Episode Twenty-Nine
In which the panel is getting intimate.
Headlines
Trey Hillman Departs
Ken Griffey Nods Off
Understanding Media (or Something Like That)
… and other askance looks!
Featuring
Matt Klaassen, Philosophizer
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In looking at Carl Crawford’s career totals this morning, it’s hard not to be impressed by his consistent stolen base numbers. Since 2003, he has stolen between 46 and 60 bases in every year except one (2008, when he wasn’t healthy), and he’s already in the top 100 in all time base stealing leaders. He’s an excellent baserunner, one of the best in the game, and it’s part of the reason he’s going to become a very rich man this winter.
However, this post isn’t about Crawford. It’s almost impossible to look at the SB leaderboard and not be in awe of the sheer dominance of Rickey Henderson, who has 468 more steals than anyone else in the history of the game. Only 43 people have ever stolen 468 bases in their careers, and yet that’s the margin between Henderson and the next most prolific thief.
Once you start looking at Henderson’s numbers, you can’t help but be drawn to 1982: 130 stolen bases, a number exceeded by only four teams last season. In addition, he was caught stealing another 42 times for 172 total stolen base attempts. He was on first or second base with the next base open 225 times, and he attempted 172 steals.
Seventy-six percent of the time, when he had the chance, he ran. The league average, not including Henderson’s craziness, was 7.8 percent. Tim Raines, who led the National League in stolen bases that year, ran on 36 percent of his chances.
We hear talk about how the game has changed so dramatically in the last 20 years, switching to a home runs and strikeouts model. However, the league average attempted stolen base rate hasn’t fallen all that far, as runners in 2010 have taken 6.3 percent of their stolen base chances to date. It’s lower, but perhaps not as dramatically so as the hyperbole would suggest.
Twenty-eight years ago, the best basestealer in the world saw an open base and ran 76 percent of the time. Forget 511 wins or a 56 game hitting streak – that’s a number that will never be duplicated. Maybe the game hasn’t changed all that much – it’s just without the most aggressive runner anyone has ever seen.
Since the Minnesota Twins signed him for $180,000 as a product of the now defunct draft-and-follow system back in 2002, Evan Meek has both tantalized and frustrated his employers. But now, with his fourth organization, Meek may soon inherit a prominent role in the ‘pen.
A stocky 6-0, 220 pound right-hander known for touching the mid-90’s with his fastball, Meek was nevertheless released by the Twins in 2005 after he walked 36 batters in 18 innings in the Low-A Midwest League. The San Diego Padres picked up the Bellevue (Wash.) Community College product, stuck him in the starting rotation and watched him whiff (8.7 K/9) and walk (4.8 BB/9) the yard in the High-A California League in 2006. In August of ’06, Tampa Bay acquired Meek as the PTBNL in a deal for Russell Branyan. Shifted to relief in 2007, he punched out 9.3 batters per nine frames in the Double-A Southern League, but walked 4.6 per nine as well.
Tampa didn’t place Meek on the 40-man roster after the season, leaving him subject to the Rule V Draft. The Pittsburgh Pirates, impressed with Meek’s work in the Arizona Fall League, snagged him with the second overall pick in the Rule V proceedings.
For the first month of the 2008 season, Meek flailed to the tune of seven K’s, 12 walks and three wild pitches in 13 innings for Pittsburgh. He was behind in the count before you could say “Marmol”–Meek’s first pitch strike percentage was 44.3, compared to the 58 percent major league average.
Still, the Pirates were intrigued enough to work out a trade with the Rays so that Meek could be sent down to the minors. In 57.1 combined frames between Double-A Altoona and Triple-A Indianapolis, he punched out eight hitters per nine innings and induced a ground ball 60 percent of the time. Most importantly, Meek issued just 2.7 walks per nine innings.
Last season, Meek began the year back at Indy but got the big league call in late April. When he took the mound, the outcome of the game was already largely determined–Meek’s Leverage Index was 0.63, lowest among regular Pirates relievers. Showcasing 93 MPH heat, a hard 90 MPH cutter and low-80’s breaking stuff, Meek had 8.04 K/9 in 47 IP, burning worms at a 52.1% rate. But alas, control remained elusive. He walked 5.55 per nine frames, posting a 4.18 expected FIP (xFIP). A left oblique strain shut Meek down in mid-August.
