As someone who spends a significant part of their work day at a desk, I spend a lot of time perusing stats. Not exactly an earth-shatterer — this is FanGraphs after all — but it does prod my mind to some interesting questions and processes. In fact, you may have read about one last week. As most of you know, I’m willing to be an open book when it comes to researching my pieces — like the Larry Walker one — so keep that in mind as you read.
Episode 140
Today’s guest Steve Slowinski contributes to both FanGraphs and DRaysBay — and, perhaps more importantly, is the driving force behind the very helpful FanGraphs (née Sabermetric) Library. We discuss, among other issues, how someone born in New Jersey and currently residing in Connecticut could every become a Rays fan. Also mentioned: Matt Moore and Brandon Guyer, just for fun.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 38 min. play time.)
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Nobody was expecting the Baltimore Orioles to instantly become playoff contenders in 2012, but today’s news out of Birdland is still depressing. According to Jim Duquette, Zach Britton’s shoulder injury from late last season is “still lingering” and will limit his workload during spring training. Britton was rated as the Orioles’ top pitching prospect coming into the 2011 season, and he was arguably the O’s best pitcher for the first half of the season before slumping badly down the stretch.
Britton is hardly the first Orioles’ pitcher to have injury troubles. Heck, at this point, Orioles fans probably expect the team’s best pitching prospects to either get injured or flop at the major-league level. Brian Matusz looked like he was off to a spectacular young career, before getting injured and failing to regain his velocity or control. Jake Arrietta and Chris Tillman used to be considered the future of the franchise, but neither has been able to successfully transition to the majors. Also, while not a highly rated prospect, Brad Bergesen flashed some promise in 2009, but has since had injury issues and trouble striking out major-league hitters.
So while this news about Britton shouldn’t be too surprising, it makes me wonder: how much of the Orioles’ struggles to develop good, young pitchers is a result of organization philosophy and management, and how much is just plain bad luck?
Intentional walks (IBB) are usually given to good and/or unprotected players in a lineup. Pitchers would rather face the next, weaker hitting batter. The IBBs lead to an inflated walk rate (BB%) for hitters. By removing IBB from a player’s BB%, a true walk rate emerges. A problem I noticed was that when a player’s IBB% increases so does their non-intentional walk rate (NIBB%). Here is an attempt at putting some numbers behind the assumption.
Spring Training is dangerously close these days, and once it starts, so do the position battles. All around Florida and Arizona you’ll see players fighting to win that last bullpen spot, platoon outfield job, rotation spot, etc. Many players who lose these battles will simply report back to Triple-A and work to get back to the show at some point, but others don’t have that option. They’re quite literally out of options.
To make a long story short, an out of options player is someone who has used up all three of their minor league options, meaning they were sent to the minors for at least 20 days in three different seasons. Once a player is out of options, he can’t be sent to the minors without first clearing waivers. As you probably know, a few of these guys will end up being traded over the next six weeks as their club looks to get some kind of return rather than lose them on the waiver wire for nothing.
MLB Trade Rumors put together a comprehensive list of this year’s out of options players, so let’s sort through the names to find some players that are useful, but just not to their current teams.
Josh Outman was back last year after missing the 2010 season due to an arm injury that required Tommy John surgery. That alone doesn’t make him unique — plenty of hurlers undergo the procedure — but there‘s more to the story.
Outman was employing a conventional delivery when his pitching elbow gave out, but that hadn’t always been the case. Prior to being drafted — in 2005 by the Phillies — the hard-throwing southpaw utilized a biomechanically-structured delivery that was developed by his father, Fritz. When I first interviewed Outman, in 2008, he described it this way.
“You would start from what would look like the stretch, your glove side facing the plate with the pitching hand in the glove. The pitching arm would then go to where the humerus is vertical, or the pitching elbow facing the sky and the elbow at a 90-degree angle. The glove would come up to where it appeared as though you were catching your glove-arm shoulder while bringing the glove elbow up high enough to conceal the baseball that is positioned almost behind your head. Then, taking a walking step towards the plate you would deliver the pitch.”
