Archive for September, 2010

Tulo’s WPA And The MVP Award

One of the objections I heard today to my suggestion that Troy Tulowitzki deserves MVP consideration is that there’s a massive gap between him and Joey Votto in WPA. And it’s true, there is. Votto has the highest WPA in baseball, coming in at +6.47, while Tulowitzki’s +1.38 ranks him just 46th among position players, never mind all the pitchers who also rank ahead of him.

One of the main reasons why Tulowitzki’s WPA is so low is that a lot of his offense has come in games that had already been decided. In low leverage at-bats, he is hitting .361/.427/.649, but just .261/.357/.472 in high leverage situations. This gap is pretty large, and the opposite of Votto’s, who has hit better in high leverage situations this year. That makes a difference to a lot of people, and I understand why.

However, let me use an example from Saturday to show why you should be careful using context-dependent stats like WPA to determine how valuable a specific player was.

9/18, Colorado vs LA

Top 1st, 2 outs, runner on 1st, no score.

Tulowitzki hits a home run, giving the Rockies a 2-0 lead. Since their chances of winning jumped from 48 percent to 68 percent, Tulowitzki gets 0.20 added to his WPA total for the season.

Top 3rd, 2 outs, no one on, 2-0 Rockies.

Tulowitzki doubles to center. Because the Rockies were already likely to win the game, this double was worth a little less than a normal double, and he is credited with just 0.02 WPA. He would eventually score on Melvin Mora’s single, and the Rockies would take a 3-0 lead.

Top 5th, 1 out, runner on 1st, 3-0 Rockies.

Tulowitzki hits a home run, giving the Rockies a 5-0 lead. Because the Rockies already had an advantage, these runs were worth less than the earlier runs, so Tulowitzki only got 0.08 WPA for pushing their win expectancy from 86 percent to 94 percent.

I’d imagine you can see what happened here. Tulowitzki received minimal credit for his 5th inning home run because the Rockies already stood a really good chance of winning the game, and yet they had those good odds of winning because of what Tulowitzki did in his prior two at-bats. He essentially created his own low-leverage situation by single-handedly beating the Dodgers on Saturday.

Do you really want to say that Tulowitzki’s two-run homer in the 5th was less than half as valuable as his two run homer in the first? In terms of the story of the game, those runs didn’t have the same impact, but were they really less valuable? The fact is that the WPA of that HR is decided by how Tulowitzki performed in his first two at-bats of the game – should we hold a player’s good performances in less standing if they come after his previous good performances in the same game? Or, alternately, should we punish him for performing well on the same day that Jhoulis Chacin was throwing a shutout? If his first inning home run had tied the game, rather than breaking a tie, and his second home run had broken open a closer affair, the WPA story would be a lot different, even though the only variable we’re changing is the performance of the Rockies starting pitcher.

For these reasons, I lean towards context neutral performance. For me, WPA is like overall team performance – use it as a tie-breaker in a situation where it is otherwise hard to distinguish between two candidates, but don’t lean too heavily upon it. I’ll give Votto a bit of a boost for just how awesome he’s been in high pressure situations this year, but I’m not going to ignore how great Tulowitzki has been in situations where the game wasn’t close just because he helped make it not close in the first place.

WPA is great at telling the story of how a game unfolded. It is less great at evaluating how much a player helped his team win through his own actions. This doesn’t make it a bad stat, but it was designed for a specific purpose, and it is best used in that purpose. Trying to take it and turn it into a value stat for player performance is asking it to do something it was never intended for in the first place.


It Must Be Gardy

I don’t care about the Manager of the Year award. If fired Royals manager Trey Hillman won it this year it would be fine with me. In fact, I’ll start the campaign now: Hillman for 2010 American League Manager of the Year!

But seriously, folks… if Ron Gardenhire wins Manager of the Year, I’m fine with it. If he doesn’t, that’s fine with me, too. I don’t care. If he does win, I know that it will drive many saber-oriented Twins fans crazy, as I’ve read many of their criticisms of his decisions. You can find enough of those around if you look around the ‘net. I’m not here to say that Gardenhire is a bad manager. I don’t really know.

That last sentence is key to my post, as a couple of my favorite saber-friendly writers seem to think that a lack of knowledge about whether “Gardy” helps the Twins win or not redounds in his favor. Joe Posnanski writes:

I think Ron Gardenhire is the best manager in baseball. I think that not based on what we see but what we can’t see.