In 2010, the 27-year-old has been a revelation. Sure, he has been lucky to post a 0.69 ERA in 26 innings pitched–he’s eventually going to surrender a home run, and he isn’t likely to strand 85.2 percent of base runners all season. But Meek has legitimately been one of the best ‘pen arms in the majors. With his fastball up a tick in velocity, he has 9.35 K/9, 2.42 BB/9 and a 52.2 GB%, owning a 2.83 xFIP that ranks within shouting distance of San Francisco’s Brian Wilson (2.77 xFIP) and Kansas City’s Joakim Soria (2.71 xFIP). That’s not to suggest that he’s suddenly on the same plane as the Giants’ mohawked stopper or the Mexicutioner, but Meek is pitching marvelously.
While he’s doing a slightly better job of locating this season, raising his percentage of pitches within the strike zone from 51.9 percent in ’09 to 53.1 percent in 2010, the big difference is that Meek is getting batters to chase his stuff off the plate for the first time. As a Rule V selection, Meek garnered outside swings just 13.2 percent of the time. Last year, his O-Swing was still below average, at 22.1 percent. But in 2010, he’s getting hitters to hack at 28.2 percent of his out-of-zone offerings.
As Meek continues to mow down hitters, he’s earning the trust of Pirates manager John Russell. In April, Meek’s Leverage Index was a custodian-level 0.66. But in May, his 1.66 LI trails only closer Octavio Dotel. He’s also being deployed often for multi-inning stints, with seven of his 19 appearances lasting a full two frames. It took a while, but Pittsburgh’s patience with Meek is paying dividends.
Undoubtedly, everyone who reads this site knows of the situation between Marlins shortstop Hanley Ramirez and manager Fredi Gonzalez which developed over the last few days. Ramirez’s actions, particularly his comments on Gonzalez’s lack of major league experience as well as Ramirez’s unwillingness to apologize to his teammates, seemed like the perfect primer for a massive clubhouse rift if it wasn’t handled appropriately.
The main issue for Gonzalez and the Marlins is that Hanley Ramirez is clearly the best player on the team. With the Marlins at 22-19, within three games of the division and one game of the wild card, losing Ramirez for multiple games could be extremely damaging to their playoff aspirations. Ramirez has a 130 wRC+ so far this year – a down year so far. Still, that’s extremely productive for a shortstop who appears to have figured out his former issues in the field. That makes Ramirez about a 5 win player even if his hitting doesn’t return to the 150 wRC+ he was at from 2007-2009, and a 7 win player if it does. Benching Ramirez for a significant period of time simply was not an option for Gonzalez.
Today, Ramirez was in the lineup after apologizing to his team. Ramirez was the most valuable position player for the Marlins, posting a .146 WPA in a 3-5 effort including an RBI in the two run fifth which gave the Marlins a lead they wouldn’t relinquish, as they defeated the Cardinals in St. Louis by a score of 5-1.
Much of the sabermetric community harps on the in-game decisions made by managers. We love to dissect the tiny differences between bringing in a closer in the 8th inning or batting a slow but excellent hitter in the leadoff slot. The impacts of those decisions tend to be minimal over the course of the season – usually costing teams only a few runs over 162 games. We spill so many words over these decisions because they seem like such easy fixes. It’s painful to see men that have been inside baseball seem to misunderstand such simple concepts.
Situations like the one that Fredi Gonzalez has had to defuse are much more likely to cost a team multiple wins over the course of a season. If the star player is visibly disgruntled and isn’t playing up to his potential, the impact on the team will almost certainly be more than a few runs. If the manager takes things too personally and benches the player for an extended period of time, or worse, instigates a trade or demotion, the impact will almost certainly be multiple wins. The job of the manager is to produce the most wins from the talent he’s given. Keeping the players in a situation in which they will produce at their highest levels is assuredly more important than the minutiae of lineup construction and, in all but the most extreme of cases, bullpen and bench management.
