When I was working for Business Week magazine in Chicago in the late 1990s, I used to print out articles from the web and bring them to a deli to read over lunch. There were no smartphones or iPhones yet, and the web was full of fabulous writing that I wanted to read. My most frequent lunchtime companion — virtually speaking — was Rob Neyer, then a baseball writer for ESPN.
Neyer’s analysis was sharp and fresh, and his writing was clear. He made judgments and told readers why he was making them, often acknowledging the reasons he could be wrong. I’ve long aspired to write about economics, politics and other subjects the way that Neyer writes about baseball.
So I was tickled to see that he picked up on our recent invention of the Matty Score, to rank baseball’s best World Series pitchers — and even more tickled that he offered a friendly critique.
We calculated the Matty Score by adding up a pitcher’s career innings pitched in the World Series and then subtracting three times the number of earned runs he had allowed. There is nothing magical about this calculation. But it feels like a decent way to measure greatness, in both quality and quantity. To rack up Matty points, you need to have an excellent outing — say, by pitching a shutout inning in relief (worth one point) or by throwing six innings and giving up only a single run (worth three).
Neyer took issue not with our back-of-the-envelope arithmetic but with the wordearned. We simply ignored unearned runs, as if pitchers deserved no blame for them. But they generally do deserve some blame. Imagine an inning in which the shortstop drops a ground ball with two outs and the next batter hits a home run. Officially, neither run was earned. Surely, though, the pitcher deserves some responsibility for the home run. A better pitcher might have found a way out of the inning.
As Neyer put it, writing for Fox Sports, where he now works: “Unearned runs don’t count for anything at all? They sure counted on the scoreboard, especially in the old days when a significantly higher percentage of runs were unearned. There are different ways to account for them, but a decent shorthand is giving the pitcher half the blame for unearned runs.”
Here, I’ve recalculated the Matty Scores, using Neyer’s shorthand; an unearned run counts half as much as earned one. The result is to make Madison Bumgarner’s performance look even more remarkable.
In his 36 World Series innings, he gave up only one earned run and not a single unearned run. By comparison, Christy Mathewson — the namesake of the Matty Score — gave up as many unearned runs (11) as earned runs in his incredible 11 World Series starts early in the 20th century. Sandy Koufax, the only other pitcher to rank above Bumgarner in the main Matty Score, gave up four unearned runs and six earned runs.
In the Neyer-inspired revised Matty Score, Bumgarner rises to a tie with Koufax for second place. He’s still behind Mathewson, but the gap is much narrower.
Who is the greatest World Series pitcher of all time? That’s a question statistics can’t fully answer. I’ll still go with Mathewson, but he had the benefit of pitching against less competition than Koufax (who played after integration) and much less than Bumgarner (who faces batters from around the world). There is certainly an argument for Bumgarner. He’s now been stellar in three World Series outings — 2010, 2012 and 2014 — and dominated one of those.
It’s a question fans can ponder over the five long months between now and the next meaningful Major League Baseball game.
World Series 2014: Madison Bumgarner Rises to the Moment, and Jaws Drop
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Now he belongs to history, alongside Christy Mathewson and Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson and Randy Johnson. The pantheon of World Series pitching greatsmust welcome a new member. Madison Bumgarner burst into the club with a performance for the ages in Game 7 of the World Series on Wednesday.
Bumgarner, a bearded left-hander from Hickory, N.C., squeezed the life from the plucky Kansas City Royals with fastballs, cutters and curveballs slung sideways from an arm that had only two days’ rest. Bumgarner, 25, shut out the Royals on two hits for the final five innings, saving a 3-2 victory for the San Francisco Giants and clinching the team’s third championship in five seasons.
“You know what?” said Bumgarner, who pitched 270 innings this season, including a postseason-record 522/3. “I can’t lie to you anymore. I’m a little tired now.”
Bumgarner, who worked seven innings to win Game 1 and fired a shutout in Game 5, has earned a long winter’s nap. He was named the most valuable player of the World Series, naturally, for his excellence in shouldering a workload that brings to mind the durable and dominant aces of old.
Late Tuesday night, after the Giants’ 10-0 loss in Game 6, Bumgarner showed the attitude of an earlier generation. He dismissed any concerns about working on short rest, guessing that his limit would be 200 pitches while sniffing that pitch counts, to him, were overrated. He insisted he would be just as effective as usual and doubted he would have trouble warming up.
“Something tells me it won’t take long to get loose in Game 7 of the World Series,” he said.
Bumgarner, who wore down a bit last season as he reached 200 innings, had prepared for this moment. All year long, he varied his workouts between starts with the hope of maintaining his strength for a deep October run. He started the Giants’ surge with a shutout in the wild-card game, at Pittsburgh on Oct 1.
