Ben, Sam, and guest co-host Russell Carleton discuss whether and how the Dodgers should discipline Yasiel Puig, teams that would want to take mulligans on their trade deadlines, and things sabermetricians are still getting wrong.
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Advancements in baseball research, and in our understanding of the game, have made it more difficult to be satisfied with a statistic. More and more, we’ve become aware of the holes, of the problems, of — sometimes — the game-theory considerations. Batting average was left behind when people realized singles and doubles aren’t the same thing. On-base percentage isn’t as good as park-adjusted on-base percentage. It’s great to have wRC+, but what was the quality of competition? To what extent did a hitter get lucky or unlucky? Everything can always be questioned, infinitely, and we’ve all become more able to perform the questioning.
Below I’m going to present a statistic that would’ve made me the happiest about six or seven years ago. Below, we’re going to review this season’s most unhittable individual pitches, as determined by contact rate against. After all, what better way to show which pitches are great and which pitches aren’t, than by looking at how often they’re hit by swings? Is this not one of the ideal measures of dominance?
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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.
1. Facts Regarding Danny Salazar After 23 Innings
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule
Facts Regarding Danny Salazar After 23 Innings
Introduction
With his start on Tuesday night against the Los Angeles Americans, Cleveland right-hander Danny Salazar has now recorded 23.0 innings in the major leagues this season (and also ever, one finds) — i.e. three innings above the haphazardly selected 20-inning threshold a pitcher must pass in order to qualify for NERD*.
Salazar debuts today on the NERD leaderboard** with perfect score of 10 — and, moreover, has recorded the highest raw score (i.e. not adjusted for the 0-10 scale) among the 217 qualified pitchers. What follows is a brief examination of those factors which have most directly contributed to Salazar’s success both in terms of run prevention and at invoking sensations of awe within the bosoms of every spectator.
**For more on NERD, see below.
**Click here to see current NERD scores for all pitchers.
I haven’t done one of these link pieces in a while, but thanks to Dan Brooks pointing this out on Twitter, I have a new site to recommend: Phil Roth’s MLB payroll visualization charts.
Basically, it takes player and team payroll information from Baseball Reference and puts it into a set of interactive charts that lets you see the variance in MLB payrolls among teams by year, as well as seeing the building blocks for each team in each year. Here’s a couple of screen shots, though the interactive graphics are much, much cooler than just static JPGs.
I thought Matt Hunter’s FanGraphs debut article last week was really interesting. So interesting, in fact, that I’m going to rip it off right now. The difference is I’ll be using a Monte Carlo simulator I made for this sort of situation, which I’ll let you play with after you’re done reading (it’s at the bottom).
Matt posed the question of whether inconsistency could be a good thing for a pitcher. He brought up the example of Jered Weaver vs. Matt Cain in 2012 — two pitchers with nearly identical overall stats, except that Weaver was a lot less consistent. However, Weaver had a bit of an advantage in Win Probability Added (WPA), Matt points out. WPA factors in a bunch of things, e.g. how close the game is and how many outs are left in the game when events occur. Because of that, it’s a pretty noisy stat, heavily influenced by factors the pitcher doesn’t control much. It’s not a predictive stat. For that reason, I figured simulations might be fun and enlightening on the subject. They sort of accomplish the same thing that WPA does, except that they allow you to base conclusions off of a lot more possible conditions and outcomes than you’d see in a handful of starts (i.e., they can help de-noise the situation).
As some of you might remember from previous articles, velocity trends in July provide the strongest signal in terms of whether a pitcher is likely to experience “true” velocity loss over the course of a full season.
Yes, I know, we are more than halfway through August. However, between work, vacation, and Saber Seminar (which, if you didn’t attend you really missed out. You can still purchase posters and t-shirts, so get on that. It’s for a good cause) I’ve struggled to sit down and run the numbers. Better late than never.
