Ben and Sam preview the Reds’ season with R.J. Anderson, and Sahadev talks to Cincinnati Enquirer Reds beat writer C. Trent Rosecrans (at 25:34).
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The default introduction: Mike Trout is among the least-troubled players in baseball. By WAR, you could split him into four or five parts and have four or five decent everyday players, at least given good enough prosthetic limbs. Trout’s coming off an MVP award he deserved, after back-to-back seasons of not winning MVP awards he probably deserved. Regarding his very well-known weakness, I’ve written about this perhaps literally countless times, so maybe you’re tired of hearing about it. And I’m about to make a post out of one quote offered at the beginning of spring training. You know what you’re getting, here. Read on, and the blame lies with you.
Trout has checked into Angels camp. Because he’s a star, people want to know what he’s thinking, and as he stood before a horde of media types, Trout said he’d like to increase his stolen bases. Good news, fantasy players! Trout also said he’d like to cut down on his strikeouts. Probably to 0%. Maybe that’s unrealistic, but Trout opened up just a little bit about what was giving him issues, and it’s not often you can get Trout to say anything of substance.
Been talkin’ about BABIP lately. Let’s talk about BABIP again. Let’s talk about Yasiel Puig, and his BABIP.
Last week, I wrote a post on Starling Marte, in which I examined his extraordinarily high batting average on balls in play. I had a hypothesis, and that hypothesis was confirmed. It was far from revolutionary. I knew that Marte was fast, and then I found out that he hits a bunch of line drives and never hits pop-ups. Then I also found out that those three things alone can explain more than 50% of the variance in a player’s BABIP. Again, that’s really nothing new.
The metric I created, BIP Score, featured Marte prominently near the top. Also near the top were a whole bunch of guys with BABIP’s above .330. Yasiel Puig is another guy with a BABIP above .330. It’s way above .330. During his time in the MLB, only two qualified batters have a higher BABIP than Puig. But he’s nowhere to be found in the top half of the BIP Score leaderboard. From the post:
Not everyone with a high BABIP scores well in BIP Score. Yasiel Puig, for example, owns a career .366 BABIP — higher than Marte’s — but actually has a negative BIP Score, thanks to his low line drive and average pop-up rate.
I felt like that warranted an examination of its own. This post is that examination.
I guess, first, we’ll take a look at that BIP Score. That’s how this all started anyway. To get BIP Score, I simply summed the z-scores of every qualified batter’s line drive rate, infield fly rate and speed score and scaled it so 0 was league average. It’s admittedly a quick-and-dirty metric, but the higher the BIP Score, the more likely it is that a player should be able to sustain a high BABIP.
With this methodology, Puig clocked in with a BIP Score of -0.3. To get a sense of the context, let’s look at the other guys around Puig who also clocked in at -0.3.
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In 2014, relievers appeared in 14,459 games. In more than 90% of those games, the reliever faced multiple hitters, but in 1,266 appearances, the reliever pitched to just one batter. In just about ten percent of those appearances, the reliever made just one pitch. This post looks back at the 139 reliever appearances that lasted just one pitch, according to Baseball-Reference Play-Index Data.
The one-pitch pitchers skewed left with 81 appearances compared to 58 for right-handers. The pitchers were incredibly successful, allowing only 15 hits, and only four extra base hits. One of those hits was a home run. Josh Outman of the Cleveland Indians made just one pitch on May 31, 2014 against the Colorado Rockies. It did not go well.
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On Monday, the Red Sox won the bidding war for Cuban prospect Yoan Moncada, reportedly agreeing to pay $31.5 million as a signing bonus, plus another $31.5 million as a tax to the commissioner’s office for going over their allocation for international spending. That totals a $63 million acquisition cost for the organization, making Moncada one of the most expensive prospects in baseball history.
But if anything, the signing cost was perhaps a little bit on the low side of expectations, which had been rumored to be in the $30 to $40 million range for months. And while $63 million is a lot of money, the Red Sox actually guaranteed $72 million to fellow Cuban Rusney Castillo last year. Castillo broke the record for most money from a Cuban signee, set the prior year when the White Sox gave Jose Abreu $66 million. The Diamondbacks clearly used those two contracts as the inspiration for their $68 million deal with Yasmany Tomas, so Moncada became the fourth Cuban to sign for between $63 to $72 million in guaranteed money.
