Last October, Jeff Sullivan wrote about how the 2012 postseason was almost historically low-scoring, calling it “Where Offense Went to Die,” because Jeff Sullivan is wonderful and perceptive. He noted the following stats at the time:

Hitters had a combined .227 batting average, a combined .290 OBP, a combined .349 slugging percentage.

If the 2012 postseason were a player, it would have basically been Justin Smoak, who had a slash line roughly in that range. Smoak was nowhere near the World Series or the playoffs, of course, largely because his Seattle team was terrible, but also because Smoak was hitting like, well, that all year.

With either one or two games remaining in the 2013 postseason, not likely enough to significantly move the needle, we’ve seen 74 playoff games, exactly the same as last year. And where are we this time around? .229/.289/.355, also known as “being within the margin of error of being completely identical”. That’s in the Starlin Castro or Mike Moustakas range of hitters this year, and again, that’s pretty poor, especially when MLB as a whole hit .253/.318/.396 this season. If you liked last year’s lack of hitting, well, you’re seeing the sequel right now, and suddenly last year’s near-historic offensive outage looks like it might not be so historic after all. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the playoffs, then discuss how MLB could disincentivize tanking for higher draft picks.

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I want to assure you right away that what follows isn’t sour grapes. I don’t have a dog in this fight. Even if I did, I’d complain on my own time, and not on the job in front of everyone (probably). What follows is about a call, and a controversial one at that, early in Monday’s Game. But I’m not here to talk about  various implications. I’m here to talk about the call’s significance, relative to others, and about the process that contributed to the call. It was, in the end, a call most extraordinary that went Boston’s way.

The Red Sox went ahead 1-0 in the first, as you recall. The score remained the same into the bottom of the third, when David Freese led off with a single. Pete Kozma bunted Freese to second, and Adam Wainwright advanced Freese to nowhere with a strikeout. Matt Carpenter came up with two down, and he worked the count full. In that full count, Jon Lester threw a cutter inside. Carpenter started to first, assuming he’d drawn a two-out walk. Bill Miller, however, called him out, and Carpenter expressed his disagreement. That went about as well as most fairly cordial expressions of disagreement on a baseball field. That is, nothing changed, and the game moved on to the top of the fourth, with Carpenter having struck out looking.

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You’ll hear some superlatives sent in Jon Lester’s direction after a couple of strong performances in the World Series. The All-Star break — when Lester was sporting a 4.58 ERA and velocity readings that didn’t inspire hope — seems like a long time ago. Between then and now came a mechanical change, and maybe a short rest, that brought the old Jon Lester back in time for this great postseason run. Remarkable about that fact, though, is that the change has been a long time coming.

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What happened in the sixth inning Monday night probably mattered. It probably mattered in ways we can’t conceive of, in ways we’d never be able to figure out. Everything, every last thing in a baseball game, is connected, and if you remove one screw, the whole bridge might collapse. No, that doesn’t work. The whole bridge might rearrange itself? No, that doesn’t work, either. Change one thing and you change more and bigger things. There we go. The sixth inning of Game 5 was probably critical somehow.

But people sure aren’t thinking about it today. The sixth inning featured the minimum number of batters, the minimum number of baserunners, and the minimum number of runs. After Adam Wainwright worked a 1-2-3 inning, Jon Lester did the same, and then the seventh inning happened, in which the Red Sox stormed out in front. The sixth didn’t feature any pivotal events, as we understand them. But it did feature maybe the most interesting at-bat of the game. In the top of the sixth, Wainwright threw six pitches to David Ortiz.

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Yesterday, in these electronic pages, the author presented five notable major-league equivalent batter lines (MLE) as calculated by Jared Cross’s Steamer projection system. Today, the author presents a very similar thing, except for pitchers.

Indeed, below are five notable pitcher MLEs from the 2013 season, where notable appears to be defined as belonging to a player who (a) was 27 or younger in 2013, (b) received little (or nothing) in the way of major-league playing time in 2013, (c) received little (or nothing) in the way of exposure in 2013, and (d) recorded over half his appearances as a starter.

For each pitcher are included his translated strikeout and walk rates according to Steamer, and the kwERA that such rates would produce. Following that (and marked by an asterisk to denote that the author has taken terrible, terrible liberties with the Steamer data) is an estimate of the relevant pitcher’s translated WAR over 150 innings.

