I was listening to yesterday’s excellent FanGraphs Audio with Carson, Jack and Matt, and they brought up Edwin Jackson. In the episode, they noted Jackson’s soaring O-swing rate last year; wondered whether that had to do with his increased slider percentage; and also considered his strikingly good pitch-value numbers on his slider versus the poor ones for his fastball, in spite of that fastball’s blazing, fourth-fastest 94.5 MPH average speed. I thought those interesting observations warranted further investigation.

First off Jackson is effectively a two-pitch pitcher, rare for a starting pitcher. To RHBs he throws his fastball 60% of the time and slider 37%. Righties rarely see his curve or change. Against LHBs he throws these tertiary and quaternary offerings a little more often, but not by much, going with his fastball 67% of time and slider 20%. So even LHBs see a fastball or slider nearly 9 times out of 10.

As Matt noted, his slider percentage increased last year, from roughly 20% in 2006-2008 to 27% in 2009. This is the big reason for his increased O-Swing%. His out-of-zone sliders get swung at 37% of the time versus 26% of his out-of-zone fastballs. (These are for the pitchf/x zone, which is a little bigger than the BIS zone used for our plate discipline section, so these numbers do not correspond perfectly). The increased use of the slider neatly corresponds to his increased O-Swings.

Like most pitchers, Jackson throws his slider more often when he is ahead and less often when he is behind in the count. In these situations there was little change in slider use in 2009. The increase in sliders came early in at-bats: in 0-0, 1-0, 0-1 and 1-1 counts Jackson threw almost a third more sliders in 2009 than previously, which accounted for the majority of the increase. So it looks like Jackson was more comfortable going to the slider earlier in at-bats and even often starting off with one.

Finally what is going on with his fastball? It seems like dialing up the speed is just not enough. On the average fastball a batter misses with 14% of his swings, against Jackson’s fastballs just 12%. And when the average fastball is put into play, it gives up a slugging of .521, but Jackson’s is .556.

Almost all pitchers need to throw a fastball at the very least 50% of the time to keep batters honest and get strikes, but it would be interesting to see whether Jackson can continue to decrease his fraction of fastballs and increase his fraction of sliders. His 27% in 2009 was already 6th most in the Bigs, but maybe he can push it north of 30% as Ryan Dempster and Brett Anderson have.

Let me start theoretical. I wonder why prospect lists run in order of career potential. In my view, prospects are valuable because they provide Major League Baseball’s best bargain. Find a player ready to contribute from Year One to Year Seven, and the return on investment is ridiculous. In three seasons, Tim Lincecum has been worth roughly $84 million to the Giants. If you didn’t know, he has not been paid that much. However, in a few short years, Lincecum will enter free agency, and he will no longer be a bargain. Teams will bid for his services, and he will be paid appropriately by what the market determines.

In my eyes, prospect lists should attempt to determine a ranking based on what value players will provide when they are under organizational control (first six to seven years). If we follow prospects because they are a bargain, we should only care about their performance when they represent a bargain. Right? Consider yesterday’s posterboy, Garry Templeton, who in a retro prospect list, probably wouldn’t rank very highly. But why not? Templeton was well above the average shortstop with the Cardinals, and was the centerpiece of a trade that netted the Cardinals Ozzie Smith. Templeton provided insane value to the Cardinals.

In fact, in their first seven seasons, Garry Templeton produced 20.5 WAR. Ozzie Smith, who peaked in Years 7-12 of his career, produced just 17.7 WAR in his first seven years. Now, readers, I ask you: why would Smith be considered the better prospect in hindsight? Particularly in today’s environment, when loyalty doesn’t exist with free agents.

************

As I’ve transitioned back into covering minor league baseball, I have begun to see the direction I want my analysis to take — it’s both outlined above, and it exists in the FanGraphs defining stat: WAR. I want to attempt to see prospects in the light that the organizations might: who is overvalued relative to the likely contributions they’ll provide and thus make a nice trade chip, and who should teams be making way for? What value might a prospect provide our team? Eric Hosmer and Pedro Alvarez are right next to each other in Keith Law’s rankings; if each is the player scouts think they could become, what does that look like in terms of WAR (an article for another day?)