Commenting on Posnanski, Rob Neyer blogs:

Managers make moves that don’t make sense, based on the numbers we’re looking at … but we often don’t have all the numbers…. If we did have absolute knowledge, Gardenhire might look better than we think.

Posnanski’s appeal to our lack of knowledge either way is more obvious, but it is also present in Neyer’s strange thought about the “absolute knowledge” we don’t have — we “don’t know everything” going on with the Twins, so Gardenhire must be making more of a difference than other managers. I’m not going to criticize Gardenhire, but rather to point out the obvious problem with this claim.

To be fair, Neyer does make some other points (although doing so cuts against his “we don’t know” claim). He notes that the Twins have historically had a low payroll (although he also notes they don’t this year [thanks to the taxpayers’ largesse towards the impoverished Twins owners], which sort of makes the point irrelevant when considering 2010), but what does that have to do with Gardenhire? It was their front office that signed Jim Thome and Orlando Hudson and traded for J.J. Hardy. When the A’s were winning despite a low payroll in the first half of the decade, did everyone credit Art Howe? Yeah, I think they did — wasn’t that what Moneyball was all about, how Billy Beane was a mere figurehead and Howe was the real mastermind behind Oakland’s success?

Some will say that Gardenhire should get credit for the Twins’ winning despite injuries to Joe Nathan and Justin Morneau. The Twins were heavily favored to go to the playoffs long before the season started, and when Nathan went down I (incoherently) predicted that certain writers would use it as an excuse to give Gardenhire credit even though the best closers don’t matter all that much. Over the last three seasons, Nathan has averaged about 2 WAR. This season Jon Rauch has been worth 1 WAR. Obviously, a brutual loss. As for Morneau, he’s actually been worth 5.3 WAR this season — a career best. The “R” (“replacement”) in WAR accounts for the playing time element. Maybe Gardenhire saw this coming, and came up with the great idea of asking Morneau to hit for a Bondsian .446 wOBA in the short time he did have. “Strawberry, hit a home run!” “Okay, Skip.” “Ha-ha! I told him to do that!”

Going through these arguments (and there are others) distracts from my main point regarding the Poz/Neyer quotes, however. In both of them, it is asserted that we can’t say that Gardenhire isn’t a key to the Twins because we don’t know/don’t have all the information. Taken on its own, it is a fallacious argument from ignorance. “I’m asserting something without argument, and it’s your job to disprove it.” I’m not even claiming that they necessarily need numbers to back it up (it would be nice, of course). The problem is that just asserting that “we don’t know why the Twins are having success, so it must be due to Gardenhire” isn’t a valid argument. What would Neyer and Posnanski say to someone who claimed that the reason the Yankees are winning this season despite Derek Jeter’s season is because of Jeter’s “intangible” leadership? Hey, Jeter’s around, the Yankees are winning, there must be some connnection, right? We don’t know, but it would be “prudent” to be open to the possibility, right? How is that any more baseless than asserting that Gardenhire must be doing something we can’t see in the numbers or in his tactics? Maybe there are other managers around baseball who have helped their teams even more than Gardenhire has; how should we select which manager has done the best at things we don’t know about?

Maybe Gardenhire is making a difference. Maybe he isn’t. But the proper inference from “we don’t know” isn’t “he probably is,” but rather “we don’t know.”


Rivera’s Cutters Working the Count

We’re pleased to welcome Albert Lyu as the newest writer for FanGraphs. He impressed us with his submissions to the Community Blog, and so we’ve found a spot for him here on the team. We think you’ll enjoy having his work published here regularly.

Dave Allen has talked at length about Mariano Rivera’s cutters and how well he locates them, but it’s always interesting to analyze what many consider to be the greatest pitch in the game. I don’t believe that there is any other pitch in the game right now that can be used so exclusively yet so dominantly the way that Rivera uses his cutter.

We know that Rivera has pinpoint control and likes to work the outer and inner edges of the strikezone against both right-handed batters and left-handed batters. We also know that Rivera is great at working the count, rarely getting to three balls. Combining both of these ideas, can we figure out how Rivera works the count based on the locations of his cutters?

