| 12:00 |
: Afternoon gang, let’s start out with our president-related business.
|
| 12:00 |
:
|
| 12:00 |
:
|
| 12:01 |
Mona Lisa Saperstein voice: Matt Bowman zips, pwease (makes hand gesture.) |
| 12:01 |
: You’ve laready put it on the spreadsheet!
|
| 12:01 |
Who are you and what have you done with Dan “Always Late Starting the Chat” Szymborski? |
Despite all the gains advanced stats have made in gaining public acceptance over the years, there’s always going to be some cases that seem inexplicable to one side or the other. Jason Heyward is generally a good example of that, because if you still rely on traditional stats, you see a right fielder who hit .271 with 11 homers and 58 RBI and consider him a disappointment. If you believe in defensive metrics and understand the effects of age and the current offensive environment, you see a star who just put up a 5 WAR season at age 24 and could command a $200 million contract in free agency next winter.
One thing isn’t really disputable, however: Heyward hasn’t really delivered on the offensive promise he showed by putting up a 134 wRC+ at 20 in his rookie season of 2010. It was one of the finest age-20 seasons in baseball dating back to 1900, and everyone on the list ahead of him — with the exception of Dick Hoblitzel, who had his career cut short by World War I — ended up becoming either an inner-circle Hall of Famer or is a more recent player well on his way there.
Heyward followed up that smashing debut with a disappointing 96 wRC+ in 2011, due in part to a right shoulder injury, then put up three straight seasons in the 110-121 wRC+ range. While that all sounds similar, how he’s made it there hasn’t been. Heyward’s power has decreased — homers down from 27 to 14 to 11, slugging percentage down from .479 to .427 to .384 — while his on-base skills have improved, going from .335 to .349 to .351. It’s still valuable, it’s just a different kind of valuable, and not what we might have expected a few years ago.
So maybe this is what Heyward is now, and maybe that’s just fine. But to listen to Heyward himself, he seems to think he knows where the power has gone, and how he can get it back. Here’s two different bits from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on Sunday morning: Read the rest of this entry »
With all of the arbitration cases heard and the major free agent signings completed, save for perhaps a Cuban free agent or two and a few relievers, we can come up with a solid estimate the Opening Day Payrolls for 2015. In 1998, the Baltimore Orioles’ payroll of $70.4 million topped all of Major League Baseball followed by fifteen straight seasons of New York Yankees payroll dominance. For the first time this centruy, the Los Angeles Dodgers finally unseated the Yankees last year. Despite Alex Rodriguez‘s suspended salary returning to the Yankees payroll and the signing of Chase Headley, the Dodgers remain well ahead. Trades for Jimmy Rollins and Howie Kendrick, the signing of Brandon McCarthy and agreeing to pay for much of Matt Kemp’s salary this season were more than enough to keep the crown for highest MLB payroll.
Figures from Cots. Minimum salaries of $507,500 added to guaranteed contracts to complete the 25-man roster.
For the second straight year, the Dodgers will have the highest payroll in baseball as the season starts. The Dodgers’ $266 million payroll figure appears staggering, more than 25% higher than the Yankees second place number and more than the ninth (Philadelphia Phillies) and tenth (Toronto Blue Jays) highest payrolls combined. However, the Dodgers’ buying power is still not at the level of the Yankees’ last decade. As a percentage of total team salaries, the Yankees’ payroll from 2004-2010 averaged 8.2%, never dipping below 7.5% before finally falling to 7.3% in 2011. The Dodgers’ payroll in 2015 accounts for 7.3% of total team payroll.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ben and Sam preview the White Sox’ season with Tim Marchman, and Sahadev talks to Dan Hayes, who covers the White Sox for CSN Chicago (at 36:52).
Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In the opinion of some, baseball is broken. Not irreparably, but it’s become borderline boring and badly in need of an infusion of offense. Pace is a problem. Games last beyond the bedtimes of millions of young fans, many of whom have short attention spans.
There are myriad issues, and they can’t be ignored simply because certain indicators suggest the sport is thriving. What, if anything, to do about them? In the opinion of John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, there are no obvious answers.
“It’s conflated,” Thorn told me a few days ago. “It’s tangled. People have a vague unease that things aren’t right — not the way the ought to be – and somebody ought to do something. The problem is, there’s no magic bullet.”
But based on historical precedent, an arsenal of options exists. For instance, following the 1968 season – aka “The Year of the Pitcher” – the mound was lowered by five inches. The measure had the desired effect: In 1969, OPS jumped from .639 to .689 and runs-per-game shot up from 6.84 to 8.14. (In 2014, OPS was .700 and runs-per-game 8.13).
It’s important to note that the game-altering move was necessitated by another game-altering move. Read the rest of this entry »
Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’m back again to close out your week by talking about pitch comps. I’ve talked about pitch comps a lot lately, looking at Henderson Alvarez, and Mariano Rivera, and Cole Hamels, and so on. Pitch comps love Marcus Stroman. Not coincidentally, I also love Marcus Stroman, but this is going to be about a different guy — this is focusing on Carlos Carrasco. And while I’ve written about Carrasco already in the recent past, I want to add something to that. Carlos Carrasco throws a changeup. No one else really throws Carlos Carrasco’s changeup.
To quickly review the methodology, I use the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards and look at velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. For this, I looked at right-handed starting pitchers who, last year, threw at least 50 changeups, according to the page. For each of the three categories, I calculated the z-score difference between a given number and Carrasco’s changeup’s number. Then I simply added up the three absolute values, yielding a comp rating. That’s all the boring stuff. Below is the more interesting stuff.
What follows does not constitute the most rigorous of statistical analyses. Rather, it’s designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have considerably more enthusiasm for than actual knowledge of the collegiate game — a shorthand means, that is, towards detecting which players have produced the most excellent performances over the first week of the college season.
As in a pair of earlier posts, what I’ve done is utilize principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.
Jason Giambi announced his retirement on Monday, after 20 seasons as a major leaguer. For most of those 20 years, Giambi was one of the best hitters in the game. I won’t waste your time putting down the narrative of his career — Jay Jaffe already did that better than I would anyway. But I thought today that we would celebrate his career with a few choice facts and/or moments from a career that at the very least belongs in the Hall of Very Good.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Chicago Cubs scored a preliminary victory on Thursday in the lawsuit filed last month by the owners of several of the rooftops looking into Wrigley Field. As I explained at the time the suit was filed, the case is the latest in a series of legal proceedings challenging the on-going Wrigley Field renovations, and in particular the Cubs’ construction of two new outfield scoreboards. Unlike earlier legal challenges to the project – which are focused on trying to overturn the city’s approval of the renovation plans – the rooftop owners’ suit against the Cubs charges the team with a variety of legal violations (antitrust, defamation, unfair business practices, breach of contract).
Last week, the rooftop owners asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order (“TRO”) preventing the team from building the scoreboards until the case is resolved. Following four hours of argument on Wednesday, Judge Virginia Kendall issued a decision on Thursday morning denying the rooftops’ request, helping clear the way for the Cubs to move forward with construction of the disputed scoreboards.
In order to receive a TRO, the rooftops generally had to show that they: 1) were likely to prevail in the case, and 2) would suffer an “irreparable” injury (i.e., one that cannot be fully remedied by money) if the restraining order was not granted. The rooftop owners believed they had established both requirements, arguing in particular that the imminent construction of the scoreboards would destroy their business. Meanwhile, the Cubs argued that the rooftops were unlikely to prevail on any of the claims they had asserted in the lawsuit, and that they could easily be compensated for any damage to their business resulting from the construction of the scoreboards through the payment of monetary damages.