On the one hand, you could say that these four contracts represent a pretty clear price range that the market is willing to pay for talented Cuban hitters, but in reality, each contract has its own unique features that make the simple guaranteed dollar amounts a poor way of evaluating the true cost of the player to the team that signed them.
For instance, Moncada — unlike Abreu, Castillo, and Tomas — was prohibited from signing a major league contract, so the Red Sox do not get the benefit of spreading the cost out over the years during which he’s going to play in Boston, nor will any of the $63 million they’ve already committed to pay cover his future salaries when he does arrive in the big leagues. In other words, the $63 million payout for Moncada was simply to acquire his rights, making it more comparable to the posting fees paid to acquire players from Japan in the past.
I don’t think the Dodgers deserve that much credit for signing Brandon Beachy. It’s not like it’s a particularly innovative idea, and a whole host of teams were interested in landing him. The Dodgers beat out almost everyone in available resources, and they beat out almost everyone in immediate outlook, and they had this other advantage, as well:
Beachy said deciding on the Dodgers was easy, mostly because the surgeon of his second Tommy John, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, is also the Dodgers’ team doctor.
“It’s the best place to be,” Beachy said. “I have a lot of faith in Dr. ElAttrache and the training room’s view for bringing me along meshes well with that.”
Beachy was drawn to the Dodgers, and the Dodgers were sufficiently drawn to Beachy to get him to sign. Given everything, the Beachy pickup hardly qualifies as any kind of genius, but for one thing, the upside is readily apparent — the upside of these things is always apparent — and for another, Beachy makes for an interesting depth play. That point isn’t Beachy-specific. Beachy and pitchers like him make for interesting depth plays.
| 11:42 |
: Happy Wednesday. Let’s talk baseball for an hour or so.
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| 11:43 |
: The queue is now open, and we’ll start chatting at noon.
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| 12:01 |
Tell us what you think about the ESPN rankings of how “analytical” each pro sports organization is. The MLB rankings seemed to be “29 teams ranked by how often they reveal details of their front office to reporters and the Phillies at the bottom” |
| 12:02 |
: Ben Baumer, who did the MLB write-ups, isn’t a reporter. He worked for the Mets, and interacted with many of the people he listed. I thought it was pretty well done, and was mostly accurate in reflecting each organization’s efforts to embrace analytics.
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| 12:03 |
So Ken Tremendous has to do a baseball analytics-themed sitcom next, right? |
| 12:03 |
: I realize I’ll probably get burned at the stake for this, but I watched one episode of Parks and Rec years ago, didn’t laugh once, and have never watched since.
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Episode 535
Promising Cuban infielder Yoan Moncada signed with Boston on Monday for $31.5 million. FanGraphs’ lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel spoke with him on Tuesday and has provided a series of audio vignettes from that conversation, which are reproduced here. Note: the actual audio with Moncada begins at about the 10:30 mark. It’s preceded by a brief conversation with McDaniel, who provides helpful contextual notes and other observations.
From McDaniel’s conversation:
Grabbed some lunch con mi amigo Yoan Moncada. He laughs when he’s talked about on MLB network. Will post audio soon. pic.twitter.com/D0xSJf0bEQ
— Kiley McDaniel (@kileymcd) February 24, 2015
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 26 min play time.)
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Finally, after what seems like an age, the appointed heroes amongst us mortal men and women have descended upon the ebullient corner of the nation, ball and glove in hand, to throw and to catch. Yes, it still snows 12 inches every week in the Northeast, but the dream is once again here — may we all rejoice in the date of winter’s true passing.
In honor of the fine March spectacle we’re about to witness, or rather to honor the sometimes low-level professional baseball that passes for spectacle because of the state of our desperation, I thought it might be a good exercise to relive some of the glories of past spring trainings. The reason for this is twofold: to remind everyone that spring training stats are next to worthless, and also to celebrate how weird baseball can be when constrained to a small sample size. Today we’re going to revel in the fact that we’re playing the game again by looking at freak occurrences that can only happen in Arizona in March.
You play 81 games at home a year, so it seems like it might be a good idea to think about that park when you’re building your team. Then again, you play 81 games on the road, maybe it’s not a good idea to worry too much about one half of the ledger, particularly if your home park is an extreme one.
Extreme parks lead to extreme home-road splits. That part seems obvious, but it bears out in the winning percentage, too. Take a look at how teams that have called extreme parks home have faired over the last five years compared to the middle.