I took all of Rivera’s cutters since 2007 and split them into different count situations not including the 3-2 count: first pitch, behind in the count, ahead in the count, and with two strikes. Borrowing Dave’s terminology, I wanted to see if Rivera’s cutters exhibit a bimodal distribution consistently and how the pitches are distributed differently around the inside and outside edges of the strike zone based on the count situation. First up, let’s compare the first pitch of an at-bat Rivera throws against right-handed hitters to left-handed hitters (all plots are from the catcher’s perspective):

Keep in mind that Rivera’s cutter moves toward LHH and away from RHH. It’s clear that Rivera likes to start off an at-bat by throwing his cutter in the same location, throwing outside to RHH consistently but occasionally going inside as well. Against LHH, Rivera almost exclusively throws inside on the very first pitch. Notice also that most of these pitches are within the strikezone, again, mostly outside to RHH and inside to LHH. Let’s take a look at how Rivera locates his cutter when he is behind in the count with more balls than strikes:

In this case, Rivera forms more of a horizontal bimodal distribution than on the first pitch, locating cutters on the inside and outside edges of the strikezone against both handed batters. He also consistently hits the strikezone, but isn’t afraid to go inside on LHH and out of the zone even when he’s behind in the count. Let’s compare this with his cutters when he’s ahead in the count with more strikes than balls:

Here, we see a very clear bimodal distribution, where Rivera works both the inside and outside edges to both RHH and LHH. Against RHH, he loves to go outside again, but goes inside a lot more than he does on the first pitch. Against LHH, he goes inside more, but also goes outside a decent amount. What amazes me about this specific graphic is that the middles of each of the four hot spots of Rivera’s cutter locations are bisected by the border of the strikezone, whether it’s the inside border or the outside border. This speaks to the uncanny control that Rivera has and how he loves to attack either edge of the strikezone when he’s ahead in the count, likely inducing both called strikes and swinging strikes. Finally, let’s look at Rivera’s cutter locations when he has two strikes:

These look similar to the plots when Rivera is ahead in the count except for two significant differences. Against RHH, Rivera goes higher in the zone, especially up and inside in addition to the outside edge. Against LHH, Rivera goes outside much more than he goes inside, very different from the other count situations against LHH where Rivera goes inside more. With two strikes, both RHH and LHH should expect the outside cutter most of the time.

Just looking at traditional statistics will appropriately show how dominant Rivera has been in his career (2.21 ERA, 8.2 K/9, and 1.00 WHIP in over 1145 IP). However, the plots above tell us how he has achieved such success: by living on the black against both right-handed and left-handed hitters and being able to consistently hit his various spots so that hitters are forced to swing at difficult pitches no matter the count.


Troy Tulowitzki: NL MVP?

On Friday, we recorded our latest version of the podcast, which focused on the postseason awards. During the discussion, I suggested that I’d lean toward voting for Troy Tulowitzki, and that was before he launched two more home runs on Saturday. His numbers in September are just crazy good(.357/.407/1.000, .577 wOBA), and he’s a big reason why the Rockies are right back in the NL West race. But I’m not throwing my support behind him just because he’s bashing the baseball of late; I think there’s a pretty decent argument to be made that he’s been the league’s best player, even after accounting for the time he spent on the disabled list.

I think we can probably all agree that he’s been the best player in the NL on a rate basis. His .420 wOBA ranks second to Votto in the NL, and he’s a shortstop. Yes, his numbers get a boost from Coors Field, but his park adjusted wRC+ is still a fantastic 158, and translates out to 42 runs above average per 600 plate appearances. Votto’s 174 wRC+ translates out to 53 runs above average per 600 PA, leaving a gap that is easily overcome by the difference in scarcity between SS and 1B.

Of course, Votto actually has 600 PA (611, actually), while Tulowitzki has racked up just 476 trips to the plate this year. While Colorado’s shortstop has been the league’s best player when he’s been on the field, Votto has a significant edge in playing time, which is why he’s right there with Ryan Zimmerman at the top of the WAR leaderboards, and why he’s likely to win the award.

Even with Votto holding a +1 win advantage by WAR, I still think a vote for Tulowitzki is justifiable. WAR is more blunt hammer than precise chisel, so while it does a great job at telling you whether a player is good or bad, it is not designed to be used to separate out small differences among players having similar seasons. Votto’s +7.0 WAR isn’t so much better than Tulowitzki’s +6.1 WAR that we should definitely say that Votto has been more valuable. The best interpretation of those two numbers is that both have been fantastic, and that there’s room for discussion about which one has been better.