This is long-winded, as I so often am, but I’m trying to create a dialogue about what a sabermetric approach to covering prospects can be. And I want your help! It’s no longer about ignoring scouting reports and restricting yourself to MLEs (was it ever?), but about finding the proper routes to evaluating players more accurately — based on development (like yesterday), based on nuance (the sinker series), and based on modern statistical analysis.

Today, I’m going to take a stab at the latter. After the jump, we’ll walk through creating a set of expectations on what the Cubs should anticipate from Starlin Castro (sorry, he’s on the brain).

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In case you missed it, play-by-play man Jon “Boog” Sciambi (hired away from the Atlanta Braves by ESPN this offseason) wrote a terrific guest piece at Baseball Prospectus on Tuesday about how sportscasters can better integrate the kind of advanced baseball analysis that goes on here and at BP, inspired by Will Carroll’s recent post “Be Stupid(er).” It’s all worth reading, but here’s the heart of the piece:

The goal is not unveiling newfangled stats; it’s about getting people to understand basic ideas and concepts. To achieve that, we can’t just slap stats up on the screen and explain them. Understanding has to come in the form of analysis. We have to use the stat and explain it…

If Ryan Howard is up, I can talk about RBI and why dependent stats don’t evaluate individual performance well; RBI aren’t what reflects Howard’s greatness, his SLG does. I can mention that Howard’s massive RBI totals may be due to the fact that no player has hit with more total men on base than Howard since 1492 (I believe this is a fact but didn’t feel like looking it up). Point is, there are dead people who could knock in 80 runs hitting fourth in that Phillies lineup. (OK, I probably wouldn’t say that on-air.)

The metrics are getting so advanced that we’re in danger of getting further away from the masses instead of closer… We can’t assume that’s understood just because we understand it. And the only way it gets embedded is to keep beating the audience with it so that it becomes ingrained the way ERA eventually did, even though that once passed for advanced math.

As R.J. Anderson recently wrote, this offseason has featured a terrific number of sabermetric primers (including a series by yours truly). But it has also heard a few “let me catch my breath!” pleas, from fans as varied as John Sickels, Bill Simmons, and Russ Smith of SpliceToday (who quotes the beloved Craig Calcaterra for cover).

Sciambi’s a good broadcaster, and he clearly has his heart in the right place: his goal is to enhance the viewers’ experience of the game, by giving them useful information that they can understand, neither dumbing it down nor sailing it over their heads. That’s a tricky assignment, because it’s always hard to be all things to all people, and it’s hard to be part of any movement pushing a paradigm shift. It’s hard to please a casual watcher who doesn’t know the acronyms or methodology of advanced sabermetrics at the same time that you’re trying to say something that Dave Cameron doesn’t already know. (As Will Carroll notes, last year ESPN tried to make OPS a regular feature of their baseball broadcasts, but apparently their viewers thought it was “too complicated.”)

So what can be done? I think a lot of non-saberheads get hung up on the constellation of acronyms that we use, getting so hung up at all the capital letters that they miss the meaning behind them. (Like Jim Bowden, creator of “OBPATUZXYZ,” or Jon Heyman, inventor of “VORPies.”) So, pace Will Carroll, we need to be willing to let broadcasters be stupid — but with a purpose. The stats around here are pretty easy to read, because they’re all scaled to look like things we’re more familiar with, but we’re not going to see a broadcaster talk about FIP any time soon. However, everyone understands runs and wins, and, as Will Carroll says, anyone can understand a statement like “Albert Pujols was two wins better than Zack Greinke last season.” It has to be justified, but we’ve all heard broadcasters make unsupportable assertions about how many more wins a player adds to his team, or how many runs he saves with his glove. These are just numbers that add support to things they already say. And it can easily be understood. Both by the Jon Sciambis of the world, and the Russ Smiths.

