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 and blue for Community Research.
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Ben and Sam banter about the origin of the pitcher’s mound, the impact of seeing a starter multiple times in the same series, and the Dodgers’ perplexing approach against Jon Lester, who continues to flourish without ever throwing to first.
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It seems a bit silly to write a piece extolling the virtues of starting pitching in the playoffs. Everyone knows starting pitching is important. Those guys pitch three times as many innings during the regular season as their relief counterparts. They win almost all the Cy Young awards — and sometimes MVPs, as well. The narrative this postseason, however, has seen the importance of starters take a back seat to a collection of guys who — either because they’ve lacked the ability to pitch every five days or, otherwise, proved unable to turn over a lineup — have been subsequently moved to the bullpen. Relievers are great — and they’re obviously exerting a tremendous influence on the current postseason — but the starting pitcher’s impact on a game is still great, no matter how early the bullpen comes in to save the day and earn our praise.
Earlier this week, Dave Cameron discussed how bullpen usage was killing offenses this postseason. Teams were shaving off more than an out per game from the starters, who were averaging a little over five innings per start. Going to good relievers earlier and avoiding pitching fatigued starters without having to use the typical below-average long man has kept offense down. On the other hand, five innings of work still represents more than half the outs in a baseball game and it’s the starters who are recording those outs.
This postseason has featured plenty of interesting baseball with all sorts of compelling performances. Without diminishing Javy Baez’s tags or Clayton Kershaw’s brilliance, it’s probably fair to say that the two main storylines have concerned bullpen usage and the impact of replay. Perhaps we’ve reached a bullpen tipping point, but it seems almost certain that this postseason will lead the league to revise exactly how replay is applied to split-second base detachments.
While most people have latched onto these stories, I’ve had my eye on something different. The Cubs and Dodgers both carried three catchers for at least one series and have both used three catchers in a single game during these playoffs. Admittedly, this is a less important and obvious development than bullpen changes and replay controversies, but it sets up a discussion I’ve been wanting to have about a potential rule change.
| 9:09 |
: Well geez everybody
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: Let’s Friday baseball chat
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| 9:09 |
: Hello, friend!
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: Hello friend
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| 9:10 |
: Jon Lester is so weird!
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| 9:10 |
: In entirely unusual ways he has to be the most awesome player in baseball to overanalyze
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Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the giant and large 2016-17 free-agent market.
Below are links to the final six ballots for this year’s free agents, including all relief pitchers.
Other Players: Pedro Alvarez / Erick Aybar / Jose Bautista / Carlos Beltran / Joe Blanton / Billy Butler / Andrew Cashner / Santiago Casilla / Brett Cecil / Aroldis Chapman / Bartolo Colon / Rajai Davis / Ian Desmond / R.A. Dickey / Edwin Encarnacion / Doug Fister / Dexter Fowler / Carlos Gomez / Jeremy Hellickson / Rich Hill / Greg Holland / Matt Holliday / Austin Jackson / Jon Jay / Matt Joyce / Colby Lewis / Brandon Moss / Mike Napoli / Ivan Nova / Angel Pagan / Steve Pearce / Wilson Ramos / Colby Rasmus / Josh Reddick / Michael Saunders / Kurt Suzuki / Mark Trumbo / Justin Turner / Chase Utley / Luis Valbuena / Edinson Volquez / Neil Walker / Matt Wieters / C.J. Wilson.
Kenley Jansen (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Jansen:
*That is, a roughly average number of innings for a starting pitcher.
**Prorated version of final updated 2016 depth-chart projections available here.
Jeff Sullivan wrote a post this morning about Jon Lester and the running game. He mentioned that I’d also be writing a post about Jon Lester and the running game, but with a greater emphasis on the numbers side of it. This is that post.
Before we get to the actual numbers, a note about Jon Lester himself. In a way, for much of his career, Lester almost been consistent to a fault. To the point where his greatness borders on boring, or forgettable. In nine years since taking on a full workload, he’s made between 31 and 33 starts in each season, always 191 and 219 innings. He had a three-year run of his ERA- being 71, then 73, then 75, and four of his nine FIP- have been between 73-76. His fastball has sat between 91.8 and 93.5 miles per hour — right at or below average — in each of those nine years. Lester’s had his two best seasons by ERA in the last three years, but even then, his FIP- figures have read: 75, 75, 82. Just consistent ol’ Jon Lester. Nothing remarkable here.
And yet, somehow, the longer Lester remains consistent, the more we realize he’s one of the most fascinating and unique specimens in the game. We realize he simply refuses to attempt a pickoff throw to first base, and that’s because when he’s forced to field a ground ball and make an overhand throw to first, he just literally can’t do it. The pitcher just cannot throw. We realize that he’s maybe the worst hitter, ever, like in MLB history. And so we watch each one of his starts with amazement, as the gifted, elite athlete is unable to hide his inexplicable ineptitudes, and as the opposition just… fails to exploit them?
Give the Dodgers credit. They sure as hell tried. Kind of. At the very least, they sure as hell put put all of Lester’s bizarre quirks front and center stage in their 8-4 NLCS Game 5 loss on Thursday night. It’s just, none of it mattered.