While we’re obviously big proponents of the usefulness of Wins Above Replacement, we do not encourage the use of it as a definitive ender of discussion when the subjects are within the margin of error. It’s one thing to use WAR to declare that Votto has clearly been better than, say, Aubrey Huff, but its another to state that it is perfectly accurate down to the decimal point. Votto and Tulowitzki are both good candidates, as is the always overlooked Ryan Zimmerman. To me, it is not nearly as clear cut which one should take home the trophy as it is over in the American League. I think reasonable cases can be made for all of them, and given the level to which Tulowitzki has been performing, it’s likely that the gap between he and Votto will decrease even more before the season is over.

Quantity or quality? Tulowitzki has the latter, having shown himself to be the NL’s best player when healthy. Does the time spent on the DL hurt his value? Certainly. But I think he might be the NL MVP anyway.


Prospects Chat – 9/20/10


Four Factors: Kemp’s Down Year

Barring one of the most unlikely 60 plate-appearance-runs in baseball history, Matt Kemp’s 2010 season is bound to go down as his worst full season as a Major Leaguer. After putting up wRC+’s above 115 and wOBAs above .349 from 2007-2009, Kemp has a .314 wOBA and a 97 wRC+ in 618 plate appearances this season, which is about 25 runs worse on offense than last year. As Kemp has served as one of the Dodgers’ franchise players, the drop in performance has to be particularly worrisome for those in the LA front office.

Diving slightly beneath the surface, we can see that the culprits aren’t exactly his power stroke nor his ability to reach via the walk. Kemp’s 7.9% walk rate is nearly a percentage point better than his career average and his .181 ISO is exactly in line with his career mark. That leaves the other two factors of hitting – strikeout rate and BABIP – as culprits for this decline. Indeed, Kemp has seen has BABIP fall down to earth, a league average .299 mark after posting .340 BABIPs or better from 2007-2009, and his strikeout rate has skyrocketed from 22% to 28%.

Just over half of this decline can be attributed to Kemp’s relative BABIP issues. The nearly 40 point drop in BABIP has cost Kemp nearly 30 points in wOBA according to the Four Factors method. That leaves the other twenty points remaining between his .314 wOBA and his typical .360-.370 wOBA to his strikeout rate, which is confirmed by the method.

The difference doesn’t really get us much closer to understanding why Kemp’s numbers are down, we just know with which components of the game he’s struggling. Part of it is probably luck and random variation, but I believe a more significant cause can be seen in Kemp’s plate discipline numbers. Kemp thrives on making excellent contact, as that spurs not only his power production but also his excellent prior numbers on balls in play.

The best way to make solid contact is by swinging at pitches that are the easiest to hit – ostensibly, those that fall inside the strike zone. Kemp has had issues with that this season, as his Z-Swing% has fallen from 72.5% in 2008 and 68% in 2009 to 64.5% in 2010. Meanwhile, he’s still swinging at over 30% of pitches outside of the zone – it’s not simply a matter of Kemp swinging less. Combine this lack of swings at pitches in the zone with a lack of contact on pitches in the zone – a Z-Contact rate down by five percentage points this season – and Kemp is putting roughly the same amount of pitches in play, but fewer of them are of the easier kind to hit- the inside the strike zone variety.

It’s possible I’m missing something here – say, a hitch in Kemp’s swing – that I would have had to see more than a select few of Kemp’s plate appearances this season to adequately judge. But the numbers definitely suggest that Kemp’s struggles are due to striking out more and reaching on fewer balls in play – that’s hard to argue. Kemp’s plate discipline numbers suggest that he’s not hitting the more hittable pitches he’s seeing this year, which is making it difficult for him to maintain the brilliant BABIPs that have sustained his hitting lines to date. Regardless whether this is the case, Kemp and the Dodgers need to figure the reason why quickly, because Kemp is simply not a productive player if his bat continues to play at this level.


One Night Only!

Note: As reader Tim points out, Jair Jurrjens has been scratched tonight and will be replaced by MLB debutant Brandon Beachy, who’s done this through 45.2 Triple-A IP this season: 9.46 K/9, 1.18 BB/9, 0.39 HR/9, 2.19 FIP. A couple months ago, gondee over at Talking Chop asked the question, “Is this guys for reals?” You can read his answer here.

This edition of One Night Only will give you neither answers nor the truth.

(NERD scores in parentheses.)