Last week, I asked you guys to list the players who had been the subject of the great spring training cliche – reporting in the “best shape of their life.” It is remarkable how many times this story has been written. Here’s the list.

Jonathan Sanchez – San Francisco
Carlos Zambrano – Chicago
Geovany Soto – Chicago
Daisuke Matsuzaka – Boston
Mike Pelfrey – New York
Brian McCann – Atlanta
Tim Hudson – Atlanta
Bobby Jenks – Chicago
Delmon Young – Minnesota
David Price – Tampa Bay
Andruw Jones – Chicago
Russell Martin – Los Angeles
Matt Stairs (!) – San Diego
Oliver Perez – New York
Corey Hart – Milwaukee
Aaron Rowand – San Francisco
Jonathan Albaladejo – New York
Ricky Romero – Toronto
Aaron Cook – Colorado
Kyle Blanks – San Diego
Matt Harrison – Texas
Aaron Harang – Cincinnati
Miguel Cabrera – Detroit
Kyle Kendrick – Philadelphia
Nick Swisher – New York
David Wright – New York
David Ortiz – Boston
Martin Prado – Atlanta

That’s 28 guys, and there were a few in the comments that I omitted, because the cited articles were more about rehabbing from an injury than getting in better shape. Needless to say, that’s a big list. The most notable changes seem to belong to Delmon Young, Jonathan Albaladejo, Matt Stairs (hilariously), and Matt Harrison, who were each reported to have dropped 30 pounds.

Of all the guys on the list, perhaps those four best serve as examples of when this story should be written. Someone drops 30 pounds in a winter, well, that’s newsworthy. A lot of the rest of it, though… it’s just filler. Not that you guys need to be reminded of this, of course.

It will be interesting to look back at this list at the end of the year and see how many of these guys beat their projections. If I don’t do that post by November, someone remind me.

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Since 1998, three things have been constant: death, taxes, and Livan Hernandez starting at least 30 Major League Baseball games. Hernandez, despite bouncing between eight teams in these 12 seasons, is the only pitcher to accomplish this rather daunting feat. It appears that Hernandez will get a chance to continue his wondrous streak in 2010, as the Nationals have added him on a minor league deal with an invitation to spring training and a shot at a starting rotation slot.

This move isn’t terribly interesting, but I find Hernandez’s streak to be fascinating. We’ve seen so many hall of fame quality pitchers in the major leagues since 1998, and the one pitcher that has managed to combine durability with enough skill to remain relevant is Livan Hernandez. Yes, the very same Hernandez that has managed 19.6 WAR since 2002, nearly equivalent to Kenny Rogers (missed all of 2007, retired after 2008) and Freddy Garcia (23 starts since 2006).

Clearly, there is value in consistency. Teams must love knowing that they can plug Livan into a starting slot and rest assured that he will give them 180+ innings, even if they’re not particularly strong of late. His FIP hasn’t been below 4.00 since 2004 and last year’s 4.44 FIP was downright resurgent after a terrible 2007 with the Diamondbacks and a merely poor season split between Minnesota and Colorado in 2008.

It’s not like he was an ace in years prior to our win-value era, either. His best single-season FIP came in Florida’s 1997 World Series run, and that was at 3.57 – respectable, but not necessarily at ace level, and it only came in 17 starts. Livan has been living on pitching to contact and allowing just few enough HRs and BBs to stay in the league. His workmanlike performance has Rally placing him all the way down at 473rd among all pitchers in terms of career WAR, despite this remarkable durability.

And yet somehow, Livan keeps on plugging along. His fastball velocity is all the way down to 84-85 MPH average velocity, and yet he somehow manages to get major league hitters out. Here’s to longevity, and good luck to Livan Hernandez on continuing his streak.