Again, for reference, the table below breaks out the percent of pitchers who experience at least a 1 mph drop in their four-seam fastball velocity in a month relative to that same month a year ago and who also went on to finish the season down a full 1 mph. It also shows the relative risk and odds ratios for each month — meaning, the increased likelihood (or odds) that a pitcher will experience a true velocity loss at season’s end when compared to those pitchers that didn’t lose 1 mph in that month.
| Month | 1 mph Drop | No 1 mph Drop | Relative Risk | Odds Ratios |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| April | 38% | 9% | 4.2 | 6.2 |
| May | 47% | 6% | 7.8 | 13.9 |
| June | 55% | 5% | 11 | 23.2 |
| July | 56% | 4% | 14 | 30.6 |
| August | 53% | 6% | 8.8 | 17.7 |
So while the overall rate of velocity loss based on a loss in June and July look pretty even, the relative risk and odds ratios increase by a solid amount in July.
| 11:42 |
: It’s Wednesday, so let’s spend an hour or so talking baseball.
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| 11:43 |
: The queue is now open, and we’ll start up around noon.
|
| 12:01 |
Have you ever seen a worse defensive OF than what the Phillies have fielded this month? |
| 12:02 |
: A few years back, the Twins had Cuddyer in center, flanked by Delmon Young and someone else who was just as bad. The Mariners OF defense this year is also horrendous.
|
| 12:02 |
X * RA9-WAR + Y * FIP-WAR = “True WAR” What is your best guess for X and Y? |
| 12:03 |
: Probably something like 30/70. This is a question we’ve pondered a lot, and whenever someone figures out how to fill in the missing variables, pitcher WAR will take a significant step forward.
|
In a sense, Clayton Kershaw is pretty easy to understand. He’s a big lefty with power stuff and multiple breaking balls to go along with a changeup he’ll mix in from time to time. He dominated in high school before getting selected early by the Dodgers, and after a few years in the majors of showing flashes, Kershaw decided he didn’t want to walk batters anymore, and now he’s probably the best starter in baseball. His next contract could break records for pitchers, and if the 2013 season were to end today, Kershaw might well win the National League Most Valuable Player Award. He’s amazing and he’s 25.
The last time I personally addressed Kershaw, I essentially made love to his curveball. Since then he’s allowed 30 runs in 17 starts. It’s tempting and easy to break Kershaw down to his component pitches, because it’s upon those pitches that Kershaw’s made his name. His curveball’s great. His slider’s great. His fastball’s great. It’s all great. But it’s also probably worth taking a moment to speak to that which might tie everything together. That which is unique to Kershaw, that which comes before he makes his pitches dart and dive.
The Fringe Five is a weekly exercise (introduced in April) 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.
Central to this exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe. The author recognizes that the word has different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of this column, however — and for reasons discussed more thoroughly in a recent edition of the Five — the author has considered eligible for the Five any prospect who was absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists.
That said, it should also be noted that in cases where the collective enthusiasm regarding a player’s talent becomes very fevered — like how the enthusiasm collectively right now for Philadelphia third-base prospect Maikel Franco is very fevered, for example — that will likely affect said player’s likelihood of appearing among the Five, given that the purpose of the series, at some level, is to identify prospects who are demonstrating promise above what one might expect given their current reputations within the prospect community.
With that said, here are this week’s Fringe Five:
Mookie Betts, 2B, Boston (Profile)
This marks the fourth week in which Betts has appeared among the Fringe Five, nor have the conditions which first earned him a place here changed, really, at all. Now in 160 plate appearances with High-A Salem, Betts has continued to control the strike zone (having recorded a 10.0% walk and 10.0% strikeout rate there), to hit for more power than his body might otherwise suggest (5 HR), and to demonstrate exciting baserunning skills (as his 17-for-17 record on stolen bases likely suggests). Since last week’s edition of the Five, Betts has performed along all those same lines, having posted a 2:2 walk-to-strikeout rate in 30 plate appearances and stolen three bases on as many attempts.