Cincinnati (7) at Milwaukee (9) | 8:10pm ET
Starting Pitchers
Reds: Homer Bailey (7)
91.0 IP, 7.62 K/9, 3.26 BB/9, .316 BABIP, 40.7% GB, 8.5% HR/FB, 4.18 xFIP, 1.6 WAR

Brewers: Chris Capuano (4)
50.1 IP, 7.51 K/9, 2.86 BB/9, .286 BABIP, 42.3% GB, 11.9% HR/FB, 4.04 xFIP, 0.3 WAR

Notes
• A reader — somewhere, sometime, writing from one of these towns that people are always living in — asked about the Brewers’ NERD and why it was so high. That’s a good question. Here are the reasons. For one, they’re actually the fourth-best team in the majors per park-adjusted weighted runs above average (wRAA), with +63.9. That mark places them first among National League teams. So that’s one thing. Another is this: the Brewers are third-best, behind Toronto and Boston, in park-adjusted HR/FB. So, that’s the second thing: they hit homers. Finally, the Brewers have been unlucky offensively. Before play on Sunday, they’d scored only 676 runs, but had recorded 702 Base Runs. NERD gives up to a 2.00-point bonus for (bad) luck (using the formula (Runs – Base Runs)/-10), and the Brewers are beneficiaries of said bonus right now. Without it, they’d still have a NERD score of 7, but wouldn’t be reaching their current lofty heights.
• Some people in this world have gone their whole lives without once seeing Juan Francisco take an at-bat. Luckily, you can do that tonight, as the free-swinging Dominican will almost definitely make at least a pinch-hit appearance this evening. In 320 PAs at Triple-A Louisville this season, Francisco slashed .286/.325/.565 with a .332 BABIP. StatCorner has him with a 114 wOBA+, which means that Francisco was above-average in the International League.
• Hey, observe what Homer Bailey’s done since his return from the DL in mid-August: 40.1 IP, 36 K, 12 BB, 2 HR. That’s a FIP of like 2.95 or so.

Other Notes
Tampa Bay (10) at New York Americans (7), 7:05pm ET
• This game is effectively meaningless, as, per Cool Standings, each team has better than a 99% chance of making the playoffs. Still, Ivan Nova’s starting for the Yankees. His NERD (6) has dropped in recent starts, but he still features a changepiece that many of our West Coast brothers and sisters wouldn’t hesitate to call “gnar-gnar.”

Texas (7) at Los Angeles Americans (1), 8:10pm ET
• I don’t know a ton about pitching mechanics — and, specifically, the sort of terminology one might employ to appear knowledgeable about such a thing — but I know that Jered Weaver seems to have a particularly efficient-looking wind-up. Specifically, he seems adept at contorting his mid-section in such a way — by sort of turning his torso plate-ward and “leading” with his chest — as to give his arm quite a bit of “whip.” Anyway, he’s had an excellent season (204.0 IP, 3.50 xFIP) despite possessing a fastball that’s just barely averaged 90 mph. Moreover, his curve (+2.23 per 100 thrown) and change (+1.66) are both excellent by our pitch-type linear weights.

Also Playing
These games are very likely playing at some kind of sporty channel near you.

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The Mariners’ Catchers Can’t Hit

In a season defined by Murphy’s Law, the Mariners’ inability to field a worthwhile hitting catcher ranks lower on the repair list than it would in most years. The Mariners’ collection of backstops has combined for a .246 wOBA. As faith has it, the 2005 Seattle club was the last team to have a catching staff so inept at the plate that they combined for a positional wOBA under .250. In other words, Seattle has seen this movie before.

The 2005 edition of Seattle’s finest highlighted their patent on Everlasting Gapstoppers. Miguel Olivo, Pat Borders, Yorvit Torrealba, Rene Rivera, Wiki Gonzalez, Dan Wilson, and even Miguel Ojeda contributed to the mess. This year’s group is more concise, with Adam Moore being the most responsible. Moore and Olivo actually have more in common from their awful seasons than one would suspect. Moore is older now than Olivo then, but their respective lines stack up well:

Olivo (’05): .151/.172/.276
Moore (’10): .169/.199/.260

Olivo and Moore each struck out in nearly a third of their at-bats and, while Olivo walked once for every 12.5 strikeouts, Moore is walking once every 11. Don’t mistake Moore as the only contributor to the awfulness. Rob Johnson and Eliezer Alonzo both own wOBA lines below .265, and Josh Bard’s .303 shines bright in comparison.