Before Rickie Weeks’ season ended prematurely thanks to a wrist injury, he was enjoying the makings of a career season. He’d hit nine home runs in roughly 150 at-bats while his previous career high of 16 came in 409. His .245 ISO would’ve easily been a career high and his .365 wOBA could’ve tied his previous career high if it remained static throughout the year. Lost, though, is something else about Weeks’ game.

Drafted second overall in the 2003 draft out of Southern University, Weeks’ career has been a bit frustrating, if superior to that Delmon Young fellow. Injuries have allowed Weeks to record more than 500 plate appearances exactly twice. His career .344 wOBA is fine for a second baseman (or anyone really), and when he has been able to stay on the field, he’s posted WAR of 3.3 and 2.1.

So what was ignored? His defensive play over the last few seasons.

Weeks posted a combined UZR score of -22.5 through 2006 (which covers 1,652.3 innings), yet has a 0.5 UZR since (in 2,343.7 innings). The issues mostly stemmed from horrendous error rates, since his range and double-play ability scores out as roughly average throughout his career. Weeks’ throwing appears improved, although maybe Prince Fielder is more graceful than he seems.

There’s improvement here, but do not, under any circumstances, buy into Weeks’ 21.9 UZR/150 as gospel. Besides the fact that 300 innings is an extremely small sample size, note that Weeks’ RngR in 2009 was uncharacteristically good. That means, if you’re placing money or life on Weeks’ UZR range, then gamble on something like -5 < x < 5 runs. Hopefully for Weeks, the wrist injury doesn’t linger and he can get back to where he left off.

Jonny Gomes is good at three things that could be considered employable skills in the baseball world. The first skill being that he crushes left-handed pitching. Klaasen covered this a few weeks back, but Gomes has an expected wOBA against lefties of .354. That’s above average, mind you, however Gomes is a right-handed batter and a poor defender in the corner outfield spots. That combination of skills is readily available throughout the minor leagues. Gomes can play a role on a big league club. That’s for sure. He can also be replaced, which is too bad, because his story is pretty fantastic.

First some background. Gomes is 29-years-old and from a smallish town in California. His younger brother, Joey Gomes, was actually drafted by the Rays, the same team that drafted Jonny years before. At last check, the younger Gomes was playing for the Newark Bears or something. The older Gomes was an 18th round pick in 2001 and quickly rose through the system by mashing baseballs. He launched 30 bombs as a 21-year-old in the hitter friendly California League, then moved on to Double-A where he hit 17 homers as a 22-year-old. In 552 at-bats at Triple-A Durham, split between 2004 and 2005, Gomes homered 40 times. That’s power.

He made cameos for the (then) Devil Rays, but saw fewer than 30 at-bats in 2003 and 2004. Gomes arrived with a sudden impact in 2005; hitting 21 homers and with assistance from a wickedly high BABIP (.352) posted a batting average above .280. He came back the next year and hit 20 home runs in nearly the same number of at-bats. Then he hit 17 home runs in 2007 with exactly the same number of at-bats as 2005. In 2008 he played a smaller role and even spent some time in Triple-A. And similarly split last season between the minors and majors, but found nearly 300 at-bats with the Reds and … of course, hit 20 home runs.

Jonny Gomes can hit home runs. He’s hit 155 split between the majors and minors since Christmas Eve 2002. Why is that date important? Because that’s when Gomes suffered a heart attack. Being the professional baseball player he is, Gomes ignored the symptoms and continued going about his business. He literally slept through a heart attack before passing out and being rushed to the hospital. Somehow he survived and featured enough heart function to play professional baseball and play the role of the gritty hustler.

That’s the other part about Gomes’ employable baseball skills. He’s evidently a great person to be around. During the Rays’ run in 2008, Gomes started the Mohawk haircut and gained popularity (albeit short-lived) for attempting to give Shelly Duncan a few cuts of an entirely different kind. Even before that, Gomes’ reputation as a maniac in the clubhouse is well-known.

