Last week was relatively eventful for two pending antitrust lawsuits against Major League Baseball. On Thursday, the district court issued an important decision in the Garber v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball suit challenging several of MLB’s television broadcasting practices under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Then later that same day, MLB officially asked the district court to dismiss the Miranda v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball case, a suit contending that MLB’s minor league pay practices violate federal antitrust law.

Let’s start with the Garber case. As both Wendy Thurm and I have previously discussed on several occasions, the Garber suit involves allegations that several of MLB’s television policies violate the Sherman Act. First, the plaintiffs contend that MLB and its regional sports network partners impose unreasonable blackout policies on fans, preventing individual RSNs from competing with one another in each team’s assigned geographic territory. Absent these anticompetitive restrictions, the plaintiffs allege, a Red Sox fan living in California would, for instance, have the option of subscribing to the New England Sports Network (NESN) to watch all of Boston’s game. The resulting competition would, in theory, drive down the cost of sports programming for all baseball fans.

Relatedly, the Garber plaintiffs also accuse MLB of violating antitrust law by selling only league-wide, pay-per-view subscription packages (MLB Extra Innings and MLB.tv), rather than allowing individual teams to offer their own competing out-of-market plans. This restriction on competition also allegedly increases the cost that out-of-market fans pay to watch baseball.

Read the rest of this entry »

Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Los Angeles NL at San Francisco | 22:15 ET
Frias (18.2 IP, 83 xFIP-) vs. Hudson (45.1 IP, 102 xFIP-)
In the foreword to his anthology of fantastic literature Black Water, editor Alberto Manguel suggests that the definitive and also most appealing characteristic of that genre is its capacity for surprise — the capacity for surprise one finds, for example, in I. A. Ireland’s Climax for a Ghost Story, which brief story not only appears in Manguel’s anthology but also right here in its entirety:

“How eerie!” said the girl, advancing cautiously. “–And what a heavy door!” She touched it as she spoke and it suddenly swung to with a click.

“Good Lord!” said the man. “I don’t believe there’s a handle inside. Why, you’ve locked us both in!”

“Not both of us. Only one of us,” said the girl, and before his eyes she passed straight through the door, and vanished.

Ireland’s brief work not only illustrates the best of fantastic literature, but also serves as a means by which to better understand Dodgers right-hander Carlos Frias. Because Frias is the man in the story, is why. But in addition to the man, he’s also the girl. And in addition to those two, he’s also — and this is most unnerving — he’s also the door.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: San Francisco Radio or Television.

Read the rest of this entry »

Monday afternoon, I participated in an Orioles-centric podcast, where one of the things I was supposed to talk about was Manny Machado. I wrote about Machado a couple of weeks ago, and more specifically, I wrote about him suddenly exercising a lot more patience at the plate. From what we understand about plate-discipline statistics, they find themselves pretty fast. It’s unusual when they move around, so Machado’s change was unusual and worth some attention. He seems to be doing the thing we all want prospects to do, but that they only infrequently pull off.

In advance of the podcast, I thought it would be smart to do a little Orioles research. I know some things about them, but I do not know everything about them, since I’m supposed to keep aware of 30 teams until the passing of the deadline renders a few of them irrelevant. Nobody wants to sound unprepared. I checked in on Machado, to make sure things were still keeping up. I checked in on Steve Pearce, out of offensive and defensive curiosity. And it was while scrolling through pages I noticed something about Adam Jones. Machado, as noted, is showing some weird changes in his plate discipline. Jones is, too, in a different way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like most teams, the Tampa Bay Rays utilize PITCHf/x data. Stan Boroski, the club’s bullpen coach, looks at it every morning and, along with pitching coach Jim Hickey, uses the findings as an assessment tool. From time to time, what he sees elicits a call to action regarding a member of the pitching staff..

Boroski, currently in his sixth season with the Rays, and fourth in his current job, discussed Tampa Bay’s use of PITCHf/x on a recent visit to Fenway Park.

——

Stan Boroski: “I look at everybody who pitched the night before and go to Jim with what I saw. If everything is within normal parameters, it’s usually just ‘So and so was good last night.’ Nothing is specifically dealt with unless something comes up that needs to be addressed.

“I usually don’t go to Kevin (Cash) unless it’s going to prompt doing something different with a pitcher, something he might need to change. That’s a pitching thing and something we normally don’t need to bother him with. But Kevin understands exactly what’s going on with our PITCHf/x stuff. It’s part of the process of how we evaluate, how we attack, and how we build our pitching. Being the manager, he’s obviously involved in all of that, and being a former catcher, he understands it very well. We’re always on the same page when we talk about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam talk to Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Pirates beat writer Travis Sawchik about his new book, Big Data Baseball.

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

I don’t need to explain pitch-framing to you. Some catchers are better at catching pitches than others. Everything under human control has people who are better at it than others. Some of you are thankful that pitch-framing is a skill. Some of you wish that it didn’t exist. It’s an interesting and complicated conversation, getting into whether the strike zone is something to be earned, or an absolute right. It’s also an important conversation, but for the moment, it’s known that some teams get different zones than others do. Been this way for ages.