The free agent catching market is rarely strong but the Mariners would be hard-pressed to find a downgrade. After all, their wOBA is closer to Mario Mendoza’s career mark (.231) than Paul Bako’s (.275). The M’s won’t respond like they did in 2005: by drafting Jeff Clement during the season then adding Kenji Johjima in the winter. Jack Zduriencik has shown a savvy for trades, so maybe the answer arrives from that form. Whatever happens, history suggests the 2015 Mariners’ backstops are going to be atrocious.


No Free Passes Against Lopez

Of the 133 qualified relievers this season, only two have managed to compile walk rates better than one per nine innings pitched. Those two are Edward Mujica of the Padres and tonight’s featured pitcher: Wilton Lopez of the Astros. Lopez’s 0.73 BB/9 rate in 62 IP leads all relievers, and it makes him a rarity: a productive reliever who doesn’t rely on the strikeout. Lopez is the only reliever in the top 25 in reliever FIP to with a strikeout rate below 7.0 K.9.

Rate starts are nice, but when it comes to players like Lopez, it can be easier to understand just how well they are pitching with raw numbers. Lopez has walked only five batters all season of the 244 that have faced him, and that includes one intentional walk.

Lopez “pounds the zone” to a degree, to use a favorite cliche of announcers. According to Pitch F/X data, Lopez hits the strike zone with 51.6% of his pitches, a mark exactly five percentage points above the league average. That puts him in the upper echelon of qualified relievers, ranking 11th. However, simply hitting the zone often is no guarantor of limiting walks. The walk rates of those in the top 10 in zone% range from 1.25 (Rafael Betancourt of Colorado) to 4.09 (Robinson Tejada of Kansas City), and although we see more in the 1-2 range than 3-4, there’s more to avoiding walks than simply hitting the zone.

The key, at least for Lopez, appears to be the ability with which he can draw strikes with both his two-seam and four-seam fastballs. Lopez has thrown 448 four-seamers and 244 two-seamers this season, and both pitches have fallen for strikes over 68% of the time, whether it’s of the contact, called, or swing-and-miss variety. It should come as little surprise, then that when we take a look at his pitch selection by count, his go-to pitch has been one of his fastballs.

In the six (!) 3-0 counts that Lopez has seen this seasons, he’s thrown the four-seamer four times (three strikes), and the two-seamer twice (both strikes). In the eight 3-1 counts, we see seven fastballs (five strikes) and one changeup (for a strike). Lopez has thrown a more substantial 20 pitches in a full count this season. Again, the fastball has been prominent, featured 18 out of 20 times and thrown for a strike a remarkable 17 times. He’s also gone to his other two pitches, the slider and the changeup, one time each, with the result each time being a foul ball.

Most remarkably, of the 20 pitches Lopez has thrown in these full counts, 18 of them have drawn swings. Only two of them have been whiffs, but it’s still remarkable that only twice have hitters even left it up to the umpire to call the pitch a ball. When we take a look at the location chart from Texas Leaguers.com, we see that Lopez has been near the zone with a majority of his full count pitches.

These graphs aren’t perfect at predicting an umpire’s call based on location, but I wouldn’t bet that 90% of these pitches would be called strikes, and swinging 90% of the time or higher is likely far from the optimal strategy. That said, most of these pitchers are close enough that it wouldn’t be worth leaving the decision up to the human umpire. Lopez’s excellent control with the fastball – roughly 10 percentage points more strikes with his fastball than the league average – keeps hitters on their toes and expecting strikes.

Lopez has been extremely successful as a reliever this year, posting 1.2 WAR to date, and there’s no reason to think that he can’t continue this success. His arsenal – particularly, the presence of a changeup – suggests to me that he may be worth a shot in the rotation, but none of the current Astros starters are warranting the boot at this point. Regardless of what role the Astros use him in, Wilton Lopez should be able to provide the Astros with quality pitching for the next five seasons, chiefly due to his excellent control of the fastball.


FanGraphs Audio: The Great (Awards) Debate

Episode Forty-Five
In which the panel takes one step back and, like, a half-dozen forward.

Headlines
You Can Spell Josh Hamilton Without M or V or P, But You Shouldn’t*
Lefties, Lefties Everywhere: AL Cy Candidates
Cage Fighting: Cameron v Joe Pawl

*Especially since M is a letter in his surname.

Featuring
Dave Cameron, Bad as He Wants to Be
Jackie Moore, Real-Live Middle Wester
Joe Pawl, Real-Live New Yorker

Finally, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio on the flip-flop. (Approximately 40 min play time.)

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