The Rays were horrible in 2007, with Gomes contributing a replacement level performance of his own, yet this didn’t stop him from trying to reverse the tide. So, what did he do? What any insane man would do: He bought a plastic rooster. Not only that, he named the rooster ‘Cocky’ and made the entire team personnel rub the rooster before taking the field. Then, during high-leveraged moments, he would sneak into the clubhouse and bring the rooster to the dugout. Unfortunately, Gomes left Cocky somewhere in Camden Yards after an excessive losing streak. Gomes also took part in the Rays’ “Wrestling Night” promotion, wore a customized robe around the clubhouse sent to him by a former teammate, and took a few sips of champagne from Dioner Navarro’s protective cup following one of those magical nights in 2008.

Yes, he’s that hardcore.

None of this makes Gomes’ any more valuable though. If he were a worthwhile player all these antics could be celebrated with sepia-toned fondness and a celebratory tone. Instead I feel compelled to mention that he’s probably not going to repeat last year. His BABIP was a tick above career rates, his walks were down, his strikeouts static, and his HR/FB well above. Even if you’re generous about Gomes in the Great American Ballpark, a .370 wOBA is quite optimistic. CHONE and Marcel have him closer to .340, which seems fair. Even if you bump that expectation up a few points for various reasons (N.L., playing in the field full-time, and maybe being used in a platoon, etc.) there’s still a good gap to make up for and one that leaves Gomes as a marginal player on a good team.

And that really is too bad, because Gomes’ third skill is that of photogenic mastery.

In the course of a discussion at The Book Blog about the Angels’ (of late) recent outperformance of (some) projections, I was reminded of a related yet quite different issue I’d thought about looking into a while back (and then promptly forgot about). The Angels are one of the teams in baseball that are praised for “playing the right way” and “doing the little things.” Whatever people mean by that, one thing we can say is that recently, the Angels have consistently outperformed their Pythagorean Win Expectation. Looking (somewhat arbitrarily) at the last three seasons in which the Angels have won the American League West and comparing their actual record with what we’d expect given their run differential based on PythagenPat.

2007: Actual 94-68, Expected 90-72, difference +4
2008: Actual 100-62, Expected 88-74, difference +12
2009: Actual 97-65, Expected 93-69, difference +4

I should say right now that this post is not saying that I am not claiming either a) that the Angels “just got lucky” and weren’t as good as their record, or b) that they have some “intangible” ability (perhaps from their manager) that has enabled them to outperform their run differential the last three seasons. Both of those are copouts, at least at this point. For now, I’m only going to look at this issue with reference to their offense.

One might say that they’ve been “good in the clutch.” And that is, in fact, true. FanGraphs’ clutch score, which measures whether players outperform not only their peers, but themselves in high leverage situations, has the following win values for the Angels’ hitter from 2007-2009:

2007: 5.19
2008: 7.34
2009: 3.22

These numbers are impressive, but they sort of beg the question. Unlike relievers, hitters don’t “earn” their high leverage playing time — unless you think most of those scores were put up by Angels pinch-hitters picked for their “clutchness.” This seems to say what we already knew — the Angels won more game than their runs scored indicate that they “should have”. Undoubtedly, there are “clutch hits,” but this doesn’t tell us how they did it — just that they did.

One thing that “right way” teams are praised for is situational hitting. FanGraphs has a stat for that: RE24. While FanGraphs’ primary “runs created above average” stat, wRAA, uses the average change in run expectancy given an event irrespective of the base/out situation, RE24 does incorporate base/out state. For wRAA, a home run is a home run whether the bases are empty with none out or loaded with 2 out, while RE24 takes into account the different base/out run expectation. As I discuss here, if we subtract the average linear weight runs (wRAA) from the RE24, we can see how much better the Angels performed in terms of “situational hitting.”

2007: wRAA +7, RE24 30.5, situational +23.5
2008: wRAA -18, RE24 18.7, situational +36.7
2009: wRAA 88, RE24 92.8, situational +4.8

Impressive. However, it actually doesn’t tell us what we want to know. This tells us that we would expect the Angels to have scored more runs than traditional linear weights (wRAA) would suggest, but the Pythagorean expectation is already using their actual runs scored. We want to know why they outperformed their run differential (for now, from the offensive perspective) — not why they scored more than their linear weights suggest, but why they won more than their actual runs suggest.