After starting against St. Louis in the finale of the National League Championship Series — for which he was also named M.V.P. — Bumgarner threw only a light bullpen session before Game 1 of the World Series. After winning that game, and allowing just one run, he did not throw in the bullpen before Game 5. He also rested between Games 5 and 7.
“He backed off,” said Dave Righetti, the Giants’ pitching coach. “He saved it for the baseball games.”
Bumgarner’s final World Series line sparkles: 2-0 with a save and a 0.43 earned run average, with nine hits, one run, one walk and 17 strikeouts in 21 innings. Add in 15 scoreless innings in earlier victories, against Texas in 2010 and Detroit in 2012, and you get a 0.25 E.R.A. that ranks as the best in World Series history, minimum 25 innings.
“It’s really special to keep hearing that,” Bumgarner said. “Obviously, it hasn’t sunk in yet. There’s not been near enough time to think about it. This is as good as it gets, World Series, Game 7. It’s pretty stressful at the same time.”
Yet Bumgarner showed no nerves. Replacing Jeremy Affeldt for the bottom of the fifth, Bumgarner was every bit as stingy as he had promised, even though his fastball was not its sharpest right away. In some ways, Righetti said, it helped him to allow a leadoff single to Omar Infante.
“Normally a starter comes out — because he’s got all his time to warm up, he’s got his best heater, and it probably drops down in the second inning,” Righetti said of a reliever. “That’s almost every guy. He had to start the other way. As a reliever — and not a closer — he had to build. I think he was at 90 and 91, and he was in the stretch right away. He had to go into a slide step right away. So he pitched. He got out of it.”
Righetti continued: “The next inning he went out a little early and started to loosen up a little better. I think he went up to 93 then, and he was in his normal range.”
After that, Righetti said, he studied the fingers on Bumgarner’s left hand. If he was keeping them on top of the ball, Righetti said, he would not make mistakes. That is where Bumgarner kept them.
On the bench between innings, Manager Bruce Bochy said, he deliberately tried to avoid Bumgarner. The only way he would take him out, Bochy said, was if Bumgarner told him he was tired. Bochy did not want to hear those words, and Bumgarner was not about to say them.
“There was nothing,” Bumgarner said when asked if there were conversations about how long he would last. “I was just concentrating on making pitches. I wasn’t thinking about how many innings I was going to go or how many pitches or any of that. Just thinking about getting outs.”
The outs kept piling up, 14 in a row, until there was only one to go in the ninth.
Alex Gordon, who had flied to center to end in the sixth, lined an 0-1 slider to center, and it skipped past Gregor Blanco. Gordon scurried around second, and the Royals’ third-base coach, Mike Jirschele, could have sent him home. But Jirschele held Gordon as shortstop Brandon Crawford took the throw from left fielder Juan Perez, and the Royals took their chances on bringing him home another way.
The task fell to Salvador Perez, the Royals’ catcher, whose Game 1 homer is the only blemish on Bumgarner’s World Series record. Perez is dangerous but a free swinger, and Bumgarner used his approach against him.
“You see how he pitched to him,” Righetti said. “He threw him all balls, didn’t he?”
That was the plan, Bumgarner said, and it worked.
“I knew Perez was going to want to do something big,” Bumgarner said. “I had a really good chance, too. We tried to use that aggressiveness and throw our pitches up in the zone. It’s a little bit higher than high, I guess.”
Pumping those high fastballs, Bumgarner got ahead in the count, 1-2, and then threw a ball before Perez hit a foul ball. Righetti said Bumgarner would have faced the next hitter, left-handed Mike Moustakas, but closer Santiago Casilla most likely would have faced Infante with the bases loaded had things gotten that far.
They never did. Perez swung hard at a 93-mile-per-hour fastball and lofted it high into the night. Third baseman Pablo Sandoval camped under the ball, caught it and fell to the ground in front of the Giants’ dugout, his wide body spread near the World Series logo, arms raised by his sides in triumph.
Catcher Buster Posey flung his face mask in the air and wrapped Bumgarner in an embrace, burying his head in the pitcher’s chest as the Giants swarmed onto the field.
Mathewson spun three shutouts for the New York Giants in the 1905 World Series, always the standard for greatness. But this was about as close as any pitcher has come since.
At 0.43, Bumgarner’s E.R.A. is the lowest in a World Series for pitchers with at least 15 innings since Koufax’s 0.38 mark in 1965. That was when Koufax pitched a shutout on two days’ rest on the road in Game 7 to stifle the Minnesota Twins.
Bumgarner, a first-round pick out of South Caldwell (N.C.) High School in 2007, is 67-49 in his regular-season career with a 3.06 E.R.A. This year was his best, at 18-10 and 2.98. He is keenly aware of other left-handers who have pitched longer and accomplished more, and he studies them intently.