It certainly appears that Gonzalez has deftly handled this situation. Ramirez is back in the lineup and has apologized, and he produced in his first game back. Gonzalez has performed the most important duty in his role as manager. Now what’s important is that this issue appears to be squarely behind the Marlins, and they can go back to winning games instead of dousing clubhouse fires. If the Marlins are still winning two months from now, nobody will even remember this incident, and for that, Fredi Gonzalez deserves praise.
Last week, I introduced to the wide readership a line of inquiry down which the very famous Jonah Keri had gotten me started. The line of inquiry concerns those bloggers who, despite almost no promise of financial compensation or notoriety, have persisted in their craft.
The question I posed — after having considered Will Leitch’s suggestion from his Costas Now episode that blogging is a really hard work — the question I posed goes like this:
Why do it? If, as Leitch suggests, it’s hard work, why do it? If, as I can tell you personally, it provides very little in the way of fame and/or cash money, why do it?
I’ve posed this same series of questions — or at least ones very similar to them — to some of the interweb’s more thoughtful baseball writers. This (and maybe next) week, I’ll be sharing their responses in these electronic pages.
Today’s willing participant is actually Mr. Leitch himself. Besides serving as the founding editor of Deadspin and a current contributing editor to New York Magazine, and besides authoring a number of real-live books (including the very recent Are We Winning?, available wherever the internet is present), Will Leitch is also one of the few living humans capable of expressing seven emotions at once, as this photographic evidence suggests:
Leitch: I’m not sure I’m the ideal person for this, because I’d been starving as a writer for nearly a decade before Deadspin finally launched. I started writing on the Web, back at The Black Table and, before that, with Life As A Loser, because I wanted to get better, because the Web was the perfect place to hone your craft out in public, in real time, with people letting you know what was working and what wasn’t. It also allowed me to do all this for free, and I mean “allowed”: I would have never been able to develop a voice had I been having to sing for my supper. It was an advantage to work it all out with nobody paying and few people reading. I did it because I have no idea how to do anything else. I wrote about a subject I know and care about and, with any luck, I’ll get to keep doing it forever.
One of the more intriguing quirks of the young 2010 season has been Jose Lopez. A full time second baseman for the prior four seasons, Lopez earned a reputation as a visually unappealing glove man who made frequent lapses on routine plays and exhibited little horizontal range. A variety of numerical systems tempered that judgment, painting Lopez as a roughly average fielder at second.
Given his set of skills though, he was never a perfect fit at second base. He moved best forward and back, not side to side and owning a strong arm there was always a sense that he profiled more as a third baseman. Lopez never got that opportunity however as Adrian Beltre, one of the best fielders in recent memory, reigned over third base.
Once Beltre departed to the land of free agency, it seemed that Lopez was too entrenched at second base to change positions. That notion was only further reinforced when the Mariners signed Chone Figgins this past winter. Figgins is a versatile player but he had settled into a majority role at third base and performed quite well there. It was surprising to many then when tidbits began to leak that the Mariners were considering moving Lopez to third and Figgins to second. It was more surprising still when it actually happened this spring.
However, those surprises have nothing on the surprise over the actual results. Jose Lopez has looked fantastic and the numbers agree. Coming off five years of Adrian Beltre, Mariner fans steeled themselves all winter awaiting the inevitable downgrade in defensive performance. Instead, Jose Lopez has undergone a renaissance at the position. His UZR numbers are off the charts, well ahead of any other player in baseball and DRS also has Jose Lopez leading the league.
It’s not all cheery news however. While Lopez may pace the entire league in defensive rankings at the moment, he also trails the entire league in hitting value. Seriously. According to wRAA, Jose Lopez has been the least valuable hitter in baseball. We have all heard the term ‘all glove, no bat’ before, but this is insane.