When we talk about pitch-framing, or pitch-receiving — there still isn’t a consensus term — we’re almost always talking about the backstops. Those are the players, after all, who are doing the catching part. So the natural process is to generate data and see which catchers are the best and which catchers are the worst. Only infrequently do you see steps back. Less is said about the pitchers doing the throwing. Less still is said about the hitters being thrown to. We understand that the strike zone is a little different for everybody. So which teams get the greatest and smallest overall benefit?

Read the rest of this entry »

Clayton Kershaw is in unfamiliar territory. The three-time Cy Young award winner and consensus best pitcher in baseball finds himself sporting a 4.24 ERA in mid-May, prompting questions about what might be wrong. As we’ll see, luck has largely been unkind to Kershaw, and he’s due for a big regression toward better numbers; however, he hasn’t been the Kershaw we’ve seen for the past two years in one important part of his game, and that has led to some poor results.

Pitchers can’t control everything on the baseball field. After the ball leaves their hand, control is ceded to the batter, the defense, and luck. Also chief among the factors pitchers have little control over: the rate of men they leave on base, the rate of balls in play that go for hits, and the rate of fly balls that go for home runs. Metrics like FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) and xFIP try to take out a lot of the variability in a pitcher’s stat line influenced by things outside of their control, attempting to measure only what the pitcher is responsible for.

Kershaw has been a victim of some of those factors in 2015. First of all, there’s the rate of balls in play that have actually gone for hits. Here’s a chart of Kershaw’s batting average on balls in play against him over the course of his career compared to league average:

This year batted balls have been finding holes in the infield and gaps in the outfield, something Kershaw doesn’t have much control over. Once those batted balls start finding gloves, they’ll start getting turned into outs more often.

Kershaw’s rate of runners left on base in 2015 has been unlike years past as well. Here’s a chart of the rate at which he’s stranded runners on base over his career compared to league average:

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Most players make it to Major League Baseball without a fully refined skillset. Some players make it to the majors with a particular skill so great it outweighs a lack of skills normally required to function at the major-league level. Sometimes, it is an electric fastball despite a lack of command or secondary pitches. For Dee Gordon and Billy Hamilton, it was elite speed. For players like Yadier Molina and Jose Iglesias, their defensive skills so outweighed their offensive ineptitude that they were brought to the major leagues without the ability to hit anywhere near a major-league level.

Jose Iglesias never hit well in the minor leagues, but his glove has earned him repeated promotions and a starting shortstop job. Iglesias’s development as a hitter was slowed further by losing 2014 due to stress fractures in both legs, but he’s been very successful putting the ball in play this season, capped by a recent extra-inning single that knocked in the winning run in Detroit’s 4-3 10-inning win against the Cardinals on Saturday. At just 25 years old, he has a hitting profile similar to current BABIP sensation Dee Gordon, and while Iglesias could still develop as a hitter like Yadier Molina or other defensive-first shortstops like Ozzie Smith or Omar Vizquel, his hot start is not likely to last.

Iglesias was called up for a week in 2011 as a 21-year-old for the Boston Red Sox when he was hitting .259 with just two walks and no extra-base hits in the early part of the season. He received just four plate appearances before returning to the minors. He was called up again in September to receive a couple more trips to the plate, after hitting just .235/.285/.269 in close to a full season in the minors. In 2012, during the Red Sox lost season, Iglesias again earned a callup, this time after hitting .266/.318/.306 in his final full Triple-A season. He notched just eight hits in 77 plate appearances at the big-league level, but already received comparisons to Omar Vizquel. He began 2013 in Triple-A and hit just .202/.262/.319 before making the big leagues for good.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mat Latos throws a pitch that nobody in the big leagues throws. For good reason, too. He has no idea where it’s going.

“I was told in high school that it would never be a realistic pitch in the big leagues,” Latos said when I asked him about the pitch that he gripped like a knuckle curve but released like a changeup and was neither his breaking ball nor his changeup. Yeah, I said, sure, but what is this pitch?

Read the rest of this entry »

Three years later, the Houston Astros’ 2012 draft is looking pretty good. Carlos Correa, their first overall pick in that year’s draft, absolutely annihilated Double-A pitching in the season’s first month. Unsurprisingly, his performance culminated in a promotion to Triple-A last week. Lance McCullers, Houston’s 41st overall pick that year, also earned a promotion with an outstanding start in Double-A. However, the Astros didn’t send McCullers to Triple-A, but straight to the majors. He’ll make his big-league debut tonight against the Oakland Athletics.

Heading into the season, McCullers looked like he was at least a year or two away from breaking into the majors. He was coming off of a rough 2014 campaign, where he pitched to a disappointing 5.47 ERA and an equally disappointing 5.73 FIP in High-A Lancaster. The biggest culprit for his struggles was his spotty command, which manifested itself in a 13% walk rate and 4% home-run rate (1.7 HR/9).

But things have been much different for the 21-year-old this year. He was nearly unhittable in his 29 innings with Double-A Corpus Christi. He struck out 37% of the batters he faced, and allowed just one homer. The hard-throwing righty posted a laughable 0.62 ERA, and his 2.26 FIP suggests his performance wasn’t entirely a fluke.

Here’s a look at one of his many strikeouts. This clip features McCullers’ curveball, which received 55/65 present/future grades from Kiley McDaniel over the off-season. The victim is fellow top-200 prospect Renato Nunez of the Oakland system.

Read the rest of this entry »