“This guy wants to be great,” Righetti said. “He loves it. He appreciates Clayton Kershaw and Jon Lester a lot, and David Price. He wants what they’ve got; he wants to be better — and now they probably are hoping they’ve got what he’s got, too. And that’s what great pitchers do, especially left-handers, because there’s so few left-handed power guys. They drag each other to greatness, and he’s part of it, and we’re lucky to have him.”
Because of Bumgarner’s brilliance, these Royals — a bottom-half team in payroll, a team without a playoff appearance in 29 years — now belong to a special group of teams in baseball history. Think of the Boston Red Sox in 1967, the season known as the Impossible Dream, or the 1991 Atlanta Braves, who went from worst to first.
Those teams, like the Royals, came from relative obscurity to push destiny as far as they could without winning. The journey of all of those teams ended in Game 7 of the World Series.
“For them to play the way they did on this stage, in this postseason, is phenomenal,” Royals Manager Ned Yost said of his players. “I’m really proud of the way they played.”
The Royals have no reason to be ashamed. They were beaten by the best. They were beaten by Bumgarner.
India's delivery men offer prize investment as billions pour into e-commerce
Thu Oct 30, 2014 11:05am IST
By Sumeet Chatterjee and Tripti Kalro
MUMBAI/BANGALORE (Reuters) - From Japan's richest man to Jeff Bezos, everyone wants a piece of India's booming online retail sector. For those without billions to pump into the tightly held firms who dominate e-commerce, the best bet may be the delivery men.
On Tuesday, SoftBank Corp (9984.T) Chief Executive Masayoshi Son joined Bezos's Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) in pledging heavy investment in an e-commerce industry worth $10 billion and seen quadrupling in five years. Son's gambit: a stake in Snapdeal, India's third-biggest online marketplace.
Yet the little-known firms that deliver goods ordered online are already raking in rocketing earnings from e-commerce in a country with the world's third-biggest Internet user base, and they're listed. Shares in companies like Transport Corp of India (TCIL.NS) and Gati Ltd (GATI.NS) have surged more than three-quarters this year as industry watchers seek a chance to invest.
"When you see the limitless growth in the e-commerce sector, you do want to get involved," said Eric Mookherjee, a Paris-based fund manager at Shanti India, whose holdings include Transport Corp. "The next Alibaba (BABA.N) or Tencent (0700.HK) can be created in a country whose population is roughly similar to China. You will get that in India."
Finance house Nomura estimated in a research note in July that India's e-commerce industry could more than quadruple to $43 billion over the next five years, driven by online retail.
Pledging to invest $10 billion in India in the next 10 years, SoftBank's Son on Tuesday said Snapdeal has the potential to become India's Alibaba, the recently listed Chinese e-commerce giant. Son is well placed to know: his fast-growing Japanese telecom and media empire is the biggest Alibaba investor.
DELIVERY OUTSOURCING A MUST
Son's move comes after India's two biggest online retailers, the home-grown startup Flipkart.com, and Amazon's India business, began spending billions of dollars to secure a bigger share of the market. Though India's Internet population is huge, e-commerce infrastructure remains relatively under-developed and ripe for huge growth.
The forecasts for future expansion, and a key role in it for third-party delivery firms, have helped push the more than $50 billion Indian logistics sector, including Gati and Transport Corp, about 80 percent higher so far this year. That makes it the fifth-best performing major industry in India by the Thomson Reuters StarMine classification.
Earnings are also ramping up. Net income of Blue Dart Express (BLDT.NS) and Transport Corp is expected to jump by 37 percent and 24 percent in this fiscal year respectively, according to Thomson Reuters' SmartEstimates, which place an emphasis on recent forecasts by top-rated analysts.
In comparison, net profit of companies in the BSE Sensex is expected to rise just 15 percent on average.
As the market surges, competition for customers among e-commerce firms will see them seek to cut delivery times and expand into smaller cities. While Amazon and Snapdeal use both in-house logistics networks and external service providers, new services will see them relying increasingly on outsourcing.
"Amazon is today advertising 24-hour delivery and that's where people like us come in," said Areef Patel, executive vice-chairman of Patel Integrated Logistics Ltd (PATL.NS), which serves Amazon India. The 24-hour delivery offer applies only to select postal codes and is not available across the country.
"We are looking to get e-commerce market share today because that's the flavour of the day," he said. Patel said his firm aims to increase the portion of revenue it generates from e-commerce companies to 20-25 percent within two to three years from just 5 percent currently.
With more than 45 percent of Amazon's orders in India coming from outside the top eight cities in the country, the company is looking to work with more logistics partners, Amazon India said.
"The biggest advantage of working with specialist logistics firms is the wide reach that they provide," said Ashish Chitravanshi, vice-president of operations at Snapdeal, speaking before the SoftBank investment was announced.
