simmered in sweet-sour melipona honey, goes out with a bang, too. “Diners were very skeptical,” says Redzepi. “But it’s one of the best desserts we’ve ever done.” The intense chocolate and the chile heat are dynamite; envision a Fudgsicle crossed with a firecracker.

If “Gilligan’s Island” had a fine-dining restaurant, Noma Mexico would be it. The adventure starts across from the oceanfront La Zebra hotel, where smiling greeters check your name off a guest list and lead you to your table via a sand trail that passes bushels and baskets of some of the many ingredients (jackfruit, mangoes, Yucatan limes) on the tasting menu. In the near distance is a long kitchen, inside of which all the cooks acknowledge each arrival with a thunderous “Yes!” (The best table may be No. 23, parked front and center amid the greenery and with a view of the kitchen that captures the four local women whose sole job is making tortillas.) Initially, you’re too dazzled by the parade of tropical dishes to notice the thought that has been lavished on the design. Soon enough, you find your fingers rubbing the smooth surface of the tables made from salam, a local hardwood, and now known as the Noma style of furniture. Everything including the water pitchers and dagger-like knives was custom-made in Mexico.

If there’s a more stunning fruit soup on earth than Noma Mexico’s bowl brightened with star fruit, grapefruit, avocado, mango (and more), I have yet to dip into it. Part of Redzepi’s talent is creating brilliance from humble ingredients: a halved coconut pressed into service as an edible display case for shimmering caviar and coconut cream; finger-length apple bananas, sliced and served with what looks like ink but is in fact charred banana skins crushed with orange juice — a surprisingly luscious portrait in ebony and ivory, finished with seaweed oil. This is food that makes you laugh and think and brace yourself for the next course.

By the end of the night, I feel as though I’ve met everyone who works at Noma. The extreme hospitality at Noma Mexico — confident, knowing, comforting — feels genuine. No doubt, it springs from the closeness of the team. The notion of family takes on new meaning when you consider the staff, made up of more than 20 nationalities, pretty much lives together for the life span of the pop-up, with only Mondays and Tuesdays off. Speaking of family, Redzepi keeps his biological tribe close. Along for the ride on this pop-up are his wife, three young daughters, twin brother (who performs maintenance) and mother-in-law, whose background in psychology makes her Noma’s “well-being officer.”

So why Tulum? To begin with, Chef Redzepi just wanted to come to Mexico. Ina brief conversation with him he shared he has spent quite a lot of time here over the past decade, traveling mostly within the Yucatan state, Oaxaca, and Mexico City.

“I keep coming back to learn and be inspired by the rich food history and tradition. We decided on Tulum because we didn’t want to be in a city. Having already done two pop-ups, in Tokyo and Sydney, we wanted something quite small, intimate, and to be more in touch with nature. At the same time, we need to be in a place with the existing infrastructure to support 145 team members—schools for our children, an international airport nearby, and then I also wanted to bring the team to a place I knew they would love. To be able to swim every day in the Caribbean Sea before coming into the kitchen is simply once in a lifetime.”

Yucatan is a huge peninsula encompassing three Mexican states. Most of it is covered in jungle, most of it very rural, with incredible diversity and ways of cooking and eating that don’t exist where we are from. People truly live off the seasons, they eat everything that’s worth eating, and they have been doing so for thousands of years. They consume food in a very sophisticated and thoughtful manner; it is more than just sustenance, and in between all of this there is so much discovery and inspiration.

Known for his use of foraged and hyper-local ingredients, Redzepi has partnered with non-profit Traspatio Maya for the duration of Noma Mexico. The organization represents a network of 15 Mayan communities cultivating indigenous products, which include staples such as beans, corn and squash.

Noma Mexico runs through May 28 in Tulum, Mexico. noma.dk/mexico. $600 per person (sold out)

Redzepi’s first foray into taking Noma international was a two-month stint in Tokyo, Japan in 2015 followed by a 10-week pop-up in Sydney, Australia in 2016. The 40-seat Noma in Copenhagen, which was named World’s Best Restaurant four times, served its last meal in February. Redzepi has plans to reinvent it with Noma 2.0 – an urban farm and entirely vegetarian restaurant.

NOMA- What its like to dine at one of the best restaurants in the world Tulum in recent years has become one the hottest destinations - Everyone is launching new design collections, inspiring projects and now culinary wonders!

#foodie #gastronomy #noma #tulum

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