Episode 412
Jon Paley (@PeloteroMovie) was a co-director of very excellent documentary film Pelotero and will be co-director of a sequel of sorts to that film, following celebrated prospect Miguel Sano’s path to the majors. Not for nothing, he’s also the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 34 min play time.)

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All the great players in the Hall of Fame have stories about them, anecdotes that capture glimpses of how they were exceptional, even among the already exceptional. Anecdotes developed in part out of exaggeration but largely founded on inconceivable truth. Here’s an old anecdote about Frank Thomas:

“We had this competition, even when he was a freshman, in which we’d wager a Coke on whether he could guess—within one mile an hour—how fast a pitcher was throwing. We had a radar gun. He’d call out the velocity. He was always on. Almost never fooled.”

It’s been my understanding that policemen are trained to do this with vehicles. Frank Thomas wasn’t a policeman, but he was sort of an officer of home plate in a way, and he was liberal with discipline. What was apparent, even early in college, was that Thomas had an unusually gifted sense of the zone. He went on to pair that with one of the best swings ever and now he’s on his way to Cooperstown, a part of baseball immortality. Pretty simple. Thomas was just one of the best at something, and also one of the best at a related something. That allowed him to be one of the best overall.

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Because of the release of ballots over the last few weeks, we’ve had a pretty good idea that Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas would get elected into the Hall of Fame on their first attempt. Today, that was made official, as all three cleared the 75% threshold and are now members of the Hall. All three are more than deserving, and raise the level of the Hall of Fame by their enshrinement.

Because today should be about celebrating greatness, here is my homage to Greg Maddux and Jeff’s tribute to Tom Glavine, with a similar piece on Frank Thomas on the way. These players are worth celebrating.

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Every career in the history of baseball, every life that’s ever been lived — they all could’ve turned out differently, unrecognizably differently, given one little change along the way. Sometimes, you have to search for what those changes could’ve been. Other times, they flash in blinding neon. Tom Glavine was born in 1966. In June of 1984, he was drafted by the Atlanta Braves. In June of 1984, he was also drafted by the Los Angeles Kings. The Braves chose him 47th, while the Kings chose him 69th, ahead of some future superstars. There was the opportunity for Glavine to play hockey and go to college for free. He chose, with some difficulty, to go where baseball might lead him. On this day, he’s become all but an official Hall-of-Famer.

Frank Thomas is going into the Hall of Fame. The talent of Frank Thomas was obvious from the beginning. Thomas left no doubt in any observer’s mind that he was one of the best hitters there ever was. Greg Maddux is going into the Hall of Fame. Maddux had plenty of talent, and also the dedication to maximize it. Maddux required a bit of a longer look, but it was immediately apparent he could do things with the baseball others just couldn’t. Tom Glavine is going into the Hall of Fame. Glavine didn’t have Thomas’ gilded skillset, and he didn’t have Maddux’s ability to miss bats and hit gnats. Glavine’s greatest strength was getting something extraordinary out of considerably duller parts.

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The first season of South Park debuted in 1997. I was a freshman in high school. An episode came out in December of that year that involved the school putting on a Christmas program, only all the parents wanted it to be either non- or universally-denominational, so the whole thing ended up being performed in unitards and it was all very cold and strange. One of the jokes circled around the fact that the music was composed by Philip Glass. Out of the group with which I was watching, I was the only one who laughed at that joke, because I was the only band nerd in the group who had any idea who Philip Glass was.

The joke fit the narrative. This was a play stripped of all decoration and pomp being accompanied by minimalist music. It was also an easy joke, because jokes about minimalist music are fairly easy to make. There’s no guitar riffs, there’s no hook, there’s no chorus. It starts with an idea. That idea is built upon, added to, modified, deconstructed, rearranged. Then, at the end, it’s right back to where it started. No matter how different or unique things get in the middle, that original idea is just under the surface — always present. It imitates life more than any other style of music. Life throws us all kinds of garbage, but it’s tragically repetitive. Babies, new jobs, weird guys on the bus, movies — they are all tiny differences, tiny theme changes, from the pulsing march of our lives. Baseball, more than any other sport, mimics that as well. There’s a beginning, there’s a bunch of wonderful and heartbreaking stuff in the middle, and then it ends. The day before Opening Day is the day after the last World Series game. Over and over — rinse, repeat. Read the rest of this entry »

Greg Maddux officially becomes a Hall of Famer today, and the only controversy surrounding his election is that it won’t be unanimous. He is, without question, one of the greatest pitchers of all time. So, let’s celebrate the things that made him great.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Cincinnati Reds. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Cleveland / Detroit / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Minnesota / New York AL / Philadelphia / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay.

Batters
It’s probably not incorrect to say that two main ways in which baseball players can provide value, broadly speaking, is by means of wins and also by means of the spectacle they’re capable of creating. Very fast Billy Hamilton has seemed — to the present author, at least — has seemed a candidate to succeed more by the latter standard than the former. ZiPS appears to suggest, however — in 2014, at least — that Hamilton is capable of producing on both accounts.

Of note, in particular, with regard to Hamilton’s projection is the BABIP (.332) part of it. On Cincinnati, for example, only Joey Votto has a higher projected one of them (.334) — and Joey Votto has produced five consecutive seasons now of BABIPs of .349 or greater. Everything else being equal, every 10 points of BABIP is worth about 0.3 wins. Using that rough estimate, here’s a table of what Hamilton’s WAR might be given an array of possible different BABIP outcomes:

The relatively optimistic WAR projection, one observes, is tied pretty closely to the relatively optimistic BABIP projection.

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Just about anyone reading FanGraphs probably knows about the debate surrounding defensive statistics. About the only thing everyone seems to agree on is that all defensive statistics are inadequate reflections of defense, or at least need extremely large sample sizes to attain reliability. This is especially true with regard to catchers, whose defensive contributions are quite the riddle to solve.

These issues extend even more in the minor leagues, where the sole widely available statistics are the traditional ones–assists, putouts, errors, double plays, range factor, and fielding percentage. Needless to say, these are not broadly effective arbiters of defensive aptitude. Again, catcher defense is arguably even more elusive, with passed balls and caught-stealing percentage the only remotely notable metrics. The desperate search to link numbers to potential leads these stats to often stand for “receiving skills” and “throwing arm,” respectively, which is a gross overstatement of their utility.

In this post, I want to examine just how meaningful, or perhaps meaningless, the passed ball statistic is for catching prospects.

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Two years ago, Michael Ohlman faced a crossroads. The Baltimore Orioles catching prospect was suspended 50 games after testing positive for a recreational drug. In three professional seasons, the 2009 11th-round draft pick had hit .217 with six home runs.

After looking both ways, Ohlman took the right turn. Following a solid 2012 season in low-A, he broke out in 2013. Playing for high-A Frederick, Ohlman hit .313/.410/.524, with 29 doubles and 13 home runs, in 361 at bats. He was honored as the Carolina League’s player of the year.

Ohlman, who celebrated his 23rd birthday last month, talked about his game shortly before the new year. Read the rest of this entry »