Outman, who was acquired by the Rockies earlier this off-season, made 14 appearances with Oakland last year, going 3-5 with a 3.70 ERA. He was 4-1, 3.48, in 12 starts, at the time of his 2009 injury.
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David Laurila: You blew out your arm in the middle of the 2009 season. Would that have happened with your old delivery? Read the rest of this entry »
(Note: I noticed a coding issue in the data, which resulted in three parks having a different classification. The data has been re-run to reflect the new results and the article updated to reflect the findings.)
Researchers have gone to great pains to highlight and account for factors outside of an individual player’s control when evaluating their performance and value. The standard for this is of course Voros McCracken’s seminal research into defense independent pitching and Tom Tango’s fielding independent pitching (FIP). While baseball is arguably the most “individualistic” of the major team sports, players do not perform in isolation from each other or from their environment.
Lately I’ve become more interested in how the physical environment of a team and its players affects their outcomes on the field. My initial research led me to look at whether a team’s home park and the degree to which it inflated or suppressed run scoring put the team at a fundamental advantage or disadvantage in terms of winning. The results suggested that hitter-friendly parks do, in fact, put a team at a fundamental disadvantage, likely due to the stress that playing 81 games a year in that environment places on the pitching staff.
In this article, I am concerned with how park factors may affect the various constructs we’ve developed to help us better evaluate a player’s talent and likely performance in the future. Specifically, to what extent to do park factors affect the usefulness of various ERA estimators? It seems reasonable to assume that while much of what happens when a ball is put in play is not controlled by a pitcher. However, given that some extreme parks are likely to exercise their own environmental force over the outcome of batted balls it stands to reason that ERA estimators that factor in a pitcher’s batted ball profile may do a better job in certain types of parks than others.
As a continuation of this week’s Best Pitches of 2011 series, we’ll look at the best changeups from 2011 today. The best sliders (by Chris Cwik) and the best curveballs (coming tomorrow by Paul Swydan) ssummarize the most effective breaking balls in baseball, but changeups are a distinctly different animal. Changeups comprise the majority of an entire subset of pitch types in offspeed pitches, and they are used differently from breaking balls too.
An offspeed pitch is normally intended to fool the batter by coming out of the pitcher’s hand appearing like a fastball, and then — with a Chris Berman WHOOP — it decelerates and drops dead towards the plate. Some changeups have armside fade, others are straight and run 10-15 mph slower than the pitcher’s fastball, and still others hit the floor with combinations of all of the above.
Carson talked earlier in the week about some of the numbers and points of context we considered in this series, and some of what he says about fastballs applies to changeups too, particularly when you consider changeups in the context of pitchers’ repertoires.
So without further ado, here are the best changeups of 2011.
Note: the average movement for a changeup in 2011 was -1.4 X-move and +4.3 Y-move.
Also note: I’ve added another pitch result stat, Whiff%, which is the number of misses per swing (as opposed to SwStr%, which is the number of misses per pitch)
On Monday morning, I wrote an article that revealed the top five teams in Major League Baseball at drafting and developing talent for their big league club over the past decade, starting with the 2002 Draft.
Several people commented that they wished to see the entire list of teams, ranked by total accumulated WAR and also including average WAR per homegrown player. Here is the entire league:
Yesterday, I discussed an important finding about the use of FanGraphs “Dollars” when evaluating past contracts. Specifically, I found that for all players with at least six years of service time in the past five years, their “Dollars” statistics summed $7.41 billion — but they were paid $8.46 billion. Players were paid 14% more than we estimated their market value to be at the time. This was happening primarily because we used projection systems that over-estimated playing time — with the side note that free agents tend to under-perform projections, anyway. Then there was this caveat: The $8.46 billion in total salaries doesn’t even take into account the value of draft picks surrendered to sign those free agents, which is another $780 million.