Name: Paolo Espino, 26, RHP (Link)
Organization: Cleveland Level: Triple-A (International)
MLE: 62.0 IP, 267 TBF, 21.8% K, 7.5% BB, 3.68 kwERA, 2.5 WAR150*
Notes: A brief inspection of Espino’s player page reveals that he has spent the past four years splitting time between Double-A Akron and Triple-A Columbus. Not a ringing endorsement, that, for a 26-year-old pitcher. He finished the season, however, by recording a 38:3 strikeout-to-walk ratio over five starts and 29.0 innings for the latter club — i.e. a more promising thing. Reports on Espino’s present repertoire appear to be entirely absent from the internet. An inning’s worth of video from Espino’s August 26th start against Louisville (during which start he posted a 7:0 K:BB in 6.2 IP) reveals that the right-hander at least throws a curveball with which minor-leaguers have some difficulty.

Like here, to Louisville’s Denis Phipps for a strikeout:

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Last night, the Red Sox won 3-1, and are headed back to Boston with two shots to win one game. They are now the heavy favorites to end the season as the World Series champs, thanks in large part to Jon Lester outdueling Adam Wainwright for the second time in this series. The Wainwright/Lester match-ups, on paper, favored St. Louis, but Boston was able to beat the Cardinals best pitcher because Jon Lester threw two brilliant outings in this series. But, for some people, the thing that they’ll remember most about last night’s game isn’t Jon Lester’s pitching, but instead, Jon Lester’s hitting.

Or, at least, Jon Lester being sent to the batter’s box with a bat in his hand; I don’t know that you can call what he does up there “hitting”. In his career, including the postseason, Jon Lester — career AL pitcher — has walked up to the plate 43 times, and in those 43 opportunities, he has made 43 outs. Back in 2009, he drew a walk, the only time he’s ever reached base successfully, but he made up for it in 2012 by hitting into a double play, bringing his totals of PAs and outs back into equalization. 21 of his 43 plate appearances have ended with a strikeout. He is, maybe, the closest thing baseball has to an automatic out.

And yet, with runners at second and third, in the 7th inning of a one run game, Jon Lester was allowed to hit. With Mike Napoli sitting on the bench. With Adam Wainwright tiring on the mound. The Red Sox had a chance to turn a close game into a pretty sure victory, but passed on the opportunity for a big inning in favor of keeping Lester in the game for a couple more innings. And that decision is essentially a microcosm of how baseball is managed.

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Before the season, I put up a three-part series (1, 2, and 3) that explained how linearly-weighted stats like wOBA, while useful for comparing players to each other, don’t necessarily reflect each player’s true contribution to their team’s run scoring.  You see, the weights used to calculate wOBA are based on league averages.  So, for a team with league average breakdowns in walk rate, singles rate, home run rate, etc., wOBA (and its offspring, wRC+) ought to work very well in figuring out how valuable a player is (or would be) to an offense.  However, when it comes to particularly bad or good offenses, or to those with unusual breakdowns, wOBA will lose some of its efficacy.

Why?  There are synergistic effects in offenses to consider.  First of all, if a team gets on base a lot, there will be more team plate appearances to go around, which of course gives its batters more chances to contribute.  Second of all, if the team gets on base a lot, a batter’s hits are generally worth more, because they’ll tend to drive in more runs.  And, of course, once the batter gets on base in such a team, it will be likelier that there will be a hit (or series of hits) to drive him in.  The reverse of all three points is true in a team that rarely gets on base.

But it goes even beyond that.  Let’s say Team A gets on base 40% of the time, and Team B gets on only 20%, but their balances of the ways they get on base are equal (e.g. each hits 7x as many singles as they do HRs) .  A home run is going to be worth something like 14% more to Team A, due to more runners being on base.  However, to Team B, a home run is worth over ten times as much as a walk, whereas to Team A, it’s worth only about 5 times as much.  That’s because Team A has a much better chance of sustaining a rally that will eventually drive in that walked batter.  Team B will be much more reliant on home runs for scoring runs.

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Ben and Sam discuss David Ortiz, Jon Lester and Adam Wainwright, and the latest questionable moves by Mike Matheny and John Farrell.

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