Index
1. Introduction
2. Fielder Credits and Debits
3. Batted Ball Types
4. GDP and Arm
5. Base Runner and Outs Adjustments
6. Other Infield Positioning
7. Outfield Positioning and “Wall Balls”
8. Infield Line Drives and Pop-ups
9. Park Adjustments
10. The Baselines
11. Recent Revisions
12. Sample Size and Reliability
13. UZR and Aging
14. Consistency from Year to Year
15. Does UZR tell us what actually happened on the field?
16. Conclusions
In a few hours, Livan Hernandez will take the hill against the Mets, and he will look to continue one of the luckiest runs in the history of major league baseball.
A quick look at the gap between Hernandez’s ERA (1.46) and his xFIP (5.09) would tell that he’s gotten fortunate, but I don’t even think those numbers do justice just how incredibly Hernandez has walked the tightrope this season.
He’s thrown 49 1/3 innings in his seven starts and allowed just nine runs while putting 51 men on base. Well, that’s not really true, because he’s allowed six home runs, so those guys were never really “baserunners” in the sense that most of us think of the word. Take the home runs out of the picture, and Hernandez has put 45 guys on base. Three of them have scored.
Three. Out of 45.
And the hilarious part is that he hasn’t even pitched all that well with runners on base. He’s pitched to 71 hitters when there as at least one man on. Of those 71, he’s walked nine, struck out just six, and posted an okay-but-not-spectacular 47% groundball percentage. However, opponents have an .054 batting average on balls in play against him in those situations. Oh Fifty Four.
It’s even better when opponents have put a runner in scoring position. In the 38 batters who have faced Hernandez with a chance to drive in a run, one has gotten a hit, and it was a single. Opponents are 1 for 30 with seven walks and a sac fly against Livan in RISP situations. Only four of those 29 outs were strikeouts.
I figured I should write about this while I still had the chance, because every time he takes the hill, there’s a chance it will all just blow up. No one can sustain this for very long, especially not a guy who just throws the ball over the plate and hopes the ball finds one of his fielders. But yet, for seven miraculous starts, Hernandez has seen just that happen.
It’s one of the most amazing things we’ll ever see on a baseball field.
The 2010 season isn’t going the way the Chicago White Sox had hoped. They are currently 7.5 games behind the Twins, and 5.5 behind the surprising Tigers. It’s still early, but given the talent gap between the Twins and White Sox, and the unlikelihood of the AL Wild Card coming out of a division other than the East, the White Sox playoff chances are fading rapidly. Starts at DH by Juan Pierre, Zombie Mark Kotsay, and, above all, Zombie Omar Vizquel are a fitting summary of the troublesome season on South Side.
There have been bright spots. Paul Konerko and, in particular, Andruw Jones have been hitting better than they have in years. One hitter whose season is off to an excellent start while not getting much press (although I’m sure White Sox fans are aware) is Alex Rios. Rios, who came over in a waiver claim from Toronto last August, has been on fire offensively, hitting .308/.350/.564 (.401 wOBA) while stealing bases efficiently and playing good center field defense. This is probably a surprise to many given his terrible 2009, when the Blue Jays let him go for nothing in return other than someone willing to take on the remainder of the seven-year, $70 million dollar contract that extends through 2014 (with a 2015 club option). While many analysts criticized the original contract as well as the White Sox/Blue Jays decisions to pick him up/let him go, as Dave Cameron and Tom Tango showed last season, all three decisions were justifiable at the time they were made.
Rios didn’t get better upon arrival in Chicago, to say the least, and finished 2009 with a horrific .247/.296/.395 line (.306 wOBA), with his fielding nowhere near his usual standard. Some probably thought the Jays had pawned off an albatross. So far in 2010, however, there are no obvious “luck” indicators for Rios. His current average on balls in play (.312) is actually lower than his career average (.319), and he’s hitting plenty of line drives without it being unsustainable. His home run per fly ball rate is a bit up, but not excessively, and it may be that he is better suited to his new home park. Hit Tracker doesn’t see him as overly lucky, in any case. Rios walk rate is down a bit and his O-Swing% is up a little, so those are worth tracking.
