Episode 319
After a week away (due entirely to the fault of the host), managing editor Dave Cameron is the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio. Discussed: various observations with regard to opening day (including notes on Jackie Bradley, Jose Fernandez, and Bryce Harper). Also discussed: free agency, its evolution.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 40 min play time.)

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I nearly began this post with a story of how I arrived at the topic, involving Dave Cameron and email and Lucas Duda. Instead, I’ve chosen to begin this post by simply alluding to the story and moving on to the meat, because the story is irrelevant and uninteresting.

On Monday, the Brewers opened at home against the Rockies. Some familiar problems popped up — John Axford blew a save in the top of the ninth — but the Brewers ultimately emerged victorious, with Jonathan Lucroy making headlines by driving in the winning run. A walk-off sac fly doesn’t feel the same as a walk-off single or a walk-off dinger, but no one would ever accuse Lucroy of being the most electrifying player in baseball. He’s just a pretty good player on a pretty good team, and on Monday they happened to win together.

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Late on March 21, there were a flurry of tweets and other bits of news suggesting that Major League Baseball was about to file a lawsuit against Biogenesis, the Miami “age and wellness” clinic linked to high-profile ballplayers and performance enhancing drugs. The interwebs were alive with speculation on the claims MLB would make; there were even rumors that MLB would charge Biogenesis was part of a “RICO” conspriacy. “RICO” is the acronym for the federal law known as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Practice Act, or the law used to bring down the mob.

By mid-morning on March 22, we had some answers. MLB filed a complaint in Florida state court charging Biogenesis, clinic director Anthony Bosch and others clinic associates with intentionally and wrongfully interfering with MLB’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program  — a part of the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and MLBPA — by inducing certain players to purchase, use and distribute performance enhancing substances (PES). MLB claimed the Biogenesis defendants knew of MLB’s prohibition on PES from Manny Ramirez’s 50-game suspension — if not from other sources — as Biogenesis allegedly supplied Ramirez with Human Clorionic Gonadotropin, a banned substance. According to MLB, Biogenesis ignored that information and continued to supply players with prohibited PES. MLB claimed Biogenesis’ action caused the league to suffer monetary and other damages, including the loss of goodwill, revenue, and profits and harm to its reputation.

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The big news of the morning is that Robinson Cano has fired Scott Boras as his agent, and is joining a newly created wing of the CAA group that will be led by hip hop artist Jay-Z. I don’t pretend to know anything about hip hop artists and their geographical biases, so I’ll just go along with the consensus that hiring Jay-Z as his agent is a pretty good sign that Cano wants to stay in New York. And, as Ken Rosenthal noted, CAA is the agency for many players who have re-signed with their current teams rather than test free agency, including being the representatives for Buster Posey, Matt Cain, Andre Ethier, Ryan Braun, Ryan Zimmerman, Ryan Howard, and Adam Jones.

Reading all the tea leaves, I think it’s probably fair to expect Cano to re-up with with New York before he ever gets to free agency. The Yankees can’t afford to let Cano leave, and despite their desire to get under the luxury tax, they’re still the Yankees. Avoiding a bidding war with the Dodgers is almost certainly in their best interests if they want to keep Cano in the Bronx, and so it seems like the interests of both parties are aligned to keep Cano from hitting free agency.

If we scratch Cano from the list of potential free agents for next winter, that leaves us with Jacoby Ellsbury, Josh Johnson, Roy Halladay, Tim Lincecum, and Shin-Soo Choo as the premier players likely to make it to the open market. And, that less than stellar class leads us the inevitable discussion of the changing role of free agency in Major League Baseball.

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I’m always looking for new angles to unlock the mysteries of BABIP, so I was intrigued by Jeff Sullivan’s exploration of pull rates against pitchers.  So I grabbed the data from baseball-reference.com, and set to work subjecting it to my usual rigmarole of correlations and multiple regressions.  You know how they say if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you?  Well, plug your ears — there’s about to be a lot of wild, uncontrolled pounding going on in here…

I’ll cut right to the chase — did I find anything interesting relating to pitchers’ overall effectiveness when it comes to their Pull%, Middle%, and Opposite%, as I’m calling them?  Well, I found one decent connection that will seem obvious and stupid after you think about it, and a slight but kind of interesting connection.  I’ll provide you with some correlation tables that have left few stones unturned.  But, mainly, the research might help to set some things straight about how important this stuff actually is for pitchers.

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After a hard-fought, closely-followed battle, Bryce Harper beat out former relief pitcher Micah Owings for the starting left field position in Washington. Okay, Owings was never really in competition to take playing time from the reigning Rookie of the Year, Jayson Werth or Adam LaRoche — the three players in positions accessible to Owings’s limited defensive upside.

But here is the deal:

A) Pitchers do not consistently practice hitting. (Simple fact.)

B) The more time between at bats, the more a hitter struggles. (The Book.)

C) The more times a player faces a certain pitcher, the greater the advantage for the hitter — both in a game and in a career. (The Book Blog.)

All three of these elements suggest pitchers should hit, let’s say, about .145/.180/.190, or -10 wRC+ (that is, 110% worse than league average). Micah Owings — a pitcher — has, through 219 PA, hit .283/.310/.502 with 9 home runs and 14 doubles, a 104 wRC+.

Micah Owings is a good hitter. Possibly a great hitter. The Nationals have a bunch of those. But surely someone else out there could use a bench bat — or a starting outfielder — with the ability to pitch a 111 ERA- every now and then.
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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Monday’s Top Performances, By Several Measures
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Monday’s Top Performances, By Several Measures
In case the reader was unaware, allow me to inform him or her that last night, under cover of darkness, FanGraphs CEO and probably your real father David Appelman added a “Yesterday” split to both the site’s batting and pitching leaderboards. As a result of that deft programming maneuver, it is now possible for readers to examine the previous day’s top performers in a single glance — and, more importantly, it’s now possible for the present author to copy-and-paste the contents of those same leaderboards into these Daily Notes pieces, thus giving readers the impression that he is “doing something.”

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Every year we hear stories about pitchers whose fastballs don’t seem to have the same life as last year. The most talked about are typically front-line starters that rely on their fastballs. In early 2013, the name that’s being discussed the most is Yankee ace CC Sabathia.

Throughout spring training, Sabathia’s velocity has been a point of concern. Coming off of elbow surgery during the offseason, Sabathia’s first regular season start did nothing to quell that concern. As The Star-Ledger’s Andy McCullough notes:

Sabathia’s fastball topped out at 91.7 mph on Monday, according to Pitch f/x data from Brooks Baseball. On Opening Day in 2012, his fastball hit 94.5 mph. On Opening Day in 2011, his fastball touched 94.7 mph.

(By the way, if you don’t read McCullough on a regular basis you are missing out.)

In the end, McCullough notes that while it’s reasonable to be concerned, Sabathia is likely to improve as the season wears on and has good enough secondary stuff to still be very good.

Overall McCullough is right, however, I think there is greater reason for concern than some may think.

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