(Additional reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee in MUMBAI; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Kenneth Maxwell)
* U.S. Treasury yields rise on Fed's upbeat statement
* Dollar index at 3-1/2 week highs
* Kiwi wilts on dovish RBNZ statement
* Brazil shocks with interest-rate hike (Updates prices)
By Lisa Twaronite and Tomo Uetake
TOKYO, Oct 30 (Reuters) - The dollar stayed on the front foot on Thursday, setting a 3-1/2 week high against a basket of currencies after the Federal Reserve surprised markets with a more hawkish policy tone and signalled its confidence in the U.S. economic recovery.
The Fed released a statement that underscored the improving U.S. labour market, dismissing recent financial market volatility, European growth challenges and largely weak inflation outlook.
While the central bank said interest rates would remain low for a "considerable time," the Fed's statement helped to push up U.S. yields and increased the greenback's appeal.
"Although the Fed's statement was hawkish than markets had expected, Wall Street shares didn't fall much. It means that the market took the hawkish tone as the Fed's confidence in the U.S. economy." said Kengo Suzuki, chief forex strategist at Mizuho Securities.
The yield on benchmark 10-year Treasury notes stood at 2.310 percent in Asian trade, after spiking to a three-week high of 2.362 percent on Wednesday.
The dollar index, which measures the U.S. currency against a basket of six major rivals, rose to 86.293 on Thursday, its highest level since October 6, in the wake of the Fed's announcement.
The euro touched a 3-1/2 week low of $1.2586 and last traded at $1.2605, down 0.2 percent on the day.
Against the yen, the greenback rose above 109 yen for the first time in 3-1/2 weeks. The dollar last traded at 109.10 yen , up 0.2 percent on the day.
Muzuho's Suzuki said the dollar may head toward the six-year high of 110.09 marked at the start of this month as soon as next week.
The yen showed limited reaction to comments by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who said on Thursday that a weak yen was positive for exporters, but also added that he will closely watch the negative impact from a weak currency on small firms and local areas.
Abe had made broadly similar remarks in early October, in the wake of the yen's drop to a six-year low against the dollar.
The New Zealand dollar, meanwhile, fell sharply after that country's central bank sounded a bit more dovish following a widely expected decision to leave interest rates unchanged.
The kiwi, already under pressure against a firmer U.S. dollar, fell to around $0.7770 from around $0.7820 before the announcement. It last traded at $0.7794.
Elsewhere, Brazil's central bank raised interest rates on Wednesday, surprising investors with a bold move that signals President Dilma Rousseff could make more market-friendly policy changes after her narrow re-election victory on Sunday. (Additional reporting by Masayuki Kitano; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)
SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) on Thursday said it would revamp its smartphone line-up to take on competitors in the rapidly growing mid-to-low range segment, after third-quarter earnings set it on course for its worst year since 2011.
The global smartphone leader's market share declined in annual terms for the third straight quarter in July-September, lagging Apple Inc (AAPL.O) in the premium market and overtaken by rivals like Lenovo Group Ltd (0992.HK) and Xiaomi Inc at the bottom end, research firm Strategy Analytics said.
Executives said the South Korean giant would overhaul its lower-tier line-up to boost price competitiveness and use higher-quality components to set its devices apart, after it announced its worst third-quarter profit in more than three years.
"The mid-to-low end market is growing rapidly, and we plan to respond actively in order to capitalise on that growth," Samsung Senior Vice President Kim Hyun-joon said during a conference call with analysts.
Samsung said its third-quarter operating profit fell by an annual 60.1 percent to 4.1 trillion won ($3.9 billion), matching its guidance issued earlier this month.
While the company expects profits to pick up in the fourth quarter on strong demand for televisions and memory chips, analysts still expect Samsung to record its worst annual operating profit in three years.
Profit for the mobile division fell 73.9 percent to 1.75 trillion won in the third quarter, its worst performance since the second quarter of 2011.
Samsung spent most of the quarter without launching a new flagship device, and continued to struggle in the mid-to-low tier markets against cheaper and value-packed offerings like Xiaomi's Redmi 1S.
Robert Yi, Samsung's head of investor relations, said the firm would launch new mid-tier models in the fourth quarter, although he didn't specify what features they would have.
Samsung expects average selling prices for handsets will rise in the fourth quarter due to an increase in premium smartphone sales, namely of the Galaxy Note 4, and as demand picks up in the holiday shopping season.
Analysts say Samsung will likely have to sacrifice margins to protect its market share. Cheaper phones are expected to drive global smartphone market growth in coming years, meaning a general trend of lower average selling prices.
Samsung's chips division was a bright spot, recording a 2.26 trillion operating profit for the July-September quarter to mark the highest earnings since the third quarter of 2010.
(1 US dollar = 1,053.5000 Korean won)
(Reporting by Se Young Lee; Editing by Stephen Coates)
