Our splits sections now include double splits for Home / Away and Handedness so you can can now see how a player did against righties at home vs righties away, and the same for lefties.
We’ve also added 1st half & 2nd half splits, with the cutoff date being the All-Star game for each season.
These are currently available in the player splits pages for both batters and pitchers.
Update: 1st and 2nd half splits are now available in the leaderboards.
No one gets elected to Cooperstown this summer, despite the deepest ballot of worthy candidates in years. Maybe ever.
What a debacle. At least now we can move on to talking about things that aren’t totally broken. Hopefully, by the time we have to do this again next year, better processes will be in place. Hopefully.
Kyle Crick enters 2013 as the top prospect in the San Francisco Giants organization. Having seen his final start of the 2012 season, I can attest to his having both the raw stuff and durable frame to eat innings at the Major League level. On a night where I saw him bad, Crick’s arsenal was awfully good. Seeing a great prospect on an off night presents an opportunity to discuss both Kyle Crick, and the value of a single look in context.
Video after the jump Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier in the offseason, it seemed absurd to think the Yankees wouldn’t acquire an established veteran catcher. Or re-acquire, if we’re speaking about Russell Martin. The Yankees are the Yankees, and even a fiscally restrained version of the Yankees is less fiscally restrained than almost everyone else. The Yankees, in theory, had the resources to get a catcher, and the Yankees, in reality, appeared to have a need at the position. And the Yankees always plan to contend, so addressing needs is sort of a thing.
Martin left, for a very reasonable contract with the Pirates. Other options have turned into non-options. The Yankees could still get a backstop, in that offseason time remains, but now they seem content to run with Francisco Cervelli, Austin Romine, and Chris Stewart. No one’s been promised a job, but this is the situation staring the Yankees in the face. These have been the in-house options all along, and the Yankees, to date, have been okay with them.
With fewer than three months until Opening Day, major league teams are revving up their ticket-sales operations. For nearly all teams, that means working to attract new season-ticket holders, as well as single-game and mini-plan ticket buyers. Only the Giants, Red Sox and Cubs have waiting lists to become season-ticket holders. Even the Phillies — which saw a 257-game home sell-out streak end last August — are selling partial season-ticket plans on their website.
Teams use a variety of marketing tools and incentives to attract ticket buyers. There are bobble-head giveaways, fireworks nights and bring-your-dog-to-the-park days. There are food coupons and discounts at the team merchandise store. But I want to focus on the basics: the day and time of game, the opponent and the ticket price. Teams use these factors in a variety of ways to drive ticket sales and maximize ticket revenue.
We’ve heard the terms “variable pricing” and “dynamic pricing.” Occasionally, they’ve been used interchangeably, although they apply to different pricing strategies.
They’re announcing the Hall of Fame results today, so a lot of people are talking about steroids right now. When people talk about steroids, they talk about home runs. And they talk about the integrity of the game, the disgrace of the “steroid era”, and what the muscle-bound cheaters did to the hallowed history books with their absurd power totals. 1998 is often held up as the pinnacle of the steroid era, where two PED users both broke the 61 home run barrier, and Mark McGwire was the first player to ever hit 70 home runs in a season. It was, obviously, the result of rampant steroid usage, you are going to be told.
After Aroldis Chapman, it’s easy to argue Tampa Bay’s Jake McGee was the league’s best left-handed relief pitcher last season. He recorded a 1.95 ERA (third behind Chapman and Eric O’Flaherty) and a 1.81 FIP (second behind Chapman) over 55.1 innings for the Rays. He racked up 73 strikeouts against just 11 walks (6.6 K/BB) in the always-tough AL East, and he did so with mastery of hitters from both sides of the plate. McGee held 90 lefties to a .256/.289/.376 (.289 wOBA) line and dominated 122 righties to the tune of a .097/.157/.134 (.120 wOBA) line. Remarkably, this comes just a year after right-handers torched McGee with a .487 wOBA (59 TBF).
Now, with the Rays searching for a bat and the Nationals searching for a left-handed reliever and a suitor for Mike Morse, McGee could become the subject of trade rumors. The pertinent questions: How much of McGee’s improvement was real? Can he continue be a legitimate threat against both lefties and righties?
Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.
1. Top Performances of the Puerto Rican League
2. Mostly Relevant Video: Boston Prospect Jose De La Torre
3. Final (!) SCOUT Leaderboards: Puerto Rican League
Top Performances of the Puerto Rican League
The playoffs for the Puerto Rican League (PRL) have begun — and, as such, the regular-season stats for the players in said League are final.
Here are the top performers of the PRL, per SCOUT (a metric explained below, but which, briefly stated, uses regressed inputs to help make sense of small samples).
Best Hitter (Overall): Pedro Valdes
A one-time member of both the Rangers and Cubs organizations — and owner of 93 major-league plate appearances — Pedro Valdes has spent the past 10-plus seasons in Japan and Mexico, predominantly. Provided his Baseball Reference page is accurate, he appears actually not to have played professional ball in 2012. Provided the author understands three words in Spanish, Valdes appears to be retiring from baseball completely following the completion of the Puerto Rican League. While hitting just two home runs in the PRL, Valdes owned the strike zone, posting a 30:16 walk-to-strikeout ratio in an estimated 116 plate appearances.
Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, which have typically appeared in the pages of Baseball Think Factory, will be released at FanGraphs this year. Below are the projections for the maybe-AL-East-favorite Toronto Blue Jays. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Other 2013 Projections: Angels / Astros / Athletics / Cubs / Giants / Nationals / Phillies / Rangers.
Batters
In 2012, Jose Bautista and Brett Lawrie combined for just 217 total games played and 935 plate appearances, posting a 3.2 and 2.9 WAR, respectively. Were each to have produced at similar rates over 650 plate appearances instead (which probably isn’t a responsible thing to assume, actually, but that’s what’s happening right now), that would have been worth about another two or three wins to the Blue Jays — and likely even more, on account of how the Jays’ main replacements at right field (Moises Sierra) and third base (Adeiny Hechavarria) were worth less than replacement level. For 2013, even with just ca. 1,100 plate appearances projected between them, Bautista and Lawrie are expected to combine for about 9.0 WAR — or, roughly what they’d have produced together in a full season in 2012.
Elsewhere, early indications are that the Blue Jays will wait until spring training to name a starting second baseman. ZiPS suggests that maybe Maicer Izturis and not Emilio Bonifacio would be the right choice, although it’s not the proverbial “slam dunk.”
