Ben and Sam discuss whether the league will ever take steps to prevent extremely long games, then talk about what baseball would be like without playoffs.
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When I’m watching baseball, I’m almost always also on Twitter. Twitter has made watching a game by yourself in your home a social experience, and so now, it’s almost like watching a bunch of games with a bunch of other people. It’s great. Twitter is really an amazing creation, considering that the idea is basically mass text messaging.
Among the people I follow on Twitter is Keith Law. Keith is a prolific tweeter, and he interacts with his massive audience pretty much every night. An ongoing point of this conversation between Law and his followers is a derision of the intentional walk. Seemingly every night, someone will send Law an example of a manager putting a batter on, followed by the guy behind the IBB’d hitter launching a bases clearing extra base hit, scoring everyone including the guy who just got walked. Or the pitcher, now without the safety net of having a base open, will end up walking the next guy unintentionally, occasionally forcing in a run without ever forcing the opponent to swing the bat.
Just based on the data that shows up in my Twitter feed on a nightly basis, it feels like the average hitter bats .950 and slugs 2.500 after the guy in front of him gets walked intentionally. And, you frequently hear announcers talk about the disrespect the IBB is showing to the on-deck hitter, and how that might motivate them to prove the opposing manager wrong. All of this talk led me to realize that I actually had no idea what really happened after an intentional walk was issued, but I wanted to find out if the narrative held up to the light of data.
So, as is my usual approach now, I asked Jeff Zimmerman to run a complicated query for me, and now I’m going to take credit for his hard work. Jeff was kind enough to extract the play-by-play data following an IBB, and then removed all of the situations where the next batter was a pitcher, since I don’t think too many people have problems with an intentional walk that forces a pitcher to swing the bat. What we really want to know is how often an intentional walk to get to a worse hitter, or to gain the platoon advantage, ends up working out.
The answer? More often than you might think.
Travis Hafner is hitting like it’s 2005. The 35-year-old has raced to a .318/.438/.667 line, replete with six home runs, three doubles and a triple in April. He has helped breathe life into a lineup missing its usual stars. With Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira, Curtis Granderson, and Alex Rodriguez all shelved, the Yankees have still managed 4.6 runs per game, good for ninth in the league.
The Yankees’ lineup has been 14 runs above average this year by wRAA. Hafner is at plus-9 himself, powering the Yankees lineup like he powered those mid-2000s Cleveland teams.
Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.
1. Featured Game: Philadelphia at Cleveland, 19:05 ET
2. Other Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule
Featured Game: Philadelphia at Cleveland, 19:05 ET
A Fact Regarding Cleveland, The Baseball Team
After their 14-2 victory over Philadelphia on Tuesday (box), Cleveland now leads the majors in park-adjusted batting by a substantial margin, with a 120 wRC+.
A Fact Regarding Cleveland, The City
In Cleveland, all love is unrequited love.
A Fact Regarding Cleveland, The Baseball Team
In no small part due to the seven home runs they hit collectively on Tuesday, Cleveland now also leads the majors in park-adjusted home-run rate (4.0%) — at least by the author’s own hasty calculations.
| 11:42 | : We’re about 15 minutes from starting up, so feel free to fill the queue with your questions now. |
| 12:01 | Is there anyone in the Angels organization who is telling Josh Hamilton to stop swinging at everything, and if so, why won’t he listen? |
| 12:02 | : It’s the million dollar question, right? It’s possible that it’s a physical issue of pitch recognition, so we should leave open the possibility that this is Hamilton trying to be selective, but yeah, it seems odd that he keeps hacking away despite pitchers hardly ever throwing him a strike. |
| 12:02 | Does Tim Hudson have a legitimate hall of fame case? He has the same ERA+ as John Smoltz. |
| 12:03 | : I think he’s going to miss out. 200 wins won’t impress the voters, and he never had a run as the best pitcher in baseball. |
| 12:03 | Josh Reddick: A little early still or concerned? |
“I’m not a tremendously gifted athlete,” Mark Trumbo said. “I have to work at it, and be smart out there.” That might be surprising given how country strong the six-foot-four, 225-pound outfielder looks, but if you consider his game at as a whole, it’s obvious that there are aspects that could use refinement. Statistics have helped shape some of his baseball values as he’s worked to improve himself, even if he doesn’t incorporate them daily.
The Fringe Five is a weekly exercise (introduced two weeks ago) wherein the author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own heart to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.
“Excuse me, sir, but what precisely do you mean by fringe?” a decidedly polite reader might ask. To which query the author would respond: “Currently, a fringe prospect is one who was absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists.” And to which the author would continue responding as follows: “There is more discussion of the definition of fringe here.”
Since last week’s edition, there have been two changes to The Five — one promotion and one demotion. With his call-up to the Yankees 25-man roster, second baseman Corban Joseph has become ineligible for inclusion here, per the author’s mostly arbitrary rules governing the matter. Meanwhile, despite the obvious charms of his changeup, Arizona right-hander Chase Anderson’s recent difficulties with Reno have compelled the author to include him (i.e. Anderson) merely among the Next Five.
Those caveats made, let’s proceed to this week’s Fringe Five.
Chad Bettis, RHP, Colorado (Profile)
The 24-year-old Bettis missed all of 2012 to a shoulder injury, but was impressive the season before that in the High-A California League, striking out 184 batters in just 169.2 innings while posting a 2.73 FIP. Bettis has returned to form, basically, as a member of Colorado’s Double-A affiliate, the Tulsa Drillers, recording a 30:2 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 26.2 innings over five starts. As Marc Hulet notes, he was particularly impressive in his April 24th outing, during which he struck out 11 of 25 batters faced.
Bettis sat in the mid-90s with his fastball during that start, while also showing a slider with impressive vertical, almost splitter-esque, movement.
Like this one, from the first inning, to strike out Rolando Gomez:
Ben and Sam answer listener emails about whether good minor-league teams could beat bad major-league teams, the Braves and Ks, whether the Jays should regret letting John Farrell go, and more.
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