The Dodgers wasted no time letting Lester know that they knew. This was the first pitch Lester threw:
In Game 5, the Dodgers stole two bases against Jon Lester, out of two attempts. Stretch that over, say, a 33-start season, and you’ve got a pitcher who’s given up 66 steals in 66 chances. That pitcher, we’d say, was historically bad at controlling the running game. It would be a huge, distracting problem. The Dodgers did take a little advantage of Lester, which was a part of their plan, and though in the end it wasn’t enough, it was something worth trying.
Yet the Dodgers could’ve pushed it further. And this was a topic of much discussion. The Dodgers danced around, taking incredibly, unprecedentedly aggressive leads, but still they didn’t seize every chance to put the game in motion. Even though Lester clearly has the yips, and everyone knows it, Dodger baserunners still exercised some amount of caution. A seventh-inning screenshot I took will stick with me:
You — you might remember Enrique Hernandez.
Hello! Do you like baseball posts about how the playoffs are different? You have come to one of the right places.
Let’s go over some easy stuff. The playoffs, just by being what they are, select for the best baseball teams. Playoff rosters are selective for the best hitters, and they’re also selective for the best pitchers. Because of the nature of the series, and with all the off days, you see bullpens used more aggressively. We wrote about that yesterday, and everyone has written about that on every day, for the past few weeks. The Indians are in the World Series, and they mostly have their bullpen to thank, and, yeah, that’s the big story in the AL as we wait to identify the other half.
I want to talk briefly about how defense factors into this. Maybe it’ll surprise you, or maybe it won’t, but come playoff time, even batted balls themselves more often meet a negative fate. Strikeouts tend to go up, and homers tend to go down, but even when you concentrate on plays where hitters knock the ball fair, you still see things favoring run suppression.
The playoffs roll on, with subplots galore, most of them involving pitching-staff usage patterns that are long overdue. Meanwhile, let’s conclude our two-part series examining macro team BIP data for the 10 playoff teams, broken down by exit speed and launch angles. (Read the Part 1 here.) We’ll examine what made these teams tick during the regular season and allowed them to play meaningful October baseball. It’s more or less a DNA analysis of the clubs that made it to the game’s second season.
First, some ground rules. For each club, all offensive and defensive batted balls were broken down (first) by type and (second) by exit speed. Not all batted balls generated exit speed and/or launch angle data; just over 14% were unread, most of them weakly hit balls at very high or low launch angles. How do we know this? Well, hitters batted .161 AVG-.213 SLG on them, a pretty strong clue.
BIP types do not strictly match up with FanGraphs classifications. For purposes of this exercise, any batted ball with a launch angle of over 50 degrees is considered a pop up, between 20 and 50 degrees is a fly ball, between 5 and 20 degrees is a line drive, and below 5 degrees is a ground ball. For background purposes, here are the outcomes by major-league hitters for each of those BIP types: .019 AVG-.027 SLG on pop ups (5.7% of measured BIP), .326 AVG-.887 SLG on fly balls (30.9%), .658 AVG-.870 SLG on liners (24.4%) and .238 AVG-.260 SLG on grounders (39.1%).
As you might expect, there are massive differences in production within BIP types based on relative exit speed. If you hit a fly ball over 100 mph, you’re golden, batting .766 AVG-2.739 SLG. If you drag that category’s lower boundary down just 5 mph, however, you get to the top of the donut hole, where fly balls go to die. Hitters batted just .114 AVG-.209 SLG on fly balls between 75-95 mph. All other fly balls — yes, even including those hit under 75 mph — fared much better, generating .387 AVG-.786 production.
Line drives tend to be base hits at almost all exit speeds. All the way down to 75 mph, hitters bat over .600 on batted balls in the line-drive launch-angle ranges; down to 65 mph, hitters still bat around .400 range in each velocity bucket. At 65 mph and higher, a liner generates an average .673 AVG-.889 SLG line. Under 65 mph, liners tend to land in infielders’ gloves; hitters batted just .170 AVG-.194 SLG on those. On the ground, hitters batted a strong .423 AVG-.456 SLG on grounders hit at 100 mph or higher. Under 85 mph, however, the hits dry up almost totally, with hitters producing a .107 AVG and .117 SLG. Between 85-100 mph, hitters bat closer to the overall grounder norm, at .267 AVG-.294 SLG.
With that as a backdrop, let’s conclude our look at each playoff club’s offensive and defensive BIP profiles. Last time, we profiled the Orioles, Red Sox, Cubs, Indians and Dodgers; today, we’ll look at the other five, in alphabetical order:
New York Mets
Two of the 10 playoff teams played well over their true talent this season, at least based on my BIP-centric method of team evaluation. Both will be covered today. First, the Mets hit significantly more pop ups than their opponents (+69), not including untracked ones in that 14% “null” group. On the positive side, the Mets hit 160 more fly balls than their opponents; they were a whopping +86 vis-à-vis their opponents in the 95-105 mph buckets. This explains why they hit 66 more homers than their opponents.
