Eno Sarris Baseball Chat — 3/21/13
by Eno Sarris
March 21, 2013
Archive for March, 2013
Stryker Trahan: Building a D-Backs Backstop
When scouting, the first instinct is to comp. You fight the urge, knowing every player is an individual, but the desire to quantify the unknown inevitably creeps into your thoughts. Who has a similar body type? A similar swing? Approach? Range and athleticism? Background? Instinctively, you formulate a first impression by answering one question: Who does he remind me of?
Then there are prospects like Stryker Trahan. The attributes packed into his dense 5-foot-10 frame are anything but ordinary:
Daily Notes: Top Performances of the WBC, Conclusively
March 21, 2013
Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.
1. Top Performances of the WBC, Conclusively
2. Final SCOUT Leaderboards: World Baseball Classic
3. Video: Puerto Rico and Boston’s Jose De La Torre
Top Performances of the WBC, Conclusively
The 2013 edition of the WBC has ended, and the Dominican Republic — by way of a 3-0 victory over Puerto Rico (box) — are now World Champions of the World until 2017.
What follows is a totally infallible record of the WBC’s top performances, according to SCOUT (a metric explained below, but which, briefly stated, uses regressed inputs to help make sense of small samples).
Best Hitter: Hanley Ramirez
Dominican infielder Hanley Ramirez was forced to leave the WBC championship game in the sixth inning after injuring his thumb earlier in the contest while attempting to field a sharply hit ground ball between himself and shortstop Jose Reyes. Before that play, however, Ramirez established himself as the most proficient batter of the tournament, posting a 7:2 walk-to-strikeout ratio while also hitting two home runs in fewer than 30 plate appearances.
Building a Farm: National League West
Prospect lists are one of the best parts of the off-season. Marc Hulet published his top 100 yesterday as the culmination of several months of work, and Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, John Sickels and a plethora of websites have published others. Each group puts myriad hours into analyzing, calling, writing, editing, re-analyzing and finally publishing their work. But even after all that, they usually come to several different conclusions. I decided — instead of focusing on a specific list — to generate a list that combined each of these lists into one.
The idea of community or consensus lists isn’t new. Sites have done it before, but I’ve added some wrinkles:
Effectively Wild Episode 164: Dan Evans on Being a Baseball Renaissance Man and His New Job with the Blue Jays
March 21, 2013
Ben and Sam talk to former Los Angeles Dodgers General Manager Dan Evans about his history as a baseball renaissance man and his new roles with the Toronto Blue Jays and the Northern League.
Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
A Summary of the Positional Power Rankings Data
As you’ve no doubt noticed, we’ve been rolling out posts that work through the expected production for each team at each position on the diamond, and with the DH post going up this morning, we’ve now done a post for each of the nine spots occupied by position players. If you missed them, I’ll put the links below.
Introduction
Catcher
First Base
Second Base
Shortstop
Third Base
Left Field
Center Field
Right Field
Designated Hitter
We’ll tackle pitchers at the beginning of next week, but with hitters behind us, I thought it’d be interesting to take a little bit of time to look at some of the data to come out of the project so far. There are several things to note, and I’ll be writing about several of those things over the next few days. For now, let’s start with the main thing we noticed as we’ve gone along.
Who’s Going to Throw 2013’s Fastest Pitch?
If I had to distill the core purpose of FanGraphs down to a two-word remark, I’d assert that the purpose is to “answer questions”. Given a third word, I’d assert that the purpose is to “answer baseball questions”. That’s really what we’re all doing here; that’s really what we’re all doing almost all of the time. Many of the questions we try to answer here are important, in a baseball sense. They’re questions like “is this player good?” and “is this player going to be good?” and “why is this player good?” Other questions are less important, like “how many players bunted for doubles in the 2012 regular season?” I specialize in examining the unimportant questions, and today we’ll tackle another.
The goal is expressed in the headline: I want to talk about who’s going to throw the fastest pitch in the upcoming baseball season. There’s no trophy for the achievement (yet), and the fastest pitch might not even go for a strike, but we’re a people who love us some fastball velocity, to the extent that we dress it up with fancy words like “velocity” instead of simpler, more accurate words like “speed”. Surely, a player would be honored to know if he threw the league’s fastest pitch in a season. Pitchers like velocity, too. We all think velocity is important, so let’s talk about the pitch with the most velocity.
Joey Votto on Hitting
by Eno Sarris
March 20, 2013
Joey Votto wasn’t always Joey Votto. Not only is his mother happy about that fact — it would have made for quite a delivery — but his journey from the 44th pick in the 2002 draft to the hitter he is today covers a lot of ground. Talk to him about pulling the ball, infield fly balls, swing planes, and batted ball distance and you quickly understand that this is a man that studies and understands his craft. Learning his story from him can help us understand baseball better.
“I was a big pull hitter in high school, but when I tried to do that in Midwest League, I failed,” he said when we talked about hitting. He’s remembering it right, too — his .231/.348/.287 line in that league was very un-Votto-ian even if the walks were there. But since then he’s changed his approach in order to use the entire ballpark.
“The ability to spread the ball all over the field prevents shifting,” he said, and with his current approach, Votto thinks he’s “a tough guy to defend.” Specifically, Votto thought that the shift (and avoiding it) might be part of the reason why his .359 batting average on balls in play leads all hitters with with more than 2000 plate appearances since 2008.
Prospect Sleepers: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
During my 2011-12 Top 15 prospects lists (in other words, prior to the 2012 season) I added a 16th player to each list by identifying a sleeper, or potential breakout star. Looking back more than a year later, I am still quite pleased with the picks – although I had more than a few misses with my collection of hits. Prospecting writing is, after all, about trying to be right more often than you’re wrong.
Below, you’ll find a review of some of my best picks, as well as my worst choices. Next week, I’ll role out a new group of sleeper prospects for 2013 – chosen by both myself and some of the smartest talent evaluators, scouts and front office members from around Major League Baseball.
A Snapshot of Team Finances: Bottom Tier
Here on the site, we’re currently doing a series called the Positional Power Rankings, going through each team’s strengths and weaknesses at each spot on the field. Well, this is also a positional power ranking of sorts. The position is each team’s financial health. The ranking? More like placing the teams in tiers: the teams most constrained by their finances; the teams in the middle; and the most financially-successful teams.
We can’t get to the same level of precision on team finances because we have to rely on publicly-available information that we haven’t generated, and that publicly-available information lacks the kind of details we’d need to really flesh out the small differences between franchises in the same tiers. However, we do have enough information to paint with broad strokes, so as part of our attempt to give an overview of where each team stands as 2013 begins, we’ll look at their access to monetary resources for the upcoming season.
Today we begin our look at the financial health of all thirty major-league teams, starting with the bottom ten. Tomorrow we will look at the middle ten and on Friday the top ten. We will focus on ticket-generated revenue (attendance), local TV revenue, and player payroll. That leaves some holes, to be sure, particularly where team owners are carrying significant debt. Some of that information is publicly-available, but not all, and even the publicly-available information may not accurate or verifiable. This isn’t precise, but hopefully, it’s still informative.
With those caveats, let’s begin.