I doubt anyone thinks that Rios’ true offensive talent is really .400 wOBA. ZiPS sees his current true talent (“rest of season”) as .350 wOBA. Given his performance so far, if he hits .350 with average defense (to add to his current +7 figure) for the rest of the season, he will be worth about five wins in 2010. That’s a great deal for the White Sox money this season (Rios is owed $9.7 million guaranteed).
What about going forward? From 2011 to 2014, Chicago owes Rios about $49 million dollars. Assuming a gentle salary inflation (7%) and 0.5 WAR a season decline, they’re paying for a player who will be worth somewhere between 3 and 3.5 wins in 2011. Assuming Rios is a .350 wOBA hitter, that makes him a +12 hitter over 700 PA. I currently estimate Rios to be about a +4 position neutral defender. +12 hitting + 4 defense +25 AL replacement level all times 85% playing time = a 3.5 WAR player. This is a decent deal for the Sox. Not great, it isn’t as though the contract would be easy to trade if they wanted to do so. But it hardly looks like an albatross at this point.
A more interesting facet of this whole thing has to do with sample size. Yes, I know, that gets mentioned here all the time. The ZiPS RoS projections incorporate the proper amounts of regression for the various components, so it isn’t as if the current .350 wOBA projection is getting “fooled” the hot start. The point about sample size I want to make isn’t about 2010, though. Rather, it is about the overreaction that many had to Rios’ 2009. Rios was bad in 2009. However, from 2006-2008 he was worth an average of 4.5 wins a season. That history did not disappear during or after 2009. So many times we get wrapped up in pointing out that the current season is a “small sample size” that we forget that even a whole season (Rios had 633 PA in 149 games in 2009) tells us surprisingly little about a player’s true talent. That isn’t to say that 2009 should get thrown out as an ‘outlier’. But once previous performance and regression to the mean are taken into account, even the significance of a full season can be exaggerated.
I’m not sure the White Sox front office was thinking in exactly these terms when the picked Rios up off of waivers — I’m sure they consulted their scouts heavily, as well they should have. However it came about, they rightly understood that there was more to Rios than his 2009 performance, and got a very good player at a reasonable price without giving up talent. 2009 counts, but it wasn’t the whole story — or the whole sample.
On Monday, May 17, the Boston Redsox led the New York Yankees 9-7 entering the ninth inning. The historical record tells us that a team has more than a 90% chance of winning that game. The Redsox lost, turning a winnable game into an actual lost game.
Let’s count a winnable game as any game where the team has at least an 81.21% chance of winning at any point during the game prior to entering the ninth inning. We see this happened 2430 times last year. Not coincidentally, there were 2430 games played in 2009. Basically, if you have more winnable games than actual wins, then this means you lost a few more games than expected. You can call it bad timing, or non-clutch, or whatever term you like.
In 2009, the Mets had 77 winnable games, but ended the season with only 70 wins. They also had 89 lose-able games (chance of winning as low as 18.79% or worse), and ended up with 92 losses. They led the league in not winning as many games as they should have. On the other end of the spectrum were the clutch-filled New York Yankees. The Yanks had 97 winnable games, compared to their actual 103, and 69 lose-able games, but ended up losing only 59. That’s an 8 game improvement.
The 2009 Rays had an interesting season: they had 19 games that were considered both winnable and losable. For example, on August 30, 2009:
In the bottom of the 8th inning, up by two, with two outs, they were in a winnable position: 86.4% chance of winning. After Polanco hits a three-run HR two batters later, they had a 83.9% chance of losing. The Rays led the league in most winnable/lose-able games. The Chicago Cubs were on the other end, with only four games that were both winnable and lose-able.
Finally, the Arizona Diamondbacks provided their fans with the most thrills. They had 99 lose-able games, but ended up with the win 17 times to lead the league. The Pirates were only able to win 5 of their lose-able games.
As for 2010, the Diamondbacks have taken a reversal, with 22 winnable and 19 lose-able games, compared to an actual 16-23 record. The Tigers on the other hand have 18 winnable and 24 lose-able games, compared to an actual 22-16 record. And the Redsox have been involved in seven games where they had the chance to both win and lose the game, to lead the league.