Enter WPA/LI. While RE24 takes base/out context into account, WPA/LI goes one step further, by taking base/out/inning into account. You can follow the link to read up, but basically, it’s “unleveraged” Win Probability. It sounds like Clutch, but it’s actually WPA without the Clutch/Leverage element. To use an example to differentiate WPA/LI: with two outs in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded, for WPA/LI a walk and a home run have the same linear weight, whereas those events would be different for both wRAA and RE24, since they don’t take game state into account. So, if any stat could take into account a player or team adjusting their play to a situtation, this would be it. As I did in my earlier Little Things post for individuals, we can do for teams: convert wRAA to wins (I crudely divide by 10), then subtract that from WPA/LI to get the situational wins above average linear weights.

2007: wWAA +0.7, WPA/LI -1.32, -2.02 Little Things
2008: wWAA -1.8, WPA/LI -1.21, +0.59 Little Things
2009: wWAA +8.8, WPA/LI +6.37, -2.43 Little Things

Now that is just bizarre. With RE24, we saw that the Angels the last three seasons have been very good at maximizing their situational hitting in certain base/out states. But “Little Things” shows the exact opposite in 2007 and 2009. They’re about “even” in 2008, although far short of what RE24 shows, and they’re 2 wins below their traditional linear weights in 2007 and 2009. It’s not just that the Angels’ hittesr aren’t living up to their reputation (according to this measure) of “doing the little things,” it’s the contrast between RE24 and WPA/LI based “little things” that is striking. It’s as if the Angels do a great job of hitting with runners in scoring position when they’re playing in blowouts, but make terrible situational plays (relative to the average run expectancy) in close games. And then if you look at their hitter’s “Clutch” scores from those years… It’s really hard to know what the big picture is.

This post has no conclusion other than to note that the title is ironic. It would be foolhardy to dismiss this all as luck. The Angels have been a very good team no matter how you slice it. And just because we don’t understand “how they do it” at the moment doesn’t mean we can never know. But at the moment, I’m simply struck by the oddity.

Yesterday I looked at David Ortiz’s decline in plate discipline values. Today I am going to turn to his power numbers. Because of Ortiz’s inclusion on the leaked 2003 list of players who tested positive for performance-enhancing substances, any discussion of his power is going to turn to speculation based on that, but I am not particularly interested in covering that angle and prefer to focus on his numbers.

Ortiz’s power decline has come in a very particular manner. Look at his ISO to each field over the years. His peak years were 2003 to 2007 before his decline began in 2008.

            ISO
       left  center  right
2003   .327   .310   .429
2004   .260   .380   .449
2005   .223   .345   .493
2006   .260   .460   .533
2007   .280   .272   .444
2008   .256   .196   .383
2009   .290   .331   .276

In his peak Ortiz showed a typical left-handed power-hitter split with his biggest power coming to right field. In the past two years, interestingly, his power to left and center held steady while to right it has fallen off. His loss of power has been almost exclusively a decrease in power of pulled balls in play. Showing it graphically (with the number the fraction of balls in the air to each region and the shading the slugging on those):

The fraction of those to deep right and the slugging on those balls in play has fallen off in the past two years, while the fraction of balls in play to the infield and just beyond has risen.

It is interesting that Ortiz has lost power to right while he has tried to swing more at inside pitches, which he would typically pull. It could be that as Ortiz has lost some power to right he has tried to compensate by swinging at more inside pitches in an attempt to get the big pull power on them.

One encouraging sign, as a commenter to yesterday’s post pointed out, is that after a horrid April and May, Ortiz had a much better June through September.

Generally, though, I find it interesting that his power to center and left has been largely unaffected and wonder how that compares to other aging sluggers.